Between Images: Montage and the Problem of Relation 0197612296, 9780197612293

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Between Images

Between Images Montage and the Problem of Relation Ryan Conrath

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Conrath, Ryan, author. Title: Between images : montage and the problem of relation / Ryan Conrath. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023030160 (print) | LCCN 2023030161 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197612293 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197612316 (epub) | ISBN 9780197612323 Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Editing. | Motion pictures—Aesthetics. | Cinematography. Classification: LCC TR899 C6576 2023 (print) | LCC TR899 (ebook) | DDC 777.5—dc23/eng/20230813 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030160 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030161 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments  Introduction: Between Images | Between Us 

vii xi

PART I :  B O DY 1. Andy Warhol in Stitches  2. Make No Prisoners 

3 27

PART I I :  T ER RITORY 3. To Place a Cut 

59

4. How to Walk through a Door 

87

PART I I I :  ECOLOGY 5. The Ecological Cut 

115

6. Space Race 

145

Conclusion: Future Montages  Index 

171 177

Acknowledgments This book bears the mark of so many cherished relations. Whether directly or indirectly, the ideas expressed in this book have taken shape through encounters with friends, mentors, colleagues, and students over the course of more than a decade. I will be forever grateful to the brilliant and indefatigable Rachel Haidu and to all the teachers and mentors who for me modeled intellectual work at its most capacious and daring: Nathan Andersen, Joel Burges, Douglas Crimp, Tom DiPiero, Eli Friedlander, Roy Grundmann, Jason Middleton, William Schaefer, Jared Stark, and Sharon Willis. A whole dream cast of beings came into my world during graduate study in Boston and Rochester who enriched my ideas profoundly: Tara Najd Ahmadi, Hend Al-​Awadhi, Charlie Anderson, Joel Neville Anderson, Tiffany Barber, Marty Collier, Jerome Dent, Lauren DiGiulio, Anna Dumont, Abigail Glogower, Cathy Humphrey, Malika Kapadia, Gloria Kim, Matt Lawrence, Alexander Marr, Jurij Meden, Jenevive Nykolak, Shota Ogawa, Chris Patrello, Peter Bo Rappmund, Joshua Rompf, Zach Rottman, Paul Rubery, Zainab Saleh, Corona de los Santos, Hardeep Sidhu, Magda Szcześniak, Sarah Thornton, and Iskandar Zulkarnain. Rachel Haidu, G. Douglas Barrett, Dave Fresko, Roy Grundmann, and Elsie Walker were each instrumental in bringing this book to fruition through their feedback on the writing at different stages and for the many intellectually and emotionally nourishing conversations over the years. In their own ways, each of these extraordinary individuals helped me get to that place of near insanity necessary for even envisioning my ideas congealing in the form of a monograph. Colleagues and friends at Salisbury University and elsewhere provided much support, encouragement, and inspiration as I finalized this project, especially Emin Lelic, Mehves Lelic, John Nieves, Ryan Sporer, and Chris Vilmar. I am especially grateful to my friends in the Film Program, Dave Johnson and Elsie Walker, who have demonstrated unwavering enthusiasm and support for my research at every turn; they are the best colleagues I can possibly imagine. No small part of the credit for this book actually being a book is due to Isabel Quintana Wulf, who provided extensive and invaluable feedback on my proposal materials and on Chapter 6, and invited me to share

viii Acknowledgments

my research at the English Department faculty salon. My friend James Hansen, whose knowledge of and commitment to the cinematic avant-​ garde is astounding, never failed to remind me of the unique delights and challenges to be found in this field. The research and writing undertaken for this book were supported at different junctures by the University of Rochester, Salisbury University, the Flaherty Film Seminar, Oberlin College, the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, the George Eastman Museum, Harun Farocki GbR, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Marian Goodman Gallery, Morán Morán, the Art Institute of Chicago, Esther Schipper GmbH, Artists Rights Society, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to the individual artists, producers, archivists, gallery assistants, curators, studio managers, and copyeditors who so generously lent their time and resources to this project, including Amy Binding, Haley Blackwell, Sean Bobbitt, Antje Ehmann, Ja’Tovia Gary, Susan Hayward, Matthias Rajmann, Peter Bo Rappmund, Daïchi Saïto, Cauleen Smith, Hito Steyerl, and Joe Walker. Working with the editorial and production staff at Oxford University Press has been an absolute delight. I am particularly grateful to Norm Hirschy, whose belief in this project has been unwavering from the beginning. He has elevated this entire endeavor, not least by commissioning reviews of such a high quality at the proposal and manuscript stages. The breadth and incisiveness of the feedback I received from these three anonymous reviewers were nothing short of astonishing. With equal parts cheer and rigor, they helped me to see the bigger picture and untapped possibilities of this project in ways that would have been impossible to glean on my own. I cannot overstate just how impoverished this book would be without their astute interventions. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared in Ryan Conrath, “Space Race: Cauleen Smith’s Cinematic Errantry,” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 3 (Summer 2021), 19–​52. I am thankful to the peerless editorial staff at Feminist Media Histories, as well as Paula Massood and Pamela Wojcik, who edited the special issue “Precarious Mobilities” and offered thoughtful feedback from conception to final draft. My writing on Smith’s work has also benefited from the input of Rebecca Zorach. A shorter version of Chapter 5 can be found in Ryan Conrath, “The Ecological Cut,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 69 (Spring 2019): 84–​95. I am especially thankful to Josh Guilford for his enthusiasm about this research in its very early stages and for his marvelous editorial work on the MFJ publication. Chapter 4 of this book is an expansion on the ideas first

Acknowledgments  ix

published in Ryan Conrath, “Disarming Montage,” Film Criticism 43, no. 1 (March 2019). Karyn, Richard, Scott, Kathy, Sharon, David, and Deb have been there through the highs and lows, and I count myself fortunate to have them as family. This book is dedicated to Steph, whose thinking and writing inspire me, and whose companionship sustains me.

Introduction What there would be between man and man if there were nothing but the interval represented by the word “between”—​an empty space all the more empty as it cannot be confused with pure nothingness—​is an infinite separation, but offering itself as a relation in the exigency that is speech. —​Maurice Blanchot, “The Relation of the Third Kind”

Shrouded in shadow, he resembles a human-​shaped cutout from a black-​and-​ white picture of a sundrenched Sicilian port. “But why?” he wonders aloud in deliberately rhythmic Italian, directing his attention from the rolling water to a yet unseen presence off-​screen. “Is it so difficult to sell oranges?” Then the scene freezes, falling into a state of eerie repose. Emanating from somewhere beyond the scene in front of us but close by, we hear the clicking and humming of a machine that is presumably the agent of all this change. The scene snaps back into motion again, this time in the opposite direction. The man sucks words back into his body. The waves gently retreat, flowing away from the seawall. Amid all this intermittent seizure and resumption of movement, the world in front of us assumes an almost plastic character. Even the man’s body appears to decamp from meaning before our eyes, dissolving, and in turn reconstituting itself as pure form (line, shape, contrast) amid this alien movement. Distended and swollen across this spatiotemporal canvas, matter itself takes flight. This is no hallucination, but an up-​close encounter with the spooky spacetime of montage. To be clear, we are in the editing studio of Jean-​Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet during the cutting of their 1999 film Sicilia!, as observed in Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, 2001). Incidentally, there are many great montage films, but the great films on montage—​Costa’s film surely makes the cut—​would make for a much shorter list. Hidden Smile takes place almost entirely in an editing suite, and this fact alone would distinguish it even among movies about editing. But what I love about Costa’s film is that it dares to capture the editing process at its most demonically involved. It does so, improbably enough, through a

Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.001.0001

xii Introduction

sequence of languorous, uninterrupted shots, revealing the cut at the height of its powers not simply to shape a film spatiotemporally but as a kind of structure of feeling, which sets viewers, producers, and critics in relation to cinema more broadly. Behold Huillet as she rolls the footage back and forth as if to home in on an almost imperceptible detail, buried beneath the many folds of material at hand. Though we may not know where any of this is headed, it is difficult not to get caught up in the intrigue. The footage again halts as Straub exclaims, “There.” A beat. A single frame suspended as if in midair, the camera remains affixed to the Steenbeck viewing monitor. There, or rather here before us, is a decisive moment in time, a unique configuration of visual information within the space of a frame, marking the precise point at which this shot must terminate so that another might take its place in the visual field. Here is where the cut intervenes. At this juncture, we see the countershot corresponding to the previous one from Sicilia!, which reveals the orange-​peddling interlocutor of the man we saw earlier. He, too, is subject to this foreign discourse, this winding backward and forward at erratic intervals, as he stutters along a turbulent chain of articulation. Notwithstanding the precise narrative details of this encounter, it takes the unmistakable form of relation, which is to say that an otherwise ordinary exchange between two men is in this instance lent an almost cosmic significance. The filmmakers engage in verbal handwringing before this image, laboring over it with the gravity of two surgeons determining the apposite point of incision. As the film advances and reverses, the figure onscreen blinks his eyes in uncannily slow motion as though caught in a purgatorial state between flesh and plastic. “He already has his mouth open, but it should work,” Huillet remarks. “It’s better with his mouth open,” concurs Straub, “just this once.” And so we have the potential site of a cut. Huillet marks the frame as an in-​point and continues driving the footage forward. The figure on screen replies, “The oranges do not sell very well,” and again freezes in place, arrested once more in an interval between speech and motion. Straub and Huillet continue to spar. Huillet believes she has found a way of editing around the figure’s blinking eyes, but Straub worries that this would “cut out some preliminary harmonies of the ‘N.’ ” As the monteurs huff and puff at each other, each insisting on the virtue of their respective theories, the figure continues his macabre dance, spewing out words in slow motion and drawing them back in at the behest of this morcellating dispositif. The machine hums, clicks, and sputters along, until it again pauses at a particular point. “This is you,” Huillet notes, indicating a point in the footage where Straub would have his cut. “This here.”

Introduction  xiii

A beat. The black-​and-​white figure, at once a docile ghost and the very measure of what is possible when two human beings communicate, hangs in suspense on the monitor. Huillet carefully drives the footage backward and forward before stopping at another point. In any other place, this frame would appear utterly indistinguishable from the other, and yet it is here that Huillet quite decisively marks her place in contradistinction to her interlocutor: “And this is me.” “What?” Straub asks. “A difference of a single frame [photogram],” Huillet replies. Something dialectical would seem at hand. It extends from the space between two people relating their shared struggles, to that of their corresponding cinematic images, to that between the producers (Straub and Huillet) of those images, all the way to us, the viewers, and to how we relate to all that the screen relates to us. Reflecting on this single-​frame difference, Straub clarifies, “Between us?” Dispassionately, Huillet confirms, as if this were foretold. Straub breaks the ensuing silence: “Alors.” “Don’t spend a hundred years on it,” warns Huillet. “I don’t need a hundred years,” Straub insists. “Just seventy.”

Montage and Relation This study is animated by my long-​standing fascination with one of the most basic operations of cinema, cutting, which encompasses a repertoire of strategies for linking, or augmenting the duration of, distinct shots. There are many variants of the cut, from dissolves and wipes to hard cuts and fades, and each of these brings a unique set of limitations and possibilities to production and reception. But even in this broad sense of the term, the cut is merely the faint shadow of a much larger ensemble of cultural, technological, and psychic operations at once nonspecific to cinema but unthinkable without it. In my view, the word that best captures that discursive ensemble is montage, and its animating principle is relation. This book begins from a basic mandate: to think montage through relation, and relation through montage. Before I address the conjunction of these two words—​of what it means to bring them together and what is at stake in doing so—​it is worth provisionally outlining each term. We can define montage broadly as how shots are cut up, separated, and assembled. The word itself derives from the French monter (to put together), the suffix -​age giving it a procedural sense, suggesting a larger apparatus of assembly.1 In film discourse, montage describes a range of audiovisual

xiv Introduction

phenomena, but to a degree is context-​dependent. In the parlance of mainstream cinema, and especially in North America, montage refers to a section in a movie featuring jumps in time and space. These are most often developmental, as in the famous training sequence from Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) or the sublimely metacinematic “We’re gonna need a montage” sequence from Team America: World Police (Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 2004). By this sense of montage as a unitary object—​as in a montage—​the proliferation of cuts becomes a visual signpost of narrative denouement, as in the late third act sequences of Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) and Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001). Another sense of montage is more closely aligned with global film movements such as interwar Soviet cinema, French impressionist cinema, global new wave cinemas of the post–​World War II era, and Third Cinema. This sense of montage carries with it a modernist sensibility, where editing is akin to Roland Barthes’s characterization of literary writing (écriture) as a “morality of form.”2 This book’s allegiances, such as they exist, fall more on the avant-​gardist side of montage, and indeed this is a book concerned primarily with filmmakers working in independent and experimental modes—​at the very least, in production scenarios minimally constrained by industrial and commercial norms. I do not wish to foreclose any specific understanding or context, however, and we will not precisely adhere to any one word or discursive lexicon in accounting for the relations between images, which, to echo Blanchot’s sentiment from the epigraph, I want to maintain as a kind of irreducible and exigent expression of cinema’s conjunctive agency. Still, the word “editing” in my view is too utilitarian, too clinical, having become practically synonymous with the system of continuity and (by association) an industrial logic of production. In this milieu, montage is part of a film’s production infrastructure that is largely unremarked on by the film itself—​hence the widespread designation of film editing as the invisible art. Here, in an elegant act of self-​ negation it is made to repeat ad infinitum, the cut forecloses its own expressive capacity in order to preserve the viewer’s immersion in the story-​world. As we will discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, this reification of image relations at the level of film language also applies to production relations, where montage is circumscribed temporally to the postproduction stage and spatially to the editing suite, the commercial film production’s provincial outpost. Just as the word “editing” has its own constraints, the word “montage” is perhaps too affixed to the discourse of European art cinema, which in the first half of the twentieth century signified a broader modernist embargo on techniques and terminology tied to the classical arts. This ostensible novelty of montage, and its allegiance to avant-​garde practices of shock and detournement, can be

Introduction  xv

equally hobbling, for it risks taking for granted that the cut has an inherently subversive or critical function, as if it somehow transcended the demands of commerce and popular entertainment. This is of course not the case. History has shown repeatedly that once-​revolutionary aesthetic devices can swiftly and easily be repurposed for spectacle. Despite these and other perils, I find the word “montage” to be the most useful shorthand for the sheer variety of techniques and effects I want to foreground in this book. Montage is, in any event, so pervasive and so essential to moving image media that it is virtually unavoidable as a topic. And yet it is perhaps that very pervasiveness of montage that accounts for its being seldom the subject of rigorous and sustained treatment in film scholarship. Despite the historical centrality of editing to film discourse, and despite significant theoretical advances in the field over the past several decades, there have been relatively few studies devoted to the topic of montage. There are naturally exceptions to this trend, one especially curious instance being Jacques Aumont’s slim monograph first published in English in 2013 under the title Montage. Arguably the thinker most attentive to the topic since Eisenstein, Aumont furnishes an analysis that reads more like a postmortem on montage, as he contends that the cinematic cut “can no longer be thought of a gesture as decisive, as definitive, as profoundly ethical as it once was.”3 What accounts for this diminished status of montage? For Aumont (and this is a common theme in contemporary film and media discourse), the rise of the internet and the increasingly digitized and automated ways in which information circulates today means that images are no longer obliged, as it were, to any precise form of relation. As Aumont asserts, “Editing in all this becomes a tool if not useless then at least without effect: images freed in this sense from any bond can no longer be truly connected to one another.”4 For Aumont, it no longer makes sense to speak of the cut as a decisive act, since any act of montage—​any means of correlating or disjoining images—​will inevitably be crowded out by the sheer number of image relations possible within our present media landscape. Indeed, for Aumont, montage has generally been usurped, its rhetorical decisiveness undermined by the vicissitudes of a digital image culture so unruly, saturated, and modular as to blunt any incisiveness the cut may have once had. Further complicating this is the fact that the creative capacities of montage have been overshadowed by an aesthetics of “slowness” that has become virtually hegemonic in contemporary art cinema. I am sympathetic to many of Aumont’s claims regarding the shifting technological and aesthetic conditions of montage, but not where the politics of the cut is concerned. I do not see a manifest or necessarily causal relation between any of these developments and some fundamental (in)capacity of

xvi Introduction

montage at the level of either politics or aesthetics. To assume that the technological and political operations underlying the circulation of images have set us on an ineluctable course toward a terminus of hypervisibility, awash in an infinitely mutable and remixable field of visual noise that evades any attempt to cut through it—​this seems, to put it bluntly, like a self-​fulfilling prophecy. Why should the cultural, political, or technological horizon of a given moment in history dictate what something like the cut can or cannot do? Understood properly as an agent of change, is the cut not precisely our most indispensable tool? Our study maintains the abiding capacity of montage to bring images into meaningful and politically salient forms of relation. Indeed, the concept of relation functions on the most basic level in this book as shorthand for cinema’s ability to work against global capital’s seemingly closed circuit of image operations, to counteract something like spectacle, which Guy Debord characterized in a formulation that has lost none of its elaborative capacity to time, not as “a collection of images but [as] a social relation among people mediated by images.”5 The word “relation” harks back to the Latin relātiō, meaning “to carry” or “bring back,” as a messenger might convey information from one party to another. In this it bears the narrative or correspondent sense of an account given but also that of a journey taken. In its common English usage today, relation tends to signify within and across familial and social networks, as with those related by blood or friendship or work. The word also has common currency in the sense of a general or felt affinity, usually among human subjects, as when one “relates” to another person (e.g., because of a shared experience) or to a character in a movie (e.g., because of their backstory or even their appearance). The topic of relation first emerged as a point of serious intellectual investigation among the philosophers of ancient Greece. Aristotle in fact listed “relatives” among the ten most fundamental categories. Whereas philosophers today might find it more intuitive to speak of relation as an intermediary substance or process, the ancients regarded relation more as a manner of disposition, an orientation, a way of understanding things as being “toward something” (ta pros ti). From this perspective, relations are not essential properties but are contextual occurrences, or, in philosophical parlance, they are not substances but accidents. But if relations are accidents rather substances, then they would be of little interest, for example, to the metaphysician, who deals not in contingencies but in fundamentals. This, as John Heil has pointed out, is one reason why philosophy remained largely dubious about relations until the late nineteenth century, when logicians and mathematicians began arguing that a comprehensive account of the world would be impossible

Introduction  xvii

without recourse to some sort of relational language.6 Since then, philosophy’s conversation around relation became undeniably livelier and more complex, but consequently also quite baffling for those not trained in the field of logic. Some basic questions remain unresolved and broadly compelling for the purposes of this study, foremost among them being whether relation is to be understood as internal or external to its terms. In other words, does relation depend on aspects essential to things, without which the things in question would not be themselves? Or is relation essentially a matter of context? In thinking about how human and nonhuman things relate, do we give priority to the things themselves, which may in itself bear no real relation to (the human concept of) relation, or do we give priority to relation as some absolute condition? Our study will tap into these and other relational quandaries from a range of perspectives, from philosophy and ecology to Black studies and media theory. Rather than propose or arrive at an overarching, unitary theory of relation, this book takes as its organizing principle the most basic condition of relation, which Randolphe Gasché intuitively characterizes as “nothing but the trait of being-​held-​toward-​another.”7 Throughout this book, relation serves as a signpost of the immanently conjunctive aspect of being in general and of cinema in particular. I seize upon the conceptual gravity of the word “relation” itself, which Marilyn Strathern aptly describes as an attractor, “a term that engages other terms, a concept in a field of concepts, an idea that draws in values and disseminates feelings.”8 Indeed, my sense of relation is informed by thinkers who approach the concept not in order to circumscribe or constrain relationality, but as an occasion to think through the commonality of being without recourse to a mythic or essentializing bond. Having responded to the strange attraction of that task, I have tried to remain as open as possible when determining which leads to follow, detours to take, and thinkers to incorporate into my own thinking.9 Still, when unmoored in relation’s vast conceptual and affective waters, I have turned repeatedly to two thinkers: Édouard Glissant and Maurice Blanchot. In a text titled The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot contends with the idea that nothing could in fact hold purchase over human relations. In other words, he wants to account for the possibility of a form of relation without power, one that does not have struggle or immediacy as its means, nor unity or identity as its ends. The kind of relation Blanchot wants to get at is what he dubs “the relation of the third kind,” which is nothing more than “the strangeness between us.”10 This “third” kind of relation, which cannot be described in terms of “proximity” or “distance” but only as an “interruption escaping all measure,” is distinguished by an internal strangeness (“strangeness of this strangeness”), which lies in how, despite its status as interruption, and despite the fact that

xviii Introduction

it “neither includes nor excludes,” would be “nevertheless a relation,” at least, he says, “if I take it upon myself not to reduce it, not to reconcile it, even by comprehending it, that is, not to seek to consider it as the ‘faltering’ mode of a still unitary relation.”11 Elsewhere, I find Glissant’s evocative description of relation as an unspoken ontological contract that forecloses unitary existence, “the moment when one consents not to be a single being [consent à n’être plus un seul] and attempts to be many beings at the same time.”12 What would it mean to extend such a contract of irresolution to the level of images, producers, and viewers? Montage is a name for that gravitational force in cinema which holds that every image must inevitably make way for another, that at last every shot must come to an end. Perhaps we are closest to relation not when we regard any relationship or relational framework per se, but rather when we try to think something like the processual totality of irresolvable differences amid the minimal sameness of Being, or as Glissant says, a “passage from unity to multiplicity” involving at once an interminable movement and a certain measure of fixity.13 Montage, I argue, is the cinema’s central means of giving shape to that passage.

Cinema, Speaking of Relation No one tool or even set of tools has sole purchase over cinema’s figuring of the problem that is relation. Film speaks of and to relation in a wide variety of ways. But because I want to get at the expressive capacity of the cut specifically when it comes to relation, this book focuses on films that deploy the cut rigorously and strategically—​if not always liberally—​in view of relation. Still, it is worth addressing some of cinema’s other means of expressing relation at the outset. This should not only help to clarify relation more broadly but also to grasp its specific affinities with montage. And montage, after all, has meaning only in relation to other concepts and other techniques in the cinema. Consider, for example, the cinematic frame, which is at base a point of relation between two terms: what falls within the image (onscreen space) with what falls outside it (the off-​screen).14 Of course, cinema was not the first art form to stage such an interplay; painting, theater, and photography bear their own frames and each engenders certain relationships between the content of the frame and everything (and everyone) beyond and in front of it. But as Eyal Peretz has suggested, because its content moves and is itself capable of movement, the cinematic frame is perhaps uniquely capable of expressing the “complex fusion between continuity and discontinuity.”15 It is impossible to disambiguate cinematic framing from ideas of on and off, inside and outside,

Introduction  xix

continuity and discontinuity, which makes sense given the relational nature of the frame. The frame establishes, or at the very least gives visual expression to, a relationship between the camera and the world, and this fundamental moment of relation extends to a whole host of other agents, from shooter to editor, projectionist to viewer. A question inextricable from the frame, though not synonymous with it, is that of scale. As Mary Ann Doane aptly defines it, scale describes the “relation between the representation of an object (or a territory on a map) and the object itself.”16 In cinema, scale broadly refers to how we name and evaluate the size of shots and how we go about coordinating and accounting for them collectively as such. Scale is also connected to distance, that is, to the real or perceived spatial expanse between camera and subject, or between viewer and screen. The dynamics at play here directly link the question of scale to that of montage. To name only one example, the perceived size of two given shots, whether it is an effect of the distance between camera and subject or that between viewer and screen, is bound to shape how a given cut reads, and vice versa. But more to the point: scale in the cinema is, like montage, an inherently unstable and slippery term. After all, there is no single, true, objective system for agreeing on the scale of cinematic images. Our perception of phenomena, and our means of relating those perceptions to others, are relational, so I can describe an image as big or small only with respect to some standard of measurement. If I am used to watching movies on my phone, a standard theatrical screening would likely register as big, whereas next to the IMAX experience even the most lavishly appointed home screening facility will likely feel diminutive. Likewise, in a film consisting largely of shots depicting sweeping natural vistas, individual pieces of vegetation will naturally appear small in relation to the frame, and to the human viewer who, viewing all of this on a screen rendered large by human scale, could perhaps be excused for the momentary sense that nature itself is a kind of diorama: an image, like any other, there for our study and pleasure. But if the same hypothetical film were to include the odd close-​up shot of a cactus, our viewer might suddenly feel dwarfed by the succulent world. Given all this, it is easy to see why Doane proposes that scale is itself “relational.”17 Cinematic montage and scale in the cinema are aligned in yet another way, because there is something about the cut and the close-​up (for example) that is inherently unruly, alien, and disproportionate. This partially explains the concerted efforts made throughout the medium’s history to stabilize cinematic scale and to domesticate the cut. The human body—​as both a sensorimotor apparatus and a figure of representation—​played an important role in stabilizing the function of both. Doane reminds us that in cinematic scale

xx Introduction

this anthropocentric bias “is deeply inscribed in the analytical classification of types of shots (close-​up, medium shot, long shot),” where size is measured with respect to the magnitude as well as the distance of bodies in relation to the camera or frame.18 For Doane, this bias is in keeping with broader efforts to preserve “the unity and homogeneity of space,” whereby the viewer’s attention is directed away from the size of screen, image, and aspect ratio and onto a much more manageable “perception of distance within the diegesis (represented space).” As Doane sees it, the conventions of continuity editing and screen direction represent efforts to cut cinematic scale down to size, ensuring that the spectator is not confronted with cinema’s “scalar abstraction,” that is, the disorienting experience of monstrous largeness or dangerous proximity in the cinema.19 Just as Doane foregrounds the unpredictable consequences when monumental size and proximity are given full expression in the cinema, I seek out the cut at its most unruly and at the limits of what is conceivable as relation or montage. Like scalar abstraction, montage also poses a threat, albeit of a slightly different sort, and this threat is an opening. In the following pages, I will establish the broad outlines of the major debates and theories of montage in the twentieth century. This initial gloss will not be comprehensive, and subsequent chapters will endeavor to fill in and refine some of that story further. The goal here is to treat montage discourse like a prism, turning it over for various possibilities rather than providing an exhaustive account. A good deal of this story will address certain figures—​André Bazin being the most obvious example—​whose theories of montage are in some ways at odds with my own. But my aim in telling this story is not to center only those thinkers with whom my own conception of montage most corresponds, nor even to significantly recast the story of montage discourse, but rather to view that story, which will be familiar to many readers, from the (perhaps less familiar) vantage of relation. In this regard, one of the central themes I want to foreground is the relation between part and whole, a concern that runs throughout montage discourse at various levels of abstraction, from the corporeal to the sociological and on to the cosmological. As with the larger structure of this book, a spirit of relational montage runs through the following account, comprised as it is of ideas that mean more in relation to each other than individually. Broadly speaking, classical and modern film theory endowed montage with one of two functions: to construct spacetime continuities or to shock viewers with novel, seemingly irrational juxtapositions and manipulations of reality. These two views played themselves out in the form of a kind of binary throughout roughly the first half of the twentieth century, as the cinematic cut took shape between two dueling modernisms: that of realism and

Introduction  xxi

that of formalism.20 At stake here was not only a question of how films could authentically represent reality but of how and to what end cinema enacts relations between viewers and the world. These early theoretical debates stand as a fascinating distillation of broader tensions between two competing ideologies of the twentieth century: collectivism and individualism. For the Soviets, arguing for the primacy of montage was in step with the project of communism, and a dialectical materialist vision of history more broadly. By contrast, for a writer like Bazin, honoring the individual human being’s experience of the world meant giving the viewer a certain amount of freedom to engage with images, which involved moderating the interventions of the cut in favor of deep space and extended duration. Lev Kuleshov, who was among the earliest and most influential theorists of montage, founded a workshop in the 1920s where he and his students ran a series of experiments to advance the hypothesis that “the basic strength of cinema lies in montage.”21 In their most famous trial, they paired the same shot of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine’s expressionless face with corresponding shots of seemingly random objects: a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan. The premise of the experiment was plain enough. Next to a bowl of soup, viewers would read hunger in the man’s face, whereas when seen alongside the image of a corpse he would appear sad. What Kuleshov sought to demonstrate with this exercise was that the signifying capacity of cinema derived not from the content of shots per se but from how they were organized in relation to one another. It followed for Kuleshov that relation was not internal to any given shot but external to it, made possible by the event of the cut. While this was a proof of concept for the primacy of montage over the shot, at another level it was a way of decentering individual human experience in favor of collective action. This took the form in the first place of a kind of mechanical sublimation of the human being by way of the interval. In the early twentieth century, the famed Decembrist and former director of the Imperial Theaters Prince Sergei Volkonsky devised a method of acting based on François Delsarte’s gestural system, whereby the human body was segmented into gestural units of relation. Proceeding from a Delsartian premise of the “independence of the limbs from one another,” Volkonsky conceptually divided the body of his actors into distinct parts (hand, chest, shoulder, leg), each with its own ensemble of gestures that obtain meaning in oppositional relation to others within a phase, thus giving way to rhythm.22 By atomizing the actor’s performance into distinct parts or phases, Volkonsky underscored the mechanical, modular character of the human body itself, whereby the “machine is set in motion by feeling and ‘oiled’ by feeling.”23 This ensemble of ideas would later be picked up by Vladimir Gardin, founder of

xxii Introduction

the Moscow Film School and one of Kuleshov’s mentors, who was the first to note a connection between “the possibilities of montage combinations” and a Delsartian system of acting that segments and deindividuates the body of the actor so that its “expressive movements” come to symbolize the “actions of man” as a whole.24 In one of their lesser-​known experiments, Kuleshov and his students rendered this idea cinematically by compiling shots of multiple women’s body parts and reassembling them to convey the impression of a single female figure getting dressed. Sounding like a cinematic Dr. Frankenstein, Kuleshov mused in 1922 that they had created “a person that did not exist in nature, but looking very real as perceived on the screen.”25 Here was a conception of montage not simply as an aesthetic or narrative tool but as a new form of relation between corporeal and mechanical terms, a means of atomizing and synthesizing life itself. Kuleshov’s experiments marked an important step in a broader consolidation of energies in Soviet film discourse to dislodge relation from human sensorimotor coordinates and remap it onto the machinic interval. As Eugenie Brinkema perceptively notes, Soviet film theory and practice during these years “was organized around an affective center: the enthusiasm and passion for montage itself, an affective technē.”26 No single figure embodied that enthusiasm more than Sergei Eisenstein. Much like his mentor Kuleshov, Eisenstein privileged a form of acting mediated by montage, a method he called “cut’ acting,” whose origins he traced back to Kabuki theater.27 But Eisenstein saw this morcellating capacity of montage as but a first step, a necessary threshold to cross on the way to a much broader horizon of relation. In a polemic from 1926 directed at the film-​theoretical propositions of Béla Balázs, Eisenstein decried the “personification of cinema in the individualized shot” as a politically misguided exaltation of the individual (i.e., bourgeois) subject. “We must look for the essence of cinema not in the shots,” urged Eisenstein, “but in the relationships between the shots just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes, etc.”28 Like many of his contemporaries, Eisenstein saw cinematic montage as an indispensable means of deconstructing, segmenting, and remediating the human body toward a revolutionary collectivist aesthetic. If montage came to lie at the heart of cinema’s expansion of the relational field beyond the strict purview of the human, then the body in pieces was an unavoidable and perhaps necessary side effect of that new order. Bazin was among the first thinkers to issue a serious rejoinder to the primacy of montage as espoused by Eisenstein and his contemporaries. As Bazin saw it, in rushing toward their dialectical, big-​picture view of relations through the door of montage, the Soviets sacrificed those complex and

Introduction  xxiii

contingent forms of relation internal to the image in the first place. Images became mere pawns in the dialectical drama the Soviets saw unfolding in montage, but for Bazin the “relationships” produced through this process were of an “abstract” nature; meaning was not allowed to emanate directly from the image but merely from its “shadow,” which is “projected by montage onto the field of consciousness of the spectator.” Bazin saw montage as an ideologically mandated external force that tends toward a false representation of relations, and for Bazin this extended to the relation between viewer and film. For example, he famously celebrated Orson Welles’s use of deep space by suggesting that it “brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.”29 By his own account, Bazin was no positivist, so favoring a more “realistic” relationship between viewer and image meant holding open the possibility of surprise and contingency—​in short, the possibility of change. Bazin saw the kind of viewer-​film relation (rapport) born of deep focus as inherently more egalitarian than that of montage because it makes for a more active mode of perception. He wrote, “It is from [the spectator’s] attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.”30 Preserving the relations internal to images meant allowing for a richer and more complex field of external relations which range from ones occurring between shots to less foreseeable ones born of the dynamic between viewer and screen. It is perhaps easy to overstate Bazin’s aversion to the cut, but upon reading him closely one is reminded that his liberal humanist vision of cinema was often at its sharpest when pitched against the almost authoritarian implications of montage, of the “absolute manipulation” of the cut, as Jean Narboni once described anti-​montage caricatures—​“an all-​powerful technique of all-​purpose arrangement.”31 In one of his most convincingly argued essays, Bazin takes aim at the anthropomorphizing tendency of montage in cinematic depictions of the nonhuman world. He suggests that in most cases, “[t]‌he apparent action and the meaning we attribute” to animals onscreen are simply not present “prior to the assembling of the film.”32 The cut functions in this regard as a device of puppetry, and not only of the nonhuman animals on screen but of those viewing it, who are strung along by montage to preserve the anthropomorphic illusion of narrative. Bazin provides the most compelling counterexample to this tendency in a now-​famous footnote concerning an “otherwise mediocre” film called Where No Vultures Fly, which tells the story of a British family living in the South African bush. In one sequence, a child breaks away from his parents’ camp, encounters a solitary lion cub, and sets off with the animal in hand. Parallel editing implies that the lioness turns back and begins tracking the child and cub. “Then suddenly,” Bazin writes,

xxiv Introduction to our horror, the director abandons his montage of separate shots that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child, and lioness all in the same full shot. The single frame in which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that has preceded it. . . . The question is not whether the child really ran the risk it seemed to run but that the episode was shot with due respect for its spatial unity. Realism here resides in the homogeneity of space.33

The special conditions at play that favor the “homogeneity of space” over the use of montage in this instance have, Bazin insists, little to do with any real danger these beings might have posed to one another. The prohibition on montage works in this instance to honor the “enclosure,” as Serge Daney put it, “of two heterogeneous objects in the same frame,” effecting a kind of internal division of the shot itself—​a rupture in the field of representation resulting from a conflictual relation of bodies within the frame.34 Not just the cut, but any gratuitous intervention on the part of the production apparatus would imperil a more a primary dialectical tension at play here between the human and nonhuman domains. Bazin’s “ban on editing,” Daney reminds us, “is a function of this risk.”35 Bazin’s intellectual program, and his efforts to decenter montage specifically, was grounded in a realist aesthetic, however much he may have viewed reality dialectically. Indeed, there is a basic way in which Bazin’s thought tasks the cinema with corresponding to reality as it is given, and in a way that does not, for example, take any special leave of something so basic (if entrenched) as linear perspective. More to the point of montage, Bazin did not seem to entertain the notion that the cut could itself be filled with meaning and feeling, that it could provide the basis for a range of real experiences falling outside of his (or any of his contemporaries’) regime of “realism.” Bazin was for all intents and purposes uninterested in the possibilities that montage could bring to the constantly unfolding adventure of cinema’s relation to the problem of relation—​a problem he took up repeatedly—​except as a kind of foil to reality itself. But if Bazin is guilty of foreclosing on such possibilities, Eisenstein is perhaps also guilty of turning the cut into a functionary for the types of change, and for the kinds of relations, that he wanted. Indeed, the many and varied currents of the cinematic avant-​garde in the twentieth century did not always maintain an entirely permissive attitude toward the cut, nor even an altogether positive outlook on it. Luis Buñuel, for example, heralded what he called découpage or segmentation—​the moment, before anyone even touches a camera, when the filmmaker pieces together a series of dreamlike images in written form—​as the original and most authentic moment of creation,

Introduction  xxv

when “the intuition of film, its cinematic embryo, comes to life.”36 In the same breath, however, Buñuel likened the activity of physically cutting film to rote, manual labor, during which the filmmaker merely puts “hand to the plow.”37 Thus even as Buñuel acknowledged the cut as an important intermediary between unconscious and conscious experience, he did not see the powers of découpage extending to “mere editing” and thus foreclosed a broader relational dynamic between the psychic and material realm. Like Buñuel, Jean Epstein was a central figure of French avant-​garde cinema during the interwar period whose films and writings largely predated Bazin’s work. Known for his bold, impressionistic camerawork and editing style, Epstein nevertheless criticized the overuse of “rapid” and “breakneck” editing in the art cinema of his moment, which he characterized as “superficial,” “a little ridiculous,” and “no longer interesting.”38 Prior to this statement, Epstein himself, along with Jean Cocteau, Emile Vuillermoz, Germaine Delluc, Léon Moussinac, and other French writers and producers, had championed the expressive capacities of cinematic montage. These writers sought to divest cinema of its allegiances to narrative by setting it in relation to other art forms, often by drawing analogies between cinematic montage and developments in music (rhythm and meter), poetry (simultanéism), and painting (Cubism).39 Epstein’s rather uncharitable analysis of montage in 1925 was thus less a repudiation of the cut per se than of its sheer ubiquity in European avant-​garde cinema, where by the mid-​1920s it had already become a kind of stylistic default. For Epstein, the gold standard of cinematic style was the cinema of Abel Gance, whose 1923 film La Roue (The Wheel) Epstein heralded as a major development in the practice of montage. In La Roue, Gance famously deployed rhythmic, expressive editing as a way of modifying the viewer’s emotional and physical reaction to events onscreen. In the film’s opening sequence, Gance depicts the wheels of a train progressing slowly on the track in a series of almost identical close-​up shots that lyrically dissolve into one another. This is followed by a sequence of wide shots which, through staccato cutting and lyrical tinting, impart the turmoil of a train crash. Much later in the film, one of the central characters, Elie, hangs off a steep cliff, with certain death below. Meanwhile, the man’s lover, Norma, panicked at his impending doom, runs to his rescue, which Gance shows through crosscutting. As Elie’s grip falters, however, the film flashes back to previous scenes of Norma in La Roue, shuttling between close-​ups on the faces of both lovers in the past and present. As the length of shots between cuts shortens, it becomes almost impossible for the viewer to keep all the images and faces apart. Then Elie falls to his death. The flashbacks of course invite viewers to empathize with Elie and Norma, but perhaps more important, they impart a suspenseful urgency to the finality of

xxvi Introduction

death itself through a sensorily jarring montage scheme, which is felt by the viewer somatically. It became a rightly celebrated sequence, and Gance’s expressive cutting would go on to dazzle viewers no less than Eisenstein himself. Even today it is hard not to marvel at the scene’s imaginative and technical splendor and at the way it sets two trains into motion by deploying montage as both a narrative and an optical device. (It may well have been the failure of Gance’s imitators to strike such a compromise that led Epstein to decry subsequent efforts at expressive montage as vacuous.) Regardless, the abiding novelty of a film made in 1923 is no doubt a credit to ingenuity of its creators, but is also a function of how thoroughly the expressive capacities of editing were stifled in the following century. At least within the context of European art cinema, Bazin was ultimately quite successful in dislodging montage from the center of film discourse. It would not be until the late 1960s, which saw a resurgent interest in Eisenstein’s work alongside the emergence of a political modernist film discourse, that montage would once more be taken up as a matter of serious consideration. These discussions tended to regard the cut at once as a semiotic operation underpinning classical cinematic narration and as an ideological one reinforcing the values of a capitalist-​imperialist-​patriarchal social order. In this milieu, the space between images could be deployed for or against the dominant political or audiovisual orders of the day, whether as a “suturing” operation to situate viewers within a film’s spatiotemporal and narrative discourse (the better to entrap them in its underlying ideological web) or as oppositional, waging an assault on normative modes of representation, repelling spectacle by dislocating images and sounds from their natural contexts. It was arguably not until the 1980s, with the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s two-​volume study of film, that montage would again be the subject of sustained and rigorous analysis. In his books, Deleuze aligns the classical period of cinema with what he calls the movement-​image governed by a sensorimotor logic of “commensurable relations” between shots.40 What prevails here are “rational cuts” that confirm and validate a humanist, logical, and spatially intuitive experience of reality. Following Henri Bergson’s phenomenological account of movement and duration, Deleuze likens shot relations in classical cinema to a dynamic of parts in relation to a larger whole. Deleuze elaborates the whole by describing it in terms of relation, one that is “always external to its terms” (i.e., is not a “property of objects”).41 The whole, moreover, is “open,” Deleuze says, and is “transformed and qualitatively changed” through the relations of its constituent objects, parts, and sets, which are themselves “closed.”42 This changing whole is essentially time, which can only be “apprehended indirectly,” Deleuze says, “in relation to the movement-​images which express

Introduction  xxvii

it.”43 The operation of montage figures here centrally, for it is precisely what “bears on the movement-​images to release the whole from them.”44 At its core, classical cinema for Deleuze stages a metaphysical drama of the particular and the universal, parts and wholes. These parts or movement-​images, because they are closed and divisible, can relate to one another only through an external force, which is to say: montage. In this regard, montage is a kind of simulation (i.e., “indirect image”) of time, because it brings closed and divisible particulars into relation and strives in some noble and mysterious way to the condition of the open, of time. The domain of the movement-​image effectively ceases in the aftermath of the Second World War, which for Deleuze marks the advent of the time-​ image. As the horrors of two world wars belatedly impressed themselves upon the human sensorium, their effects register cinematically in the sudden prevalence of “irrational cuts”—​evincing no apparent underlying narrative or spatial logic. The sensorimotor rationale by which human subjects once related to cinematic images, and by which those images related to each other gives way in modern cinema to “non-​commensurable relations between images.”45 Modern cinema is thus marked by the “obliteration of a whole,” where the erstwhile “totalization of images” of classical cinema is abandoned “in favor of an outside which is inserted between them.”46 Unlike the montage of classical cinema, in modern cinema the cut “no longer forms part of one or the other image”—​it no longer has to work toward an outside, because in the absence of any whole to bring them into meaningful relation, for the “incommensurable” images of modern cinema the cut is outside, is synonymous with “the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable.”47 Such a cut—​we might call it any-​image-​relation-​whatever—​is shot through with a seemingly inconsolable helplessness, an existential lameness on the part of human beings before History, and marks “the erasure of the unity of man and the world.”48 Despite the gloomy picture he paints, some part of Deleuze is clearly encouraged, if not consoled, by the developments of what he calls modern cinema, for it means at long last that “the interval is set free, the interstice becomes irreducible and stands on its own.”49 And while the irrational cut is in many respects a figure of horror and loss, Deleuze does suggest—​albeit somewhat in passing and quite near the end of his study—​that the regime of the time-​image still holds space for relation, “for incommensurability denotes a new relation and not an absence.”50 In fact, Deleuze introduces the term “relinkage” to account for the relational activity of irrational cuts. This activity is additive rather than associative, and Deleuze is careful to point out that relinkage in this sense is not “a second linkage” that comes after the fact but “a mode of original and specific linkage, or rather a specific connection between

xxviii Introduction

de-​linked images.”51 In the passage from movement-​image to time-​image, then, relation changes from being external to internal, outside to inside. In many ways, this book is an effort to account for exactly such a phenomenon of “relinkage,” which Deleuze posits as pivotal to incommensurable relations but which is left for the most part unelaborated by the end of Cinema 2. It does so, in part, by envisioning a form of montage that is at once deterritorialized from the rigid narrative and spatial logic of the movement-​image, but whose reterritorializing capacity precludes neither individual/​collective human action nor meaningful (even relatively stable) relations between images. The proposition that montage is a matter of relation runs the risk of appearing self-​evidently true, and thus wholly inadequate to the task of an entire monograph. It almost goes without saying that when we talk about editing or montage we are talking about the relationships between images or shots. In this sense, are we merely saying that shots are the relata of the relational matrix of montage, and by extension of cinema in general? First and foremost, I hope to jettison the association of the cut with negation, lack, and indeterminacy, instead regarding it as a formative space imbued with the sheer potentiality of being-​with. Another way of saying this is that montage gives form and expression to the processual, nonprogrammatic, and transindividuating character of relation. However, just as montage gives expression to relation, it is also a relational process in its own right. Here montage designates an expanded field of relational techniques between (and among) images, screens, beings, and environments. The artists I will discuss in this book employ montage to devise new relational forms amid historical situations where the very concept of relation is in flux. Whereas montage might otherwise appear synonymous with social, ideological, or technological operations that subject relation to the fixity of a predetermined sequence, the filmmakers I discuss employ strategies of cutting and splicing, grouping and assembly to enact new relationships and to shift the terms of relation more broadly: to reterritorialize relation itself. The cut becomes the space of this relational imaginary, giving form to the exigency of connection where sequence is no longer given in advance. Between Images proposes a novel understanding of the cinematic cut as a technique of relation, a means of radically rethinking and reshaping how humans relate—​to ourselves and each other, to technology and the planet, and beyond. Through a series of six case studies, I situate the cinematic cut within an interdisciplinary conversation about the abiding capacity of cinema to effect change. In my view, it is the space between images rather than images themselves that figures this capacity. Indeed, a basic argument of this book is that the cut remains a fundamental procedure linking cinema to politics. To

Introduction  xxix

that end, Between Images presents a collection of works where the space between images is brought radically to the fore. In this expanded field of the cinematic cut, the space between images is endowed with the eventfulness of being understood as a relational enterprise. While the meaning of relation shifts across these case studies, it tends to fall within one of three domains: body, territory, and ecology. Rather than treat these as if they were distinct domains, the book takes an additive approach, with each new section registering an expansion of the relational field. Within and across these domains, the case studies contained in this book address a range of urgent issues facing our contemporary politics, from corporal punishment and surveillance capitalism to neocolonialism and climate change. In my analysis, the space between images becomes the setting, as it were, where these challenges are posed and even imaginatively redressed. Part I, comprising the first two chapters of Between Images, situates the question of relation under the rubric of the body. The body opens our study because on a very basic and visceral level it is the earliest and most elementary unit of relation that we encounter. Jacques Lacan even went so far as to designate the body as the original locus of relation, since it is where we first confront the duality of our existence as part of a vast continuum of being but also violently “marked” as different upon entry into the symbolic. “The body,” says Lacan, “is originally the site of the Other, insofar as it is there that the mark qua signifier is first inscribed.”52 In designating the body as the original locus of the Other, Lacan posits that the turbulent and even violent history of each person’s socialization is first written on the flesh, which grounds all relations that follow. Chapter 1, which focuses on Andy Warhol, follows a trajectory from the experience of self, body, and world as part of an undifferentiated continuum (a function of narcissism), through a crisis of separation (the body in pieces), and ultimately to the recognition of the body as nonunitary, never fully one’s own. This transubstantiation of the body from an individuated, selfsame unit to a divided and public “object” marks a provisional series of steps in this book’s larger (by no means linear or tidy) discussion of relation. I regard Warhol’s montage practice quite broadly across psychic, conceptual, and formal registers. Cutting, suturing, and even seriality all have purchase here, as I trace montage across Warhol’s work in photography, painting, illustration, and even writing. The red thread running through all of this is ultimately a claim for montage as a technique of social jouissance, a means of coming to terms with and ultimately even enjoying the fact of one’s image, one’s body, and indeed oneself as immanently shared, which is to say related. Readers could justifiably wonder why an artist like Warhol should open a study on montage since his films so often traffic in extremes of duration.

xxx Introduction

Indeed, it is true that Warhol’s is widely regarded as a cinema of the long take, which the artist deploys on some level precisely to repel the negativity of the cut. Part of the logic of opening this book with Warhol is to underscore the presence of montage even in the absence of cuts, cinematic or otherwise. (Such an insight of course goes at least all the way back to Eisenstein’s writings but can be found throughout Bazin’s work as well.) Warhol’s ostensibly phobic attitude toward the cut merely provides the conceptual and psychic backdrop for my discussion of his photographic experiments in the 1970s, where we find him becoming an artist of montage to a much more explicit degree than was borne out in his previous visual practice. Not surprisingly, this intensified relationship to the cut comes about in the aftermath of Warhol’s brush with death, when he was shot multiple times by Valerie Solanas. For many of his friends and commentators, Warhol emerged from the shooting an entirely different person—​reclusive, hypersensitive, cold, and removed. Likewise, his artistic practice took on a more business-​oriented and superficial veneer, apparently devoid of the aesthetic and political subversiveness of his previous work. My treatment of Warhol’s practice fundamentally rejects this narrative. By focusing on such idiosyncratic objects as the so-​called stitched photographs and the numerous representations of the artist’s scarred body, Chapter 1 finds in the much-​lamented later stage of Warhol’s career an artist quite directly contending with questions of relation, of what it means to be with oneself and with others. Montage, I argue, was Warhol’s primary tool for doing so. Chapter 1 turns to psychoanalysis for a conception of the relation between part and whole, singular and plural, which, in Lacan’s well-​known account of the mirror stage, emerges first as a relation between the fantasy of selfsame wholeness and the threatening otherness of the outside. All that otherness notwithstanding, in a sense the underlying relation that haunts Chapter 1 is that between Warhol and Solanas. For all the trauma and pain this relationship brought upon both parties, each nevertheless played an indelible role in the other’s life and work. At a basic level, this is how Between Images gets from the individual to the pair, from wound to suture, from zero to one—​to two. Chapter 2 introduces a discussion of the cinematic cut in the “expanded field” through an engagement with Steve McQueen’s gallery exhibition practice, before turning on a close reading of his debut feature, Hunger (2009). The beginning of Chapter 2, however, locates readers at the conclusion of a dissolve between the first two chapters rather than on the other side of a hard cut. Before diving into McQueen’s work directly, it returns to Warhol, offering a brief account of his practice of cinematic montage. This detour lays some of the groundwork for the book’s larger transition at this

Introduction  xxxi

point from photography to cinema. It also implicitly addresses the question of why Warhol and McQueen are placed next to each other here in the first place—​not only as two figures related under the rubric of this book but as two ostensibly distinct “images” on either side a cut between “1” and “2.” In the first place, their relation has to do with the seeming propensity of both artists for duration, or more precisely for the long take. On one level, this harks back to my earlier point about montage existing even in the absence of cutting per se. At certain points in this book it is precisely the absence of cutting which propels its theorization of montage, and surely this is most true of the first two chapters on Warhol and McQueen. Thus Chapter 2 is cast to some degree as a corrective to the pervasive and, I believe, outsized lot given to the long take in the criticism surrounding McQueen’s work, one of its basic aims being to displace attention from duration to the cut as an indispensable technique of relation therein. My discussion of McQueen opens with a survey of his early films—​Bear (1993), Five Easy Pieces (1995), and Just Above My Head (1997)—​as they were displayed together at a major retrospective of his films at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. For this exhibition, McQueen and his team constructed a tripartite projection “column” onto which each of those three works was projected simultaneously. What interests me about this projection mode is the ways it sets up a form of spatial montage, such that the edges where two given planes of projection converge operate as “cuts,” at once uniting and separating the three films as they unfold across this column. Lending this spatial montage its dynamism, in part, are the viewers themselves, whose physical movement through space at any given moment determines the shape of montage. My treatment of this figure of the “expanded cut” is informed by a late essay by Eisenstein that imagines montage as a “path.” Thinking alongside Eisenstein’s rewarding short text, I argue that a relational poetics of montage emerges from McQueen’s installation when viewers opt into an active relationship to the column itself, at once as a site of projection and as an aspect of the gallery’s architecture. At the same time, relation unfolds here at the level of the filmed bodies themselves, whose combustive interaction across this structure defies the self-​containment of otherwise distinct shots and films. Through a sustained treatment of McQueen’s tripartite projection structure, the book’s conception of the cinematic cut extends beyond the traditional screen and into the expanded domain of the gallery. My discussion of Hunger in a sense reverse-​engineers the expanded cut and places it back in the black box and the single screen. Part II shifts focus away from corporeality and embodiment to space and technology as sites of relation. Chapter 3 focuses on the work of Harun

xxxii Introduction

Farocki. A specific feature of Farocki’s discourse I highlight is his spatial conception of montage. This spatial and geographic metaphor prevails at virtually every level of Farocki’s praxis, even before the mid-​1990s, when he turned increasingly toward expanded and more explicitly spatial and place-​ based modes of exhibition. What is at stake here is the “reterritorializing” capacity of montage, of how it may be used to coordinate or recoordinate oneself (in relation to society, to other people, to one’s surroundings) in a world increasingly permeated and structured by technologies and processes that compress and confuse space. What Farocki called “soft montage”—​where images constellate in an air of “general relatedness” rather than strict opposition or equation—​was an operation born of an enduring attentiveness to the social, material, and phenomenological possibilities of the cinematic interval understood as a reterritorializing gesture. Nowhere was this capacity clearer to Farocki than in the figure of the editing table, or Schnittplatz—​literally a place of editing or cutting. That something so basic and material as a table could stand in for an entire politics of the moving image attests to the fact that Farocki viewed montage not simply as a technical or even aesthetic operation but as a technique for living, a means of placing oneself in the world. Editing in this regard is less an operation than a situation, a means of finding one’s bearings amid a rapidly shifting horizon of world-​images. Chapter 4, which focuses on the work of Berlin-​based filmmaker and media theorist Hito Steyerl, follows from the previous chapter’s claims regarding the spatial and technological operations undergirding montage. Steyerl’s work casts these questions in a new light, particularly in her sustained polemic around countercinema, from the Soviet avant-​garde to the films of the New Left. Steyerl is deeply critical of the ways in which montage, across the history of cinema, has been aligned with a range of violent and militaristic metaphors, and she seeks to displace the historical analogy between cinema and war in favor of a spatial and geographic language. Grounding these claims is an extended close reading of Steyerl’s two-​channel video, Abstract (2012), which occupies the second half of this chapter. A dual-​screen work dealing with the extrajudicial killing of Steyerl’s close friend Andrea Wolf in 1998, Abstract mixes footage taken in Kurdistan and Berlin across two monitors, so that these two territories come to interpenetrate one another. My discussion builds to a key moment in Abstract when Steyerl appears to cross over from one screen (itself a kind of shot) to the next as if through a door, an act of relation I argue is informed by a broader politics of solidarity and rescue.

Introduction  xxxiii

Part III of my study shifts focus from technology and space in the previous two chapters to landscape and the environment, framing montage in terms of ecological relation. Chapter 5 examines the phenomenological workings of montage in experimental films about landscape, pitching the cinematic interval as a crucial mediating device in the cinema’s environmental imaginary, what I call the ecological cut. This chapter works in part as a survey of the historical intersections (explicit and implicit) between environmentalism and the cinematic avant-​garde, turning on a polemic aimed at what I argue has been an overrepresentation of the long take in the cinematic avant-​garde’s environmental discourse. Against this privileging of the long take as a signifier of ecological consciousness or natural presence—​a notion that obtains at least as much in scholarship as it does in the films themselves—​the ecological cut attests to the fact that in an era of rapid environmental change, when humanity’s sense of dominion over the Earth remains largely unchecked, the space between images becomes an indispensable tool for taking stock of and radically modifying our troubled relationship to the planet. To flesh out this idea, I turn to several recent works in contemporary avant-​garde landscape cinema, including works by Daïchi Saïto, Peter Bo Rappmund, and Ja’Tovia Gary. In Saïto’s and Rappmund’s films in particular, the cinematic interval affirms the natural world’s capacity not to be seen, its right not to be possessed or known. Gary’s cinema stages these tensions more explicitly within a framework of racial antagonism. Deploying a range of strategies like split-​screen, “distance montage,” graphic rhyming, and “strobing,” Gary’s film works to reveal a fundamental gap in how black and white bodies experience the natural world. Though their means and ends often differ, these three filmmakers deploy montage as a means of “ecological estrangement,” where the natural world is seen not as some static, external phenomenon but as an anthropogenic “text” whose meaning is historically contingent and collectively made. This chapter aims to make novel contributions to recent critical debates around place and the environment in moving-​image art, not only by mapping out the ecological valences of montage more generally but by doing so specifically through three important experimental filmmakers whose work has received relatively scant treatment within a discourse that historically tends to elide filmmakers of color. Chapter 6 brings race front and center through a discussion of the interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. I view Smith’s work as an ongoing effort to remake cinema’s ecological relationality through a prism of Black feminist subjectivity. At the same time, I read her montage discourse as a means of contending with and remaking

xxxiv Introduction

human-​planetary relations based not on ownership and domination but on shared lineages, memories, and places. The book concludes by bringing the study’s larger questions more directly into the present moment, pulling focus on the difficulty and urgency of relation in light of recent global developments around the COVID-​19 pandemic, climate change, and authoritarian power and violence. Throughout the book, I trace the cut synthetically across the cinematic avant-​garde from the 1960s to the present. My aim in this regard is to treat the cut formally as an object of close and sustained analysis but also to reassert its political valence in a thoroughly globalized and digitized world. Between Images offers an analysis that routes around despair, or at the very least holds open the possibility that art may still have something to say, if not always something to do, about the ongoing problem of relation on this planet. Ultimately, I hope to leave the reader with a renewed sense of the potentiality of cinema, and of montage in particular, which in the final analysis is simply a metaphor for change. The cut and the splice are two sides of the same portal, a door we walk through in order to encounter cinema’s unthinkably vast field of relations, and to relate to cinema itself differently. Writing this book has been a way for me to repeatedly remind myself that the work of relation is far from over, and that its unresolved and ongoing strangeness should be regarded not as a liability for the future of our species but as its north star. Readers could challenge me here by contending that the way I conceptualize relation—​especially when I do so with recourse to thinkers like Glissant or Blanchot—​is simply a kind of theoretical poetry, or worse, that it disagrees with the urgent demands of the present and in no clear way lends itself to action, to say nothing of mere survival. But thought, while by no means exempt from the material realm, is tasked with problems of different sort, and a different means of acting in the world. Thinking is of course less beholden to laws (whether of physics or logic) than other kinds of production. All the urgent threats of our moment, from petrocultures to authoritarian polities, from white supremacy to the carceral state, bespeak a broken, exhausted, and desperate relational imaginary. The crises wrought by these ways of thinking, acting, and relating are functions of the status quo, and so the urgent need for a changed state of affairs does not negate the unique space reserved for thought, because thinking is an indispensable agent of change. Pervasive emergency overrides neither strange thinking nor the thinking of strangeness; it propels them. Existing somewhere between the possibilities of imagination and the facts on the ground, between the virtual and the material, montage brings relation home from the strangeness of thinking to the concrete immediacy of the world.

Introduction  xxxv

Notes 1. Monter has an array of meanings in French: spatial ascension, as in climbing a mountain or stairs (monter les escaliers); a constructive or schematic sense, as in starting a business or building a legal case (monte une boîte); creative production, as in staging a play (monter un spectacle); transportation, as in boarding a vessel or riding a horse (monter à cheval); a legal (du montage juridique) or economic (du montage financier) state of affairs. We will tap into nearly all these strata of meaning, but it is naturally the sense of assembly or arrangement that will be most pertinent. 2. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15. 3. Jacques Aumont, Montage, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose Books, 2013), 39 4. Aumont, Montage, 42, emphasis mine. 5. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and White Press, 1970), unpaginated, emphasis mine. 6. John Heil, “Relations,” in The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, ed. Robin Le Poidevin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 312. 7. Randolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9. 8. Marilyn Strathern, Relations: An Anthropological Account (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 2. 9. These thinkers include Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hito Steyerl, Guy Debord, Annette Michelson, Kaja Silverman, Jean-​Luc Godard, Frank B. Wilderson III, Michel Serres, Dziga Vertov, Maurice Blanchot, Karen Barad, Fred Moten, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Gilbert Simondon, Jean-​Luc Nancy, and Hannah Arendt. 10. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 68, originally published in 1969 as L’Entreiten infini by Editions Gallimard. 11. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 68, emphasis mine. 12. Édouard Glissant, “One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara,” trans. Christopher Winks, Journal of Contemporary African Art 28 (Spring 2011): 5. Glissant’s phrasing was famously borrowed by Fred Moten as the rubric for his trilogy of books, consent not to be a single being. 13. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 183. 14. The cinematic frame is among the most widely and rigorously theorized aspects of film language. Some of the most influential discussions of the frame can be found in Pascal Bonitzer, “Deframings” (1978), in Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 4, 1973–​1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, ed. David Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 197–​203; Jean-​Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field,” trans. Diana Matias, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 421–​443; Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-​Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

xxxvi Introduction 15. Eyal Peretz, The Off-​Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 37. 16. Mary Ann Doane, Bigger Than Life: The Close-​Up and Scale in the Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5. 17. Doane elaborates, “Scale is always comparative, relational—​a ratio—​and it can only be understood as produced for a particular viewpoint or subjectivity, a perspective” (Bigger Than Life, 22). 18. Doane, Bigger Than Life, 22. 19. Doane, Bigger Than Life, 22. 20. Siegfried Kracauer similarly identified the two major “tendencies” in filmmaking as “realist” and “formative.” See Siegfried Kracauer, “Basic Concepts” (1960), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 147–​158. 21. Lev Kuleshov, “Art of the Cinema,” in Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 52. 22. Sergei Volkonsky, Vyrazitel’nyi chelovek: Stsenicheskoe vospitanie zhesta (po Del’sartu) (Expressive Man: Stage Gesture Training [after Delsarte]) (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1913), 79, cited in Mikhail Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor,” in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 33. 23. Volkonsky, Vyrazitel’nyi chelovek, 132, cited in Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments,” 35. 24. Vladimir R. Gardin, Vospominaniya (Memoirs), vol. 1: 1912–​21 (Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1949), 143, cited in Yampolsky, “Kuleshov’s Experiments,” 38, emphasis mine. 25. Lev Kuleshov, “Montage,” Kinofot 3 (1922): 12. 26. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 41. 27. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 43. 28. Sergei Eisenstein, “Béla Forgets the Scissors” (1926), in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–​1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, trans. Richard Taylor (London: Routledge, 1988), 147, emphasis mine. 29. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 35. 30. Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 36. 31. Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” trans. Tom Milne, in Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 3: 1969–​1972: The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (London: Routledge, 1990), 31. It is especially interesting to consider Bazin’s relationship to Soviet film discourse in light of a proliferating international Stalinism among the left-​wing French intelligentsia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bazin’s deeply strained relationship to this movement no doubt bears out to some degree in his often suspicious demeanor toward the more boldly stated pronouncements of Soviet film theory. For more on this, see (especially Dudley Andrew’s introductory remarks on) André Bazin, “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema,” trans. Georgia Gurrieri, in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29–​40. 32. André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 44. 33. Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” 49–​50, emphasis mine.

Introduction  xxxvii 34. Serge Daney, “The Screen Fantasy (Bazin and the Animals),” trans. Mark Cohen, in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 32. 35. Daney, “The Screen Fantasy,” 33. 36. Luis Buñuel, “Découpage, or Cinematic Segmentation,” in An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, trans. Garrett White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 131, originally published in Gaceta literaria, no. 43 (October 1, 1928). 37. Buñuel, “Découpage, or Cinematic Segmentation,” 134. 38. Jean Epstein, “For a New Avant-​Garde,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, trans. Stuart Liebman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 303. These remarks first appeared in written form in Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna, ca. 1925. 39. Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/​Anthology, 1907–​1939, vol. 1: 1907–​1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 95–​116. 40. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 181. 41. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 9–​11. 42. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 9–​11. 43. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 29. 44. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 29. 45. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 213. 46. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 187. 47. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 214. 48. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 187. What I refer to here as any-​image-​relation-​whatever is an intentional riff on Deleuze’s “any-​space-​whatever” (espace quelconque), which throughout Cinema 2 refers to the “disconnected” and “empty” spaces of modern cinema. 49. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 277. 50. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 279. 51. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 277. 52. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book XIV, “The Logic of Phantasy,” 1966–​ 67), translated from unpublished French manuscripts by Cormac Gallagher, p. 129, translation modified.

PART I

BODY

1 Andy Warhol in Stitches Nobody imagines that what is interesting in a wound is the scar. —​Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV Don’t laugh. Oh, please don’t make me laugh. —​Andy Warhol, upon being shot

In the summer of 1968, Valerie Solanas entered the recently relocated Factory at 33 Union Square West and shot Andy Warhol. Though he survived, Warhol later remarked, “It hurt so much, I wished I was dead.”1 Based on the many accounts by artists and scholars reflecting on Warhol’s career, the shooting not only pierced the artist’s flesh but ruptured his very body of work. Lynne Tillman writes, “Things changed then. [Warhol] changed, the Factory changed. They were never the same again.”2 Roughly coinciding with the move from the more permissive space of the old Factory into a less public one, the shooting marked the end of a certain inclusiveness about Warhol’s world. As James Benning notes, Warhol “kept the Factory door propped open from the beginning (until Valerie Solanas changed all that).”3 Annette Michelson hits an even more melancholic note when she writes that “the shot from Valerie Solanis’s [sic] gun in 1968 marks the boundary between two sites and modes of production, the moment when a systematic division of labor replaces a previous artisanal mode of production.”4 Thomas Crow could barely recognize the “bizarre, right-​wing media creature” who emerged from the shooting.5 In this narrative, the shooting stands as a cut, one lying between the artist’s celebrated output of the 1960s and his often denigrated and largely ignored output from the 1970s and 1980s. In this later period, Michelson writes, “Warhol assumed the role and function of the grand couturier, whose signature sells or licenses perfumes, stockings, household linens manufactured elsewhere.”6 But while it is tempting to view the shooting as a point of traumatic separation, doing so risks reinforcing the ways in which the artist’s later output Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0001

4  Between Images

often gets cordoned off from his paintings and films from the 1960s, as if one could pollute the other. By dwelling upon the traumatic nature of this event, Warhol criticism has attempted to circumvent an abiding uneasiness with the artist’s “post-​’68” work. The almost compulsive degree to which critics restage the shooting as a break suggests the wounds Solanas left lie as much now on the critical corpus of Warhol’s work as they marked his body. But these traumatological narratives have done little to shed light on the actual pain Warhol experienced or its consequences for his work. Instead, they have relegated that trauma to the level of art historical reception where, in sublimated form, it carries out the work of the censor, dividing Warhol’s corpus against itself, breaking it up into apparently cohesive units, deploying it in service to the critical tendencies of the day. David James has cautioned against this tendency to compartmentalize Warhol’s practice, suggesting that we instead take the “irreducible contradictions in [his] multiple aspirations as themselves the data of study.”7 I share James’s wariness about these critical defense mechanisms. At the same time, one faces the danger of eliding precisely those ways in which so much of Warhol’s life and art defied the work of contradiction, discontinuity, and negation.8 Not all that is wounded can be redressed, but it is impossible in the final analysis to disambiguate the event of wounding from its antithesis: the cure. Warhol’s wounds, and the sutures that never fully closed them, in fact figured prominently in his work after 1968, just as he was delving head-​on into the medium of photography. They were, in a strange way, Solanas’s major contribution to art history.9 In following this line of questioning, we will eventually arrive at the seldom discussed “stitched photographs” that Warhol produced beginning in the early 1980s until his death in 1987 (see Figure 1.1). I argue that these objects lie at the end of a sequence of works through which Warhol tried to account for the event that nearly claimed his life, and to find in photographic montage a surrogate body—​one that might hold the physical pain to which that event gave rise and serve as a proxy for the medium of cinema he ostensibly abandoned. The stitched works are fascinating and perplexing objects. They defy some of our most fundamental assumptions about Warhol, that quintessential iconoclast ever defiant of artistic norms whose art violated even the notion that art must violate. Indeed, the stitched works on some level betray a seemingly altogether different tendency: they speak of the cure. At the same time, the stitched photographs offer an opportunity for criticism to inquire into its own wounds. For the very presence of the stitches poses vital questions regarding how and to what end a work addresses its viewers, how it “sutures” us

Andy Warhol in Stitches  5

Figure 1.1  Andy Warhol, Greek Sculpture (Female No Arms), 1976–​1986, six gelatin silver prints stitched together with thread (sewn posthumously in 2014), 27.25 x 31.75 in. © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

into its discourse. Borrowed from midcentury psychoanalytic discourse and repurposed by film theorists to describe a manner of narrative and ideological recruitment of the viewer through cinematic editing, the theory of suture has acted as a site of discursive tension since the 1970s. Not unlike Warhol himself, suture is perennially being buried and exhumed, pilloried and rescued. The claim that Warhol’s stitched photographs invoke the theory of suture could only be the product of a misreading. One would have to (mis)recognize the stitched works as visual puns on a theoretical discourse that has given rise to, and which is itself characterized by, numerous misapprehensions. Nevertheless, it is from this place of faltering that we will proceed. Just as Christian Metz once admitted to using “the theory of fetishism as a fetish,” we will be sutured by the theory of suture.10

6  Between Images

Something from Nothing The concept of suture was originally developed by Jacques-​Alain Miller to describe the process by which the subject enters the symbolic realm, which, as Jacques Lacan characterized it, is the domain of meaning systems, of the languages, laws, and mandates that circumscribe subjects. In Miller’s account, suture describes the most elementary form of relation in psychoanalysis: the kind to which lack gives rise. Miller thus casts suture as “the general relation of lack to the structure of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-​the-​place-​of.”11 Here Miller is talking about a form of relation that exists between a nothing (i.e., presymbolic subject) and a something (signifying chain, structure, discourse). Prior to being discursively anointed as presence, the subject is a sort of absolute zero, non-​self-​identical and unquantifiable, but after assuming the form of a signifier (a name, a pronoun) is thereby counted. This naturally comes at a price, for the subject can only ever announce itself by way of a name that betrays its incommensurability with the discourse of the Other. Crucially, however, it is this space of noncorrespondence that serves as a launching pad for desire. “It is in the interval between the signifiers,” Lacan says, “that lies the desire offered for the subject to grasp in the experience of the discourse of the Other.”12 Born of a division, the subject bears the mark of an inaugurating cut, at once a source of threatening negativity and one of propulsive positivity. Suture names this double movement of inscription and erasure—​the paradoxical means by which the subject is at once reminded of its status as lack but attempts to overcome it with recourse to signifiers that temporarily defer the crushing weight of nothingness. Identity is thus characterized by a tension, in that “the definition of the subject comes down to the possibility of one signifier more.”13 Film theorists in the 1960s and 1970s would deploy suture as a metaphor to describe the spectator’s investment in a film’s fiction, noting how certain films attempt to close or heal their figurative wounds—​the limits of the frame, or the “negative” space between shots—​to maintain the viewer’s investment in the narrative. Films do so in the first place, these theorists posited, by upholding a minimal illusion of spatiotemporal unity across shots. Jean-​ Pierre Oudart designated the shot/​reverse shot as a primary staging ground of suture. In Oudart’s scenario, the viewer is shown an image of something or someone. This produces pleasure in the spectator, who perceives no separation between their body and the space of the image. According to Oudart, in this first stage, “space was still a pure expanse of jouissance” prior to the interruption of signification and cutting.14 Inevitably, however, the viewer will discover the frame, which interrupts pleasure. In this instant the image

Andy Warhol in Stitches  7

becomes a signifier of what Oudart calls the “Absent One,” residing in the space beyond what the image shows. If the initial shot necessarily betray a lack that interrupts the viewer’s pleasure, every shot that follows is, in one way or another, an attempt at disavowing that initial experience of lack. The suturing film thus announces something as absent only to invest the viewer in the drama, in sublimated form, of suture itself. This drama is propelled by the hope that eventually the subject will occupy the position of or somehow resolve negativity. This structuring absence is akin to a ghost poised at the other end of a given shot, always disappearing just as the viewer passes over the void of the cut, animating the hope (however faint) that at last some future image could capture its fugitive presence. The tragedy of this drama is that the viewer (i.e., subject) is the true ghost of this operation. The film’s procession of images allows the viewer to operate under the assumption that the absence in its field of representation will eventually be revealed (or healed), just as the procession of signifiers allows the subject to disavow the condition of disappearance that characterizes their presence. The apparent wounds of a given film are in fact our own. Daniel Dayan saw suture as a favored practice in classical Hollywood cinema and a means of ideological “entrapment.”15 Later in the 1970s, Stephen Heath would resituate suture more firmly in terms of narrative discourse,16 and Kaja Silverman, writing about film sound in the 1980s, would claim that “the entire system of suture is inconceivable apart from sexual difference.”17 Suture is often incorrectly understood as the mechanism by which the gaps in the signifying chain become smoothed over or artificially healed, but as Pavle Levi clarifies, the effect of suture essentially depends on effecting an “impression that closure is never total.”18 In other words, the “lack” of this relation does not simply threaten but also animates the procession of signifiers. As Silverman explains, “it is only by inflicting the wound to begin with that the viewing subject can be made to want the restorative of meaning and narrative.”19 Though it has been explicated primarily around film, suture permeates multiple discourses. In theory, it is equally applicable to literature or photography as it is to cinema. Victor Burgin was early in applying suture to photographic discourse. “To look at a photograph beyond a certain period of time,” he writes, “is to become frustrated: the image which on first looking gave pleasure by degrees becomes a veil behind which we now desire to see.”20 The more time one spends with a single image, the greater the threat to the imagined stability of one’s look. In Burgin’s model, the absent body that poses this threat, and the one to which the look ultimately belongs, is the camera. However, unlike in motion pictures, in the discourse of photography one

8  Between Images

image does not necessarily give way to another. By what means, then, does suture intervene to disavow the photograph’s internal lack? For Burgin, it is “not an arbitrary fact that photographs are deployed so that we need not look at them for long, and so that, almost invariably, another photograph is always already in position to receive the displaced look.”21 Similarly, Christian Metz has suggested that the photograph is structured like a fetish, and as such is intimately tied up with death. “The photographic effect,” writes Metz, “is not produced from diversity, from itinerancy or inner migrations,” but is the effect “of a laser or lightning, a sudden and violent illumination on a limited and petrified surface.”22 The fetish-​like quality of the photograph lies in how it figures—​precisely by not showing—​that which lies beyond its frame. Even as the off-​frame space of the photograph, like death, “marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted forever,” the viewer nevertheless “cannot help imagining some off-​frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness.”23 The photograph, frozen there like a corpse, speaks of that which has no substitute, of an absence that cannot be revealed in any reverse shot. And yet every photograph activates the viewer’s imagination, drawing desire toward its outside. In this way, the photograph does suture, if we conceive of suture not in the sense of closure but as how absence gives way to desire, where lack becomes interval.

“Innermission” Warhol toyed with photography at different points throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the medium of course provided the original material for much of his work before he began taking pictures himself. But it was not until the late 1960s that photography would emerge from his practice in an even vaguely unmediated form. Some of the first pictures he personally captured and placed into circulation survive in the form of “bonus” prints from a consumer lab in New York. These comprise two photographs: one larger image intended for a personal album, and a smaller one “for your wallet,” both of which came on a single perforated sheet.24 These images first surfaced in the form of a photo album in the May 1969 issue of Esquire, which had commissioned Warhol to document the parties and performances surrounding New York City’s experimental theater and performance art scene that was booming in the late 1960s. This photo essay was the first visual work Warhol produced following his assault, and the first in which he would exhibit the effects of that event on his body (see Figure 1.2). One immediately notices that these objects were not used as they were intended; the perforations and instructions for use/​

Andy Warhol in Stitches  9

Figure 1.2  Andy Warhol, untitled photograph of artist photographing himself in the mirror. Chromogenic color print 3.5 x 6 in. © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

separation remain intact. A certain subversive intimacy inheres in Warhol’s refusal to cut these objects. Whether it is the instructions for where and why to cut or the presence of the perforations themselves, all the residual information in the bonus prints is not unlike the flash frames, rollout footage, or white punch marks that reside in his films. Just as he did so often elsewhere, here Warhol actively cultivates the stuff marked for erasure by denying the cut its prescribed function. It is as if that information were integral to the image. Even before being shot, Warhol was always coming undone. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he recalls the extended periods of illness following one of multiple childhood panic attacks: “When I was little and I was sick a lot, those sick times were like little intermissions. Innermissions. Playing with dolls. I never used to cut out my cut-​out dolls.”25 According to this account, bouts of illness did not dispossess the young Warhol of time but rather made time, created intervals, gave him a way to relate to the sequence of events in his own life. The word “intermission” naturally evokes the theater and cinema, namely the gaps between film screenings when “nothing” happens. But here Warhol suggests that things do happen during these in-​between times. One could easily miss the moment in this anecdote when the author invents the word “innermission.” With a minor linguistic adjustment, Warhol shifts emphasis from the interstitial to the internal, which reflects a larger slippage in his discourse between community and solitude, between wholes and particulars.

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This play on words posits a subject position that is in-​between, as if one’s identity were constantly unfolding at the edges of, and being constituted by, other forms of subjectivity: a self immanently divided. Warhol preserves a space for the cultivation of and immanent relation to the self (innermission) but imagines that space situated in the gaps (intermission) between “selves.” There is also the matter of the paper dolls, which Warhol insists he “never cut out.” As with the bonus prints, the outline (or perforations) around the cut-​out doll function as tacit instructions. The child internalizes this imperative to cut and, with it, a tacit commitment to the material and social world that hails him. For while the child must perform a sacrifice on these dolls by removing them from their sheet, suspended in possibility, he is compensated with the power to dress the dolls in any number of pregiven items of clothing. The moment when the child first incises into the outline of the cut-​out doll constitutes a kind of primary instance of socialization. At this point, he is ready to dress the dolls—​to relate these erstwhile unadulterated bodies to the symbolic realm. But Warhol could never bring himself to perform this operation, because he “didn’t want to ruin the nice pages they were on.”26 Warhol had always aspired to “blankness,” and these precut dolls maintained their power as projective figures for him because they remained “uncut” and incomplete. Cutting them out of their “nice pages” would narrow the horizon of their montage, their means of relating to and being with other pictures. Instead of enacting only those cuts laid out in advance, Warhol made a commitment from the beginning to the fundamentally relational promise of montage: the absolute openness and variability of the cut, that in-​between space of desire and abjection which both prohibits and authorizes contact. Such a commitment underlies Warhol’s refusal to cut the bonus sheet of a picture depicting his own scarred body (Figure 1.2). The absent/​present cutting registering in the still-​intact perforations plays off his own scars, whose stitches would have only recently been removed. Both body and photograph here figure as precarious surfaces subject to manifold forms of cutting. That Warhol’s eyes are closed is apparently an effect of the flash bouncing off the mirror. But this is also legible as an act of visual deferral, as if he were entrusting his scars to future manifestations and circulations of the photograph. “It’s sort of awful,” Warhol remarked shortly after his assault, “looking in the mirror and seeing all the scars. It’s scary. I close my eyes. But it doesn’t look that bad. The scars are really very beautiful. They look pretty in a funny way.”27 Publicly, Warhol rarely turned away from images others would find terrible, yet here he openly admits to closing his eyes to the sight of his own disfigured body. But in a typically Warholian maneuver, he contradicts himself in the space of the same statement, substituting a “scary” image for a “beautiful” one. This substitution, it turns out,

Andy Warhol in Stitches  11

is less a function of disavowal—​of looking away from something toward something else—​than of an interval in the time of viewing a single image. A cut, a blink lies between the horror and beauty of a scar. If fear and pain do not exhaust the range of emotional responses one can have to physical trauma, this is an insight borne out not by any given image of a body in pain but by the interval between images. Like so many of the burned, pulverized, and wrecked bodies that he put on display in his disaster paintings, Warhol places his own body on view to highlight the mutability of flesh and interpretation alike. The pink drugstore envelope Warhol submitted to the editor of Esquire contained prints similar to that of his scarred torso. These depicted performances by Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, and various members of the Living Theater and Performance Group. It is curious that Warhol would include the image of his scarred body in this photo album at all. But this is perhaps where he did defer to the faculties of montage. By intervening into this typology of performance art with the image of his scarred body, Warhol re-​inscribed himself into the scene of artistic production as a kind of supplement, an exception that proves some secret rule. There he emerged not as a renewed presence but as a transmogrified body, camping with eyes closed at the moment of capture.28 This seemingly minor gesture on Warhol’s part would in fact anticipate the sublation of performance art into photography that Douglas Crimp later described in characterizing postmodern photographic practices of the late 1970s. For the group of artists that Crimp treats, performance—​with its emphasis on theatricality, site-​specificity, and limited duration—​becomes “just one of a number of ways of ‘staging’ a picture.”29 Any photograph of a performance exaggerates the experience of exclusion to which Metz refers when he associates photography with death. As Crimp writes, “It can be said quite literally of the art of the seventies that ‘you had to be there.’ ” Such a photograph would likewise magnify the stakes of suture, making more urgent that necessity for another picture to emerge as a (temporary) gauze for the wound of having-​not-​been-​there. But as Crimp reminds us, at least where the photographic activity of postmodernism is concerned, “we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.”30 How, then, are we to read this group of photographs along the lines of suture? Not only is each image within this group a fragment by virtue of its inclusion within a sequence, but, since one of the conditions of performance art is that it cannot be duplicated, it doubly cuts the viewer off from the scene. Within this sequence made up of fragments of nonrepeatable and unrelatable events, one object stands out as an exception: Warhol’s scarred body. Often neglected in analyses of suture is the fact that difference, not similarity, grounds meaning,

12  Between Images

since a given chain of signifiers presumes to account for (i.e., to repress) the element that cannot ultimately “fit” into that chain but which sets it into motion in the first place. By my reading, the un-​incorporable, absolute zero of the Esquire sequence lies in the bonus print of Warhol. It is the element that simultaneously has no place in the sequence and propels the sequence forward, keeping it going beyond its limits. Just as it is the single element that cannot be sutured, so too is it the element that somehow authorizes the relations between the other photographs and which most forcefully suggests a space beyond the sequence, suturing me into that exterior. And what is it into which I am sutured if not more pictures, if not more images? The very fact that these images are presented in the form of detachable consumer objects suggests that “performance” can no longer be contained by the space and time of the event but necessarily extends into the realm of images and their relations. Warhol’s bonus photograph displaces performance onto the surface of his flesh, blurring the border between body and image. Neither Warhol nor Solanas can be stabilized as the authors or figures of this performance. Instead, the scar is what stands in as authorizing presence, is what sutures us. And what is a scar if not another image? It marks the body as palimpsest, a moving map, a picture in process. As B (Brigid Berlin) notes to Warhol about his scars in The Philosophy, “They’re the best things you have because they’re proof of something.”31 A scar is the impression of an event, an index of two bodies, two images, set on an ineluctable course for convergence. As Petra Kuppers writes, “If skin renews itself constantly, producing the same in repetition, the scar is the place of the changed script.”32 With the scar, the body becomes a site of strangeness, a stumbling block in an otherwise smooth progression of signifiers. Whereas the rule of flesh is repetition, the scar is characterized by movement and flux. This is the claim we’re making here for the photographic interstice. The scar and the cut are not merely loci of difference but sites out of which meaning is generated. “The scar, the trauma, and the cut are not simply tragic sites of loss,” Kuppers continues, but “sites of fleshly (and skinly) productivity.”33 Just as the scar is that element that cannot be sutured, it nevertheless propels the sequence forward. B does well to remind A of the authorizing labor of his scars: “You put your scars to work for you.”34 Indeed, in the years following his assault Warhol went to great lengths to enter his scars into the circulation systems of the art world and its public. As one critic insightfully notes, “Warhol’s scars became a kind of paradigmatic found object.”35 Appropriately, Warhol’s body would become a topic of his and other people’s art only after it had been irreversibly altered by another. The scars offered the perfect excuse for inscribing himself into the visual field of the art world, and immediately following his shooting Warhol would place his scarred body on display in numerous images produced not

Andy Warhol in Stitches  13

only by his own hand but by David Montgomery, Richard Avedon, Carl Fisher, and other artists. In a fabulously ordinary portrait painted by Alice Neel in 1970, a solitary Warhol sits shirtless, enclosed within the vacuum of the canvas, breasts sagging atop a mangled torso—​the living-​dead figure of his own relational/​antirelational “innermission.”36 One decade gave way to another. Imagine leaving during the intermission of a screening or theatrical production, and upon returning you realize everyone has left. Warhol later mused: In the ’60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the ’70s everybody started dropping everybody. The ’60s were clutter. The ’70s are very empty.37

“I was shot in 1968,” writes Warhol, “so that was the 1968 version. But then I have to think, ‘Will someone want to do a 1970s remake of shooting me?’ ”38 If Warhol’s scars were proof of anything, it was that the event which nearly claimed his life and its effects on his own body were subject to the same manner of repetition and appropriation as any of the images he repurposed for his own artworks. So while the shooting did not kill him, it epitomized an idea implicit in a work such as Suicide: Fallen Body—​namely, that even one’s death is not an original. How better to protect oneself against such a recognition than to render one’s own trauma a fiction by turning it into an image like any other? At one point in The Philosophy, B says to A, “I think you produced Frankenstein just so you could put your scars in the ad.”39 B’s reference here is to the promotional poster for the film that depicted an expanse of flesh bearing a sutured wound in extreme close-​up detail, and the attendant insight is crucial. For while neither the sutures nor the flesh in the ad for the Morrissey-​directed film were Warhol’s, the poster attested to the transmigration of his disfigured body onto a collective image-​unconscious. This was a culmination of the artist’s efforts to amass a visual collection of his scars large enough to consign his body to the realm of the imaginary, imbricating corporeal and photographic surfaces. Once the physical trauma of the shooting had been bound, cast off, and delivered over to photography, a new body could be assembled.

Cuts, Threads, and Stitches Warhol’s brief experiments with photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s would eventually lead to a sustained and highly productive engagement with

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the medium beginning around 1976, when he began using the Minox 35 EL, among the most lightweight and portable cameras available at the time that could take full-​frame 35mm pictures.40 From 1976 until his death, 35mm black-​and-​white photography would occupy a central role in Warhol’s practice. During this time, he photographed seemingly everything and everyone, from penises and posters to flowers and cadavers. Warhol’s photographic archive grew increasingly vast throughout the next decade. According to William Ganis, he took nearly 125,000 photographs, about a fifth of which were marked for printing.41 Even by Warhol’s own account, his world shrank considerably following the assault. And yet the photographic archive he amassed bespeaks a mechanical, mobile substitute for the bygone swinging door of the Union Square Factory. The swing of that door gave way to the ceaseless rotations of shutters. The photographs he took during the latter part of his career map the movement of a body with an insatiable, indiscriminate visual appetite. Collectively they reflect a permissiveness of content harking back to the Silver Factory—​a fact nowhere more evident than in Warhol’s so-​called stitched photographs. In 1982, Warhol bought a Bernina sewing machine and began to sew his black-​and-​white photographs together with thread. The idea came from his close friend and traveling companion Christopher Makos, who had employed the process previously in his own work. The completed works typically consist of identical black-​and-​white photographic prints, ranging in number from four to twelve, sewn together with thread. The repetition at play in these works recalls Warhol’s silkscreened serigraphs from the 1960s, but while the latter comprise already highly mediated images, the stitched photographs were captured by Warhol himself and were relatively unaltered. Excess thread remains in every stitched piece, hanging off the sides of the photographs or dangling from their points of juncture within and beyond the grid. Warhol enlisted various friends and associates to perform the actual sewing, including the designer Michelle Loud and Brigid Berlin. An expert knitter, Berlin was likely the inspiration for a series of drawings Warhol made in 1977 depicting the activity of knitting. Benjamin Buchloh notes the “counter-​gendering” effected by these works in how they align drawing with knitting, where the latter “suddenly appears as not all that different from other mark-​making processes in time.”42 Warhol had in fact already begun to explore the mark-​making capacity of thread as early as 1952. In a drawing aptly named A Sewing Machine, he suggests an analogy between the hand-​drawn line and machine-​made stitch generated by a sewing machine, which resembles a human signature—​the line, the stitch, and even the artist’s imprimatur, all cut from the same cloth.43 Knitting, sewing,

Andy Warhol in Stitches  15

and stitching—​processes typically associated with feminine domesticity—​ appear in Warhol’s artistic lexicon at this moment not only toward a demasculinized form of drawing but to further trouble the boundaries between human body and the surface of the image. In the Knitting series, the pronounced two-​dimensionality of the illustration flattens hands, needles, and thread onto a single plane, while the absence of crosshatching makes each drawing appear to be comprised of a single, continuous line threaded along the surface of the paper. Where Warhol does add definition to the hands, it is often with the same curled lines—​like that of the “sewing machine” piece—​that characterize the fabric. This blurs the distinction between knitter and knitted, as if the woman’s hands are being knitted into as much as they are performing the knitting. In one of the Knitting drawings, the knitter’s left hand is rendered contiguous with the working yarn, which loops down and across the center of the image, up through her right index finger, and feeds into the yarn tail. The overall visual effect is a kind of looping of knitter and knitted, yarn and flesh. The corporeality of knitting is further emphasized in a piece where the line of yarn is awash in red (see Figure 1.3). Unlike the other drawings, here the frame cuts off the line of thread as if it were a suture being pulled taut after passing through a wound that is elsewhere. The shocking redness of the line of yarn, coupled with its conspicuous extension beyond the visual field, invest Warhol’s drawing with the content of trauma (as if the frame were not traumatic enough). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud invokes the concept of “binding” (Bindung) to describe the process whereby the organism, having undergone a breach in its shield, must confront the excess stimuli that enters its system, “binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of.”44 For Freud, the binding of libidinal excitations lies at the heart of ego-​formation. To bind is to cut. Indeed, for Freud fabric has deep ties to the realm of the fetish, for it is clothing that provides the primary screen between the child’s curious eyes and the revelation of the mother’s absent penis. As Anne Hamlyn elucidates, “It is this space of interplay between the fabric and the flesh of the woman’s body, the space of potential revelation, that becomes the fetishized ground of male desires.”45 But for Hamlyn, what differentiates fabric from more phallocentric fetish forms is that “textile objects are chosen for their contiguity, that is to say, their nearness to the maternal body rather than because they stand in symbolically for the missing penis.”46 Fabric does not presume to substitute for anything, nor does it intervene as a distancing mechanism from the maternal body. Rather, it is the thing. The surface of the image is to the eye what cloth is to the hand. Both are products of attachment as they are of traumatic separation.

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Figure 1.3  Andy Warhol, Knitting, ca. 1977. Graphite and wash on J. Green paper, 40.75 x 27.5 in. © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Warhol famously declared himself a fetishist: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”47 By saying “There’s nothing behind it,” Warhol does not mean to diminish lack, nor to discount the natural sense one gets that a picture hides something. Rather, his statement posits nothing as something. It is precisely the opacity of the surface (of the photograph, of the fabric) that sets imagination into motion and which prompts the suturing desire of the subject to supplement the image. It is by investing oneself in, manipulating, and accumulating images that one turns nothing into

Andy Warhol in Stitches  17

something, correcting a perceived lack in the field of representation. To admit that there is “nothing behind the image” is to take the lack as content—​it is, to quote Joan Copjec, to “take desire literally.”48 Warhol’s drawings not only challenge cloth’s ghettoization within the confines of feminine domesticity but employ the language of fiber as a means of expressing the body in new ways. Warhol and Berlin clearly sensed this imaginative function of the fiber arts, what Rozsika Parker describes as the “subversive” capacity of the stitch.49 It will be crucial to grasp this destabilizing element of fabric in our account of Warhol’s stitches. But let us return one last time to the knitting drawings. Were we to view them as a sequence that ends with the red piece, then we could say that the series invites the viewer to become absorbed (in the image and in the activity of knitting) but ultimately undermines this fascination via the intervention of red within the sequence. This interruption directs the viewer’s attention to the aesthetic (mis)matching of body and cloth and, concomitantly, to the edges of the image. The red intervenes to remind the viewer of what is lacking in the sequence. We could misunderstand this intervention as a refusal to suture, but in fact it is precisely an instance of it. But what is the suturing element here? What, in other words, is the element simultaneously lacking in the series but interior to it, in that it gives the series a reason to pile on additional signifiers? Late in his fourteenth seminar, Lacan reveals something critical about what he has for years described as the (big) Other: that unfathomable yet somehow also proximate figure of radical alterity, an unknowable x to which all subjects necessarily relate, but which never relates back, and which is, in an important but not altogether intuitive sense, that unrelatable term at the heart of all relations. “What is this Other,” Lacan asks with typical performative flair, teasing out the desire of his audience to know what he supposedly knows: the big one, there, with a capital O? What is its substance? Huh? I allowed myself to say, for a time, that I camouflaged under this locus of the Other, what is called agreeably and, after all, why not, the spirit. The trouble is that it is false. The Other, when all is said and done, and if you have not already guessed it, the Other here, as it is written, is the body!50

That Lacan would name (or write) the Other as the body might be surprising on some level, but perhaps only if we forget the simple fact of the umbilicus, the mark of both a line and a cut. Whether in the form of protrusions or cavities, the modest but fateful navel is a reminder, even in the apparent confines of our unitary somatic housing, that we are contiguous with an other, and indeed with every placental mammal. “[It is] there that the mark,

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as a signifier, is originally inscribed.”51 The body, whether conceived as the organism or as what Lacan called the “vital immanence,” is the unsuturable subject of suture. What might such a body look like? One answer to this question can be found in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, which describes “making” (creation, imagination) and “unmaking” (destruction, negation). Scarry differentiates pain from other perceptual states since it is essentially devoid of referential content. Whereas most desires like hunger and lust have objects, pain is unique in that it “is not ‘of ’ or ‘for’ anything—​it is itself alone.”52 This solitary, exterior quality of pain imbues it with something beyond language. And yet for Scarry, the pain that bodies undergo assumes a very real creative function, because the “permanently objectless” nature of pain gives rise to the exigent work of invention, which Scarry names “imagining.” In this way, imagination and pain constitute (dialectically) related terms subtending the work of subjectivity. Her conception of imagining is, in some ways, not far off from the Lacanian conception of desire, for like desire, imagining is the response to a lack. I want to pause here to return to the bonus photograph from Warhol’s Esquire album. We have already noted that this was the first time Warhol made an image of his body after the assault, and how his closed eyes seem to mark the instance of a deferral or substitution, as if he were delivering his body over to the realm of photography. What has not yet been noted, however, is the inexplicable fact that the larger image on the left has been cropped, dismembering Warhol in a manner not unlike the iconic photograph Richard Avedon would take the following year of the artist’s scarred torso. Both are photographic equivalents of what Pascal Bonitzer, in cinematic terms, calls “deframing,” which occurs in the form of a “displaced angle” that “mutilates the body and expels it beyond the frame.”53 No doubt death is operative here, but so too are irony, laughter, and an abiding sense of sharing and commonality. There is something funny about the smaller image on the right, which likely emerges from how it posits the artist’s morcellated body as a kind of mass-​produced souvenir, as if one’s trauma could be carried around in one’s wallet, as much a form of currency as a dollar bill. Just as it underscores traumatic violence by transferring the image of the artist’s scarred body onto the surface of the photograph, it also quite literally minimizes that trauma, miniaturizes it, rendering it even more subject to movement and replication than before. The larger image on the left is only an extension of this process. Warhol’s scarred torso is divorced from his head and limbs by some Absent One in a move that, as the perforations themselves suggest, turns bodily montage into a matter of merely physically cutting into the surface of the image. Warhol reduces his body to a cut-​out doll, a detachable consumer object

Andy Warhol in Stitches  19

subject to the infinite movement of a sequence. But this body in pieces is not simply a function of traumatic operation of a public one—​a communal desire (an “innermission”) to reconstitute something psychically and relationally concrete from the residue of pain. The image on the left dispossesses Warhol of his own trauma, turns his scarred body into an image, and in so doing effaces the camera. But just as we note this absenting of both the producer and the means of production, we would also have to note the ways in which both continue to somehow reside in the image. Notice how Warhol’s right hand creeps into the frame and rests atop the artist’s shoulder as if it belonged to some other body beyond the image. Detach the larger image from the smaller one and you will see how this hand touches Warhol from beyond, draws him elsewhere, as if toward some adjacent image. And does the black shoulder strap hanging down into the picture from above not also pull him, pull us elsewhere? It dangles there like a piece of excess suture stitching his head and torso together, anticipating the thread formations that will later populate the surfaces of the stitched photographs. More than any other component, the shoulder strap is the part of the camera that assumes a connection, an intimacy with its user. It is first and foremost a piece of fabric that threads the camera operator into the territory of the image, as if the camera were a reclaimed body part. Though the picture on the right tells me that the strap is not physically attached to Warhol’s body, the cropped picture on the left suggests otherwise. It insinuates a body that lies beyond the image at the same time as it anticipates other photographs, opening onto a horizon of montage.

Making Contact Upon encountering one of Warhol’s stitched works, one is inevitably confronted by a certain interpretive vertigo. The language typically used to describe photographs at some point simply feels insufficient, utterly ill-​equipped before such strange objects. But perhaps the best way to begin reading one of the stitched works is by taking it literally—​as a piece of fabric. It solicits our desire to touch it, to handle it like a piece of cloth. This is not merely some hermeneutic yarn but a condition of the work’s facture, for the photographs have been stitched together, treated like pieces of cloth. Treating photographs in this way would have necessitated a certain blindness, one imagines, not only to the content of a given picture but to the assumed function of photography writ large. Is the photograph not something to be looked at? Even when we physically handle photographs, the sensation of touch seems secondary to

20  Between Images

the experience of gazing at a picture. But the stitched photographs tell another story. In certain cases, the edges of the photographs have become frayed, and some pieces have even cupped slightly. This gives them the appearance of having passed through numerous sets of hands, like the old photographs or postcards found in public markets or family albums. These works solicit our fingers as much as they engage our eyes. In her magnificent book Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin writes that “touch puts people in contact with photographs, but as photographs pass from hand to hand they establish and maintain relationships between people.”54 From this vantage, what a photograph precisely figures becomes harder to pin down, at least if one limits one’s perception to the content of a given picture. This is because we don’t simply look at photographs but are, as Olin reminds us, also “with photographs,” since they are “physical objects, with a physical visuality that we can touch,” rendering photography at once “individual, interpersonal, and communitywide.”55 Given her intersubjective, communal conception of the medium, it is curious that Olin makes no mention in her study of contact prints. The contact print gets its name from the process whereby a photosensitive surface is exposed after being placed in direct contact with a photographic negative. Once processed, this yields a positive image of the negative film strip, which can be used to determine what frames will be printed for display or circulation. Because of the sheer number of photographs Warhol took between 1976 and 1987—​by the count of Richard Meyer and Peggy Phelan, over 130,000 frames—​he ordered many hundreds of contact prints.56 Many of these sheets still bear the mark of Warhol’s grease pencil, whether as a line cutting diagonally through a given picture marking a given picture’s exclusion or as a circle, conferred upon the lucky ones. A contact print is essentially a montage, a congregation of images, bodies, data and marks. The images are placed in contact with one another but are also themselves the material result of a contact between surfaces and materials. It would be inaccurate to say that a contact sheet comprises multiple, separate photographs, since it also collapses many images onto a single surface. The montage of a contact sheet precedes any given photographic print in its individuated form, betraying a whole history of touch—​ a kind of tactile plurality embedded in every image. When the artist, grease pencil in hand, hovers over the contact sheet, its surface glimmers with possibility, none of the images having yet been marked for exclusion or printing. David Wojnarowicz plays off this sense of sheer haptic potentiality in an untitled piece from 1988 depicting two male figures, one’s arm draped over the other, locked in a kiss. The figures are outlined in grease pencil, and one of Wojnarowicz’s own contact prints substitutes for their flesh, the boundaries

Andy Warhol in Stitches  21

of their bodies rendered contiguous across the photographic sheet’s expanse. So visually clever is this work that one could overlook its central conceit: that bodies relate the way pictures do. This process of photographic selection is rendered analogous here to that of choosing one or more sexual partners. Both invariably involve some degree of cutting or rejection. “Photography” in perhaps its most plural form (as contact print) makes up the content of these two bodies, and yet the grease pencil, a tool of inclusion and exclusion, provides an outline of those bodies and encloses that multiplicity, closes the set. Wojnarowicz’s piece suggests that the coming together of two bodies, like the coupling of two images, always carries the trace of its “leftovers,” of other possible connections either foreclosed or merely deferred. There is always a third close at hand. It is this sense of deferred multiplicity, I believe, that characterizes Warhol’s stitched photographs. But what also links these two artists in this case is the way both employ photographic montage as a means of figuring the human body. Indeed, in Wojnarowicz’s piece this is almost literally the case, as a montage is what “fleshes out” the figures. The stitched photographs get to that relation perhaps more obliquely. We have already discussed some of the ways that Warhol’s sewn works evoke corporeality, for instance, through their tactile quality, or the impression they convey of being-​held or being-​touched. But what is it that really lends the stitched works their corporeal quiddity if not the stitching? The threads not only solicit the viewer’s touch but emphasize the fact that the photographs relate to one another through physical contact. Indeed, the very presence of the stitches in these objects endows the photographs with a fleshy quality. A series of stitched works made from Warhol’s photographs of a medical laboratory and dissection class, for example, obviates an implicit function of all the stitched works: suturing as a countermovement to the ruinous work of death.57 With these obtuse objects, Warhol attempted to blur the boundaries between corporeal and photographic surfaces, in effect rendering photography a substitute for flesh. Following the logic of suture, in Warhol’s scenario the photograph becomes a substitute for the missing part-​object of the body cut off from and by representation—​a traumatic recognition distilled in but not exhausted by the shock of a near-​fatal wound, and the attendant horror of realizing it could happen again, that one’s trauma is as reproducible as a can of soup. The activity of stitching for Warhol could appear as an attempt to fulfill the impossible promise of suture: of finding a permanent, safe dwelling within the symbolic without recourse to the dispossessing movement of substitution. While in principle impossible, such a promise is not without its own imaginary currency in that economy of surfaces Warhol trafficked.

22  Between Images

By shooting Warhol, Solanas on some level made good on the promise of her manifesto’s title: The Society for Cutting Up Men. This is corroborated by way of a cinematic pun in Mary Harron’s 1996 biopic on Solanas, I Shot Andy Warhol. The very first images of Harron’s film depict Warhol (played by Jared Harris) directly following the assault in a series of close-​up shots bereft of a medium or wide shot of his full figure, his body morcellated in advance as a collection of part-​objects: a reflection on the film’s part, perhaps, of Solanas’s more primary act of montage. Warhol completely consumed himself with photography in the years following his brush with death, though it might be more accurate to say that he really wanted photography to consume him. In doing so he attempted to shift the coordinates of his own absence and presence, to renegotiate the terms of cutting to which his body had been subjected. Warhol reclaimed, redeployed his scars as he might any other mass cultural artifact (Coca-​Cola bottles, Brillo boxes). But none of this would have been possible without the complex work of substitution that necessarily involves so much suturing. Still, any claim that Warhol’s stitched photographs participate in a form of suture would need to be qualified by the fact of their almost assaultive manner of repetition. The initial observation that the photographs are identical might lead the viewer to search for even the slightest differences among them, but this search would almost invariably be frustrated by the simple fact that the photographs are very much the same. This fact of multiplicity is set against the overwhelming sameness, the lack of movement across photographs. There is something impertinent about this stasis. If these stitches do indeed disclose a reparative impulse, it would seem to bear little actual resemblance to the work of signification, since here the viewer is denied any shelter in difference. And yet the surface of the photograph becomes somehow more than a compensatory piece of symbolic armor shielding the viewer from lack. Much better than that: it is something you can hold. Wear it if you want. It is a fibrous surrogate, a second skin allowing for the prolongation of jouissance. Take pleasure in repetition, it seems to say, relish the deferral of meaning.58 In the final analysis, it is impossible to stabilize the effect of the stitches themselves. How we read the sutures is ultimately a function of how they suture us. To engage theory is to invest oneself (and one’s body) in the games and pleasures of language. A number of Warhol’s stitched works are positively brimming with mortal symbolism: the skulls of human heads, anatomical skeletons, dissected bodies, and even guns. In any of these pieces, we could read the accretion of photographs as an irresolvable movement toward fixing death as meaning, the mad dash toward some future image, some reverse shot to stave off this being-​ with-​death. The stitches suture us into the interminable sequence of such a

Andy Warhol in Stitches  23

wish. On the other hand, we could note how the excess threads dangling off the edges of the stitched photographs resemble the various tendons and tissue hanging from the leg of a body in one of Warhol’s dissection photographs. The effect here could recall the moment in the sequence of knitting drawings when the thread is revealed as being red, lifted up into the frame by hand and needle, an otherwise ordinary domestic scene pierced by the sudden realization that the coordinates of fabric and flesh have been confounded. Have I been knitting myself this whole time? We are, in a fundamental sense, irreversibly sutured to ourselves. Even in a seemingly gloomy stitched work such as the one depicting human skeletons in a science laboratory, we need not work hard to detect a kind of laughter—​of being in stitches over one’s own wounds.59 The operation of suture cannot be resolved in Warhol’s world either as a movement toward pain or pleasure, as a device of agony or ecstasy. There is of course always something awful, something painful about being riveted to any image. After all, a wound is an image like any other. It is a photograph you are forced to sit with. It has no substitute and does not give way to another. And we, like Warhol, might want to close our eyes. But our stitches and our scars also speak to the possibility, and the possibilities, of occupying more than one position simultaneously in relation to our cuts. For a wound, too, can suture.

Notes 1. Andy Warhol quoted in Victor Bockris, Andy Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 298. 2. Lynne Tillman, introduction to The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–​67 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), 9. 3. James Benning, “Life Is Finite,” in More Voices: Filmmaker James Benning, blog, Wexner Center for the Arts, September 30, 2008, http://​wexa​rts.org/​blog/​more-​voi​ces-​filmma​ker-​ james-​benn​ing. 4. Annette Michelson, “‘Where Is Your Rupture?’ Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” October 56 (Spring 1991): 45. 5. Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Andy Warhol (October Files), ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 60. 6. Michelson, “ ‘Where Is Your Rupture?,’ ” 93. 7. David E. James, Power Misses: Essays across (Un)Popular Culture (London: Verso, 1997), 175. 8. For a lively and deeply considered discussion of positive affect in Warhol’s work, see Jonathan Flatley, Like Andy Warhol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 9. James Harding has even gone so far as to posit her gesture as the most “profoundly subversive moment of American avant-​garde performance in the 1960s.” James Harding, “The Simplest Surrealist Act: Valerie Solanas and the (Re)Assertion of Avantgarde Priorities,” TDR/​The Drama Review 45, no. 4 (2001): 146

24  Between Images 10. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 89. 11. Jacques-​Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” in Concept and Form, vol. 1, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Verso, 2012), 93. Miller’s essay originally appeared in English in Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–​78). 12. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-​analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-​Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981–​1998), 199. 13. Miller, “Suture,” 100. 14. Jean-​Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–​1978): 35–​47, originally published in Cahiers du Cinema 211 and 212 (April and May 1969). 15. Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 451. 16. Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (1977–​1978): 48–​76. 17. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 221. 18. Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 143–​144. Joan Copjec is also helpful here, noting that the moment of suture occurs when “[t]‌he endless slide of signifiers (hence deferral of sense) is brought to a halt and allowed to function ‘as if ’ it were a closed set through the inclusion of an element that acknowledges the impossibility of closure.” Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 174. 19. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 204. 20. Victor Burgin, “Photography, Phantasy, Function,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 191. 21. Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 152. 22. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 88. 23. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 87. 24. It was not uncommon at the time for photo services to offer such supplementary prints with an order. 25. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harvest, 1977), 117, emphasis mine. 26. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 117. 27. Andy Warhol quoted in Leticia Kent, “Andy Warhol: ‘I Thought Everyone Was Kidding,’” The Village Voice, September 12, 1968, https://​www.villa​gevo​ice.com/​2020/​10/​14/​andy-​ war​hol-​alive-​well/​, emphasis mine. 28. Warhol’s photo album appeared in the same issue of Esquire that glibly announced “[t]‌he final decline and total collapse of the American avant-​garde” on its cover, complete with a photomontage by George Lois depicting Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. 29. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 77. 30. Crimp, “Pictures,” 87. 31. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 11. 32. Petra Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 1. 33. Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility, 18–​19. 34. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 11.

Andy Warhol in Stitches  25 35. James M. Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-​Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 91. 36. According to Blake Gopnik, Warhol himself put the idea of the portrait in Neel’s head, saying to her, “Why don’t you paint me with my scars?” See Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), http://​www.apple.com/​apple-​books. 37. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 26. 38. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 84. 39. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 11. 40. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Vintage/​Knopf Doubleday, 2014), 330. 41. William V. Ganis, Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16–​18. 42. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Shadows and Other Signs of Life; Anniversary Notes for Andy Warhol (Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), 29. 43. Jennifer Doyle, “Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/​Pop Sex,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 200. 44. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” ed. Salman Akhtar and Mary Kay O’Neill (London: Karnac Books, 2011), 30, emphasis mine. 45. Anne Hamlyn, “Freud, Fabric, Fetish,” Textile 1, no. 1 (2003): 15. 46. Hamlyn, “Freud, Fabric, Fetish,” 16. 47. Andy Warhol quoted in Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story” (1966), in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 90. 48. Copjec, Read My Desire, 14. 49. Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989). 50. Jacques Lacan, “La logique du fantasme” (“The Logic of Phantasy”), 1966–​1967, translated from unpublished French manuscripts by Cormac Gallagher, p. 129, emphasis mine. 51. For an excellent account of this facet of Lacan’s thought, see Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 14–​18. 52. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 161–​162. 53. Pascal Bonitzer, “Deframings” (1978), in Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 4: 1973–​1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, ed. David Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 198–​199. Edward Branigan explains that deframing constitutes a kind of “antisuture” in the sense that the “spectator infers that a violation has occurred within some human transaction but sees on the screen no cause, effect, or reaction. Something is permanently absent.” Edward Branigan, Projecting a Camera: Language-​Games in Film Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), 143. 54. Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1. 55. Olin, Touching Photographs, 17. 56. Richard Meyer and Peggy Phelan, Contact Warhol: Photography without End (Stanford, CA: Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and MIT Press, 2018).

26  Between Images 57. It is difficult to conceive of Warhol’s attitude toward death and illness as anything but cripplingly repressive. In his account of the artist’s “hypochondria,” Brian Dillon suggests that the shooting gave rise to “a pattern of preoccupation and avoidance that would last the rest of Warhol’s life, and which may in fact have precipitated his early death at the age of fifty-​ eight.” Brian Dillon, Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 253. In fact, Warhol had always suffered from some anxiety about his body. This manifested initially in childhood, alleviated to some extent in his early adult years, and returned with force after his assault. In the diary entries he made from 1976 until the year of his death, Warhol explicitly mentions Solanas nearly a dozen times, often wondering whether she would one day return to finish the job. 58. This chapter’s discussion of Warhol’s photographic practice as deferral/​consummation of illness and death owes a debt to Roy Grundmann’s stirring analysis of Blow Job through the framework of hypochondria as a “cultural sensibility.” See Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), especially chs. 3 and 4. 59. See discussion of skeletons and skulls in Richard Meyer and Peggy Phelan, “Talking Warhol,” in Contact Warhol: Photography without End (Stanford, CA: Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and MIT Press, 2018), 20–​21.

2 Make No Prisoners It is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one that our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis. —​Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” A body is an image offered to other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body. —​Jean-​Luc Nancy, Corpus

At issue in the first two chapters of this study, contained under the rubric of the body, is the complex relay between self and world, where the body figures the limits and possibilities of that relationship. Importantly, however, the bodies at the heart of these case studies are, in so many ways, bodies in pieces: from Warhol’s disfigured anatomy to that of Bobby Sands in McQueen’s feature film Hunger, which we will take up in the second part of this chapter. But whereas the cut is often regarded as threatening the unity of bodies, either by parceling them up individually or, like a wall, separating them from one another, montage assumes the powerfully imaginary function in these instances of redressing the violence and abstraction inflicted upon bodies. In foregrounding this imaginary function of the cut, I do not mean to say montage has an entirely reparative or even positive function. Instead, the fantasy of corporeal unity, like that of the unified, selfsame “I,” is but one blade of a dialectical motor shuttling between the particular and the universal, between the wound and the stitch, between the monad of primary narcissism and the cosmic ocean of interconnection. What we are calling montage is a name for that motor. By way of clarification, let us return to Warhol’s stitched photographs and again consider the notion that what those works confront us with is an overwhelming, almost irrational form of repetition. The serial repetition and deployment of stitching bespeaks an almost maniacally curative impulse, a will to self-​enclosure that repels the call of relation. This anti-​relational function of Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0002

28  Between Images

Warhol’s stitched works is not unlike that of the long take at its most extreme. Of course, Warhol’s films were notoriously long, and this durational intensity has become synonymous, in one way or another, with a perceived prohibition on montage presiding over his cinematic practice. This coupophobia, or fear of cutting, would appear most conspicuous in films like Eat (1964), Empire (1964), Blow Job (1964), and many of the Screen Tests (1963–​1966) which largely comprise single static shots with as few “cuts” as a given roll of film allows. Paul Arthur brilliantly described Empire as the longest establishing shot in film history, and Blow Job as the longest reaction shot.1 The same cannot be said of Sleep (1963), however, Warhol’s first film, which actually contains a multitude of cuts beyond even those necessitated by the maximum length of a film roll. Additionally, with his films Lupe (1965), Bufferin (1966), and Chelsea Girls, Warhol experimented extensively with strobe cutting, where a visual flash of light and attendant scratchy “bloop” on the soundtrack result from turning the camera on and off, often in rapid succession. As Homay King notes, with Bufferin and Chelsea Girls, both from 1966, strobe cuts “create an effect of seemingly random interruption and spatial disjunction: semiarbitrary, even gratuitous punctuation marks thrown in more for their capacity to excite and convey affect than for their value as expository signposts to the viewer.”2 That arbitrariness may bear out to some degree in the films themselves, but given the function of the cut here, which as King herself points out is more affective and somatic than narrative or even formally consistent, its precise effect would seem contingent on each viewer’s response. Commenting on this technique of in-​camera editing, Warhol said, “Since everyone says I never stop the camera, I stop it now, start and stop, and that makes it look cut.”3 Still, as with his use of the cut elsewhere, Warhol’s cinematic cuts are often individually quite charged and rendered in a manner that is far from arbitrary. Early on, Warhol employed the strobe cut as a kind of narrative ellipses, as in Lupe, his fictional retelling of the final moments in the life of Mexican actress Lupe Velez (played by Edie Sedgwick), who according to legend intended to orchestrate her own “beautiful suicide” in bed but ended up dying while vomiting into a toilet. In the film, a single strobe cut operates as a disjunctive mark between Warhol’s footage of “Lupe” setting the scene for her death and subsequent footage of Edie’s motionless body wrapped around a toilet. One struggles to designate such a cut, located in such a place, as anything less than almost primordially charged. The cut here not only underscores the tensions between self-​image and public persona, between the myth of celebrity and the ordinary facts of one person’s life, but also distills, makes felt as a cutting flash of light, the perilous gulf between being and nonbeing, thematized in

Make No Prisoners  29

this instance as the tragic irony of someone (anyone) presuming to curate their own oblivion. In Lupe, one solitary strobe cut is host to so many of the tensions we found when tracing the cut and the stitch across Warhol’s visual and written discourse following his own hazardously proximate encounter with death. Whether a film splice or a whole inventory of sutures and wounds and threads and needles, when we see such things on a continuum of relational tactics, in the “expanded field” of being-​with, we find that the montage was very much operational throughout Warhol’s career, and his experiments in editing and collaborative self-​portraiture explored in Chapter 1 attest to the dynamic and ever-​changing relationship he had to the cut as a relational operation. In a fascinating twist, it turns out that one of the first projects Warhol undertook after being released from the hospital postsurgery was to edit the raw footage of his feature film Lonesome Cowboys (1968). As his biographer Blake Gopnik recounts, “Warhol, brutally cut up by his surgeons, now had to perform similar surgery on his Arizona footage.”4

Expanding the Cut In 2013 at the Art Institute of Chicago, Steve McQueen and his production team constructed a freestanding video projection wall with three sides (see Figure 2.1). It stood in the artist’s cinematic city like some phantasm, faintly illuminating the cave-​like dark in which it nested.5 Each side of the wall was host to one of three early works by McQueen: Bear (1993), Five Easy Pieces (1995), and Just Above My Head (1996). In the past, these films would be shown independently, often in their own dedicated screening room, but in this context each film became part of a larger sequence. At the broader levels of McQueen’s exhibition practice, this was a continuation of what Okwui Enwezor characterized an effort to “dislocate film projection from screen to space,” thereby underscoring the role of “embodiment in the reception of filmic images.”6 More specifically for our purposes, what this exhibition showcased was a form of montage whose processes extended beyond the screen to the space of the gallery and which turned on (and with) the bodies occupying both. Central to these procedures was the viewer’s body, which, circumambulating the structure and viewing it from a range of positions, disclosed an expanded field of montage: the expanded cut. Before exploring the role of the viewer’s body in this dynamic, this chapter will examine how the cutting in each of these three films works to shape and dissolve its bodies, to bring bodies together and apart, in ways that trouble many of our preconceptions about the relations between the cinematic cut

30  Between Images

Figure 2.1  Installation view: Steve McQueen, Bear, 1993, and Five Easy Pieces, 1995. Steve McQueen, March 16—​September 1, 2013, Schaulager® Münchenstein/​Basel. Courtesy of the artist/​Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/​Paris. © Steve McQueen. Photo © Tom Bisig, Basel.

and the cinematic body, beginning with the assumption that they are wholly distinct phenomena in the first place. Indeed, throughout McQueen’s gallery-​ based work, montage assumes a physical, corporeal character, as bodies carry out many of the functions we tend to associate with cutting. In approaching these films, one must address cut and body not separately, but as fundamentally related terms. In cinema’s infancy—​in the period, as it were, before the cut—​the medium placed the human body on display with marked persistence. In doing so, cinema came face to face with its own horizon of possibility. Before editing and camera movement were standardized, the image and its frame provided the central stage upon which this fascination would play itself out. With the revolution brought about by editing, so the story goes, cinema traded in its fascination with bodies and their horizon of relations for one with images and the potential relations between them. McQueen’s breakout film, made while he was a student at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Bear depicts a sequence of physical relations played out between two naked Black men, one portrayed by McQueen and the other by an actor credited as Vernon Douglas. The film opens on a seemingly straightforward

Make No Prisoners  31

shot/​reverse-​shot sequence that shuttles between close-​ups of the men’s faces. In one moment, they taunt and glower at one another, and in the next they are smiling and laughing, caressing lips in anticipation. As we see the two men for the first time together in the same frame, McQueen tackles the other man and both dip below the frame. After another round of playful taunting, McQueen reaches out his hand to grasp the other’s shoulder before both are locked in full embrace. Shortly after this they break apart, taking leave of each other and the frame as if repelled by some secret pressure within the image. Following this disunion, the camera lingers on the black space of the room, until the image itself evacuates, leaving us only with a white frame. What follows is an extreme low-​angle shot in which we see the two men converge once again in the frame, locking arms in what appears to be a wrestling match. With pained, labored expressions, their faces momentarily occupy the screen as if they were being crushed together within the image’s vice grip. Heads and genitals, buttocks and thighs move in and out of the visual field as the frame plays host to a dizzying phantasmagoria of body parts. The final image we’re left with is a low medium shot depicting the legs of both men as they appear to dance around each other in slow motion. Throughout Bear, we are confronted with an abiding relational ambiguity in the interactions between the two male figures. That relational turbulence extends to the space between images as well. As Enwezor has noted, the black leader that sits between shots is often indistinguishable from the dark space enveloping the figures, and it becomes difficult to tell where the body begins and the image ends.7 Bear deploys the cut at once to posit relations and to undermine a sense of relational fixity between the two men, launching viewers into a corporeal and affective mise en abyme. Throughout the film, the two men’s bodies operate simultaneously as sites of narrative accretion and dissolution, of a kind of visual ordering and entropic disordering. Whereas continuity editing typically works to place the human body and montage in service to a narrative logic, McQueen’s editing works against telos simply by setting two mercurial faces against one another. Rather than fix these faces and bodies within a causal sequence of gestures that could stabilize their subjectivity or movement, McQueen cuts between them in a way that denies their assimilation into some preestablished order. As numerous scholars of early cinema have shown, there is a way in which the medium, in its infancy, harnessed its own potential for movement by deferring to that of bodies. Consider the locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, which often depicted human bodies engaged in physically demanding tasks. Muybridge seemed to imagine that, by amassing such a vast visual archive of corporeal feats, he could harness the body’s physical

32  Between Images

movement to animate the very medium of photography. Competitive sport was one of Muybridge’s favorite topics. Everywhere in his grids men, often unclothed, can be seen fencing, boxing, running, and generally engaged in vigorous physical activity. In one study of two scantily clad young men wrestling, the telos of physical sparring appears coextensive with that of the photographic sequence itself. That is, in the absence of an actual zoopraxiscope, the effect of “motion” here depends first upon a common understanding of how a wrestling match proceeds: two men approach one another, and a struggle ensues, until one body forces the other into submission on the ground. Most viewers would recognize the poses in Muybridge’s photographs from other wrestling matches they may have seen, and based on this will (un)consciously animate the frozen poses into fragmentary gestures and actions, in turn imaginatively matching the actions across the empty spaces between photographs, filling in the gaps and traversing those semantic chasms which threaten to destabilize the relations between images, gestures, and positions.8 Though Muybridge conducted his experiments under the auspices of scientific investigation, it is well known that he was also a master of illusion and a salesman (not a scientist) at that. In fact, many of these studies of locomotion were staged, as Muybridge often had his models carry out their actions as a sequence of fragmented gestures, pausing for each moment of photographic capture. A wrestling sequence like this one is thus in reality less a fragmented montage of two bodies in motion than the documentation of two bodies montaged by the ready-​made relational mode of wrestling. In other words, what we see here are individual mimetic fragments or “shots” of the body in between movements, broken down into phases in advance of photographic capture, in service to movement. One of Muybridge’s wrestling plates is particularly telling in the way it deploys the telos of sport to foreclose on other forms of relation, to substitute the contingency of montage for what Sam Rohdie characterizes as the spectacle of movement subtended by a “wish,” a desire for continuity implicit in the ordering of images and concomitant invitation to bridge the space between them.9 For Rohdie, that spectacle in which the reader/​viewer takes part is an extension of Muybridge’s own will to fix his photographic plates as unities, not only “to overcome the inherent discontinuity of his images” and thus stabilize his plates as commodities, but to foreclose on “the possibility that each [image] might be part of another series telling another story, unravelling the one.”10 In point of fact, what we see in the wrestling plate is actually two of the photographer’s students attempting to emulate a wrestling match. Before the second figure appears in subsequent frames, the man in the upper left frame almost resembles a solitary Renaissance nude. Upon close inspection, we can see the hesitation and uncertainty in their own

Make No Prisoners  33

approach toward one another in individual frames: a symptom, perhaps, of the strange series of movements the photographer required them to perform. Because the two men had to pause between their movements, they would have presumably required them to remain suspended at turns. The effect of this procedure lies somewhere between erotic embrace and frozen mortification. But to read this sequence as a wrestling match is to consummate it as spectacle, which in turn mystifies the real material and physical relations—​ones, for example, that extend from the economic and intellectual authority Muybridge held over his students—​as well as the contingent, imaginary ones latent in a given sequence. In one respect, Muybridge’s studies bespeak the tendency of montage to submit bodies to a predetermined sequence of images, a relational plan. Muybridge had to abstract the physical interactions between these men to evoke a sense of continuous motion across photographs. And Rohdie is correct to describe the gap between images as containing an implicit invitation to spectacle, yet we should not deny the capacity of the photographic interstice to act as a space of subversion, out of which emerges another kind of relationship, born of the contingency of reading: of our innate capacity as viewers to focus on whatever aspect of a visual construction we deem worthy of attention, up to and including the interstices themselves. For its part, Bear actually does move, but it stretches out the substance of the interstice/​cut as undecidable nexus and drapes itself in that strangeness. What presides over the passage of one shot to the next in Bear is nothing other than the strangeness of passage: the relationship between one image, one body, and another. The transitions between shots and spacing of bodies do not resolve into a narrative, spatial, or even temporal logic except to provide a ground for the unpredictable unfolding of exchanges, touches, glances, and movements between images and bodies on screen. To create Just Above My Head, McQueen held a 16mm camera at arm’s length, aimed it at himself, and walked for ten minutes as the camera captured his movement in a single nine-​and-​a-​half-​minute take. That Just Above My Head unfolds in a single shot does not, however, mean that montage is absent. Throughout the piece, McQueen’s head and upper body reside within the lower depths of the image, at times receding almost entirely below the frame. As we discussed in Chapter 1, there is an apparent (if not innate) violence to the relationship between frame and body. Just Above My Head on some level bears witness to that violence, since not only does it portray a body’s struggle to endure within the frame, but the white sky, which seems to envelop the artist’s head, reminds us that film stock is calibrated in a way that effaces the details of Black skin.11 In short, Just Above My Head appears to depict the body as it is most imperiled by the mechanics of representation, subjected to

34  Between Images

the cuts and erasures of framing and exposure. At the same time, Just Above My Head suggests the operation of montage belongs as much to the body as it does to the cinematic apparatus. The frame, which is a kind of cut, announces itself in McQueen’s film through its virtual contiguity with the artist’s body and the contingencies of its movement. Montage and body emerge here as mutually constituting devices of selection and framing. The relation between the body and the frame, at least where the cut is concerned, is never simply unilateral. We must insist on this point. The unstable and chancy interplay between body and frame that we see in Just Above My Head is reminiscent of the “flash” that Roland Barthes refers to in discussing the pleasure of the text. According to Barthes, this pleasure is not to be found in some “erogenous zone” (as if one could point to it or touch it), nor in the image’s content, but in intermittence itself. “The intermittence of skin,” writes Barthes, “flashing between two articles of clothing . . . between two edges . . . it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-​as-​disappearance.”12 McQueen’s body in Just Above My Head is suspended in such a zone of fleshy intermittence. In this sense, the film establishes a tension between the extended duration of the long take and the body fragmented by and held within it. It is true that the cinema brings both images and bodies into motion. However, as we discussed in relation to Muybridge’s studies in locomotion, this effect of motion necessitates a forgetfulness of the gaps between photographs, even requires a blindness to the body’s own status as intermittence. In order to animate itself and to set the body in motion, the cinema must not only efface its own gaps but must work to efface the body as a volatile and contingent thing. Otherwise, the body would threaten to interrupt the motion of film, to render the relation between images inoperative. The body does not belong to motion, but neither can stasis claim it solely for its project. The body is movement, lying somewhere between stillness and motion. Always coming between, the body is montage. As Drew Leder aptly puts it, echoing Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, “It is because we experience from the body that it constitutes a null point in the perceptual field.”13 Just as my body is what allows me to experience the world and constitute myself as a subject, it is also simultaneously unthematizable to me. I can walk forward, moving and looking, taking in visual information while cutting up the world with my selective perceptual apparatus. But if for some reason (perhaps through injury, illness, or the threatening presence of another body), I am made aware of my legs as walking and my eyes as seeing—​if I become aware of my body as such—​then seeing and walking falter, at least in the functional sense. The body is what makes experience “flow,” is what makes it “natural,” but it is also what threatens to interrupt that flow, denaturalizing my

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experience, what Leder designates as the body’s “dys-​appearance.”14 Just as the classical paradigm of filmmaking demands that the cinematic apparatus remain invisible in service to the viewer’s investment in the narrative, so must one’s body recede from conscious thought if one is to experience the world through it. The body is to experience as Barthes’s “erogenous zone” is to the text: a flash, at once an appearance and withdrawal from sense. Whereas Just Above My Head explores the dynamics of montage through a body’s movement over the course of a single take, McQueen’s film Five Easy Pieces does so across a variety of seemingly disparate shots figuring a multitude of bodies in motion. Subjects include men hula-​hooping, shot from a high angle; a woman carefully navigating a tightrope, seen primarily from a low angle; and McQueen himself urinating from an extreme low angle. Five Easy Pieces is a film that revels in irrationality. It bears an almost Sadean impulse, which is less a function of its content than the apparent absence of connective tissue running through it. But even as it casts the viewer into a turbulent phantasmagoria of bodies in extremis, it is not without a certain logic. First, we see the tightrope walker from a discomfiting low oblique angle, her feet slowly and carefully navigating the line, arms outstretched to maintain balance. McQueen cuts between this image and a high-​angle shot of five men hula-​hooping. One effect of this cut is that the tightrope walker seems to hover above the men with hula hoops, as if theirs was her “reverse shot.” There is also a graphic match of sorts that occurs here in the rhyming of posture and gesture—​the funambulist with her outstretched arms echoes the hula-​hoopers, arms akimbo, as they attempt to keep their hoops in motion. In the absence of any narrative or symbolic thread to hold these two activities together, we nevertheless deduce a connection through the migrations of corporeal disposition and movement across shots. The hula-​hoopers, funambulist, McQueen, and indeed the montage itself all conspire to maintain a sense of balance, of a minimal sense of relation amid a strange procession of images. As we have already seen, a distinguishing feature of McQueen’s early films is the emphasis they place on human bodies: bodies in motion, bodies at rest, bodies seen simply in relation to one another. This deferral to corporeality for McQueen is not only a citational practice, harking back to early cinema, but a way of harnessing potentiality. As Jonathan Auerbach argues, the body in early cinema acted as a countervailing force to the regimenting and abstracting effects of representation. Auerbach demonstrates how the human body, far from being byproducts of a visual regime of control and surveillance, figured cinema’s own formlessness. “Rather than being driven primarily by concerns about plot, time, or narrative causality,” many of Auerbach’s case studies utilized “bodies to try out differing productions and reproductions of space in

36  Between Images

ways that significantly test possibilities for the new medium of cinema.”15 Bodies helped shape the emergent form of cinema, and as Auerbach attests, even “narrative continuity” was dependent “less on particular techniques of filmmaking, such as analytic editing, than on representations of corporeality: the moving body or bodies in the film turning into the abstracted body of the film.”16 Indeed, McQueen’s experimentalism extends to both the realm of the moving image and the moving body. His interest lies in the many ambiguous, intervallic spaces where image and body seem poised between the solid and the liquid, between emerging and dissolving forms. As we have also seen, Bear, Just Above My Head, and Five Easy Pieces all suggest points of imbrication between the filmed body and body of the film. In Pieces, the movement of the funambulist down the high wire comes to reflect the passage from one image to the next, just as the gyrating movement of the hula-​hoopers recalls the cycles of the projection reel, even the rotations of the film spool as celluloid passes through the gate. At one point, a hula hoop slips off the waist of one of the men, and the film cuts to an extreme low-​angle shot of McQueen standing over the camera. Here, too, a graphic match carries us over the cut, as both men are depicted from roughly the same low angle. McQueen begins pissing in the direction of the lens, which reveals a reflective liquid surface. Even if there is no physical “cut” in this instant, the film undergoes a change as the shot appears to ripple and shimmer at the meeting of these two liquid bodies. This moment provides an almost comically literal example of how bodily process and montage become imbricated in McQueen’s cinema. Here, the artist intervenes in the structures of both the shot and the larger film as well as the mapping of bodies across its parts. Consider the fact that before this moment, two sets of bodies and two spaces dominated the structure of the film, and that there was some equilibrium holding the film’s bodies and images in minimal relation. McQueen’s provocative act throws off that tenuous balance. As we will see, this balancing act, as well as its interruption, not only occur on the level of the shots in Pieces but are reflected at the level of the projection structure more broadly.

Between the Wipe and the Fold McQueen once remarked that the three films projected onto the Chicago exhibition structure were “leaning on each other,” as if they were themselves moving bodies on display.17 Indeed, the theory of montage we have explored up to this point—​namely the idea of the interstice as populated, traversed, and mediated by bodies—​takes on additional significance when we consider how

Make No Prisoners  37

the projection structure displaced and triangulated Bear, Five Easy Pieces, and Just Above My Head. One of this projection’s very basic achievements was to entrust three previously disparate films (and the bodies that inhabit them) to an open sequence, each work constituting units or cells of a theoretically interminable and contingent montage. Upon facing one of the edges of this structure where two given projection planes converge, the viewer encounters a split-​screen effect, where two of the three films can be viewed simultaneously next to one another. This gives the impression of viewing a massive strip of film laid out horizontally. Here, the corners between two given projection walls recall the frame lines separating two given images on a film strip. During the process of editing on a physical work print, cuts are made on the frame line and then spliced together (either by glue or tape) with another shot. In this way, the cut and the splice are two sides of the same operation. McQueen’s projection structure places both aspects of montage on display at once, and it is the position and movement of the viewer’s body in space that extend that disclosure to the broader architecture of the gallery. Moving left or right in relation to these edges of projection effects a contraction in one image and a dilation in another. This is almost the equivalent of what is referred to in editing terminology as a wipe, in which a new shot gradually populates the frame horizontally from either side via a moving boundary line. Now largely obsolete, the wipe is a type of editing technique (like dissolves and fades) that before digital editing would have been processed using an optical printer. Historically, the wipe was most common in feature-​length fiction films of the 1930s but was gradually overtaken by the dissolve, the fade, and eventually the straight cut.18 Unlike the dissolve’s cross-​pollution of shots, the wipe to some extent preserves the visual integrity of each shot. Whereas the dissolve in most cases underscores a temporal shift, the wipe is spatial and geographic, indicating a change in place.19 But the problem with the wipe, at least from the perspective of classic continuity editing, is that among all the optical editing techniques it is the most conspicuous. If editing to some extent always risks betraying the constructed nature of a film, the wipe flaunts that risk with gusto. Writing at a time when it was considerably more widespread than it is today, Béla Balázs decried the wipe as a “barbarian bit of laziness” that only furthers cinema’s servitude to the theater, likening it to a “curtain of shadow” being “drawn across the picture.”20 While intended as a denigration, Balázs’s evocative description of the wipe as a “curtain of shadow” aptly characterizes its effect in the context of McQueen’s expanded field of the cut, not only for the latter’s capacity to disclose or mask but for how montage is here rendered theatrical, which is to say conspicuous, an object of display and agent of drama in its own right.

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McQueen’s projection structure serves at once as a device of partition and obstruction as well as one of disclosure and flow. It is a wall and a threshold, which is to say a curtain. At the Chicago show, I stepped away from the projection structure, positioning myself directly in front of a fold between two projection walls, with Bear on the left and Five Easy Pieces on the right of this movable split screen. The relations that emerged between the two films at first merely amused—​an intriguing visual echo here or an unusual juxtaposition there seemed like small, happy accidents. But the relational theater gradually became more interesting and somehow more concrete as my investment in the projection ensemble deepened. Each time I moved in relation to this structure constituted an act of editing, while the cuts in the individual films themselves called attention to the sequencing in which I was myself engaged. In one moment, the body of one of the wrestlers in Bear seemed to extend outward beyond the right edge of the frame and into the total blackness temporarily comprising the image of Pieces. At another point, on the left the two men from Bear gyrated within the frame like two images struggling to cohere, while on the right, the hula-​hoopers mirrored this movement with the swaying of their bodies as if they were propelling the entire projection event. While inverted, the extreme perspective of these two images—​one low and one high—​was synthesized by my own frontal view, but at once frontality no longer looked like itself. By interfacing with and expanding the frames of the projection structure’s centrifugal montage, I found myself a co-​conspirator in some mysterious plan to cast the spatiotemporal coordinates of the museum into disarray. As I continued my discursive walk around the structure, I observed images and bodies mingle in an irresolvable series of touches and glances akin to the interplay between the two men in Bear. Certain instances of linkage were almost absurd in their apparent coincidence. At one point in my simultaneous viewing of Bear and Pieces, the shot/​reverse-​shot sequence from the former in which the two men exchange glances unfolded on the left-​hand screen, while on the right, the Pieces-​version McQueen aimed his penis toward the camera. At one point, the Bear-​version of McQueen smilingly licked his lips and closed his eyes with pleasure, while on the other screen McQueen began to urinate, once again agitating and rippling the entire surface of the image. The effect of this chance encounter between Bear and Pieces—​and between two “McQueens”—​was a curious one, and perhaps plain language is welcome here more than anywhere: it looked like McQueen was pissing on his own face. McQueen’s body intervenes in Pieces in the sense that the stream that passes through it effects a changed state of affairs both in that particular image and in the viewer’s mental map of the film as a whole. The body breaks up the projected image and itself, interrupting the perceived unity or flow of each. A line is thus drawn, traversed, and thrown out

Make No Prisoners  39

of balance between a body’s means and ends, or between the body as functional vessel and the body as idea, question, process. When the stream reveals a reflective surface, any stable telos in the act of urination is interrupted, rippling off into so many directions like the liquid plane it touches. This moment when liquid meets liquid occurs as if to ask, as Gilles Deleuze once did in relation to the work of Spinoza, “What can a body do?” Deleuze answers this question with recourse to the question of relations. For Deleuze, the horizon of both relation and the body is contingent on the “capacity to be affected.”21 Power, understood in this way, is also vulnerability, since it suggests the capacity of individual bodies to effect change as being coterminous with their ability to be affected from without. If the “image” of a man urinating on his own gleefully receptive face can be said to elicit a “shock,” where is this shock finally delivered if not to the viewer, in whose body the question of montage registers in flesh and blood? The stream of urine suddenly reveals the image as being multiple, diffuse, and open, and this gesture of bodily montage in turn solicits the viewer’s intervention in the flow of images—​affecting them and being affected by them. The images lean on each other, they are beside themselves, and in the chaotic tumble of images that inevitably ensues from gravity, a passage opens for the viewer. McQueen intervenes into this shared object of interest, breaks it up and submits it to the processes and demands of the body, making manifest the mutual reorganization of appearances that takes place between bodies. By intervening in his own image, McQueen makes himself multiple, submitting his body to the volatility of an open sequence. This split, bifurcated, and above all shared body migrates between screens and viewers as they circumambulate the projection structure. McQueen thus intervenes here not only in an image of his own body but in his authorship, insofar as the act of breaking his image into “pieces” anticipates the viewer’s own intervention in the body of his films. This would appear as a kind of death if not for a future montage to which McQueen entrusts his image and his own work. Montage comes to resemble a means not only of reanimation and renewal but of a passage from the one to the many.

Interval: Montage and Architecture Sergei Eisenstein remarked on the affinities between cinema and architecture throughout his writing career, but his most rigorous and imaginative attempt at articulating that relation was in an essay he wrote between 1937 and 1940 titled “Montage and Architecture.” In it, Eisenstein posits what architectural historian Martino Stierli describes as an “implicit theory of embodied

40  Between Images

spectatorship on the basis of mobility in space.”22 In doing so, Eisenstein constructs a genealogy of montage that predates cinema, stretching back to ancient Greek and Roman architecture. He begins his essay by discussing the concept of a “path” in the arts of montage: [When talking about cinema], the word path is not used by chance. Nowadays it is the imaginary path followed by the eye and the varying perceptions of an object that depend on how it appears to the eye. Nowadays it may also be the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; and these diverse impressions pass in front of an immobile spectator. In the past, however, the opposite was the case: the spectator moved between [a series of] carefully disposed phenomena that he absorbed sequentially with his visual sense.23

Just as a path carved out for walking constitutes a cut in the landscape, so too does montage carve a cinematic path through a vast landscape of images down which the viewer cognitively and optically ambulates. As Eisenstein writes later in his essay, “It is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one that our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis.”24 Strikingly, Eisenstein carves out a retroactive path for trading in the immobilized and receptive body of cinema’s imaginary spectator for a mobile, thinking, and dynamic agent. Is this not the same Eisenstein who imagined cinematic montage as a “kino-​fist” that strikes viewers over the head through revolutionary image pairings?25 Here, in the mature architecture of Eisenstein’s thought, instead of a fist propelled down onto the heads of the masses, montage manifests as a kind of ambulation—​a concomitant unfolding of images and feet. Giuliana Bruno extends the frames of Eisenstein’s architectural prehistory of montage by relating it to the form of the gallery installation, which “reproduces the haptic path that makes up the very museographic genealogy of cinema. An editing splice and a loop thus connect the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of the twenty-​first.”26 Once displaced within the museum, the moving image is delivered back to the body. Because it provides a space where viewers physically navigate moving images, carving out and cutting through that space, the architecture of a moving-​image exhibition redeems the physical world beyond the screen and in turn the body’s pride of place within the operations of montage. Cinema becomes architectural, architecture becomes cinematic. Montage becomes a matter not only of the space between images but of the space between bodies, as the image disperses across space and is traversed, partitioned, and taken up once more by bodies.

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Wild Walls In 1976, the British government revoked the “Special Category Status” that ensured certain liberties for political prisoners, such as the ability to wear civilian clothing, to live in special compounds outside the normal prison blocks, and to communicate freely with each other. Once dispossessed of these rights, the prisoners of the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland were moved to the infamous H-​Blocks, designed with the aim of restricting the means of contact between bodies. In response, the Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners—​or “Blanketmen” as they came to be known—​underwent a “no-​ wash” protest. They ceased bathing and grooming themselves, routinely spread their feces on the surfaces of their cells, and made their piss flow freely into the surrounding spaces. Despite spending hours each day attempting to banish the smell from their own bodies, H-​Block warders trailed it home to their families and into their communities, from whom they were gradually isolated. In an extraordinary account of this history, Allen Feldman suggests that the H-​Block guards became “an inadvertent emissary of the Blanketmen,” for in attempting to “encode the bodies of the inmates,” the warders “had transmuted their own bodies into a text that displayed the signs of unavoidable polluting contact.”27 Our reading of Hunger begins with this image provided by Feldman of the H-​Block as a space of “unavoidable polluting contact.” McQueen’s film reproduces and depicts the historical Maze Prison as an antirelational space par excellence. But a close reading of Hunger will reveal a profoundly conjunctive poetics at the film’s heart, which countervails against the prison’s punitive foreclosures upon the potentiality of being-​with. In this, we will read the cut as a device that both polices and animates the cross-​pollution of bodies. Following from our reading of McQueen’s gallery projection practice earlier in this chapter, we will reverse-​engineer the “expanded cut” to find similar operations occurring at the level of an ostensibly self-​contained unitary film. Early on in Hunger, there is a brief shot depicting one of the corridors in the prison. Soon human piss begins flowing from the cracks of the doors and into the corridor like outstretched arms, before ultimately converging into a single pool—​the very image of a dispersed, eccentric, authorless body. Much later, in an almost identically composed shot of the same corridor and one of Hunger’s famously long takes (it lasts nearly five minutes), we see the outcome of that dispersal and comingling of urine. A prison guard at the other end of the long corridor pours cleaning solution in with the urine and begins sweeping in the direction of the camera, our line of sight on a path for convergence with the oncoming wave of disconcertingly mixed fluids. Even as this

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mass slowly approaches the viewer, it disperses outward as the quietly obstinate guard intermittently attempts to sweep the liquid back under the doors toward its points of origin. Once the guard makes his way down the length of the corridor, the liquid has fully pooled into a single mass and converged in the bottom quadrant of the image, submerging us, as it were, up to our necks. Here, we might recall the moment from Five Easy Pieces when McQueen pisses on an image of himself in an act of pure cinematic jouissance, rendering his own body and that of the film multiple, fragmented, but related by the concrete fact of montage. In our reading, this moment seemed to anticipate a larger relational turbulence among images and bodies brought about by the spatial triangulation of Bear, Just Above My Head, and Five Easy Pieces, wherein the viewer (rather than McQueen per se) is enlisted as a kind of conduit, a relational prism for the exhibition’s violent proliferation and cross-​pollution of images and bodies. As we will see, Hunger similarly seizes upon bodily processes to reveal the internal multiplicity of the image. Even in the absence of cuts, the image breaks itself apart, fractures itself, casting the viewer headlong through the density of solid walls and across impossible distances into a centrifugal movement of bodies, images, and viewing positions. Hunger seems to take place in the interval between action and result, between a kind of base materiality and its resolution as meaning. At length the film endeavors to give shape to the spaces between gestures and forms—​between piss and antiseptic, profanation and purification, the swelling and contracting of bodies. Back in the corridor scene, that experience of suspenseful betweenness takes the form of a slowly approaching wave of mixed fluids. The viewer’s conscious or unconscious anticipation of the cut is propelled, necessarily to some extent, by a desire to resolve the violent confusion of boundaries at hand. When the cut does arrive, as is so often the case with this film, what it brings about is less a resolution of dissident material and bodily relations than a further incorporation of them, a digestion into the body of the film and, in turn, that of the spectator. In one shot we are practically submerged in urine and cleaning solution, and in the next, by way of a low-​angle medium dolly, we are gliding down the corridor in the opposite direction like a tranquil ghost surveying a wasteland (Figure 2.2). One of the central gestures of the Blanketmen during the no-​wash protest was to cover the walls of their cells with their own feces. While this deployment of excreta could read as a destructive act of negation in how it violates the spatial and temporal coordinates of an architectural assembly, it is also a means of construction and sharing. As Feldman points out, the walls of the H-​Blocks became extensions of an “architectural continuity” that “signified a political continuum.”28 The body’s hidden recesses projected onto the walls of the prison was the foundation of the

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Blanketmen’s dissident communal infrastructure. The warders, by contrast, sought to police the borders between bodies, blocking the passages within and between them. At one point in the film, a man enters a prison cell wearing a hazmat suit. He removes his headgear and stares off screen. The film then cuts to a shot of a shit-​painted wall. Here is a rather conventionally executed shot/​countershot formulation: a subject looks off screen, calling attention to the frame, after which a new shot emerges that reveals the “lack” announced by the previous shot. In revealing that lack, the new shot attempts to “suture” it, much as the hard line of water emanating from

Figure 2.2  Stills from Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008).

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a high-​pressure water hose incises the frame to efface shit from the wall attempts to purify the space of this chaos (Figure 2.3). It was in this uneasy interplay between pollution and purification that the Blanketmen initially located their political subjectivity. But when the British state intensified its efforts to contain that struggle to the interior of the Maze Prison, the Blanketmen’s answered with a hunger strike. To consciously court death through prolonged self-​induced hunger is to assume a position between extremes of power and vulnerability, of appearance and disappearance. As Patrick Anderson notes, the hunger strike assumes “aesthetic, social, and political significance by summoning us to bear witness to disappearance as a productive rather than destructive force in staging the venue of subjectivity.”29 The Blanketmen often referred to this act as “going to the edge.” As Feldman observes from the testimony of numerous ex-​Blanketmen, “Reaching the ‘edge’ was reaching the cusp of history; it was the creation of a new sociotemporal continuum arising out of the biological time of the dying prisoner.”30 For the Blanketmen, the generative capacity of the hunger strike consisted in the protesting body’s transmigration, its spillage through the walls of the prison and into the body politic. Hunger gives expression to this spilling through a careful orchestration of duration and cutting. This dynamic comes to the fore most dramatically in the film’s third act, which depicts the final days in the life of Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender): the first of the H-​Block Provos to starve himself to death in the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike.31 At one point, we see Sands seated on a toilet, almost entirely obscured from our view save for his blurry, cropped figure in the bottom half of the image. When Sands attempts to hoist himself up, he falls out of frame, collapsing from exhaustion toward the floor before his ward nurse catches him. The next shot, which is from the nurse’s point of view, depicts a white toilet bowl spattered with blood expelled by Sands moments earlier. Here we encounter another aspect of Hunger’s symbolic economy of excreta. The frontality of this shot combined with its depiction of body matter sprayed in a spiral formation upon a white surface harks back to the earlier shot of a white prison cell wall painted with shit. That the toilet spattered with Sands’s blood recollects the spiral of shit suggests a continuity between these gestures, which would otherwise appear distinct in their content and form. Moments like this are akin to what Artavazd Peleshian calls “distance montage,” where a given film’s images come to relate not only across a particular cut but across longer durations, so that “even if something that’s part of the whole isn’t there at a particular moment, you feel its breath.”32 Here, as elsewhere in Hunger,

Make No Prisoners  45

Figure 2.3  Stills from Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008).

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images, bodies, and acts separated by time and space, cordoned off by cuts and walls, reach out toward one another across the distance. We have already observed how Hunger participates in a dissolution of borders through montage; it carries this further in a series of cross-​dissolve transitions that follow from this image of the bloodied toilet. Shortly after this shot first appears, it dissolves into an image of Sands in bed. He lies still, until he is seized by a deep visceral agitation and begins to vomit. His head subsequently falls into the section of the frame occupied by the toilet in the preceding shot (Figure 2.4). Here, the toilet somehow remains in the shot even after its visual evacuation, as if Sands were expelling into that toilet still, furthering the film’s surging accumulation of excretory signifiers (piss +​shit +​blood +​vomit) across visual, spatial, and temporal lines. In part, it is the placement and movement of Fassbender’s body within and across these two shots that contribute to the sense that Sands vomits both onto the floor and into the absent toilet. Yet the dissolve in some sense always bears out such visual tensions because of a certain softness, its capacity for blunting the edges of spatiotemporal change. But there is another side to the dissolve. As Christian Metz puts it, “At the moment of the lap-​dissolve the film exhibits nothing other than its textual progression,” for in “hesitating a little on the threshold of a textual bifurcation” a film reminds us that it “performs a weaving operation . . . is always adding something.”33 Like the wipe, the dissolve (or lap dissolve, as it is sometime called) was one of the most common editing techniques utilized by studio films. After roughly 1970, however, with the exception of some brief and intermittent periods of revival, the dissolve remained relatively rare in feature films.34 All transitions have both an additive and subtractive tendency, and the lap dissolve is particularly prone to revealing those leftovers of textual progression. When Fassbender/​Sands leans over and expels into the empty space previously occupied by the toilet, his body doubles and crosses both images, double-​crossing space as if he were traveling back into the evacuated image and back into the present one again. In performing its own disappearance, this body recollects what has been lost in the progression of images. That the dissolved toilet in fact stays behind, or rather moves forward even after ostensibly disappearing amid the march of images, and that it does so in order to be thrown up into may seem like a silly point to belabor, but I focus on it for a reason. There is a particular reverence paid in the last half-​hour of this film to the event of death. Hunger invests itself in the death of its protagonist, carefully describing each trial of pain and each dissolution of bodily relations, tending visually to each wound with the exacting precision one might lend to a religious ceremony. Just as the nurse figure in Hunger assembles and maintains an ornate system of support for his

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Figure 2.4  Stills from Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008).

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patient, so does the film enact a virtual support apparatus, a cinematic hospice so to speak, for a dying and pain-​stricken body. Directly after Sands vomits, he is again seized by pain. As if on cue, the camera begins to hover above the man like a fascinated, weightless eye as he writhes violently upward, and the shot momentarily dissolves into an image of birds in flight. This dissolve occurs almost simultaneously with the thrashing of Sands’s body, being affected by it. In its textual swelling, the film almost seems tethered to the lifeline of this dying body, as if to commit itself to a similar horizon of extreme affects (if not oblivion per se). This is not the only instance in Hunger of ornithological imagery, which proves an important means by which the film draws from the political mythology of its historical actors. In his diaries, Sands often wrote of the birds outside his cell and of his childhood ambition to become an ornithologist. At one point, in a section titled “The Lark and the Freedom Fighter,” Sands ponders a murder of crows gathered outside the prison hospital room where he later died, which leads him to recount a story his grandfather told him of a caged lark who refused song to his master, who kills the bird for this offense. Sands relates his own travails as a political prisoner to the lark’s. The proliferation of bird imagery in the final act adds to the overall sense that the space of history and myth has penetrated the boundaries of the visual narrative. In the first image we see of Sands during the hunger strike, Fassbender is a blurry figure confined to the bed in the background. In the foreground, in clear focus, a feather floats down and cuts through the frame vertically. Later, in the final act, as we described earlier, we see birds taking flight from a tree. This recalls several passing images of the same tree from earlier in the film, where it stood leafless and lifeless, set against a dark blue sky. This tree surfaces, for instance, during a short montage that attends Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s voice-​over. Whereas the significance of this tree to the film’s overall structure was previously ambiguous, the text retroactively opens up in this dissolve between the birds in flight and Sands’s writhing body. Thus, on some level the film incorporates the dying body of Sands, which spills into its internal and external relations as through the cracks of prison cell doors, reaching backward and forward across shots and architecture in a kind of retroactive, corporeal remediation of cuts. The textual obstructions that otherwise work to regiment beings, materials, and spaces begin to crack open. Yet it would not be entirely accurate to call these transitions in Hunger lap dissolves. In fact, no proper term exists for what they are. If anything, they are lapsed dissolves, given their function as pulsations or flashes of a shot’s “outside” rather than gradual incorporations of it. As the sound of flapping wings invades the soundtrack, the camera begins to move erratically above the man’s body, placing the viewer once again in an implausible position that is

Make No Prisoners  49

not-​quite-​human. After a beat, a tenuous calm returns to both camera and body save for the enduring sound of flapping wings. Once again we get a short lapsed visual dissolve into an image of birds in flight, and the camera’s movement begins to register more as birdlike than as some arbitrarily erratic or frenzied motion. Finally, the shot of Sands in bed dissolves fully into the shot of birds. Subsequently, as if to underscore the unresolved nature of these transitions, the film once again dissolves back to the prison hospital, where we see a white bed sheet covered with brownish-​red splotches of blood, echoing the image of birds taking flight against a white sky (Figure 2.5). This image of the empty bed now substitutes for the disappearance of Sands’s body (spilling and bleeding out), for its flight (the story of the lark), and for its reinscription into the fabric of the world. All of this happens, of course, before the film even gets around to directly contending with Sands’s death. But the implication is clear: the writing of myth, and the transmigratory labor of bodies upon which that mythography rests, was set in motion in advance of its author’s disappearance. Every film is a kind of body, and the work of montage in this regard is manifold. For instance, editing may give the impression of a unitary body whose parts are related in their dependence upon one another and that, in its movements and operations, appears seamlessly connected. Such a body faces its necessary perils. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, the boundaries of the body “can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. . . . The functions of its different parts and their relations afford a source of symbols for other complex structures.”35 Douglas’s formulation provides a helpful description of the status both of the body and of the image in Hunger. Just as the Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger strikers subjected the boundaries of their bodies to a perpetual state of crisis, a nonsovereign state of mutual affectivity, in order to renegotiate the symbolic order of the prison and the state, so too does Hunger subject its own internal boundaries to the exteriority of relation, turning its own “insides” out. The bodies in and body of McQueen’s film labor toward a mutual dissolution of borders, enlisting themselves in a broader affective montage stretched from cut to frame, image to screen—​from film bodies to film viewers.

Between the Lines In a short piece on the Berlin Wall written in 1962, Maurice Blanchot wrote of the essential abstraction of walls, noting that even “in the concrete oppression that it embodies, it is itself essentially abstract.”36 In this way, the wall “reminds us that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently

50  Between Images

Figure 2.5  Stills from Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008).

Make No Prisoners  51

impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis.”37 What Blanchot wished to highlight about the Berlin Wall was that despite its concrete heaviness, despite its facticity as separation, it was also weightless, almost nothing at all. A wall is an “in-​between” thing that limits or prohibits movement across a given interval. And yet, in enacting a cut along a horizon of action and movement, a wall conditions the emergence of new relations and forms of action. Thought is also like a wall in the way it partitions the world even as it places that partitioning work under threat. The physical partitioning of the world is beholden to such a tension. Cuts and divisions are the very fabric of our world. Like a cut, a wall is equivocal, providing the basis for coming together even as it forces apart. McQueen harbors a keen interest in walls, boundaries, and all manner of obstruction, but also their traversal: the movement-​beyond they already invite. In one sense, this refers to Britain’s enduring colonial legacy, for instance, in the partitioning that held Northern Ireland apart from Southern Ireland for so long, and which was, with the Belfast Agreement in 1998, reinforced once more in defiance of the nationalist cause. This partitioning is also a wall that circumscribes movement across land and delineates the inside and outside of bodies. It also refers to the walls that constituted the labyrinthine system of the Maze Prison itself. But there is another dimension of walls that informs the images and sounds of Hunger, which speaks to McQueen’s decision to avoid using breakaway walls (or “wild walls,” as they are called in production terminology) in the production of the film. Typically, film sets are designed for maximum flexibility, so that they can be reconfigured cheaply and quickly. A wild wall is basically a prop wall: it looks like a real barrier onscreen but in reality is as mutable as the position of a light or the placement of an actor within the frame. Avoiding this kind of architectural malleability, the set designers and carpenters who worked on Hunger re-​created the infamous H-​Block from the ground up. According to McQueen, because its walls were static, the set assumed the “contained element of the actual prison.”38 This containment, in turn, made for a kind of spatial and corporeal realism.39 The walls of the set provided the secret method for their own disavowal, to pass through the walls of time. Let us return briefly to McQueen’s gallery exhibition practice to put a finer point on this idea of the wall as a device of disjunction and conjunction. Rayners Lane is a film installation McQueen devised in 2008 which consists of a continuous loop of a ten-​minute 16mm film print. At the heart of the piece is a single photograph of bricks, essentially a medium frontal view of a larger brick wall. This photograph was reproduced, multiplied many times over through optical printing to extend the length of a thousand-​foot roll of film, enough for roughly ten minutes of continuous projection. Upon encountering McQueen’s peculiar

52  Between Images

installation, one is struck by the notion that every photograph is somehow destined to be a wall, to announce a division not only between the past and present but also between a here and an elsewhere, between “them” and “us.” This registers in Rayners Lane on the very surface of the image as the expanse of brick flattens and becomes synonymous with the photograph itself. However, once this photograph is fed through the projector and set on a continuous loop, the wall appears to move, lurching and swaying amid the subtle agitations of the film print as it moves through the projection gate. This instability is a function not only of the film projection but of the wall’s displacement, the fact that it has been cut out and reinstalled within the gallery. This image is, after all, a fragment of a wall, which only further emphasizes its status as a cut, that there is a “beyond” of this image. But is what lies beyond the frame in this instance not simply more wall? For the viewer who faces it, the space beyond this wall—​the “elsewhere” to this “here”—​becomes indissociable from the surrounding architectural space of the exhibition itself. The image as a static construction or immovable wall is thus set against its status as movable object through spatial displacement and cinematic ingestion by projector and viewer alike. If such a wall is made “wild” and turned into one image among others, this is less the result of a change in its actual weight or material construction than of being subjected to the open field of relation, to a renegotiating movement on the part of other materials and bodies. One of the minor characters in Hunger is a police officer whose unit is deployed to the Maze to assist the warders by ritualistically striking the prisoners into submission with batons. At one point during this scene, we find the young officer violently beating a prisoner, and his intensifying fury builds to a crescendo until the film cuts to the image of an empty cell. After a beat, two guards enter and drop Sands’s motionless, battered body inside. The almost mechanical sound of batons hitting shields in unison begins to swell on the soundtrack, as the film effects a match-​action edit to a medium shot from above of Sands hitting the ground. The next shot shows the same officer from earlier, and the transition here from the previous shot appears seamless by virtue of the similarity of both men’s position within their respective frames. Whereas the premise of this violent ritual is to police corporeal and conceptual borders, here the transition between shots counteracts that work of partitioning, blurring the physical walls that separate the two men. This gesture is echoed in a more direct but decidedly less conventional manner in the shot that follows from this initial image of the police officer. In a medium-​ wide shot, we see the young officer on one side of the wall, tears flowing down his face, while on the other side we see prisoners struggling to make their way through a corridor lined on both sides with police striking them with batons (Figure 2.6). These two spaces appear continuous save for an intervening wall.

Make No Prisoners  53

Figure 2.6  Stills from Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008).

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But on closer inspection of the image one notices that the action on the left side of the wall occurs at a different speed from the movement of the police officer’s body on the right. Indeed, a split in the image lies between the left edge of the wall and the space of the corridor. This split-​screen effect makes it seem like we are looking at a unitary shot, but we know such a shot would be impossible in the absence of collapsible walls. The film’s editor, Joe Walker, thus spliced two distinct shots within the same frame, using the wall itself as a bridge. This visual splice confounds the boundaries between the architecture of a historical prison and that of the moving image, gathering them onto the “set” of montage. Walker’s employment of the wall as a bridge between shots and bodies in this instance might recall how the triangular column at McQueen’s art exhibition employs a wall, folded into a triangle, as the basis for a montage of contingent relationality. Hunger speaks a language of walls, barriers, and confinement, but this is also a language of openings. The film depicts bodies intervening in the conditions of their confinement through the construction of ever new forms of relation and interest, which provide the basis for change. At the same time, Hunger reflects such interventions through its own language and invests the viewer with that language, just as McQueen’s triangular projection column solicits the viewer’s participation in the dissolution of barriers and walls by figuring the space between images as one of mutual interest. In doing this, McQueen sensitizes us to another kind of space, where bodies and images become process, and where the terms of community and sharing are constantly shifting. Walls alone circumscribe this movement, and walls want to be wild.

Notes 1. Paul Arthur, “Flesh of Absence: Resighting the Warhol Catechism,” in Andy Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 150. 2. Homay King, “Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 470 3. David Bourdon, “Warhol as Filmmaker,” Art in America 59 (May–​June 1971): 51. 4. Blake Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), http://​www.apple. com/​apple-​books. 5. The Art Institute of Chicago hosted the major solo exhibition of McQueen from Thursday, October 17, 2013 to Thursday, January 9, 2014. This show then traveled to the Basel Schauerlager. It was curated by James Rondeau in collaboration with McQueen. 6. Okwui Enwezor, “From Screen to Space: Projection and Reanimation in the Early Work of Steve McQueen,” in Steve McQueen: Works, ed. Isabel Friedli (Basel: Schauerlager, 2013), 28. Similarly, Jean Fisher has noted how McQueen’s exhibition practice demands that the “linkages and associations to construct sense” come from “the viewer, not the film itself.”

Make No Prisoners  55 Jean Fisher, “Imitations of the Real: On Western Deep and Caribs’ Leap,” in Steve McQueen Caribs’ Leap/​Western Deep (London: Artangel, 1999), 120. 7. On the use of “black space” in McQueen’s work, and in Bear in particular, see Enwezor, “From Screen to Space”: “The milieu of Bear is the black ground against which its action is set, a ground that, as such, is far more than a backdrop: it is a symbol of blackness itself, and a milieu in which ideas of visibility and invisibility are explored and negotiated. In a sense, the background and the space of the struggle are an arena—​call it the social milieu of black masculine absence—​where the modes of behavior occur. With these parameters established, the directness of the images and the physical immediacy of the film’s formal qualities announce an unabashed celebration of visual pleasure” (23). 8. For an evocative and elucidating discussion of montage in Muybridge’s photographs, see Sam Rohdie, Montage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 3–​5. 9. Rohdie, Montage, 4. 10. Rohdie, Montage, 5. 11. Mark Durden, “Viewing Positions: Steve McQueen,” Parachute 98 (April–​ June 2000): 18–​25. 12. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 9–​10. 13. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 16. 14. Leder, The Absent Body, 83–​99. Also see Drew Leder, The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 15. Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 106 16. Auerbach, Body Shots, 103. 17. Steve McQueen quoted in Solveig Nelson, “Steve McQueen,” Artforum International 51, no. 9 (May 2013): 320–​321. 18. John Carey, “Temporal and Spatial Transitions in American Fiction Films,” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1, no. 1 (1974): 46. 19. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 65. 20. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (Character and Growth of a New Art), trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 151. 21. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 218, emphasis mine. Also see Michael Hardt, “The Power to Be Affected,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 215–​222. 22. Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 181. 23. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” trans. Yves Alain Bois, Assemblage 10 (1989): 116. 24. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” 117. 25. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 1: Writings, 1922–​34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 64. 26. Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 28 27. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 195–​196, emphasis mine.

56  Between Images 28. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 184–​185. 29. Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 23. 30. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 225. 31. Bobby Sands embarked on a hunger strike on March 1, 1981, and died sixty-​six days later, on May 5, 1981. 32. Artavazd Peleshian quoted in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 101. 33. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 276. 34. James Cutting, Kaitlin Brunick, and Jordan Delong, “The Changing Poetics of the Dissolve in Hollywood Film,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 29, no. 2 (2011): 149–​169. 35. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 116. 36. Maurice Blanchot, “Berlin,” in Political Writings: 1953–​1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 75. 37. Blanchot, “Berlin,” 75. 38. Steve McQueen, “Interview with Steve McQueen,” in Hunger (New York: Criterion Collection, 2009), DVD. 39. As the film’s editor Joe Walker recounts, some of the actors used this fact as a way of “getting into” their characters. Personal correspondence with author.

PART II

TERRITORY

3 To Place a Cut All communities are communities of the table. —​Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques

As we saw in the introduction to this study, Lev Kuleshov’s experiment with the actor Ivan Mosjoukine was less about the power of acting or gesture than the capacity of montage to determine meaning. For Kuleshov, it was above all the editing apparatus, which is to say the cut, that charges the otherwise gratuitous relation of two given shots with an almost fateful significance. Another of Kuleshov’s experiments, less discussed than the Mosjoukine case but no less important, was The Created Surface of the Earth. In it, Kuleshov aimed to demonstrate essentially the same phenomenon vis-​à-​vis space. The result would be a unified “creative geography”—​a landscape born of montage. In his account of the experiment, Kuleshov seemed to describe an actual place, rendered by little more than the careful orchestration of disparate shots within a sequence. Contained within this segment were five distinct actions:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A young man walks from left to right. A woman walks from right to left. They meet and shake hands. The young man points. A large white building is shown, with a broad flight of steps. The two ascend the steps.1

Kuleshov was quick to point out in his account of the experiment that none of the individual “shots” in the sequence was captured in the same location. So, before the man and woman converge in the same frame, they are in fact located in completely different areas of Moscow. But because of the trajectory of the actors’ movement in their respective frames and the placement of those images within the larger sequence, viewers would perceive them as sharing the same general space.2 At one point in his account, Kuleshov boasts that the “white building” that appears in the sequence after the man points off-​screen Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0003

60  Between Images

was in fact an American photograph of the White House in Washington. It might as well have been right in front of the two actors, however, by virtue of the simple fact that an adroit “cut” lay between the man pointing off-​screen and the image of the building. By the time the couple is seen ascending a set of white steps, which were in fact those of a cathedral in Moscow, the viewer would have already been sutured into the imaginary space of the segment’s creative geography: a place no more illusory than the motion perceived in the rapid succession of individual film frames through a projector. One of the great powers of cinema is its ability to create worlds. The late cultural geographer Yi-​Fu Tuan once remarked upon his feeling of “disorientation” when attending a play: the theater presents “a world in which the human beings are real and complex, but the setting is two-​dimensional and cardboard.” He contrasted this experience to attending a movie, where “the ontological status of objects (setting) and people is equalized.”3 Tuan always saw geography as a cultural matter, places being contingent and differential rather than fixed, so it is no surprise that he regarded cinema as an ideal setting for the recognition that we humans are defined at least as much by the physical world around us, by its constituent matter and equipment, as we ourselves define that world. From very early on, theorists and practitioners of the cinema recognized this ability not simply to reproduce space but to reshape it, to collapse borders and bring the faraway close at hand. Just as the telegraph, the locomotive, and the automobile divested time and space of their sensorimotor constraints, so too did cinema, and montage specifically, promise to collapse distances, extending perception far beyond the limits of embodied human experience. Seen from this perspective, cinema reflects a larger condition of global modernity which, in Anthony Giddens’s well-​known formulation, can be characterized as “the separation of time and space” and the “dislocation of space from place” that follows from that larger spacetime disjunction.4 Whereas Part I of this book views relation through the prism of corporeality, Part II shifts the emphasis placed on bodily relation in the first two chapters to spatial relation. Specifically, Chapters 3 and 4 are interested in the “creative geographies” that emerge from the relations between humans and equipment. Underlying this inquiry into space, materiality, and the problem of relation is a larger concern with the interwoven effects of global capitalism and technological automation on our individual and collective experience of space. Amid a pervasive mystification and narrowing of relation under these regimes, how might cinematic montage elucidate and broaden humanity’s horizon of relation? I can think of no better figure to ground such an inquiry than Harun Farocki. A concern that ran throughout his filmmaking career has to do with the kinds

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of spatial relations brought about, but also foreclosed upon, by contemporary economic, political, and technological systems. At the same time, his work consistently explored cinema’s complicity in these systems, as well as its potential as a countervailing force. Farocki remarked on the “deterritorializing” effects of electronic control technology, whereby “locations become less specific.”5 His thinking was aligned here with that of Paul Virilio, who noted as early as 1987 that the convergence of screens and cameras with electronic telecommunication technology meant that “architectonic elements begin to drift and float in an electronic ether,” so that the “distinctions of here and there” are rendered meaningless.6 In light of that broader problem, this chapter aims to foreground a specific feature of Farocki’s image discourse that regards montage as a spatial and material operation. This prevails at virtually every level of his practice and phase of his career, even prior to the mid-​1990s, when he increasingly turned toward expanded, and more explicitly spatial, modes of exhibition. What he would ultimately call soft montage—​where images constellate in an air of “general relatedness” rather than strict opposition or equation—​was an insight born of an enduring attentiveness to the phenomenological functions of the cinematic interval.7 I want to argue that in Farocki’s practice montage is less an operation than a situation, a means of finding one’s bearings amid the rapidly and necessarily shifting coordinates of images. Throughout Farocki’s body of work, we find a sustained effort to enlist the cinematic interval in the work of place-​making, in short reterritorializing it. My aim in this chapter is to build on existing work by scholars who have foregrounded the novelty of Farocki’s interventions in editing by framing his montage discourse specifically within a descriptive modality of space and place. My own claim here is that Farocki endows the cinematic interval—​and this obtains across his dealings with analog and digital cinema—​with a material character in order to maintain its coordinating, reterritorializing function within our spatial-​relational imaginary. Where the editing table is host to montage rather than mere cuts, it becomes a form of thinking situated at the site of montage, of the cut understood as a place of relation.8 While he surely shared this aim with other filmmakers, perhaps most notably Chris Marker and Jean-​Luc Godard, Farocki’s project can be distinguished for its persistent efforts to figure the space between images quite literally in many instances as a place, where montage resonates spatially and materially. When I say that Farocki’s montage praxis registers spatially and materially, I am talking not only about film editing, but more broadly about the imaginative work of relation made manifest in cinema and in the world. To elucidate this point, this chapter will focus on one of the central figures of relation that recurs throughout Farocki’s body of work: the table. Tables are everywhere in

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Farocki’s cinema, providing the setting for a wide range of activities, including interviews and interrogation, discussion and debate, intellectual and manual labor, and even violence. But the fact that something as seemingly ordinary as a table would assume such a central position reminds us that cinema, for Farocki, was a technique for being in the world, a way of finding one’s bearings and of situating oneself in a world populated by others. The table for Farocki stands as a privileged site where the imaginative capacities of cinema and the possibilities of everyday life overlap, but it is also intimately bound up with montage. In this regard, it is revealing that Farocki favors the German word Schnittplatz—​literally a place of editing or cutting—​when referring to an editing table located within a cutting room (Schneiderraum). At another level, the table provides a setting for a much broader sense of montage as a technique of relation.

From Industrial to Operational Images Farocki sustained a sharp focus on matters of relation throughout his career. As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, this concern was with power more broadly, or with what “images can tell us about the power relations in society.”9 One of Farocki’s concerns on this front had to do with the kinds of relations brokered by our technological infrastructure, specifically where the production and circulation of images is concerned. No artist working at the turn of the twentieth century was more attuned to the effects of technology on human perception, and Farocki turned repeatedly to some of the most basic but trenchant questions of technological reproduction and its effects on human relations. Foremost among these was the question of how to locate oneself amid the ever-​widening field of sensory information brought about by advances in computation and communication technologies. This is at base an issue of positionality or of coordination, of the degree to which humans might understand and respond meaningfully to the workings of power when its technological infrastructure so exceeds common understanding. Before posing these problems specifically in relation to digital media, let us consider them in the context of modernity and its relations of production more broadly. A dilemma that lies at the heart of modernity and its attendant “isms” can be summed up in the question of whether technology, by exceeding the perceptual and productive capacities of the human body, has a liberating or alienating effect on human relations. For certain sectors of the leftist avant-​garde, the revolutionary potential of new technologies lay precisely in their ability to bring about a broader displacement of individual, creaturely interests for

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collective interests. Nowhere did this play out more dramatically than in the realm of labor. How, for example, could the proletariat seize the means of production if those very means outpace and outsize humans? One answer to this question was that people must disappear or migrate into machines. Different versions of this scenario would be proposed at varying pitches of technological optimism or pessimism by artists and critics working in the first half of the twentieth century, with Futurist, Constructivist, and Dadaist praxis furnishing early figures of what would later be named the cyborg.10 In a famous polemic, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his collaborators advocated that the human body be jettisoned in favor of a machinic perceptual apparatus. According to the Kinoks, this process would be mediated by cinema: “I am kino-​eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility.”11 For Vertov and his colleagues, only once society emancipates itself from human sensorimotor coordinates could a genuine and durable communist spacetime be achieved. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) was intended as a kind of proof of concept for the liberating power of the cinematic apparatus: a demonstration of the radical potential of the technology and an argument for bringing the human sensorium up to speed with it. In Vertov’s film, cuts level vast distances between individual subjects and places, gathering them together within the cinematic geography of a revolutionary city. In one breathtaking sequence, Yelizaveta Svilova’s deft montage gathers seemingly disparate forms of labor into a hypnotic, rhythmically propulsive sequence of images. A woman loading clumps of mud into a train car, a man sharpening an axe, a girl packing matchboxes, manicurists and barbers, editors of film and weavers of fabric—​all these figures and spaces of labor are synthesized into a unitary “workspace.” At the same time, a tacit contract of hypervisibility implicates these subjects. Transparency is rendered absolute, for the jettisoning of human perception by the kino-​eye amounted to “the possibility of seeing without limits and distances, as the remote control of movie cameras, as tele-​eye, as X-​ray eye.”12 Thus, “[l]‌ife caught unawares” was the price of the collectivist ticket. It is a beautiful and deeply alluring idea, not least when executed in such aesthetically daring a manner. A visionary such as Vertov would surely have anticipated, and presumably shuddered at, the dystopian potential of such a contract. Still, his film seemed to have a built-​in antidote to such dangers, for Man with a Movie Camera was meant not only as a demonstration of technological prowess but as an elucidation of that technology. Even as the Kinoks bombard viewers with the sheer spectacle of a technologically mediated postrevolutionary society, they also clued spectators in on how that technological social body comes to be, and

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not just from the cinematographer’s point of view but also that of the projectionist, the editor, and even the orchestra. The idea, perhaps, was to have two trains running at the same time: to enthrall viewers with the effects of cinema on the fabric of spacetime and to instruct them as to its means of production. It was a bargain, and one no doubt worth taking. In Farocki’s body of work, the erstwhile modernist enthusiasm for the emancipatory capacity of cinema is traded in for a more ambivalent attitude regarding technology in general and its role vis-​à-​vis politics and aesthetics.13 Consider for a moment the following passage: Cameras are built to accommodate the gaze of a human eye. But heavy industry accomplishes work, which cannot be surveyed by a human eye. Industry extends the labour process over vast distances and at the same time concentrates and joins the work of many different sites of production. A gigantic organism, at once beyond vision and of somnambulist precision. How can one grasp this with images? Ought there not to be images that do not fit into households, nor on walls, into pockets, or illustrated books? And on no retina?14

These words feel like they could have been written in Vertov’s time, since they speak to some of the same conundrums regarding the role of technology in mediating human relations. In fact, they postdate it by nearly fifty years and are spoken aloud by Farocki’s narrator in his 1978 film Industry and Photography. In this profoundly conflicted vision of humanity’s relationship to machines, Farocki’s narrator suggests that heavy industry makes a creative geography of its own, one that is inaccessible to humans and “cannot be surveyed” by them. The concern here is with a basic inaccessibility of production by humans at both experiential and cognitive levels. Further complicating this scenario is the problem that the relations undergirding production implicate humans to a lesser extent as the technological infrastructure of work advances, a consequence not only of the nature of automation but also of the privatization of work under capitalism. One passage from Industry and Photography makes this idea manifest through an extended long take in which the camera tracks along the surface of a brick wall surrounding an industrial production complex. “It is a new development in history,” the narrator muses, “that work is not accessible anymore, not visible. It has disappeared behind walls like a private possession. Since the start of big industry work can no longer be viewed. It has become invisible, lost its concreteness.” Once again, as in our discussion of McQueen’s cinema, we are faced with the fact of a wall. What is notable about this moment is not only that a wall announces a decentered human sensorium and obstructed human body but that it is attended by a long take. It is as if the

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long take, in its spatiotemporal continuousness, were the very image of an exhausted and fumbling human sensorium. In his film Between Two Wars (Zwischen Zwei Kriegen, 1978), Farocki assumes the position of a young artist in the 1970s who sets out to document the quickly disappearing blast furnaces that prevailed in the German landscape during the interwar period (1917–​1933). In a voice-​over narration, Farocki’s character reflects the peculiar demands this project placed on representation: I wanted to tell this story with machines which actually produced this story. But I remember spending the summer of 1976 straining my eyes for some traces of them, as one does in a place one knew as a child. Each time I heard of a works that had been demolished it seemed a little more impossible to tell this story. I need not be ashamed of this feeling. Things disappear from sight before they’re understood.

Farocki’s photographer in this case recalls his vexation at the task of depicting the vast organism of industrial modernity whose processes span an obscure, downright spooky spacetime. As he speaks these words, we see Farocki standing in the foreground surveying the site of a blast furnace, his hand shading his eyes from the sunlight. After a moment, the film cuts to the character’s point of view of the building, which is followed by yet another shot of the man standing in the same spot as before, with the landscape now containing almost no trace of the structure seen earlier. Here Farocki gives expression to the shock of disappearance by way of an irrational cut. He is, for all intents and purposes, in the exact same location and position, but the mise en scène is utterly different. Thus, even as the shot positions Farocki’s character conventionally as the perceptual locus of this space, the true bearer of the gaze turns out to be something not strictly human: a gaze embodied in the form of the shot/​reverse-​shot formulation itself. The body (Farocki’s) that “persists” across these shots is (like the demolished structure) wholly subject to the irrational interval of global capitalism. And yet it is to the very irrationality of the cut, to the violence of the sequence that one must entrust oneself in furnishing witness to this disappearance. Later in the film, the photographer will explain that he decided to take up photography as a way of making sense of these transformations. But as he soon comes to understand, “one photo isn’t enough, you need two photos of everything.” Indeed, a solitary photograph will not do, for one needs at least two images, which is to say a representational form that can minimally accommodate itself to the sheer deterritorializing velocity and scope of global capitalism. As the film progresses, we encounter gradually less of Farocki’s

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photographer, save for his voice-​over commentary over footage of heavy industry. During one sequence of shots depicting the interior of a working blast furnace, Farocki remarks off-​screen, “The machine looks like a giant finger, stretched out from a giant fist. It runs on rails. The finger, a steel ram as thick as a man.” Farocki’s observations about industrial production earlier in his filmmaking career would later give way to a concern with computational media more broadly and what he came to call “operational images.” Unlike the photographs in Industry and Photography, which are produced by a set of sometimes overlapping human and machinic processes and are meant to be looked at by people, operational images are often entirely machine-​generated and “not intended for human eyes.”15 Martin Blumenthal-​Barby defines the operational image as a signifier of “the fading importance of the human as referential center in favor of ‘intelligent machines’ that render decisions autonomously.”16 In fact, the operational image routes around questions of human relations entirely, for if it represents anything to us at all, it is a nonrelation. In an important sense, operational images are aligned with what Gilles Deleuze calls the “control society,” which is basically shorthand for society as it exists under a computer-​powered neoliberal capitalist order. Deleuze distinguishes power in control societies from the “disciplinary” tactics described by Michel Foucault. Compared to the former, disciplinary acts are more conspicuous, visible, concrete (which is not, for Deleuze at least, to say better or somehow more amenable to resistance). In a disciplinary society, subjects pass through various “internments” or “spaces of enclosure” (e.g., prison, school, courthouse, motor vehicle administration, security checkpoint, hospital), all of which may have a “common language” but are essentially “independent variables”—​they are, Deleuze says, “analogical.”17 On the other hand, mechanisms of control “are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical.”18 Deleuze thus points out that “enclosures are molds, distinct castings,” whereas “controls are modulation, like a self-​deforming cast that will continuously change . . . like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”19 At the same time, Deleuze contends that while the disciplinary society has two poles of “individual” and “mass,” that “mass/​individual pair” no longer holds in control societies, for “individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ ” divided internally and against one another, while masses have become “samples, data, markets or ‘banks.’ ”20 Following from Deleuze, Shane Denson posits that images in our “post-​cinematic media regime” have become “discorrelated, dividual, molecular, metabolic, and even post-​perceptual,” since the “apparatuses and processes that are productive of images today . . . take place outside the spatial

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and temporal dimensions of human perception.”21 Operational images, like Denson’s “discorrelated” images, are postcinematic and postperceptual, vectors of control for a population that is “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”22 In Counter Music (2004), a city symphony film made in and for a time of operational images, Farocki places images of people sleeping in Man with a Movie Camera in relation to contemporary CCTV images of people asleep in medical laboratories. “For Dziga Vertov,” the text reads next to the footage of Mikhail Kaufman setting out with his camera rig, “the day begins with the production of images.” Following this, we see footage from Vertov’s film of a woman sleeping in her apartment and a boy asleep on the bench. Farocki then switches back to the contemporary sleep lab footage, accompanied by images of various sine wave outputs from the electronic devices monitoring human bodies. Alongside these images, the text reads, “For us the day begins with their reproduction. We show sleep from cameras already pointed at their sleepers.” What has changed here is of course that the intermediary of the cameraman has been removed, and in his place we find a decentralized surveillance system that regards human beings as “a lump to be dissected and rendered as numbers,” or “images processed by a program.” Whereas the “city” in Man with a Movie Camera is a creative geography spanning disparate locations in Russia and Ukraine—​Kiev, Moscow, Odesa, and Kharkiv—​which, once dissected and dislocated by the camera and its operator, is synthesized as a revolutionary territory by montage and its user, Counter Music depicts a city whose inhabitants are numerically synthesized and operationalized in advance.

Reterritorializing the Cut Let us return to one of the provisional claims of this chapter, namely, that Farocki’s cinema does not merely corroborate the deterritorializing effects of operational images, but in an important sense seeks to counter these effects. It is here that we can begin to speak about Farocki’s montage praxis as one of reterritorialization. To some degree, my use of these terms “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” follows from the analysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their two-​volume study Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The concept of territorialization, and the accompanying terms “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” appear throughout Anti-​Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). But whereas in Anti-​Oedipus “deterritorialization” is taken as a largely positive development, a function of libidinal

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excess energy once freed from the “territorializing” structures of power, in A Thousand Plateaus the situation becomes more complex and difficult to parse. There, one gets the sense that some degree of “reterritorialization” is necessary to actually finding one’s bearing, to articulating a position. As Deleuze and Guattari write: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand–​use object, mouth-​breast, face-​landscape. And each of the two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary reterritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and landscape.23

A crucial figure of reterritorialization in Farocki’s practice is the table, and one of the earliest and most poignant examples of this can be seen in the 1969 film Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire). The film opens on a medium shot of Farocki seated at a table as he reads a written statement by a North Vietnamese victim of a napalm bomb deployed by U.S. Armed Forces in 1966. The camera is placed at eye level with the filmmaker and situated at such a distance from him as to simulate the position of another person seated on the opposite side of the table. Farocki reads the horrifyingly detailed statement directly from a printed sheet resting on the table in front of him, written in the first person (“Napalm burned my face, both arms and both legs”). Following this, he looks into the camera and dispassionately asks, “How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes.” In the shift here from first-​person to second-​ person mode of address, and with the mere upward tilt of his head from page/​ table to camera/​spectator, Farocki enters the Vietnamese witness, the viewer, and himself into a relational set, a triangulation that occurs by way of the table. After speculating further about the futility of showing viewers images of burned Vietnamese bodies directly, he concludes that abstraction would be better: “We can give you only a hint of an idea of how napalm works.” The camera then dollies in closer and tilts downward toward the table as Farocki grasps a lit cigarette and stubs it out on his bare arm. At this point, a voice-​over narrator explains that napalm burns at nearly eight times that of the embers of a lit cigarette, while the shot of Farocki’s wounded wrist, displayed upon the table like an offering, turns into a freeze frame. At this moment of arrest, the filmmaker’s burned flesh is rendered into an image, as if to make the gesture

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itself more amenable to being placed alongside other images and edited into a sequence, priming it for relation. The narrator continues, “If viewers want nothing to do with the effects of napalm, then it is important to determine what they already have to do with the reasons for its use.” In this moment, the film takes special aim at those viewers who imagine they are exempt from any direct relationship to napalm and by extension from the atrocities committed by Western forces in Vietnam. Following the freeze frame, the film cuts to a shot of a rodent cadaver doused in napalm being burned. From this initial juxtaposition of images—​cigarette burn on wrist and burning rodent cadaver—​the film suggests a direct link between the material infrastructure of the Western petit bourgeois world and the atrocities in Vietnam, via the example of Dow Chemical, a producer of plastic for everyday use and of Napalm B. Notwithstanding the rhetorical nuances of that larger argument, it is inaugurated by this initial image of a man seated at a table. In his 1995 film Schnittstelle (Interface), Farocki revisits this moment from Inextinguishable Fire by way of a split screen. On the left we see Farocki in 1969, his arm outstretched on the table with the fresh burn on display, and on the right, in 1995, he holds his arm up to the camera, the editing table in the background, and points to the same spot bearing an almost imperceptible trace of the event, a barely legible scar (Figure 3.1). While it is “only in a single spot,” Farocki says in voice-​over, nevertheless this “point relates to the real world.” In a striking double-​image that is simultaneously an act of montage, Farocki suggests a continuity between two arms, two images, two moments in history. He suggests the burn as an act of montage that “relates to the world,” born of self-​transformation in view of a spatial passage (unsteady as it may be) between Germany and Vietnam, and more broadly in the intervals between the “I” of the filmmaker, the “you” of the viewer, and the “he” of the speaker/​writer. Let us take special note of the fact that it is the humble social artifact of the table that helps mediate this porousness among otherwise disparate coordinates. First, it furnishes a site of relation between Farocki and the Vietnamese witness, then between Farocki and the viewer, where the latter is almost invited to sit down at the opposite end of the table to witness his act—​a kind of “countershot” to Farocki’s “shot” on the other end of a table. This relational synthesis of viewer-​filmmaker-​witness spans Eastern and Western geographies, the home and the workplace, science and warfare, forged in the smoldering collision between two shots. Already, here, before we get to more direct points of relation between cinematic montage and the table, we can already glean the significance and indeed the conjunction of both as sites of relation,

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Figure 3.1  Still from Schnittstelle (Interface) (Harun Farocki, 1995). Single-​channel video edited from two-​channel installation. Courtesy of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki GbR, Berlin.

as places where materials, beings, and conceptual terms are gathered. What is it that makes a table such a potent figure of relation? Being seated at a table is among the most basic relational postures, for it involves directing one’s body and one’s thinking toward a world of others. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt employs the table metaphor to imagine a coalitional politics that might account at once for the many points of connection and indelible differences between subjects. Arendt writes, “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-​between, relates and separates men at the same time.”24 Arendt’s use of this metaphor is not a one-​off moment; the table recurs throughout The Human Condition as a figure of what she calls interest. For Arendt, interest describes the possibility of finding commonality by way of difference, and it is this sense of relation as occurring through separation, rather than despite it, that underlies Arendt’s entire vision of politics.25 The table in this way represents a material manifestation of interest, or as Arendt sometimes writes it to invoke the condition of in-​betweenness more explicitly, inter-​est. As anyone familiar with her thought will know, Arendt was anything but sanguine about the fate of common being in the twentieth century. Her largely negative appraisal of modernity was in large part due to the ways it forecloses on the interest of the commons. This is because modernity, in

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Arendt’s estimation, brought about a blurring—​if not a total loss—​of the distinction between public and private, which “constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-​resting stream of the life process itself.”26 Interest, in turn, is a function of what Arendt calls “the world,” the material realm that “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”27 This realm of the public is to be distinguished from the private domain, which Arendt believes must ultimately be transcended (though, crucially, not abolished) for human society to flourish. What animates the public domain is the sum of anthropogenic artifacts—​tables, chairs, doors, envelopes—​that provides a gravitational pull away from the private domain of the self or the family. Arendt believed that the public realm was gravely imperiled by modern life, wherein the “common world” (the being-​in-​common through difference that is interest) gives way to “the social.”28 But if the public realm is to be revived, Arendt cautions that it cannot happen through religious, ethnic, or national affinity, nor even through a shared worldview, but through a common use of artifacts, spaces, and institutions. It must occur in the first place as a shared investment in the material realm, which for Arendt precedes the political life of “action.”29 With the disappearance of the material realm, the risk is less that we would be incapable of connecting than that separation, and by extension any concrete point of relation, would effectively cease to exist. As Arendt writes in a wonderfully evocative passage, “The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where . . . people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”30 The disarming image of a gathering suddenly dispossessed of a table was clearly intended as a forewarning about the increasingly central role of automated processes, as well as that of science and technology more broadly, in public life. Arendt suggests that the most important question regarding technology has little to do with whether technology could make “human life easier and human labor less painful,” which she contends is based on an “anthropocentric” premise.31 Rather, the question of “whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines” is quite immaterial in Arendt’s view, and she proposes that we instead ask “whether machines still serve the world and its things.”32 That technology should be valued for its ability to “serve the world and its things” is far from an expression of anthropocentric hubris or of base, creaturely materialism. Rather, it reminds us of the indispensable role in Arendt’s thought of “human artifice,” which functions in the first instance not “to help human life processes” but to “offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves.”33 The world of things, which for Arendt is

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nothing less than the relational world of interest, is above all a space of difference, a threshold into ever new horizons of action and relation. Here, the singular quality of each human being—​sustained in the ongoing processes of interest—​gives way to the multiple, to something bigger and other than itself. By expressing anxiety about the potential “disappearance of the sensually given world” posed by the machinic world in its “continuous process of operation,” Arendt does not wish to preserve something (i.e., something inherently human or “natural”), as if humans would lose what they already have. Rather, her worry about such a scenario is that it would foreclose on something we lack. For with the disappearance of the sensually given world, “the transcendent world disappears as well, and with it the possibility of transcending the material world in concept and thought.”34 The table, as a figure of this horizon of transformation, is above all a reminder of the indispensability of the world, with the material and discontinuous means it offers for elaborating, differentiating, and positioning ourselves in relation to one another. I do not wish to overstate the affinities between the worldviews of Arendt and Farocki, between which we could surely find as many points of opposition as agreement, particularly when it comes to the question of technology. But I do think Arendt’s table metaphor is an apt one for regarding Farocki’s practice. This would seem especially true in light of how Elsaesser characterizes Farocki’s approach to the “idea” as a “material object,” where concepts manifest visually not as concrete images but rather “in the in-​between, or during the passage from one to the other.”35 As we will see, this material as well as spatial thematization of change is exactly what animates Farocki’s montage discourse.

The World of the Editing Room Beyond the commentary offered by his films, Farocki’s critical writings provide invaluable insight into his montage praxis. In his four-​page essay “What an Editing Room Is,” which first appeared in a 1980 issue of the German film magazine Filmkritik, Farocki gives a comprehensive account of the phenomenology of the cut. The essay’s title already does considerable work, as it foregrounds the space in which editing takes place rather than the process of editing itself. Farocki wastes not a word on mystical or romantic musings and does not come down on any single definition of editing or the editing room. Instead, he characterizes the editing room as an ambivalent space caught between the demands of art and money. “Film script and shooting schedule are ideas and money,” he writes, and “the work at the editing table is something

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in-​between.”36 This interstitial character of editing extends to its spatial and physical coordinates as well, and it is no mistake that editing studios tend to be relegated to “back rooms, basements, or attics.”37 Editors, who deal in intervals and gaps, are themselves banished to the interstices of industrial production. Farocki emphasizes that editing studios tend to be “inhospitable places” and likens them “to the shacks inhabited by foremen in factories or on construction sites—​the outposts of bureaucracy on the field of production.”38 The historical mutations of the editing table even bear this out, for as Farocki would note fifteen years later in Schnittstelle, the “solitary workplace” of the nonlinear editing station signals “a turn away from” the large, shared workspaces of the “factory society.” An important distinction that gets naturalized within the context of industrial film production is that between on-​and off-​location. “On location,” he writes, “you can place the camera here or there. The decision just takes a minute and is made with a ponderous expression. Later in the editing studio a whole week is spent appraising where to put this one-​minute shot.”39 If the author exaggerates this scenario slightly, it is only to emphasize that the power relations at work here have, as one of their consequences, iniquitous distributions at the level of space. Indeed, it is as if the editing studio were not a place at all. Despite the inhospitality of the editing studio, or perhaps because of it, one is drawn in by the work that occurs there. “Each cut is a particular effort [that] draws the editor under its spell,” Farocki observes, and this intensiveness makes it difficult “to keep work and life apart.”40 That editing tends to confuse the boundaries between working and living is a consequence of the granular attentiveness and “ritual repetition” it demands.41 For example, editors are often shuttling rapidly between vastly different scales of duration and size, between fast and slow motion, and thinking simultaneously in terms of individual frames and of the relations between shots. As anyone who has spent significant time with the process knows, editing can produce a kind of spatiotemporal whiplash when its spooky spacetime begins to bleed into lived experience. It is in any event on account of the intensive “familiarity” with the material required by editing that “a film becomes a space,” as Farocki puts it, one that “you can inhabit and feel at home in.”42 But of course Farocki regards this as a false sort of hospitality. For when it takes place under the auspices of industrial film production, the editing table becomes a space of control, blurring the distinction between work and life. This is especially significant because, for Farocki, what determines the political possibilities of the editing table is its capacity for creating change, for encompassing and engendering new forms of relation (between images, people, groups, concepts, and places). In this sense, the work of the editor laboring under the auspices of industrial

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cinema recalls the broader dissolution of the public realm described by Arendt. To elucidate this point, I turn to another of Farocki’s early texts on montage, “Shot/​Countershot,” which adds considerable nuance and rigor to his treatment of this topic. The essay begins with the basic premise that the shot/​countershot technique in cinema “is the first rule, the law of value.”43 As Farocki sees it, this primacy of shot/​countershot is corroborated in the fact that it is “a method of montage which has an advance effect on the shooting,” meaning that it is so deep-​seated and conventionalized that it transcends the ostensible division between production and postproduction.44 Here, as elsewhere, Farocki exhibits a special penchant for spatial thinking. Recalling an observation by Hartmut Bitomsky, Farocki imagines, “There was at first just one space which the camera captured in a theater-​like long shot . . . [and] with the introduction of shot/​countershot the room was divided into two, making two sets out of one, just as the introduction of industrial production brought with it the second shift.”45 Here, Farocki gives us an abbreviated genealogy of cinematic language through the spatial metaphor of an erstwhile unitary space (a “room”) divided by the cut and made modular, just as the assembly line divided labor itself into a series of repeated gestures, tuning the human body to the rhythms and movements of machines. Once divided this way, the world becomes a creative geography (re)made in the image of machines. Films become worlds that are as real (perhaps even more so) than the ones our bodies inhabit. At one point in the essay, Farocki recalls a scene from Irving Lerner’s 1959 film City of Fear: “There is one place (I continue to speak of places) where the hero has already been injured by the corrosive cobalt and is overwhelmed by the traffic on the street. Lerner expresses this by cutting from automobiles coming from the right to others coming from the left; this use of shot/​countershot lends the automobiles something human, much as dangerous machines used to be portrayed with eyes.”46 In this variation on Kuleshov’s “creative geography” experiment, Farocki suggests that shot/​countershot not only makes space modular and by extension the relations between locations in the world more fluid, but likewise ascribes as much value and narrative agency to a mechanical body (in this case, an automobile) as to a human body. “In those days I didn’t see the cuts between people,” Farocki recalls, “but I would of course have noticed the cuts between cars, the cars in montage.”47 When the world is remade in the image of shot/​countershot, all bodies take on the property of machines. But what does this mean for Farocki? At one point, he muses, “Perhaps you can compare shot/​countershot with running. Always one foot in front of the other. First right, then left. For as long as you don’t know which one was first.”48 What is striking about this passage is the notion

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that the politics of montage could be assessed based on the range of bodily movement it either prohibits or enables. What animates shot/​countershot, in this regard, is also what constrains the body’s horizon of movement. One must move forward, nonreflexively and ceaselessly, like a treadmill-​bound automaton, each leg figuring as one side of the shot/​countershot dichotomy. But for this movement to sustain itself, the runner must remain oblivious to their own gait. Just as an invisible cut may be thought to propel the accumulation of shots, so too is the runner’s forward momentum ensured by a seamless transition or match-​action cuts between the right and left legs. “Looking at or thinking about either action or viewing can make you despair,” Farocki writes. “If you don’t look and don’t think, there is a rhythm capable of sustaining something.”49 Just as the runner cannot reflect on their own ambulation without stumbling, the editor must disavow the interstices enabling the progression of shots, lest despair set in. Farocki’s metaphor for an editor in this case may be a runner, though one could (to recall our discussion of McQueen’s films in Chapter 2) also say tightrope walker, wrestler, or hula hooper. In any case, it is a matter of maintaining one’s footing before an abyss. But this stumbling or falling is precisely what underlies the political possibilities of editing for Farocki. For it is in editing that one is confronted with the choice either of avoiding this vertigo or of abandoning oneself and one’s work to it. “At the editing table,” he writes, you learn how nothing you have planned seems to work. You remember a tree standing close to the house, its branches beating against the railings of a balcony in the wind—​but on reaching the balcony and about to jump, you find yourself looking into an abyss. You prepare cuts and stage a movement so as to allow reediting, only to find at the editing table that the picture has a completely different movement, one which you have to follow.50

The Schnittplatz, or the film as it is re-​mediated by the process and place of the editing table, assumes powerfully spatial significance here. Now this can be a familiar, homogeneous, static space whose borders never shift, or it can be a place where difference is introduced, widening the field of relation. To determine the shape of a film in advance is to presume to know the layout of its architecture, which, where montage is concerned, will inevitably shift beneath one’s feet. A chasm opens where one had remembered a path, an experience of vertigo where one anticipated safe passage between images. This event speaks to an almost sovereign power of montage that exceeds human intention and understanding but which, despite that obscurity, Farocki insists, “you have to follow.”51

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In On Construction of Griffith’s Films, a dual-​channel installation film from 2006, Farocki looks to an early example of shot/​countershot from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, in a scene depicting a courtship between two protagonists separated by a door. In Griffith’s film, we see the couple together in the same frame walking down a hallway toward the woman’s apartment. When the man suggests that he come inside, the bashful woman darts into her apartment and closes the door behind her. From this point onward, until the end of the scene, when they kiss, the man and woman appear in single shots, from outside and inside the apartment, respectively. In his experiment, Farocki further isolates them across the two screens. Whereas in Griffith’s traditionally cinematic sequence one shot takes the place of another within the frame (“succession”), in Farocki’s dissected version the digital equivalent of black film leader marks a shot’s absence (“simultaneity”) (Figure 3.2).52 Yet one shot does not replace another in the sense of substituting for it within the frame, but rather flickers in and out of existence on its own screen. In a way that feels intrinsically more dialogical than the sort of montage occurring within the space of a single frame, the absence of a given shot registers—​that is, it remains—​in this ostensibly negative space. Through a technically quite simple gesture, On Construction thematizes montage as a (re)territorializing operation. We see the cleaving and junction of shot/​countershot, are made to feel the interval holding these spaces and bodies together and apart. “Shot” thus names not only a particular frame but a place: a hallway or room on either side of this erotic architecture. Precisely the same effect could not be achieved using, say, a traditional single-​channel split-​screen technique, since the distance/​proximity between shots here is inextricable from the space between screens, and by extension, the space occupied by the viewer. Farocki supplements these images with critical intertitles throughout the film, and in doing so writes an architectonic account of film editing: A door stands between the subjects and between the shots as a connection and separation. As if again to deduce—​what this is: montage. Splitting space into subspaces. Each shot is enclosed space in itself. Even in open air, a shot is an enclosed space. Cinematography erects imaginary walls, opens and closes imaginary doors. Cinematography constructs its own spaces, structures of its own making. Parallel-​worlds.

The first sentence of this passage is perhaps the most significant. For like a door, the cinematic interval mediates space deixis, creates place. In this way, the word “door” might well be substituted for the word “table” or “cut.” (Doors will occupy a central place in our discussion of Hito Steyerl’s work in

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Figure 3.2  Stills from Zur Bauweise des Films bei Griffith (On Construction of Griffith’s Films) (Harun Farocki, 2006). Single-​channel video edited from two-​channel installation. Courtesy of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki GbR, Berlin.

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Chapter 4.) Cinematography and montage, doors and tables and walls—​these are not random elements arbitrarily populating a spatial container but are technologies for turning abstract space into place. The interval between shot and countershot is, like a door, a way of distinguishing inside from outside, “here” from “there.” Like a table, it brings us together without, as Arendt says, us “falling over each other.”53 At one point in Between Two Wars, we see Farocki seated at yet another variant on the Schnittplatz—​a table facing a bare white wall save for an assemblage of photographic prints affixed to its surface, arranged neatly in three intersecting rows, depicting a mix of urban and industrial landscapes. Farocki explains in a voice-​over that he was unable to secure funding for the film we are watching, so he paid for it by working in “the culture business.” The film then cuts to Farocki’s point of view, revealing a gathering of glossy photographs of nude women, a veritable explosion of images that cover the surface of the table. In the bottom-​right quadrant of the frame, Farocki inscribes lines of text on a white notecard: “I earned money by writing captions, taking every job, hiding sensuality behind words. As is usual.” The task laid out for Farocki, in other words, was to mystify the real relations at play within, behind, and between these images—​between photographer and subject (exploitation), between viewer and “nude” (voyeurism), between the subjects of the photographs themselves (workers), and ultimately by “hiding sensuality behind words” to further obscure the relation between flesh and capital (the body as spectacle). He pauses for a moment to gather his thoughts, still caught in this tangle of photographic fetish objects, then directs his gaze toward the arrangement of photographs on the wall. We should note the shot/​reverse-​shot movement that has already been established in the first three shots of this scene; it starts with a medium shot of Farocki at his desk, which then gives way to a POV shot of the nude photos strewn across the surface of the desk, which leads to yet another medium shot (of a slightly different angle than the first) of Farocki at the desk, his attention directed at the images on the wall. During this relatively simple procession of shots, we are sutured into a drama of images as viewers just as Farocki is himself poised between images: between his nascent historical film project and the “culture business.” In this sense, Farocki is situated at the crossroads between two forms of montage, between two editing tables, two forms of interest. The nude images on the table serve as a counterimage to the assemblage on the wall, the latter being ordered in a seemingly coherent and intentional manner, the former being haphazard, obscure. But the apparent orderliness of assembly in this case is not necessarily synonymous with relational fixity. “Coordinates

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serve to determine a position,” Farocki will later remark in Schnittstelle, comparing this cross-​like assemblage to a coordinate graph. “In this case, images were to measure that determination” (Figure 3.3). Montage thus takes the form of mapping, as if it could set a course for one’s destination. Perhaps it is such an insight that compels Farocki to break out of his reverie and with both hands swiftly clear the table, the photographs and notes falling onto the floor. As this happens the camera dollies in and tilts downward before arriving at a direct view of the table: a series of movements that directly harks back to the moment with the table from Inextinguishable Fire discussed earlier. Once again, we find Farocki positioned before a solitary table. But as in Inextinguishable Fire, the drama here becomes how to clear the table, tabula rasa, to make way for the most fundamental and basic form of relation. Once cleared, the black reflective surface of the table recalls the passages of black-​painted film leader that occupy other parts of Farocki’s film, but here the table itself becomes an analogue of the cinematic interval, a kind of topos of montage. Farocki places a solitary notebook on the table which bears the handwritten title “Zwischen Zwei Kriegen” and gently drapes his arm over it. At this point, the film cuts to a medium shot of the same notebook held by another of the central characters in the film: a woman who formerly served as a nurse on the Western Front, and since the end of World War I has reported on the psychological after-​effects of battle on soldiers. Like Farocki’s character, this woman has independently endeavored to bear witness to the troubled relations underlying large-​scale productions (in

Figure 3.3  Still from Schnittstelle (Interface) (Harun Farocki, 1995). Single-​channel video edited from two-​channel installation. Courtesy of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki GbR, Berlin.

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this case, a military one), in view of relating the findings to others. Like Farocki, she studies relation in view of relation. And here again, it is a table that stages this cinema-​topographic passagework: between two moments in time and two bodies—​between two figures of relation.

Crossing the Abyss In the mid-​1990s, an art museum in northern France commissioned Farocki to make a new video that would be a reflection on his larger body of work. The result, Schnittstelle, was something of a breakthrough in Farocki’s discourse on images. It was the first moving-​image work he created expressly for exhibition in a gallery setting. It also marked the first occasion in which he worked with multiple video channels. Schnittstelle opens on a close shot of Farocki’s hand as he writes on a notepad, directly above which, reflected on the glass tabletop, are two monitors displaying video footage from his 1992 film made in collaboration with Andrei Ujica, Videograms of a Revolution. In voice-​over narration, Farocki speaks the words we see him writing on paper: “I can hardly write a word these days if there isn’t an image [ein Bild] on the screen at the same time.” After a beat, he adds, “Actually, on both screens.” At this point, the left channel cuts to a medium shot of Farocki seated at a table populated by nonlinear editing equipment: two monitors, tape decks, and a control panel. With his attention directed at the monitors, Farocki says, “This is a workstation [Arbeitsplatz]: an editing station [Schnittplatz] for the reworking of images and sounds.” At first, the left channel displays a medium shot of Farocki seated at the table, while on the right, we see footage of Videograms from one of the monitors. Farocki then begins describing for the viewer each piece of equipment that comprises the Schnittplatz. As he does this, the right-​hand monitor begins showing a new shot of the editing table from a tighter perspective over the filmmaker’s right shoulder. Farocki continues speaking, now in voice-​over: “The thing is that there are two images seen at the same time—​one image in relation [in Beziehung] to the other.” Schnittstelle is a fascinating film, a kind of montage procedural that, perhaps more than any other of Farocki’s works, depicts the activity of editing at the most granular level. Farocki’s focus throughout the movie is on the sheer variety and novelty of the image relations made possible at the editing table. At one point in the movie, as we see him at work constructing a sequence, he tells the viewer how this process brings “two images in a relationship with each other”—​one that could, like any other, “be the beginning of a new film.” But an idea that tacitly recurs throughout Schnittstelle, and one that of course comes up in other works

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by Farocki, is that editing is a perilous and sometimes overwhelming process that could easily go off the rails. It is this perilousness, one gets the sense, that accounts for Farocki’s comportment throughout the movie as he effects an almost cybernetic precision in his movements and posture. But this is less a performance of virtuous discipline than a way of accentuating another kind of relation, namely, that between the sitter—​that is, the editor, the monteur—​and the table. This emphasis on and elaboration of positionality before the editing table is, in many ways, a necessary extension of its increasingly virtual character. Later, we see Farocki seated at a flatbed editing table working with 16mm film. “When working with film instead of video,” he remarks, “you have to make an actual cut in the image or sound strip.” As he says these words, he uses a guillotine film splicer to join two pieces of film. The left-​hand channel then switches to a shot of Farocki once again seated at a nonlinear editing bay. Now, we clearly see that much of the manual activity and physical equipment have been subtracted from the process, including the physical print and the mechanism for cutting and splicing film. Instead, one mainly pushes buttons and turns dials. In this context, Farocki points out, one makes an “imaginary cut and not a real one.” Farocki goes on to explain how it is possible to detect a cut on a 16mm workprint. As he runs a film reel through the flatbed, he places his finger along the edge of the print, searching for the presence of irregularities, perhaps created by glue or tape, that would indicate the presence of a splice. After demonstrating this, he removes his hand from the reel, rubbing two fingers together as if to register something felt. As this happens, on the left-​hand screen Farocki’s hand enters the frame against the backdrop of a blank video monitor at the nonlinear editing bay and once again rubs his two fingers together. “This is a gesture indicating ‘fine perception’ or ‘sensitivity.’ The hand had almost no contact with the object, but perceived it nonetheless.” Now his hand seems to move automatically, disembodied from its previous material context of touch. What happens here in effect is the migration of a relational gesture from a “material” context, where the cut is something that can be seen and touched, to a “virtual” one, where it is “imaginary.” The persistence of Farocki’s “fine perception” gesture across this interval speaks to the critical function of the artist, and (given the video’s didactic and explanatory structure) of the viewer, in the reterritorialization and rematerialization of the image and its relations. Along with Schnittstelle, The Expression of Hands (Der Ausdruck Der Hände, 1997) stands among Farocki’s most direct and focused meditations on montage as a site of intellectual, material, and creative production. In it, he expands upon the rematerializing valence of gesture through a more explicitly topographical metaphor. Here, however, the interval between “shots” on the editing table is figured through the pan of a camera positioned at a high angle above Farocki, the

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shot shuttling between two screens on the left and right side of the editing table. The film opens in the midst of an analysis of Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) as Farocki plays through a pivotal scene where the main character, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), robs ex-​prostitute Candy (Jean Peters) on a train. The camera’s attention is fixed on the left-​hand monitor as the scene plays out. At one point, there is a close-​up of the thief ’s hand as it unlatches the victim’s purse and rifles through it in search of a wallet. As this happens, we see Farocki’s own hand in the bottom-​right corner of the frame, poised for engagement. At one point, as the character’s hand probes the woman’s purse, Farocki’s hand is suddenly animated, mirroring the movement of the hand on screen. Skip empties the wallet and makes his way out of the train, pursued by two plainclothes police officers who had evidently been surveilling him, who are subsequently cut off by the closing subway doors. “What happened?” asks one of the frustrated officers. The other replies, “I’m not sure yet.” Farocki pauses the tape, arresting the propulsive uncertainty of the moment. The world of the film evacuates as the screen subsequently goes black, and in its place a reflection of Farocki’s image occupies the screen. Wearing a white T-​shirt and black-​ rimmed spectacles, his image hazily illuminated and distorted by the curvature of the screen, Farocki seems to address the viewer from another dimension. “It is difficult to grasp [erfassen] this sequence of images,” he remarks with characteristic analytic directness. This seemingly simple gesture not only has the effect of blurring the boundary between profilmic space and that of reception, but is also an act of montage, being the occasion of one image taking the place of another. Farocki reveals his own image for the first time in this film as one among others in a phantasmagoria of audiovisual information. But in doing so, he also clearly sets the terms of this discourse from the outset around relation itself, stressing the sheer difficulty of grasping these images in relation to one another. In a subsequent scene, Farocki turns to the Bergefilme, or mountain film genre, as another case study in the hand’s cinematic value. On the right-​ hand screen, in an unidentified black-​and-​white Berg Film, a man struggles to maintain his grip as he climbs the face of a mountain boulder. In a voice-​ over, Farocki muses, “On the mountain man is back—​or is still—​on all fours.” Later we see the climactic scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), as Eva Marie Saint hangs perilously off a boulder at Mount Rushmore as Cary Grant reaches to assist her. “On the mountain,” continues Farocki, “man’s life hangs on the hand’s basic function.” At one point during this sequence, the camera pans left toward the other screen, and as this happens the camera briefly passes over Farocki’s hands, which from that vantage appear to grasp the invisible edge of the editing table, parodying the gripping gesture of the mountaineer (Figure 3.4). Beyond providing a particularly effective visual

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Figure 3.4  Stills from Der Asdruck der Hände (The Expression of Hands) (Harun Farocki, 1997). Single-​channel video. Courtesy of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion. © Harun Farocki GbR, Berlin.

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pun, Farocki’s gesture reflects what is at stake at the Schnittplatz. In the interval figured between these two screens, we find something akin to the abyss Farocki mentions elsewhere in reference to the cinematic interval, as if to suggest, in navigating the sheer range of possible image relations, the monteur is who climbs the mountain, their life hanging in the balance between images.

Notes 1. Kristin Thompson, introduction to “The Rediscovery of a Kuleshov Experiment: A Dossier,” ed. Yuri Tsivian, Film History 8, no. 3 (1996): 358. 2. Noël Burch points out that the effect that Kuleshov theorized and formally articulated had already been implemented practically by D. W. Griffith as early as 1912. Burch writes that Kuleshov’s “experiment was in fact nothing more than the rational formulation of the contiguity match long since mastered at the practical level by D. W. Griffith. In The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), for example, a whole ‘imaginary’ neighborhood is similarly constructed by laying end-​to-​end fragments of settings which are brought together only by the successive frame exits and entrances of the actors.” Noël Burch, “Film’s Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 84. 3. Yi-​Fu Tuan, “Sight and Pictures,” Geographical Review 69, no. 4 (October 1979): 422. 4. Giddens writes, “The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-​to-​face interaction. In conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them. What structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the ‘visible form’ of the locale conceals the distanciated relations which determine its nature.” Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 18–​19. 5. Harun Farocki, “Controlling Observation,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 293 6. Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 87–​88. 7. Nora M. Alter, “Two or Three Things I Know about Harun Farocki,” October 151 (Winter 2015): 151. 8. “One notices montage or editing as montage; cuts do not make their appearance as cuts obvious. Ideas are part of montage; ‘anything but ideas,’ we are told by the middle-​class ideology of evidence; where the law of value reigns, nobody has to interfere with the story.” Harun Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot: The Most Important Expression in Filmic Law of Value,” in Nachdruck/​Imprint: Texte/​Writings, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer and Nikolaus Schafhausen (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2001), 108. 9. Thomas Elsaesser, “Political Filmmaking after Brecht: Harun Farocki, for Example,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 143. 10. See Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) and Matthew Biro, The Dada

To Place a Cut  85 Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 11. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-​Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 17. 12. Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-​Eye,” in Kino-​Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41. 13. Michael Cowan, “Rethinking the City Symphony after the Age of Industry: Harun Farocki and the ‘City Film,’” Erudit 11 (Spring 2008), published online July 7, 2009, https://​www.eru​ dit.org/​en/​journ​als/​im/​1900-​v1-​n1-​im3​117/​03753​8ar/​. 14. Voice-​over excerpt from Industry and Photography (Harun Farocki, 1978) cited in Elsaesser, “Political Filmmaking after Brecht,” 144. 15. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, “A to Z to HF: 26 Introductions to HF,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig, 2009), 211. 16. Martin Blumenthal-​Barby, “‘Cinematography of Devices’: Harun Farocki’s Eye/​Machine Trilogy,” German Studies Review 438, no. 2 (May 2015): 330. 17. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 4. 18. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 19. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 20. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 5. 21. Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 53–​54. 22. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 174. For an elucidating discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of these terms, see Eugene W. Holland, “Deterritorializing ‘Deterritorialization’: From the ‘Anti-​Oedipus’ to ‘A Thousand Plateaus,’” SubStance 20, no. 3 (1991): 55–​65. 24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52 25. According to Katherine Adams, “Arendt understands the differentiating function of materiality and interest as fundamental to relation. While interest is an expression of material separation, it is never merely adversarial, but always a postulate of association, a comparison of outlooks upon a common world.” Katherine Adams, “At the Table with Arendt: Toward a Self-​Interested Practice of Coalition Discourse,” Hypatia 17, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 15. Adams further elucidates, “Without materiality, without difference, there is no contact or commonality, only the paradoxical isolation of sameness” (16). 26. Arendt, The Human Condition, 33. 27. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52. 28. Arendt, The Human Condition, 28. 29. In Arendt’s system, the fabrication (poiesis) of things serves as the basis for the relation between human beings and the earth. This relation between humans and the earth is what she calls “world.” World, in turn, encompasses all relations between people and is the space where interest and a life of action (vita activa) take place. 30. Arendt, The Human Condition, 53. 31. Arendt, The Human Condition, 151. 32. Arendt, The Human Condition, 151.

86  Between Images 33. Arendt, The Human Condition, 152. 34. Arendt, The Human Condition, 288. 35. Thomas Elsaesser, “Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence,” in Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 104, emphasis mine. 36. Harun Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is” (1980), in Nachdruck/​Imprint: Texte/​Writings, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer and Nikolaus Schafhausen (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2001), 78. 37. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 78. 38. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 80. 39. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 82. 40. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 78. 41. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 83. 42. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 78. 43. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 86. 44. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 86. 45. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 96. 46. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 98. 47. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 98. 48. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 98. 49. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 98. 50. Farocki, “What an Editing Room Is,” 78–​79. 51. Farocki, “Shot/​Countershot,” 80. 52. In a written account of his film series Eye/​Machine (Aue/​Maschine, 2001), Farocki distinguishes between two modes of image relations, succession and simultaneity: “There is succession as well as simultaneity in a double projection, the relationship of an image to the one that follows as well as the one beside it; a relationship to the preceding as well as to the concurrent one. Imagine three double bonds jumping back and forth between the six carbon atoms of a benzene ring; I envisage the same ambiguity in the relationship of an element in an image track to the one succeeding or accompanying it.” Harun Farocki, “Cross Influence/​Soft Montage,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig, 2009), 70. 53. Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.

4 How to Walk through a Door A montage must hold together with invisible forces the things that would otherwise become muddled. Is war technology still the forerunner of civil technology, such as radar, ultra-​shortwave, computer, stereo sound, jet planes? And if so, must there be further wars so that advances in technology continue, or would the simulated wars produced in laboratories suffice? And, moreover, does war ever subordinate itself to other interests; does it not always find—​according to Brecht—​a loophole? —​Harun Farocki, Cross Influence/​Soft Montage Whoever is an image is an object. Whoever is not an image raise their hand. —​Hito Steyerl, 2013 interview

Speaking to an audience at the 2014 Flaherty Film Seminar, the filmmaker Hito Steyerl suggested an urgent need for new ways of thinking cinematic politics. “A different metaphor has to be found,” she asserted, “for the old dialectical model, first of all of montage, but also of shooting against one another.”1 These observations underscore a core tenet of Steyerl’s discourse: that the production and circulation of contemporary media demand novel ways of thinking, resisting, being, and, perhaps above all, new ways of relating. In this case, Steyerl’s interrogation was directed at montage understood as a relation grounded in conflict between two discretely opposed forces: “good” versus “evil,” “truth” versus “fiction,” “rich” versus “poor,” and of course “shot” versus “countershot.” At the same time, Steyerl’s remarks were likely aimed at a broader politics of aesthetics that posits a revolutionary ideal of cinema, which routes around and fundamentally opposes ideological mystification, falling wholly and transparently on the side of truth. In 1972, Peter Wollen hinted at such a cinematic politics with reference to what he saw as an “increasingly radical” tendency in the films of Jean-​Luc Godard: to create a “counter-​cinema” whose “values are counterposed to those of orthodox cinema.”2 But even as Wollen proclaimed the necessity of a rigorously dissident cinematic politics, Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0004

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he cautioned that such a cinema would not have some “absolute existence,” for countercinema “can only exist in relation to the rest of cinema.”3 More than any material and formal fact of either cinema or war, this is to a large extent a matter of discourse, of how key theorists and practitioners have historically envisioned cinematic politics through a dualist, or (as it were) duelist, framework, from Sergei Eisenstein’s famous characterization of montage as “conflict” to the widespread metaphor of the camera-​as-​gun. Even as the technologies of cinema and war have fundamentally changed, the martial metaphor persists largely intact, its meanings and implications seemingly naturalized. It almost goes without saying that today’s advanced and thoroughly global financial and military systems are sufficiently comprehensive, delocalized, and slippery to bedevil any deterministically oppositional view of politics, cinematic or otherwise. Perhaps what truly vexes the language of shot/​countershot is less that it is grounded in a logic of conflict per se than its basic incompatibility with how images and deadly projectiles circulate in the contemporary moment. As Paul Virilio noted, advances in the “technological vehicle” shifted the parameters of war. With the advent of “the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket, airwaves)” came the disappearance of “the world as a field, as distance, as matter.”4 Speed thus emerges as the sine qua non of contemporary warfare, which in turn spells a radical narrowing of space and the ascendance of time as the zone of conflict. Virilio writes: If, as Lenin claimed, “strategy means choosing which points we apply force to,” we must admit that these “points,” today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it may be. . . . [G]‌eographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value and, inversely . . . this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of vector in permanent movement. . . . All that counts is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path.5

Any paradigm figuring discretely opposed forces locked in battle, because it necessarily assumes a stable field of action, has little bearing on today’s wide-​ ranging, decentered, and largely instantaneous and invisible movement of deadly vectors. Harun Farocki himself sounded off on this sticky relationship between war and cinema. In reference to his Eye/​Machine (2001–​2003) series, Farocki remarked, “The key to ‘intelligent weapons’ is image processing. Images of the terrain it is to traverse are stored in a rocket. During its flight, it photographs the terrain below and compares the two images, the goal image and the actual image. The idea of working with two image tracks to illustrate

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the process of comparing performed by software is an obvious corollary.”6 As Farocki attests, the operations underlying this fatal interplay between “image” and “weapon” turn on comparison and simultaneity, not on opposition or conflict, his suggestion being that traditional montage, where shots appear in succession rather than simultaneously, lacks a basic explanatory capacity in the face of such operations and has serious shortcomings as a means of resisting them. Following from our discussion of Farocki’s spatial interrogations of cinematic language in Chapter 3, this chapter turns to Steyerl’s practice to ask fundamental questions about cinema in general, and montage specifically, as technologies of relation. We will begin with the “war” question: What does it mean that so much of our thinking around the politics of cinema is historically (and indeed is still today) grounded in a language of conflict? In posing this question, we will also ask about the forms of relation to which this analytic gives rise, that is, of how the war analogy not only sets images in relation to one another but how it sets viewers and screens in relation as well. Both Steyerl and Farocki have sought to disclose the material as well as metaphorical points at which cinema and war intersect. At the same time, they have both worked to displace the oppositional language that animated the political modernisms and militant cinemas of the twentieth century with one that acknowledges the complexity and irrationality of the contemporary circulation of power. In this, both filmmakers offer alternative visions of cinema’s capacity to effect political change. Steyerl’s aim in interrogating the dialectical model of montage, for example, isn’t to repudiate oppositional aesthetics tout court but to inquire into our manner of speaking about images, what we want from them, and how these ways of speaking and desiring correspond to the reality of how images circulate in and shape the world. A basic assumption of this chapter is that no necessary or fundamental relation inheres between cinema and war. Cinema isn’t bound (ontologically or otherwise) to violence any more than it is affiliated with peace or benevolence. The relation of cinema to war exists instead on an analogical continuum, with “harder” and “softer” associations emerging depending on material, cultural, and historical conditions. Cinema’s points of affinity to other discourses are above all contingent upon the subjects that engage it and the world in which it exists. The film-​war analogy is an alluring and powerful instance of the relational capacities of cinema as a whole and of montage, but ultimately, as we will see, it a limited one. Just as every shot must come to an end, so every concept has its limits. With this in mind, we will begin by outlining a brief history of the film-​war analogy as it subtends the discourse of the cinematic avant-​ garde from Eisenstein to Godard. We will then focus our attention on Steyerl’s

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own relationship to that tradition as well as her broader praxis before diving into a close reading of her dual-​channel video Abstract (2012).

The War Analogy The abiding power of the film-​war analogy derives in part from the fact that it is as old as the medium itself.7 In 1882, Étienne-​Jules Marey conceived the “photographic rifle” (fusil photographique) to showcase his chronophotographic method. Suggesting a kinship between the acts of aiming a firearm and framing a shot, this consolidation of camera and gun, for several commentators, betrays an armamentary logic underlying the project of cinematic movement. “With the chronophotographic gun,” Friedrich Kittler writes, “mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage.”8 Elsewhere, in a monograph devoted to the topic, Virilio suggests an even deeper level of this martial metaphor: “Just as the nitrocellulose that went into film stock was also used for the production of explosives, so the artilleryman’s motto was the same as the cameraman’s: lighting reveals everything.”9 Virilio does not mince words. “War is cinema and cinema is war,” he concludes.10 From a handful of material and technological points of resonance across these two fields, Kittler and Virilio both extrapolate a structural complicity, an ontological relation between cinema and war. Of those who would enlist cinema in the designs of war, Eisenstein was among the earliest and most polemically forceful. Early on, he expressed the analogy through a dialectical framework, writing in 1929 that “montage”—​always his chosen weapon—​“is conflict.”11 Recalling a battle sequence from his own 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein notes that before the battle even begins, “[t]‌his clashing of the two foes is first shown as a clash of shots assembled by means of contrast—​solving the introductory phase of the battle without yet bringing the troops into contact. A filmic battle has already begun, however, by means of this clash of the plastic elements that characterize the antagonists for us.”12 For Eisenstein, the battle that precedes any given depiction of war occurs between filmic signifiers, and it is at this level of montage that cinema’s conflictual politics finds purest expression. Even at the level of discourse did battle seem to Eisenstein an apt metaphor for montage. “There was a period in Soviet cinema,” he recalls in the opening pages of The Film Sense, “when montage was proclaimed ‘everything.’ Now we are at the close of a period during which montage has been regarded as ‘nothing.’ . . . After the storm ‘for montage’ and the battle ‘against montage,’ we must approach its problems simply and afresh.”13 Dressing his account in

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evocative revolutionary war imagery (“storm for” and “battle against” montage), Eisenstein recasts the heady and famously polemical debates around montage in the 1920s and 1930s as nothing less than a battle for the future of cinema. The martial metaphor would be repurposed by radical practitioners around the globe during the second half of the twentieth century. One of the great torchbearers of this militant ethos was the Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, whose rapid-​fire montage film, Now (1965), underscored its antagonistic position with a stop-​motion animation of the film’s title at its conclusion, drawn with bullet-​size incisions on a paper canvas. The deafening sound of a machine gun serves only to secure the analogy: cinema must be weaponized; filmmakers and spectators, take up arms. Having once famously declared, “Give me two photographs, a Moviola and some music and I’ll make you a film,” Álvarez located cinema’s political valence not in solitary images but in montage, where the cut itself becomes a space of ballistic propulsion capable of collapsing walls and breaking chains.14 Elsewhere, in the United States, there could be no mistake as to the Newsreel Collective’s radical aims, their logo consisting of rapidly flickering text accompanied by the sound of a machine gun. The Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gentino further seized upon the martial metaphor in their influential essay “Towards a Third Cinema.” Their filmmaker figure bore an explicit resemblance to the revolutionary guerrillero, whose camera was the “inexhaustible expropriator of image-​weapons,” his projector, “a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.”15 An unspoken but decisive term in this characterization of cinema’s revolutionary mechanics is montage, which presides over the passage from camera to projector to gun. Like Álvarez, Solanas and Gentino located cinema’s capacity for mobilizing revolutionary bodies not in the recording of images but in their grouping, their retooling as munition by way of the cut. This is corroborated by the duo’s film made a year earlier, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), within which cuts abound, often in the form of extended lengths of black leader. It is in these intervals that the filmmakers addressed the audience directly, often encouraging them to engage in dialogue with one another during and after the screening itself.16 These, for lack of a better name, are so many protracted cuts, marked, as the filmmakers imagined, not by absence and lack but by action, construction, revision, addition, and dialogue. In short, the time and space of the cut (and by extension the screening itself) is surrendered to the will of “the people,” which in turn gives rise to “a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of becoming.”17 Here, the evacuation of the picture amounts not to lack but plentitude, not to finality but to the promise of new beginnings. In this disappearance, the picture gives

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way to the image of a new body and a new revolution—​a revolutionary body in the making. Second only to Eisenstein’s rigorous martialing of cinema’s revolutionary mechanics were the efforts of Godard, who would also emerge as one of the severest inquisitors of that very discourse. In a cameo appearance in Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le fou, the American director Samuel Fuller parodied the revolutionary ethos of the era’s leftist cinema with the line “Film is like a battleground.” Not long after this, however, Godard would reinvent himself as a militant filmmaker for the internationalist cause in the late 1960s when he formed the Dziga Vertov Group (DVG) with Jean-​Pierre Gorin. Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory) was to be one of the group’s films. Conceived as a cinematic study of the Palestinian Revolution, Jusqu’à la victoire would comprise footage shot in refugee camps and Fedayeen training facilities and was intended to mobilize international support for the cause of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1970, Godard laid out the group’s intentions for the project by way of an editing metaphor: “Each combination of images and sounds are moments of relations between forces, and our task consists of directing these forces against those of the common enemy: imperialism.”18 Then, in September, King Hussein ordered the destruction of the Fedayeen network in Jordan, resulting in the death of thousands of Palestinian guerrillas, some of whom had appeared in the footage collected for Jusqu’à la victoire. In light of this catastrophe, Godard balked at the prospect of deploying images of vanquished Fedayeen in a film proclaiming victory for Palestine. Jusqu’à la victoire was consequently abandoned and DVG dissolved. Years later, Godard and Anne-​Marie Miéville would revisit the Middle East footage, resulting in a film called Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1976). Approaching the Palestinian footage reflexively, Ici et ailleurs effects an exhaustive autocritique doubling as a repudiation of the French Left. Absent here are the triumphalist slogans of international leftist solidarity, along with any clear sense of how cinema could be deployed to such ends. Indeed, throughout the film, the practice of montage is likened to a kind of false reconciliation of conflict. “Death is represented in this film by a flow of images,” Godard remarks pensively over footage of military training exercises intercut (and interrupted) by images of vanquished Fedayeen in the aftermath of the Black September massacre, implying an analogy between the additive valence of montage and martial violence. In an explicit reversal of Godard’s claim in 1970 that montage must be weaponized for revolutionary ends, here a sequence of images figures as so much chatter that drowns out silence and negates the crisis of death. The consequences of this are powerfully elaborated in a scene where the filmmakers, heard in voice-​over, comment on footage

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Godard and Gorin had of a group of Fedayeen soldiers debating how to reoccupy an Israeli-​captured river embankment. Godard responds to this scenario melancholically, “What is really tragic is that they are here talking about their own death. But nobody said that.” To this, Miéville adds, “No, because it was up to you to say it and what is tragic is that you didn’t.” An extended period of silence follows, wherein neither the filmmakers nor the Fedayeen speak. At last, Godard admits, “It is true that even to silence, we never listened in silence.”19 There is a line in Ici et ailleurs that aptly distills the film’s tenor of postrevolutionary disenchantment. “Time,” Godard says, “has replaced space, speaks for it, or rather, space has inscribed itself on film in another form, which is not a whole anymore, but a sum of translations, a sum of feelings which are forwarded.” In an intriguing prelude to Virilio’s claims a mere year later in Speed and Politics, Godard and Miéville describe a general triumph of time over space and its consequences on politics. These insights, in turn, ground the film’s (auto)critique of so-​called militant cinema, and by extension of montage as a means of countering ideology.20 For Godard and Miéville, that model of montage is too much like the spectacle of televisual flow, a “vague and complicated system,” as they call it, “where the whole world enters and leaves at each moment.” At one point, Godard even suggests that global capitalism “builds its entire wealth” on the idea that the whole world may be captured in a single image. Godard and Miéville’s response to this dilemma is to repurpose the cut at once as a space of silence and of possibility, one meant to actively repel ideology and intervene in the flow of images. The cut, which is frequently made visible in Ici et ailleurs either in the form of black leader or even graphically through the word et rendered in three-​dimensional blocks, becomes a means of interrupting spectacle—​it becomes the “place” within which the filmmakers relinquish their claim over others, over images, and turn down the noise to fall on the side of listening. What these cuts forbid is an underlying logic of montage which assumes a common discourse, a shared politics, whether to unite here and elsewhere or delineate friend from foe. What the cut forecloses in this sense is a form of relation that is ideologically predetermined or socially prescribed. Rather than a device of fragmentation, negation, or counterforce, the cinematic interstice in this instance becomes the descriptor of a postrevolutionary “sum of feelings,” an affective topography for novel associations, insights, and relations. For Godard and Miéville at this moment, the politics of filmmaking can no longer be measured simply by the degree of clarity or decisiveness with which a work engages given political situations, but by the extent to which the filmmaker exhibits and thematizes their own limitations in doing so. Political filmmaking simultaneously demands that one be keenly

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aware of the medium’s powers and of one’s own inability to fully control or manage those powers. Speaking about Ici et ailleurs, Serge Daney summed up this problem nicely: “For it’s in the nature of cinema (delay between the time of shooting and the time of projection) to be the art of here and elsewhere. What Godard says, very uncomfortably and very honestly, is that the true place of the filmmaker is in the AND. A hyphen only has value if it doesn’t confuse what it unites.”21 To say all of this is but one way of reformulating a well-​rehearsed notion: that October is far behind us. We are, as Hito Steyerl claims in November (2004), in “a time when revolution seems to be over, and peripheral struggles have become particular, localist, and almost impossible to communicate.” That a cut separates us from history’s grand political battles is a notion that lies at the heart of Steyerl’s 2004 film. At one point in the film, Steyerl even cites Godard as an interstitial figure of this passage from October to November. It is no longer possible, insists Steyerl, to universalize revolutionary icons, “as in the time of leftwing internationalism when the icons of famous internationalists occupied the fantasies of metropolitan youths.” Here she includes a clip from Chris Marker’s 1967 coalitionist film Far from Vietnam, in which Godard announced his decision “to speak in every film about Vietnam.” This was Godard as the October filmmaker, working in a time when it still seemed possible (even necessary) to intervene directly into politics with film. From this figure of the revolutionary filmmaker, Steyerl cuts to a sequence from Eisenstein’s October (1928). Her voice-​over continues, “We are no longer in the period of October described by Eisenstein, when the Cossacks decide to join the Russian proletarians and international brotherhood during the Bolshevik revolution.” She follows these images with a rapid succession of intertitles on which the word und appears in bold letters, clearly a citation of Godard and Miéville’s film. From this, she launches us back into the present, where we find a photograph of a woman with short blond hair gazing off into the distance. This woman, we learn, is Andrea Wolf, a German activist for the Kurdish resistance and once Steyerl’s closest friend, who was killed by Turkish security forces in 1998. Those who are familiar with Steyerl’s body of work know that Wolf at once haunts and propels the artist’s practice. In November as well as Lovely Andrea (2007) and Abstract (2012), Wolf operates as a structuring absence, much as—​at the risk of collapsing so many meaningful distinctions—​the Fedayeen did for Godard and Miéville in the 1970s. In their own ways, these images of ghosts provide countershots to the image of History as populated by agents acting for discrete political ends under clearly defined social, economic, and material conditions. To base political action on such a notion of historical

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agency would perhaps seem absurd in our moment. Global capital, for one, is too diffuse and complex to constitute a discrete and opposable force. In any case, as Godard and Miéville repeatedly remind us in Ici et ailleurs, it is “too simple and too easy to simply divide the world in two.” Another problem—​ one which is just as important but does not demand any grand conception of agency—​has at base to do with historiography and representation, that is, with the intellectual, aesthetic, and political processes involved in accounting for the lives and deaths of others. For Steyerl, Andrea’s image poses a challenge to any project that would seek to offer a stable account of history, or the other’s place in it. In this way, Steyerl continues along the path carved nearly thirty years earlier by Godard and Miéville. At the same time, Steyerl has expanded the terms of this discourse to address issues regarding identity and surveillance on the internet, the poetics and politics of digital image culture, as well as “cuts” of both the cinematic and economic sort. Besides being her most politically trenchant and formally ingenious works, these three films are threaded together by a common purpose: to commemorate Wolf ’s death, not by resolving it but by renegotiating the terms of her posthumous circulation as an image, whether as a political symbol for the Kurdish resistance movement or as a feminist icon. The images of Wolf in Steyerl’s cinema, and the ways they are compiled and circulated, suggest an alternative geography—​one in which, as Steyerl suggests in November, “Kurdistan is actually here, in Germany.” I began this chapter with Steyerl’s claim that an alternative metaphor to that of opposition and conflict must be found for montage, since such a conception, she insists, is not sustainable “under the present technological conditions.”22 Apropos our discussion of deterritorialization in the previous chapter, we could restate that this fundamental problem has to do with the compression and operationalization of space under capitalist globalization. This is to say that images have forfeited their coordinating function, are no longer quite able to situate their beholders decisively in the world and in relation to one another. Leaving aside the difficulty of distinguishing between ally and foe, we face the problem of disambiguating here from there or inside from outside. Consider for a moment the example of doors. Like so many other technologies, doors have undergone significant transformations over the past century. As Bernhard Siegert points out, doors are themselves media and have a historically critical function as “cultural techniques” since “they operate the primordial difference of architecture—​that between inside and outside.”23 But the traditional symbolic door has today been replaced by numerous automatic devices whose opening and closing are mediated not by physical contact but by an “invisible power.”24 Changes in doors over the past century underscore fundamental shifts at the level of everyday experience,

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beginning with the introduction of the revolving door into public spaces through the ever-​increasing prevalence of automatic sliding doors. Indeed, as Siegert attests, cybernetic doors mean that “the basic distinction of inside and outside has been replaced by the distinction between current/​no current, on/​ off,” and as a consequence “the place of the law is replaced by a short circuit between the imaginary and the real.”25 Adrift in a cybernetic field, one cannot know whether a door leads to fantasy or oblivion. Not unlike Godard’s “uninterrupted chain of images,” here space is rendered as a chainwork of undifferentiated locations, or as Virilio characterizes the dream of the “war model,” an “artificial topological universe: the direct encounter of every surface on the globe.”26 Digital technologies collapse spatial coordinates by way of substitute thresholds that obscure rather than clarify the underlying operations of the hardware or software.27 As Wendy Chun warns, “If you believe that your communications are private, it is because software corporations, as they relentlessly code and circulate you, tell you that you are behind, and not in front of, the window.”28 The window is an impoverished metaphor for most graphical user interfaces or operating systems because they mystify the relationship between inside and outside, capturing their users in an all-​encompassing interiority. Considering such problems, Steyerl’s call for a new conception of montage appears less an appeal to the egalitarian function of contemporary imaging technologies than a clarification of their suturing operations. Here, we need only consider how most images today are produced: on cameras embedded within smartphones. The crucial part of this story has less to do with the convergence of telecommunication and imaging technologies, however, than with the spatial situation of the smartphone camera, namely, the front-​facing lens, which marked the beginning of the contemporary selfie.29 By allowing users to take pictures in either direction without physically moving the device, the front-​facing smartphone camera altered the very structure of photography, blurring the distinction between what is in front of and behind the camera, between shooter/​target, onscreen/​off-​screen. Thus, as Steyerl asserts, “off-​screen” has vanished—​it is “nowhere,” and yet, somehow, it is “everywhere” at the same time.30 With the advent of the smartphone camera’s doubled lens, and the attendant undecidability between shooter and target structuring its visual field, offscreen has become an endangered species, for the image’s “outside” is subject to the interchangeability of a mere switch. Just as the mass implementation of automatically revolving and sliding passages signals a forfeiture of the door’s symbolic function (inside/​outside) for a cybernetic function (on/​ off), so too does the doubling of the camera bespeak the radical reversibility

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of contemporary images. It is as if we find ourselves in some ultimate stage of expanded cinema, where all the world’s a shot.

Abstract: A Close Reading Inspired in part by Farocki’s On Construction of Griffith’s Films, Steyerl’s Abstract is a dual-​channel work that similarly envisages editing as a spatial phenomenon. At the same time, Abstract attempts to articulate the consequences and uses of such a spatial conception of montage for contemporary politics. Like her film November, Abstract ostensibly concerns the life and death of Wolf. In the 1990s, Wolf enlisted in the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)—​the militant left-​wing organization long deemed a terrorist group by the Turkish state—​and in 1998 was killed along with nearly forty other militants in a raid on a PKK encampment by Turkish Armed Forces. Much of Abstract features an interview that Steyerl conducted with a Kurdish man who witnessed the event. Throughout, the viewer is shuttled between the site of Wolf ’s death in southeastern Turkey and a crowded square in Berlin as the many points of distance and proximity between these places are gradually revealed. The process that ensues is thus to be distinguished from the dialectical language of montage espoused by Eisenstein, for what Steyerl assumes from the outset is something resembling a spatial totality, disjunctive and paradoxical as it may ultimately prove to be. At the beginning of Abstract, a sentence appears on the left screen: “This is a shot.” Even as the statement prompts anticipation for the shot in question, we are also aware of the digital black leader that fills the screen on the right, which echoes the interstitial space of both Ici et ailleurs and On Construction. The difference here is that a black frame is itself presented as a shot as much as the shot’s other. Thus, in the first few seconds of Abstract, the deictic “this” and the signified of “shot” are subjected to a signifying turbulence and stretched across the expanse of two screens. But as soon as this indexical plasticity is established, something conventionally recognizable as a “shot” springs into existence on the right-​hand screen. Its frame betrays a faint motion as it floats, hazy, amid a rocky landscape in Kurdistan. We are plunged once more into darkness and remain suspended there until another sentence appears in place of the previous image: “This is a countershot.” A new shot emerges, this time on the left (Figure 4.1). There is Steyerl standing among the crowd at Pariser Platz in Berlin. In front of her she holds up a smartphone, which is positioned to precisely obstruct our view of her eyes. An analogue to this image can be found in

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Figure 4.1  Stills from Abstract (Hito Steyerl, 2012). Single-​channel video converted from two-​channel installation, HD digital video with sound, environment, duration: 7:30 min. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/​ Paris/​Seoul. © Hito Steyerl/​VG Bild-​Kunst, Bonn, 2022.

Steyerl’s short video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File (2013) (Figure 4.2). Ironically assuming the form of an instructional video, How Not to Be Seen explores the possibility of concealment in a world where visibility is the rule. In the second “lesson” of the piece, Steyerl

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Figure 4.2  Still from How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (Hito Steyerl, 2013). Single-​channel video, HD digital video and sound in architectural environment, duration: 15:52 min. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/​Paris/​Seoul. © Hito Steyerl/​VG Bild-​Kunst, Bonn, 2022.

posits the act of taking a picture as a technique of invisibility. Once again in Abstract, we find the artist’s eyes blocked by the same device, her gaze replaced with that of the smartphone camera. It is no mistake if this device reminds the viewer of a censor bar, for it has the effect of de-​individuating Steyerl, de-​emphasizing her status as author and resituating her as a subject bound by the same rules and processes of digital mediation as the video and its spectators. At the same time, the composition of this shot could lead the viewer to wonder whether Steyerl is taking a picture of herself, or of the camera that records her, or of the viewers (us) regarding that recording. This confusion becomes a generative one in Abstract, for it is precisely this device that will suture artist, spectator, and recording apparatus into an unlikely interchange throughout the video. By repurposing the visual language of the censoring cut and recasting it as a material object in the mise en scène, Steyerl also displaces the classical means of linking shots: eyeline matching, where the off-​screen direction of a subject’s gaze becomes synonymous with the viewer’s desire to see beyond the frame, thus grounding the progression and accumulation of shots. Consider again how Steyerl’s video begins. First, we see handheld footage of Kurdistan,

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designated in the video as “shot.” This is followed by footage of Steyerl holding up the smartphone in Berlin. Typically, in a shot/​reverse-​shot scheme, the one bearing the gaze is first depicted, followed by a shot of what they see, but Abstract inverts that scenario by beginning with the point of view and following that with a shot of the one ostensibly bearing that perspective. Even though the smartphone’s screen has not been disclosed, the viewer can already infer a connection between these first shots—​that what Steyerl is looking at is the Kurdistan footage, and that the device itself is somehow a hinge between these spaces. As we will see, by displacing her gaze with that of the smartphone, Steyerl builds a bridge not only between images and screens but between Kurdistan and Germany, viewer and artist. The space between “here” and “elsewhere,” “shot” and “countershot” is collapsed here onto the surface of a smartphone, while the viewer, poised between these terms, becomes a kind of intervallic figure: a third “shot.” Moreover, the associations being drawn here unfold in a gradual, “soft” manner, and indeed, the process of association itself is already a central subject of “display” here. Following this initial sequence of shot/​ countershot—​ of Kurdistan/​ Germany—​a new statement emerges: “The grammar of cinema follows the grammar of battle.” The words hang there across two screens before evacuating, and we hear a missile launching and detonating. What follows emerges as if from the rubble of this discourse that has just been articulated and exploded. Soon, on the left-​hand screen, we get a shot revealing more of the surrounding territory in Kurdistan. This time the image is accompanied by the testimonial of an elder Kurdish man. A new statement appears on the right-​ hand screen: “This is an interview.” The man recalls the events surrounding the raid to Steyerl and her translator—​how multiple Cobra helicopters swept in and kept “shooting and shooting and shooting.” When he utters the word “shooting” for a third time, both image and sound evacuate, giving way to a new shot on the right depicting the same pile of rubble from before. “This,” we are again told by letters on screen, “is a shot.” It begins on a rapid zoom inward, charging like a bullet toward its target, until settling upon that unassuming pile of rubble which, we later learn, is a collapsed cave where the vanquished PKK militants were buried by Turkish Armed Forces. The velocity of this inward camera zoom, coupled with the fact that it appears directly after the thrice-​uttered word “shooting,” suggests an analogy between the video camera used to record these images and the artillery affixed to military helicopters. But as we will see, Steyerl makes this connection not in order to reinforce the cinematic grammar of battle but rather to transpose the space-​defying, border-​crossing means of firearms and artillery toward the ends of excavation and rescue.

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The shot of the burial site disappears, and again (on the left-​hand screen) we see Steyerl at Brandenburg Gate holding a smartphone at eye level, again attended by the sentence “This is a countershot” on the right. The sentence gives way to a new shot, and for the first time both screens are occupied by video footage. The new shot is directed downward at the ground above the burial site, littered with signs of life and struggle. With grim limpidity, the Kurdish man designates objects among the wreckage. “This is a blanket”; “This is a piece of cloth”; “This is a jacket”—​he names these items with careful precision, often holding them up or pointing to them with a long stick as if to foreclose any occlusion in referential passage. The shot on the right then disappears, and again we are left with only an image of Steyerl holding the smartphone in Berlin. In the place of the former, a familiar sentence emerges: “This is a shot.” By now, it is worth noting that the construction “This is a . . .” has been employed in the naming of such a diverse collection of objects and forms that the distinction between the domain of the image (shot/​countershot) and that of things (jacket, coat, ammunition) has all but dissolved. This turbulent accumulation of things both material and digital effects a “soft montage” between profilmic and filmic space, of gunshots and video shots, testimony and battle. The next shot that appears reveals the screen side of the smartphone for the first time in the video. On it, we see the earlier footage of Kurdistan, while the shot of Steyerl holding the phone persists on the left-​hand screen. (An example of this configuration can be seen in the first frame within Figure 4.3.) This pairing of shots comes closer than perhaps any other in Abstract to the classical form of shot/​countershot. Were these images to be seen in succession rather than simultaneously, as they are here, the shot on the left would disclose a discrete amount of information up to and including its frame (i.e., lack of information), while the shot on the right would expand that horizon with the revelation of new content, retroactively compensating for the lack in the previous shot’s visual field. But Steyerl’s use of shot/​countershot here departs in crucial ways from this classical scenario. We have already touched upon one of these distinguishing factors, which consists in the way Steyerl obscures her eyes and thus denies the spectator their traditional viewing surrogate in the mise en scène, a gesture that on its own implicates viewers in the process of editing. At the same time, by figuring the smartphone so prominently as both an object and a subject of vision, Steyerl further blurs the boundaries between shot and countershot, image and screen, collapsing the signifying chain onto the screen of the smartphone. In this way, we could say that the shot on the right denies the shot/​countershot dyad its conventional telos in the linearization of perspective and narration of continuous space. Rather than proceed in service to a cumulative orchestration of presence and lack, in Steyerl’s

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video shots appear, disappear, and resurface in a soft montage that gradually reveals rather than insists upon associations at once spatial, temporal, and conceptual. At one point, Steyerl’s translator picks up an ammunition shell left over from the raid and holds it up for closer inspection. The shot of the artist on the left disappears, while on the other screen the man passes the shell to Steyerl. Precisely when this object passes into the space beyond the smartphone screen, the following text appears: “This is a 20mm ammunition case fired by Cobra helicopters” (Figure 4.3). In this moment, the video almost seems to collect the ammunition shell into its discourse, much as the villagers had when, as the guide attests, they gathered various pieces of wreckage from the raid. The image of Kurdistan on the right, which itself appears on the smartphone screen, is now directed toward another portion of the collapsed cave. When Steyerl’s guide speaks of rocket shells that were found beneath the rubble, a new shot appears on the smartphone, consisting of slow-​motion footage depicting a rocket shell buried beneath the dirt. Further text appears on left: “This is a Hellfire missile fired by Cobra helicopters.” When this sentence disappears, a shot of Steyerl from behind appears in its place, and immediately thereafter the shot on the right disappears, leaving us once again with Steyerl in Berlin. But something has changed. As if by the same mechanism that switches the smartphone camera’s point of view, here, for the first time, we see the off-​screen information that was merely implied by the earlier shot depicting Steyerl from the front. (See the first frame of Figure 4.4.) But the field of vision has expanded. In the background is the Frank Gehry–​designed DZ Bank building in Pariser Platz. As before, Steyerl raises her arms at eye level as she grasps the smartphone, which is eclipsed in this shot by her head. On the right-​hand screen, the shot of the buried missile shell persists on the smartphone, until the entire shot disappears and is replaced by the sentence “This is a countershot.” Both screens then go black, leaving us with the sound of wind. Soon, an altogether new configuration emerges. It consists of the same shot depicting Steyerl from behind, and an additional one depicting her from the front (Figure 4.4). While it is possible to characterize this configuration in terms of shot/​ countershot, it is distinguished by the fact that each image depicts the same, solitary subject (Steyerl) at opposite ends of a single line of action simultaneously, conveying the impression of a 360-​degree field. This is because any shot that follows from one occurring on the line of action may, according to the rules of continuity editing, be taken from any angle and still maintain the impression of spatiotemporal continuity. And yet the field being expanded

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Figure 4.3  Stills from Abstract (Hito Steyerl, 2012). Single-​channel video converted from two-​channel installation, HD digital video with sound, environment, duration: 7:30 min. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/​ Paris/​Seoul. © Hito Steyerl/​VG Bild-​Kunst, Bonn, 2022.

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Figure 4.4  Stills from Abstract (Hito Steyerl, 2012). Single-​channel video converted from two-​channel installation, HD digital video with sound, environment, duration: 7:30 min. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/​ Paris/​Seoul. © Hito Steyerl/​VG Bild-​Kunst, Bonn, 2022.

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here is not a result of the camera’s position in relation to the immediate space or action around it per se, but rather acts a visual analogy for a much wider dilation of the cinematic field, one in which, as Steyerl remarks in her film November, “Kurdistan is actually here, in Germany.” Throughout Abstract, shots appear and disappear as if the installation were itself a contracting and expanding topography. But this configuration of shot/​countershot can be further distinguished by the fact that it turns not on a human line of sight but on a technological gaze. As Steyerl threads it into the structure of Abstract, the smartphone, in conjunction with the editing across two screens, effects passages between shots and spaces, enabling the complex work of geographical transpositions occurring throughout the piece. Soon the shot depicting the artist from the front will disappear and the following sentence will take its place: “This is the company Lockheed Martin that produces the missiles.” This sentence disappears, and once again we see the smartphone screen from Steyerl’s perspective. On it, the Kurdish elder continues to elect articles among the wreckage. “These are all belt scarves—​they wrap around your hip. All these are belt scarves.” By now, the breathless labor of this inventory appears to have exhausted its speaker. “Thirty-​nine people were killed,” he says, and the soundtrack takes leave of this speech and is overcome by the sound of wind. The shot on the left depicting Steyerl in front of the Lockheed Martin building disappears, while on the right, on the smartphone screen we see fragments of bone amid various pieces of clothing and debris. Soon after this, Steyerl lowers the smartphone down below the frame, and the focus of the shot pulls from foreground to background, where we now see the exterior of Lockheed Martin’s Berlin headquarters in full relief. What happens in this instance is a kind of soft montage within profilmic space, where the image of a human bone fragment in Kurdistan is transposed onto the surface of a building in Germany. Directly after this rack focus, a new sentence appears on the left: “This is where my friend Andrea Wolf was killed in 1998.” What we encounter here is a stirring in the deixis of place, for the implication is that Wolf ’s death occurred in two places simultaneously. This slippage, which only furthers the video’s gradual superimposition of Kurdistan and Berlin, is less an oppositional act than an analogical one. That is, the conceptual and technical apparatus animating Abstract is not geared toward decisively hitting a distinct target, but rather toward the disclosure of a system within which seemingly disparate materials and places circulate and exist simultaneously within unified creative geography, including the artist herself. Steyerl’s performance lecture “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” (2013) functions as something of a postmortem reflection on Abstract. In it, the artist states that her goal in creating Abstract was to “follow a few pieces of debris

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back to their makers, back to their manufacturers, back to the places they were launched from initially.”31 In other words, the operative assumption here was that of a relative constancy, from origin to destination, of deadly projectiles—​ specifically, that they are beholden to the same laws of physics as any other material object, such that one could trace an ammunition casing back in space and time to a point of origin. But as Steyerl goes on to suggest, the technology of war does not follow such laws of physics. In conveying this idea, she points out an intriguing coincidence in the visual appearance of Lockheed Martin’s Hellfire missile launcher and their corporate headquarters in Berlin: a “perfect match,” as Steyerl puts it. This analogy between a Frank Gehry–​designed building and an apparatus manufactured for death suggests a kind of quantum volatility of matter where a missile can transform, midflight, into a work of art.32 While this analogy is not to be taken literally, it does have a certain explanatory power. To elucidate this, we might consider Steyerl’s discussion in her lecture of a 20mm projectile manufactured by General Dynamics, whose casing features so prominently in Abstract. This object reveals yet another facet of the strange physics of capital and war that discloses a link not only between “starchitecture” and missile launchers but also between video art and Gatling guns. In 2013, the Art Institute of Chicago staged a major solo exhibition of Steyerl’s work. There, Steyerl found herself in front of Abstract, standing in a museum that draws major financial support from the Crown family, whose patriarch, the late American industrialist Henry Crown, in 1959 became the largest shareholder of General Dynamics Corporation, one of the largest defense contractors in the United States.33 Upon seeing Abstract displayed at the Art Institute, a strange feedback loop revealed itself to Steyerl: “I found a picture of myself . . . shooting video on an smartphone, with the caption, ‘This is a shot.’ So, did I shoot the bullet I found on the battlefield myself?” This question is perhaps less an invitation to further Steyerl’s paranoid reading of her own video than to consider a fundamental tension running through her work, that of a certain difficulty posed to any critique of violence under this advanced stage of global capitalism. Of course, the case of the Art Institute is but one illustration of the cultural sphere’s nonexemption from the global workings of state violence and war. It is telling of this larger difficulty that, in the “Battlefield” performance, when Steyerl purports to hold up the 20mm bullet to give form to the object of her critique, the bullet is invisible: she comes up empty-​handed. Toward the end of Abstract, in a voice-​over, Steyerl’s guide recounts how Wolf was captured alive, brutally beaten, and eventually killed by her captors. On the right-​hand screen, we again see Steyerl in Berlin, while the shot on the

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left now depicts Steyerl holding her smartphone, the screen of which displays the guide standing atop a hill in Anatolia. The man’s voice enters the soundtrack once more. “Whenever I see the perpetrators, I think of this horrible act,” he declares, and makes his way down a hill into a valley. The shot on Steyerl’s smartphone holds on this for a moment, until we hear a clicking noise on the soundtrack like the one from the beginning of the piece that preceded the sound of a missile launch and explosion. As we hear this clicking sound, on the right-​hand screen we see Steyerl lower the camera below the frame, revealing her eyes. This sound match transposes the clicking sound from the beginning of the film associated with the missile launch onto the act of capturing of an image. She then lowers the smartphone below the frame, even as, on the left screen, she continues holding the device. In this instant, she bifurcates her image, splitting her body in two. Gazing off-​screen for a moment as if to regard the scenes of Kurdistan and Berlin simultaneously, Steyerl then walks forward, disappearing off the edge of one screen and reappearing on the other (Figure 4.5). Soon the translator joins her, and both make their way down the hill behind the Kurdish elder. These two shots dwell for some time on their respective screens as we hear the familiar sound of a missile surging through space and exploding. Digital black leader once again fills both screens, attended by one last written formulation: Shot.            One opens a door Countershot        to the other

No longer content to wait for the next image to materialize, Steyerl cuts a door from Germany to Kurdistan. This is not merely a cinematic magic trick but a simultaneously political and aesthetic gesture. She divides herself in two, extending her flesh across the distance holding Germany and Kurdistan apart. Crucially, this autogenetic act is thinkable for Steyerl only within the realm of the digital, which promises to innervate and link bodies even as it threatens to cut them further, and which forecloses any definitive separation between shooter and target, much as it does a decisive act of critique. At the same time, this gesture is aligned with Steyerl’s larger efforts to fundamentally reconceive the politics of montage, displacing the model of editing grounded in dialectics and shock—​a relic of the avant-​garde—​for one that is spatial, geographic, and corporeal. Steyerl’s act envisions the cinematic interval as a physical opening in the geographic imaginary, a passage from here to elsewhere. By walking through the cut, she not only reveals hidden relations between places, words, and shots but suggests that those relations must be enacted physically, even

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Figure 4.5  Stills from Abstract (Hito Steyerl, 2012). Single-​channel video converted from two-​channel installation, HD digital video with sound, environment, duration: 7:30 min. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin/​ Paris/​Seoul. © Hito Steyerl/​VG Bild-​Kunst, Bonn, 2022.

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as the artist must be prepared to find herself, at any given point, on the wrong side of politics. In seeking out Wolf, Steyerl cuts a passage into the off-​screen, as if to say, Where there is no door, make a cut.

Notes 1. Hito Steyerl, Q&A with audience at Flaherty Film Seminar, Hamilton, NY, June 14–​ 20, 2014. 2. Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-​ Cinema: Vent d’Est,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 418. Wollen’s essay was originally printed in Afterimage, no. 4 (1972). 3. Wollen, “Godard and Counter-​Cinema,” 426. 4. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Marc Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 149–​150. 5. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 150–​151. This scenario has become even more acute in the years since Speed and Politics was first written, for the arms race is quickly approaching lightspeed, with U.S., Chinese, and Russian militaries having either deployed or reached the advanced developmental stages of laser weapons systems. 6. Harun Farocki and Yilmaz Dziewior, “Conversation October 23, 2010, Kunsthaus Bregenz,” in Harun Farocki: Soft Montages, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Bergenz: KUB, 2011), 210. 7. Julianne Burton, “The Camera as ‘Gun’: Two Decades of Culture and Resistance in Latin America,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 49. See also Alisa Lebow, “Shooting with Intent: Framing Conflict,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence, ed. Joram Ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 41–​62. 8. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-​Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 124. 9. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 20. 10. Virilio, War and Cinema, 34. 11. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 38. Eisenstein writes in the same passage, “So, montage is conflict. As the basis of every art is conflict (an ‘imagist’ transformation of the dialectical principle). The shot appears as the cell of montage. Therefore it also must be considered from the viewpoint of conflict.” It is worth stressing that the emphasis on conflict in Eisenstein’s writing is complex and nuanced, and that in any case conflict is not necessarily synonymous with war. Indeed, one could say Eisenstein likened montage to war as much as he likened it to music and literature or (as discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 of this book, respectively) architecture and landscape. Still, conflict, antagonism, and often war explicitly were thematic staples in his larger discourse on montage. 12. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 208. 13. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 3.

110  Between Images 14. Santiago Alvarez quoted in Derek Malcolm, “Santiago Alvarez: LBJ,” The Guardian Unlimited, June 17, 1999, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​film/​1999/​jun/​17/​der​ekma​lcol​ msce​ntur​yoff​i lm.derek​malc​olm. 15. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gentino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 1:50. 16. Made a year before “Towards a Third Cinema” was written, La hora de los hornos is a 260-​ minute essay film in three parts that has become a paradigmatic text of the Third Cinema. 17. Solanas and Gentino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” 63. 18. Jean-​Luc Godard, “Jusqu’à la victoire,” originally published in “El Fatah,” 1970, http://​www. diago​nalt​houg​hts.com/​?p=​1728, emphasis mine. 19. The following text is spoken later in Ici et ailleurs: “Where did the inability to see or hear these very simple images come from? We have, like everyone, said something else about them. Something other than what they are saying. It seems most likely that we do not know how to see or listen. Or, that the sound is too loud and covers reality. Learn to see here, in order to understand elsewhere. Learn to understand speech in order to see what others do. The others, the ‘elsewhere’ of our ‘here.’ ” 20. Irmgard Emmelhainz, “From Third Worldism to Empire: Jean-​Luc Godard and the Palestine Question,” Third Text 3, no 5 (2009). 21. Serge Daney, “Preface to Here and Elsewhere,” trans. Bill Krohn and Laurent Kretzschmar, unpublished single-​page text, New York, 1977, 1, http://​kinosl​ang.blogs​pot.com/​2009/​ 01/​pref​ace-​to-​here-​and-​elsewh​ere-​by-​serge.html. It is worth mentioning that this quote reflects an unfortunate tendency in Daney’s writing about Ici et ailleurs (and in much of the criticism surrounding that film) to omit Miéville’s name and thereby negate the significance of her role in shaping the more reflexive (and in my opinion altogether more adventurous) cinematic praxis that Godard began taking up in the late 1970s. 22. Steyerl Q&A session at Flaherty Film Seminar. 23. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-​Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 193. 24. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 203. 25. Siegert, Cultural Techniques, 203–​205. 26. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 152. 27. Virilio was also struck by the effect of these technologies on the human-​architectonic interface: “From here on, urban architecture has to work with the opening of a new ‘technological space-​time.’ In terms of access, telematics replaces the doorway. The sound of gates gives way to the clatter of data banks and the rights of passage of a technical culture whose progress is disguised by the immateriality of its parts and networks.” Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 88. Elsewhere, Virilio evocatively describes this phenomenon as a function of cinema’s displacement of architecture in his signature tone of apocalyptic lyricism: “The question today therefore is no longer to know if cinema can do without a place but if places can do without cinema. Urbanism is in decline, architecture is in constant movement, while dwellings have become no more than anamorphoses of thresholds. . . . After the age of architecture-​sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie; an un-​ habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom

How to Walk through a Door  111 for the fascination of the mobs.” Paul Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Phillip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 64–​65. 28. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 21–​22. 29. See Andrew Durbin, “Selfie Poetics,” Mousse 44 (Summer 2014), http://​mou​ssem​agaz​ine. it/​and​rew-​dur​bin-​sel​fie-​poet​ics-​2014. 30. Steyerl Q&A session at Flaherty Film Seminar. 31. Hito Steyerl, “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” (2013), lecture originally given at the 13th Istanbul Biennial, video uploaded October 2, 2013, https://​vimeo.com/​76011​774. 32. Steyerl, “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” 33. Obituary of Henry Crown by Joan Cook, New York Times, August 16, 1990, http://​www. nyti​mes.com/​1990/​08/​16/​obi​tuar​ies/​henry-​crown-​indust​rial​ist-​dies-​bill​iona​ire-​94-​rose-​ from-​pove​rty-​by-​joan-​cook.html.

PART III

ECOLOGY

5 The Ecological Cut Landscape is the freest element of film, the least burdened with servile, narrative tasks, and the most flexible in conveying moods, emotional states, and spiritual experiences. —​Sergei M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature A landscape is always the suspension of a passage, and this passage occurs as a separation. —​Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image

James Benning’s 2011 video Nightfall consists of one continuous ninety-​eight-​ minute shot captured in the Sierra Nevada Forest. Within the frame, which remains static throughout, little happens beyond the gradual withdrawal of light as night descends upon the scene. Benning’s films have trafficked in extremes of duration and attention since the mid-​1970s, though with more recent exercises in ascetic maximalism as Nightfall, the filmmaker appears to be flirting with self-​caricature. Much of the appeal of Benning’s films undoubtedly lies in how they enlist and train the viewer’s attentive, disciplined gaze; his works teach us to look and listen—​to “pay attention to things.”1 Remarking on Nightfall during a postscreening discussion, Benning claims that the experience of watching such a scene in nature is qualitatively better than in the cinema. While “we have the discipline to sit and watch this in the theater,” he observes, “if I took you to that mountaintop, you’d probably have difficulty sitting there for an hour and a half. But it would be a much richer experience because of course it’s much more real.”2 By Benning’s own logic, the demands Nightfall places on the viewer’s time and attention betray a planned obsolescence encoded within it. But if this cinematic forest is an impoverished version of the real thing, why produce or exhibit it at all if not to abolish the necessity of the screen itself? Seen this way, the extended duration and perspectival fixity of Nightfall posits presence at the level of the signified (the event as what matters) and lack at the level of the signifier (the projection event as mere substitute). If Nightfall finally wants to place its viewer Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0005

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anywhere, it is not within the experiential field of cinema but its outside, into the great outdoors. Enlisting the cut here would foreclose a more fundamental interruption when the spectator, midway through the screening, flees the cinema for the forest, favoring the presence of nature over the poverty of the screen with its punitive frame. What does it mean in the twenty-​first century to appraise the shortfalls of meditation based on a conception of nature as presence and cinema as absence, as separation? The question is worth asking if only because Benning’s remarks reflect a larger conception of nature which has become commonplace in experimental film discourse in recent decades. Admittedly few viewers would have the physical or attentional stamina to sit with a single landscape for ninety-​eight minutes, to say nothing of a single shot of a single landscape captured by a solitary, unmoving camera. And yet, within the broader sensibilities and predilections of contemporary experimental film culture, the radical durational gesture at the heart of Nightfall could appear perfectly routine. This phenomenon, which implicates viewers and programmers as much as producers and films, is best summed up as a contemplative mandate animated by an almost athletic relationship to time. This mandate is based on the assumption that duration can somehow redress the cinema’s relation to the natural world despite the former’s abiding status as an anthropogenic machine. While landscape and duration may have found their most extreme point of convergence in Benning’s work, this is hardly foreign territory to the cinematic avant-​garde. Scott MacDonald, a leading authority on the treatment of place and the environment in avant-​garde cinema, suggests that “ecocinema” has less to do with conveying messages or telling certain stories than with providing “new kinds of film experience,” and by extension new ways of perceiving, being in, and relating to the world around us. MacDonald characterizes the ecocinema experience as foregrounding “patience and mindfulness,” which he appoints as “qualities of consciousness crucial for a deep appreciation of and an ongoing commitment to the natural environment.”3 Stephanie Lam similarly argues that a “slow eco-​aesthetics” is uniquely poised to respond to, and fulfill, a desire for more immediate and extended visual contact with nature. . . . A slow aesthetic is ecological but, more than that, it is ethical. Without the ability to experience environmental change as a temporal condition, and to recognize nature as concrete, present, and all around us, it will be difficult to find ways or reasons to step out of habitual modes of seeing the world at a remove.4

The emphasis that MacDonald and Lam place on qualities like mindfulness, attunement, slowness, immediacy, and extensiveness are in line with broader

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currents in experimental cinema’s environmental discourse, which tend to favor the long take over montage. MacDonald is keen to point out that the long take inverts the “fundamentally hysterical approach” to the environment seen in popular cinema and advertising, where “consumption of the maximum number of images per minute models unbridled consumption of products and the unrestrained industrial exploitation of the environment.”5 Here, the suggestion is that montage operationalizes at the level of film language the relations of relentless production and consumption under capitalism. MacDonald therefore seizes upon the “pedagogical” possibilities of distended duration as a panacea to the unchecked consumption and environmental exploitation of late capitalism, made manifest in the visual discourse structured by abundant cuts and short takes. Such a sensibility—​we might call it the ecodidactics of the long take—​is very much in keeping with Benning’s remarks discussed earlier. It is as if the cut were a manifestation of anthropogenic plundering of, as Benning put it in one instance, “an unspoiled, virgin kind of landscape.”6 All of this in a way comes down to a question of place: of how films depict, constitute, and set viewers in place. Place, in turn, is a matter of relation. In one regard, place implies not only a continuity of beings with their environment but a spatiotemporal expansiveness. To be in place in this imaginary sense is to be synonymous with, or sutured into, one’s environment. This is place as absolute immersion, which forgets division and separation, where the discontinuous connections and uneasy relations of ecology become falsely reconciled as whole. This is ecology as a long take. But cinema is capable of thinking ecology otherwise. Throughout this book, I have sought to underscore the equivocal nature of relation, an underlying assumption being that when it elides things like absence, negativity, distance, and division, connection tends toward artificial synthesis. A relational poetics of montage by extension views the cut as an agent of conjunction as well as disjunction, and this poetics of montage suggests a way of regarding the cut ecologically, or what we might call the ecological cut. This designation is, at least in part, a corrective to the overrepresentation of the long take and consequent reification of environmental concepts within the cinematic avant-​garde’s ecological conversation. My aim in the following pages is not to dispute the validity of the long take per se as a technique of ecological relation, nor to deny the inherently ecological valence of montage.7 Instead, I deploy the cut as an ecological figure to trouble a broader relational suturing subtending ecocinema, at both the conceptual level of discourse and the phenomenological level of production and reception. Primarily, however, the ecological cut is a reminder that separation, far from undermining cinema’s ecological ability, is a necessary function of it.

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Landscape and Ecology in the Cinematic Avant-​garde From the beginning, cinema evinced a keen interest in the natural world. Some of the earliest films were actualities of iconic North American landscapes, from the Yosemite Valley to the Catskill Mountains. Many of these films either explicitly or implicitly positioned themselves within the tradition of western landscape painting, a tradition that, as Alan Wallach describes it, “centers on a subject-​object relation” of binary oppositions (“self and other, viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle”), whereby the “subject dominates imaginatively an expanse of actual or represented landscape.”8 Early on, cinema delivered the natural world to spectators positioned safely within the confines of the black box, creating an “economic relationship” between “landscape and consumer” and thus aligning itself with the modern project of partitioning the natural world into digestible morsels.9 The appetite for natural scenery as a source of cinematic spectacle would prove short-​lived, however, as narrative filmmaking ultimately relegated landscape to the background. This was made possible by a series of technological developments and commercial efforts to “tame” the natural world within the house of cinema. Perhaps the first and most basic means of this domestication was the cinematic frame itself, followed by Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, an infernal domicile festooned with tar paper and constructed on a turntable to harness the sun’s light throughout the day. It was only a matter time before production infrastructure made it so the film studio could take leave of the sun’s domain. Upon encountering one of UFA’s monolithic production cities in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer related the details of his visit in a tone at once horrified and awestruck: The natural things outside—​trees made out of wood, lakes with water, villas that are inhabitable—​have no place within its confines. . . . [T]‌he entire macrocosm seems to be gathered in this new version of Noah’s ark. But the things that rendezvous here do not belong to reality. They are copies and distortions that have been ripped out of time and jumbled together . . . [a] bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm.10

For Kracauer, being in the 350,000-​square-​foot UFA studio was like stepping onto an alien planet. This simulated ecosystem warded off the sheer contingency of the natural world, and by extension the inherently untidy and unpredictable relation between humanity and the planet. For Kracauer, this was clearly a false reconciliation of human and nonhuman domains, a

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compensatory image of the natural world deployed as a distraction from the fundamental antagonisms of a divided socius and from the alienation of a species increasingly at odds with its host planet.11 From the 1940s through the 1960s, experimental filmmakers like Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, William Greaves, and Jonas Mekas elaborated upon cinema’s early fascination with landscape. Unlike in the anthropogenic “laboratories” described by Kracauer, where cinema subsumes and simulates nature, the cinematic avant-​ garde explored the human-​ nonhuman relation itself as an untidy and unpredictably generative process. In films like Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957), Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961–​1964), Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), and Mekas’s Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, aka Walden (1969), “nature” emerged as an unstable category “to be interrogated and critiqued.”12 Early on, that larger endeavor to denaturalize human perceptions of the natural world were coextensive with montage. Prior to roughly the mid-​1960s, Annette Michelson contends, American avant-​garde cinema was “postulated on the primacy of the part object.”13 This primacy of fragmentation and partition, expressed primarily through montage, was for Michelson a refusal of narrative codes but also a reminder of the irreparably divided nature of the socialized body, and of a profound need to redress those divisions not through the compensatory aesthetic gestures of the culture industry but rather, as Laszlo Moholy-​ Nagy once breathlessly contended, through “a synthesis of all vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-​embracing Gesamtwerk [life] which abolishes all isolation, in which individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.”14 In Michelson’s analysis, postwar American avant-​garde filmmakers used montage to unlock the body’s ready-​made plasticity and modularity and deployed that body as a “vital impulse” in view of an outward movement from the particular to the universal. For example, Maas’s film Geography of the Body (1943) morcellates male and female body parts to create a larger “landscape,” while Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) fragments and duplicates the artist’s own body to render a phantasmagoria of desire and abjection bespeaking the violent unconscious of gender relations in midcentury America. For Deren, however, the filmmaker enacts such a form not with recourse to the world as it already exists, as if nature were a ready-​made, but by isolating “parts” and displacing them from their “natural” context to a new, “un-​natural” context—​a “dynamic, living whole in which the interaction of the parts produces more than their sum total in any sense.”15 For Deren, the artist takes up the mandate to change nature by constructing works of art that play host to an unpredictable movement between parts and wholes. This is neither about aesthetic mastery

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precisely nor even play for Deren, but is grounded in an ethical program that measures the value of a work of art based on its openness to the contingency of relation. In Dog Star Man Brakhage extended the passage from unitary body/​self to landscape by scaling it up to a cosmological level. In the film this is dramatized visually through shots depicting the artist’s ascent of a mountain to chop down a dead tree intercut alongside celestial and cellular imagery, lending to the action of felling a tree the very weight of creation and destruction, of segmentation, ordering, and construction alongside the indefatigable forces of entropy to which all particulate matter is subject. In “Metaphors on Vision,” Brakhage supplies his own account of this metaphysical passage from the particular to the universal: I began to feel that all history, all life, all that would serve as material with which to work, would have to come from the inside of me out rather than as some form imposed from the outside in. I had the concept of everything radiating out of me, and that the more personal and egocentric I would become, the deeper I would reach and the more I could touch those universal concerns which would involve all man. . . . First I had the sense of the center radiating out. Now I have become concerned with the rays. You follow? It’s in the action of moving out that the greatest concerns can be struck off continually. Now the films are being struck off, not in the gesture, but in the very real action of moving out. Where I take action strongest and most immediately is in reaching through the power of all that love toward my wife (and she toward me), and somewhere where those actions meet and cross, and bring forth children and films and inspire concerns with plants and rocks and all sights seen, a new center, composed of action, is made.16

Here is a trajectory from the “personal and egocentric” world of the self to “those universal concerns” that “involve all man,” which in Brakhage’s particular case involves a rigorous, dialectical movement that takes him from the unitary world of the self to the dyad of marriage to a world of children, all of which would make for an utterly anthropo-​hetero-​normative genealogy if not for the procession of nonhuman signifiers following from this initial montage of bodies: the “films” and “plants” and “rocks” that all have equal purchase over this “new center.” If we scale this metaphysics back to the level of avant-​garde film history, we could say that the “action of moving out” is interrupted at some point, stops short of its target. This appears to be Michelson’s argument when she regards the developments of American avant-​garde cinema in the 1960s. Experimental cinema during this period was marked in Michelson’s view by a

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larger shift from “assertive editing to that of long shot/​plan sequence,” which she regards as a departure “from the body’s analytic representation” in view of its “synthetic incorporation.”17 It seems to me that what Michelson sees happening in this passage from the disarticulated social body to the “erotic” whole body is a false synthesis of the particular and the universal—​“false” in large part because montage and close-​ups, which speak the language of the part object, are forfeited in favor of long takes and long shots, which speak (and in a way force) the language of the whole. It is during this period of the ascendancy of long shots and long takes in the cinematic avant-​garde that P. Adams Sitney dates the “international emergence of a cinema of landscape.”18 MacDonald also roughly points to this moment as marking the beginning of a “cinema of Place,” which laid the foundations for the emergence of ecocinema later.19 Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970), for example, consists of a single static view of a rural landscape near Binghamton, New York. In subsequent decades, filmmakers such as Peter Hutton, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, Emily Richardson, Jennifer Baichwal, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and Lois Patiño, as well as producers associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, have built upon this tradition, their work having become mainstays of the avant-​garde film festival circuit. These trends in film exhibition, coupled with the outsize role extended to “slow cinema” and long takes in ecocinema scholarship, imply that the absence of montage is practically imperative to an ecologically conscious cinema. That cinema’s capacity for being ecological lies in its ability to defer (if not foreclose) the cut is a notion that can be traced at least as far back as André Bazin, who famously saw montage as thwarting the screen’s ability to reflect “the spatial density of something real.”20 Bazin’s sentiments still resonate today in much of ecocinema scholarship and practice. Lucien Castaing-​Taylor, filmmaker and founder of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, endorses a mode of observational filmmaking that honors “the homogeneity of space” over the ersatz spatiotemporal constructions of montage, thereby “preserving the relationships between objects.”21 Here again, to favor relation over separation is to repel the lure of the cut. But the premise that montage obstructs rather than advances cinema’s ecological capacity is itself the byproduct of a more fundamental separation anxiety animating much of ecological discourse, one that functions ostensibly as a countermeasure to the operations of splitting and bifurcation at the heart of modern discourse. This makes perfect sense if one sees the project of modernity itself as the operationalization of a perceived divide between mind and matter and its many attendant rifts, for example between signs and things, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Bruno Latour calls this procedure

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“partitioning”—​itself a means of differentiating the “us” of so-​called Moderns from the “them” of the Premoderns.22 Latour’s point, then, is that the Modern subject is constituted on the abjection of a Premodern subjectivity, where “Nature and Society, signs and things, are virtually coextensive.”23 The modern self is thus a flight from those “horrible mixtures” and the archaic, dark energies of the Premoderns. Inasmuch as modern subjectivity rests on a foundation of so much partitioning and compartmentalization, it would seem to follow—​and this is one of the central assumptions of contemporary ecological discourse—​that our planetary crisis is precisely a consequence, and in many respects a violent undermining, of that will to split and divide. At the turn of the twenty-​first century, Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen argued that the age of the Holocene had given way to a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, characterized by a level of human activity of sufficient scale and depth as to be inscribed within the planet’s fossil record.24 The beginning of this seemingly irreversible entanglement of human history with earth history has been the topic of much debate among scientists, with events such as the rise of agriculture approximately twelve thousand years ago, the colonization of the Americas (1610), the Industrial Revolution in Europe (ca. 1800), and the Trinity nuclear test (1945) all being advanced as markers for a so-​called golden spike. Its precise historical origins aside, the Anthropocene may at base be understood as the name for a broadly and deeply entangled set of relations between a species (in this case Homo sapiens) and its environment (in this case planet Earth). On the most basic level, this sense of entanglement speaks to an underlying continuity among beings and their environment (in the more precise sense of the term “ecology”), a continuity among the human and natural domains. Such characterizations, it should be emphasized, are not merely figurative but very much grounded in scientific fact, for the ecological sciences rest on a basic understanding of the inherent interconnections underlying life systems at a planetary scale, as opposed to a discontinuous collection of biotic and abiotic components.25 As the biologist and mycophile Merlin Sheldrake reminds us, “[S]‌elves emerge from a complex tangle of relationships only now becoming known.”26 What makes the Anthropocene novel is that the human-​earth interconnection becomes sufficiently deep as to be detectible in the fossil record, and so entanglement is itself revealed as a problem, in part because we Moderns have suppressed it. The environmental movement has countered that suppression, in part, by doubling down on entanglement—​in other words, by emphasizing a deep and irreversible continuity of the human and natural domains, a position that the environmental legal scholar Jedediah Purdy aptly describes as an “acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is

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no longer useful or accurate.”27 That this imbrication of the human and the natural is itself a central feature of the Anthropocene attests to its uncanniness. It is a return of the repressed, of sorts, but at a planetary scale. In ecological discourse, this entangled relationality grounds an ethical program that has interconnectedness and interdependence as its central tenets. One important expression of this can be found in William Cronon’s classic work of ecocriticism, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” which, in its fundamental critique of the “wilderness idea,” still reads as a necessary corrective to the prevalence of “romanticism and post-​frontier ideology” in environmental discourse.28 As Cronon warns, when “we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles.”29 For Cronon, the trouble with the idea of wilderness is that it maintains and even reinforces a larger sense of separation between the human and nonhuman world that arguably got humanity into its environmental bind in the first place. Elsewhere, the ecologist Christopher Uhl explicitly views the eradication of separation as the precondition for a sustainable world, and contends that only once “separation consciousness” gives way to “relational consciousness” will humanity be capable of thinking and acting ecologically, from the starting point of interdependence.30 Meanwhile, the relatively new field of sustainability science has turned to complex systems theories to “transcend modernist paradigms by conceiving of humans and nature as interconnected within hybrid systems.”31 But even here scholars have expressed concern that these perspectives “remain captive to paradigmatic assumptions that implicitly reproduce a separation between humans and nature”; some even advocate that sustainability scientists engage with the “relational turn” in the humanities and social sciences to better account for the “complexity of human-​nature connectedness.”32 While there is obvious virtue to all these ways of favoring interrelational ways of thinking and acting, ecological discourse risks eliding separation as a process fundamental to relation in the first place. That separation is indispensable (if not primary) to relation is an insight born of a wide range of discourses, from deconstruction and psychoanalysis (see discussion of suture in Chapter 1) to evolutionary biology and Taoism. But so as not to stray too far from the topic at hand, we might provisionally consider the fact that ecosystems were only “discovered” in the decades following the Second World War by ecologists working under the auspices of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, who first visualized species interaction via fallout from nuclear weapons detonated in the Pacific Proving Grounds. It is this historical concurrence between ecological and military discourses that has led environmental historians like Laura J. Martins to contend that “violence made ecosystems

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manifest.”33 Ecological relation, understood in this properly political and historical sense, is perforce a function of separation.

One, Two, Tree: Forest Dialectics Landscape and long takes were not always so closely aligned. Sergei Eisenstein devoted considerable thought to the concept in his sprawling text Nonindifferent Nature and elsewhere. In his dealings with the topic of the natural world, Eisenstein aims to articulate those innermost relations and processes underlying a dynamic and (of course) dialectical view of history.34 Ideally, cinema is for Eisenstein a medium that harnesses change, is shot through with a sovereign movement at virtually every level. In Eisenstein’s view, this restless and dynamic movement works not only at the level of the film itself—​as in montage, the transition or movement from one shot to the next—​but at its production and reception. Even the viewer must be sent into a state of ecstasy, which, as Eisenstein elucidates, is a means of “ex stasis (out of a state)”—​a quality he describes interchangeably in this text as being beside oneself.35 Eisenstein’s cinematic praxis triangulates viewer, screen, and world toward a mutually mobilizing and turbulent relation of mutual destabilization. For such a movement to sustain itself, the filmmaker must seize upon the “inner ‘plastic music’ ” of things, which is to say the essential dynamism and pathos underlying all natural and human phenomena, marked at one important level “in the passage of representation into music.”36 What is especially intriguing here is that of all the elements at the filmmaker’s disposal, Eisenstein finds landscape to be the “freest element” and explicitly aligns it with montage, both being agents of this ex stasis when wielded properly.37 Eisenstein turns to the example of Walt Disney, whom he extols for his unparalleled mobilization of the figure. In the same breath, however, he takes the animator to task for his static landscapes. “Disney is amazingly blind when it comes to landscape,” Eisenstein laments, for these mere backdrops invariably pale next to the shimmering, morphing cartoon bodies populating them.38 Disney’s animated figures radiate an almost cosmically emancipatory drive, but when set against the backdrop of an immobile and indifferent landscape, that dazzling plasticity reveals itself as but a “momentary, imaginary, comical liberation.”39 Eisenstein celebrated cinema’s capacity to mobilize figure as well as landscape, character as well as setting, in service to a radically emancipatory vision of space itself, but saw in the radiant mobility of Disney’s figures a mere ruse of emancipation, meant to route around the brutal stratification of American life. The failure to find a “stylistic unity of figures and setting”

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betrays, in Eisenstein’s view, a fatal indifference on the part of the artist toward the world around him.40 There is an alternative history of the cinematic avant-​garde’s treatment of landscape to be gleaned, which runs from Eisenstein, Deren, and Brakhage up to the present. Kurt Kren’s 3/​60 Trees in Autumn (3/​60 Bäume im Herbst, 1960) is just one seldom-​discussed case. Though ostensibly aligned in their subject matter—​both heavily feature trees—​it is difficult to imagine two films so diametrically opposed as Nightfall and Trees in Autumn. One decisive distinction lies in the dizzying succession of images in Kren’s piece, where a shot encompasses one to eight frames and a second marks the passage of two to six shots. Kren’s film is an exercise in rigorous inattention, refusing as it does to settle on any particular view or part of this landscape. And yet it would be a mistake to understand the film’s seemingly perpetual movement, its ceaseless diversions and detours, as implying some undifferentiated flux or totality. As Peter Gidal aptly notes, the frenetic movement in Kren’s film challenges viewers to “make of the possible jumble of images discreet and separate segments.”41 That is, the sheer onslaught of images and the seeming arbitrariness of their sequencing becomes an occasion for the viewer’s partaking of separation. Malcolm LeGrice once singled out Trees in Autumn as “the first film in general that I would call Structuralist.”42 It is curious to imagine structural film, whose aim is precisely to denaturalize connections (especially between content and form, viewer and screen), as having begun in a forest—​an environment which, perhaps more than any other, implies interconnection—​ and yet in Kren’s film it is the setting for a dialectical movement less between the trees themselves than between film and forest, spectator and nature. The film’s blustering soundtrack, hand-​drawn in ink by Kren, parodies the will to synthesize and order the natural world by providing an unlikely sonic bridge across a surge of cuts. And while the sheer additive quality of Trees in Autumn, its restless accumulation of shots, likewise reflects an almost analytical mania, the relentlessness of this visual onslaught simultaneously articulates an excess, a point of separation animating the desire to dominate and structure nature in the first place. Each cut thus expresses an irresolvable dialectic between perceiver and perceived, aligning ecological consciousness not with attunement but with a perceptual agitation capable of measuring the limits of technologies, their attendant representations, and the relations they enable. Enlisting a cut here could situate us in yet another forest, the stately Mount Royal hill in Montreal, where Daïchi Saïto staged his super-​8 film Green Fuse (2008). The film opens on daytime footage of the thick trunk of a solitary tree vertically bifurcating the frame. The exposures themselves last a fraction of a second and were captured at a lower frame rate, resulting in a sped-​up

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effect so they appear as bursts of movement and light amid passages of black leader of equal length. Each time the film shuttles between the tree footage and black leader the play of light and shadow echoes across the body of the tree. Eventually, as the body of the tree becomes almost entirely shrouded in shadow, the footage begins to switch between vantage points closer and farther from the tree, in a series of transitions that could be described straightforwardly as axial cuts if the shifts in scale did not repeat multiple times and were not themselves separated by passages of black leader. The consequence of this technique, at least at a subliminal visual level, is to confuse the leader for film exposure, by extension rendering the body of the film interchangeable with that of the trees. As Green Fuse proceeds, the initial play of “positive” space/​exposed image and “negative” space/​black leader expands (or, more to the point of the film’s title, explodes) to encompass other natural forms and vantage points. Certain exposures simply contain patches of sky or grass, while others depict a variety of trees within the mise en scène in a way that emphasizes the spacing between them. In one especially clever passage, Saïto switches rapidly between two shots where a parcel of tree trunk appearing as a black rectangle occupies the right and left half of the frame respectively, giving off a “shutter” effect as the forest shuttles between frame left and right. In the sequence that directly follows, Saïto cuts between short bursts of a wide view of a tree and footage of an empty blue sky. At this point, the open sky has displaced the black of opaque leader, effecting a slippage between “sky” and “film,” and the passages of sky are replaced again by passages of black leader. In this sequence, the ostensibly negative space of black leader is rendered analogous to an expanse of sky. Saïto carries many of the ideas from Green Fuse further in his follow-​up film, Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009). The numerous trees on display here, which appear in rapid bursts of images amid passages of black leader, were initially filmed using 8mm and 16mm film stock, which Saïto then hand-​ processed and recaptured using an optical printer.43 Here again, the forest manifests as a radically interstitial and intervallic space, an ecology characterized as much by separation and division as interconnection and continuity. Such tensions are reinforced in Saïto’s film by an erratic interplay between figure and ground.44 In one shot, a tree trunk bifurcates the image vertically along its central axis, while a subsequent shot depicting two trunks literally substitutes the forest for the trees (Figure 5.1). This undecidability between figure and ground in turn operates a turbulence at the level of the sign, as the multitude of tree trunks and intervals of black leader come to mirror one another, effecting a confusion between the divisional labor of the cinematic cut and the syntactic function of the trees.

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Figure 5.1  Stills from Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (Daïchi Saïto, 2009). Courtesy of the artist.

What to make of such trees that figure as both presence and lack, at once positively and negatively charged? In his short monograph, Moving the Sleeping Images of Things towards the Light, Saïto writes:

128  Between Images Film dissects space in time, and by doing so it dissects time in space at the same time through concentrated processes of distillation. When I’m out with a camera and film something in front of my eyes, I am not trying to represent nature itself. The most I can do is express my sensation of nature, in terms intrinsic to the medium I use. My films are the condensed visual transposition of my sensation of nature, which is fragmentary and in constant flux. Though there may be trees in my films—​leaves, flowers and sky—​they are not real. They have become something else, something like an incomplete metaphor of the world I live in. To say that a film depicts nature is therefore a contradiction. Nature is natural only when it is not seen. Close your eyes, and nature will restore its naturalness.45

Now consider this statement alongside Benning’s remarks on his own process: Time affects the way we perceive place. That’s where I get this idea of “looking and listening.” In my films, I’m very aware of recording place over time, and the way that makes you understand place. Once you’ve been watching something for a while, you become aware of it differently. I could show you a photograph of the place, but that doesn’t convince you, it’s not the same as seeing it in time. I’m very interested, now, in how much time is necessary to understand place.46

There is a fundamental distinction to be made between the way these two filmmakers understand the relationship between perception and the environment, or between cinema and the natural world. Benning conceives place as a particular intersection of space and time; space accrues meaning seemingly in proportion to its accumulation of time. One cannot grasp (“understand”) place authentically without perceiving it (“looking and listening”) as temporal duration (“over time”). Strikingly absent from Saïto’s discourse is any prevailing sense that attentive observation will open onto more connections, more nature, more world. On the contrary, Saïto insists that wherever nature is sensuously perceived is where it has taken flight, has become something other. “Close your eyes,” he writes, as if to imply, Make a cut, and you will find nature. Rather than as continuity or presence, nature manifests here in the interstices of representation. I take Saïto’s remarks in this case not as presenting an image of the natural world as some irresolvable plurality or metaphysical substrate, but as a space for interrogating how we perceive and represent the world in the first place. It is to acknowledge nature’s capacity to denaturalize: to place a cut in the procession of images, media, and technologies that have become second nature. Historically, the axiom of interconnection has been complemented and reinforced by a view of ecological systems as tending toward harmony and

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equilibrium. By the dawn of the modern environmental movement in 1970, this idea had long been taken as gospel. By the 1990s, however, a new generation of scientists began challenging the orthodox view that ecological succession—​the process of change in an ecological community over time—​ is a march toward balance. Scientific study gradually revealed nature’s fundamental tendency toward chaos rather than harmony, and forests provided critical staging grounds for this theory. In ecology, the term “succession” is used to describe serial changes occurring within an ecological community over time. In the case of complex communities like forests, the initial colonization of empty land or barren rock by pioneering species marks the instant of what is called primary succession, with subsequent, so-​called secondary successions occurring when a disturbance—​the classic example is a wildfire—​ wipes the ecological slate clean, as it were, and the area is recolonized over time. For decades, the consensus among ecologists was that succession described a linear process tending toward a state of harmony, with a given ecological community achieving higher levels of interconnection, biodiversity, and resilience at each stage of secondary succession until finally reaching a point referred to as a climax, so long as humans did not intervene. Burning down the climax forest, therefore, meant throwing succession into a regressive, less stable state. This model was gravely undermined as early as 1973 by two scientists associated with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, William Drury and Ian Nisbet, whose observations of southern New England’s temperate forests led them to assert that the process of ecological succession was not an inevitable march toward stability, but rather, that change in a given community transpired without any calculable direction and did so indefinitely. As Donald Worster explains, Drury and Nisbet’s findings bore “no evidence of a progressive development over time: no trend toward biomass constancy, diversification of species, cohesiveness of plant and animal communities, or biotic control over the inorganic environment.”47 Instead, Drury and Nisbet asserted that “the phenomena of succession result from differential growth, differential survival, and perhaps differential dispersal of species.”48 In other words, while they perceived patterns underlying the activities of individual species, they observed no such patterns between species, nor any collective effort to achieve some final, balanced order. What this revealed, in Worster’s words, was a picture of forests as “nothing but an erratic, shifting mosaic of trees and other plants.”49 At last, the story of earth as all-​encompassing totality tending toward harmony may have less bearing on the natural world than humanity’s technological imaginary, manifesting today as a cybernetic regime aspiring to project a seamless web of connections upon the planet, one that makes few (if any) distinctions between clouds of data and clouds in the sky, between trees in

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a forest and decision trees structuring machine intelligences. In this sense, where human ecological thought may be at greatest risk of going astray is in the idée fixe of interconnection. Against both the utopian fantasies of late capitalist technocrats of an Earth 2.0 and organicist myths of a self-​regulating planet, the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat calls for new conceptual and technological frameworks capable of thinking nature beyond the dominant paradigm of interconnection. The idea, “repeated as a mantra, according to which everything is interconnected,” Neyrat calls “the principle of the principles of ecology and environmentalism.”50 Of course, that principle of interconnection is in many ways a necessary countermeasure to the fundamental and long-​standing antirelationality at the heart of the modern project and its attendant dualisms (nature vs. culture, human vs. nonhuman, etc.). But Neyrat also sees interconnection as a trap and maintains that ecology’s “principle of principles” has lost its capacity to contend with, and in some respects is even complicit in, some of the most destructive forces facing the earth and its inhabitants. Neyrat even goes so far to call the Anthropocene itself “a grand narrative seeking legitimization for the installation of a global, pilotable, management machine: Its politics propped up by the powers of engineers, and its fantasy being the possibility of an integral project of terraforming.”51 Contrary to the prevailing notion that “everything is interconnected,” Neyrat maintains that decisive and truly reparative change in human-​ planetary relations is impossible without “a counterprinciple of separation,” for “when everything is considered to be continuous and connected without a rift or outside, automated reactions replace decisions, and each novelty that emerges into the market of saturated anthropogenic environments is presented as an inevitable fate.”52 Rather than view nature as “an element folded into a permanent process of transformation” or else as “something immediate (continuous, enveloping, perhaps even maternal),” an ecology of separation perceives nature locally, or as Neyrat intriguingly puts it, as a “detour.”53 In this sense, nature functions as a spatiotemporal bypass capable of introducing a rupture within the anthropogenic technological imaginary through which to “measure the relations” thereby produced and the limits to those relations.54 We could see the long take as the cinematic paradigm of the axiom of interconnection, for it suggests natural and cinematic processes are bound together within a larger spatiotemporal continuity. At the same time, the long take also betrays a view of nature as an all-​encompassing “immediation” for which the cinematic experience is a necessarily impoverished substitute, even if it is capable of approximating nature (provided montage is kept at bay). An ecology of separation naturally allows for quite a different view of things, for it suggests that cinema’s capacity for thinking ecologically lies as much in its

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ability to effect a sense of distance from nature as one of continuousness and connection. Such distance would seem particularly hard-​won for landscape as much as the cinema, if only for the ways both provide the setting for imaginary plentitude, for an operational distance whose virtual effect is one of epistemic proximity. Rebecca Sheehan rightly notes that historically the pictorial tradition of landscape tends to suggest a “conflation of subject with external world.”55 But Sheehan, herself a scholar of experimental cinema, reminds us that this understanding of landscape as a site of imaginary plentitude, while real in the sense of being a powerful and pervasive visual or psychic effect, is but one aspect of the relational dynamics made possible by landscape as an aesthetic genre. Sheehan furnishes examples from American avant-​garde cinema where landscape is deployed as an “in-​between” figure, simultaneously reflecting “a desire for total representation while issuing persistent incompleteness.”56 Following from Georg Simmel’s theory of landscape, Sheehan suggests landscape always marks both “nature’s infinitude” and “the dividing nature of the gaze,” because any given landscape is at once continuous with the world and by definition a fragment born of a limited human perceptual apparatus.57 Thus what Sheehan identifies as the “promise of total visibility inherent in wide-​angle views” is counterposed with the inevitable ways in which the frame undermines that promise, or by a combination of stasis and extreme duration that forces us to confront the limitation of our own perspective as viewers. Another instance of incompleteness for Sheehan can be seen in the “spatial gaps” opened between varying shot sizes, as between a “wide-​angle shot (generally used to represent landscape) and the analytical editing that may break that shot down: close-​ ups and medium shots whose partial representation of the wider-​angle view point to the infinitude contained within landscape’s whole.”58 For Sheehan, experimental cinema’s ecological thought lies not in how a given film creates a sense of absolute connection or separation between viewer and environment but in how it opens a generative gap between ideas and experiences like “connection” and “separation,” “internal” and “external,” “viewer” and “world.” Saïto’s films positively dwell in such gaps. We have already examined how Saïto’s films shuttle rapidly between different perspectives, between light and dark, between foreground and background. This frenzied vitality extends to the treatment of scale and distance as well. Neither Trees of Syntax nor Green Fuse, for example, establish any central visual motif of distance or size when it comes to the trees themselves. What we conventionally think of as close, medium, and long shots are seemingly given equal purchase. This is in no small part because of how Saïto’s films confuse distinctions between foreground

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and background. A given shot may read as “long” in relation to the “background” trees or perhaps “close” or “medium” in relation to those closer to the camera. But these categories are confounded before Saïto’s dramatic use of exposure and consequent interchangeability of things like negative and positive space or focus and defocus. Any effort to establish a ratio of scale and distance throughout Saïto’s films will inevitably falter before the actual experience of viewing them. Thus, while Saïto’s work corroborates Sheehan’s account of landscape as an “in-​between” in how it opens a gap between subject and world, it perhaps goes even further by thwarting any effort to affiliate a particular aspect of film grammar (e.g., editing, scale, duration) with whole or part. A long shot or long take can thus only signify “the promise of total visibility,” as Sheehan puts it when we fail to see totality or partiality as themselves relational terms. Likewise, close-​ups and medium shots are only “finite” or “partial” representations relative to a preestablished whole, in the same way that a cut can be designated an interruption only with recourse to a perceived continuity. Saïto’s cinema flouts our efforts to establish a stable grammar of relation at the level of signifier (e.g., close-​up and long shot) and the signified (tree and forest) and the interactions between them. All of this obtains not only at the level of the image but also its “other”: the cut. To create his 2015 film Engram of Returning, Saïto repurposed a collection of travel footage shot on Kodak’s now defunct 16mm film stock, Kodachrome. He rephotographed and developed much of this material by hand, subjecting it to subsequent mutation through chemical intervention, optical printing, and editing, before ultimately bringing everything together on 35mm CinemaScope.59 Though what is precisely figured in Engram is often difficult to ascertain, given the film’s numerous mediating strata, one can deduce a number of relatively discrete environments encompassing mountains, oceans, rivers, trees, hills, and fields (Figure 5.2). What is ecological about Engram, however, is less a question of its depiction of the natural world per se than the kinds of relations it produces between the images themselves. As is often the case with Saïto’s work, Engram consists of an intermittent shuttling between black leader and visual material. As such, some measure of obscurity invariably attends each image, taking flight precisely at the point where it risks crossing over into legibility. Engram’s images, and by extension its landscapes, are further imbued with a sense of restless movement, for unlike Green Fuse or Trees of Syntax, much of the footage here either involves frame changes or was shot from a moving vehicle (cars, planes, trains). Yet another crucial development that occurs between Trees of Syntax and Engram is that the interval slows down; whereas the former comprises images of a single wooded area seen in rapid bursts, the latter encompasses shots of multiple

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Figure 5.2  Still from Engram of Returning (Daïchi Saïto, 2015). Courtesy of the artist.

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landscapes that would otherwise unfold as continuous takes if not for the frequent passages of black leader into and out of which the film frequently (and more gradually) fades, as if to suggest a sleeping traveler opening their eyes only intermittently to catch brief glances of a passing landscape before falling back to sleep. In this way, Engram envisions the spectator as an itinerant passenger who is attentive to a particular image or landscape even as they are able to withdraw, take leave, let go. Ecosystems are often measured in terms of resilience, a word that, as Neyrat reminds us, implies drawing back. As such, Engram’s ecological thought may reside in how it orchestrates, through its numerous devices of abstraction and its extension of the interval, a kind of resilient interchange between the screen and the viewer. If one consequence of the Anthropocene is, as Neyrat observes, that “we no longer know how to maintain a distance, how to separate ourselves,”60 then we must devise ever-​new means of drawing back from the closed circuit of our environment, must plot novel detours around and away from it. Peter Bo Rappmund’s 2015 film Topophilia engages with landscape on precisely such terms. Like Engram, Topophilia is a kind of travelogue, having emerged out of thousands of photographs taken during the filmmaker’s trek along the eight-​hundred-​mile expanse of the Trans-​Alaska Pipeline System. These high-​definition photographs captured at intermittent speeds were later painstakingly arranged by the filmmaker using various sequencing techniques. Partly because Rappmund’s process foregrounds technological mediation so insistently, his landscapes register as the products of an unstable, almost physical reaction between observer and observed. At the same time, Topophilia suggests a highly differential, even combustible relationship between the pipeline’s infrastructure and its surrounding environment. This is not merely to suggest that the pipeline has somehow thrown off the equilibrium of the natural environment, for, if anything, it is the anthropogenic infrastructure in this instance that betrays aspirations to stasis and balance. Everywhere, Rappmund’s questing eye locates signs of division and difference, whether in how an expanse of pipe segments the landscape or in the juxtaposition of motion and stasis among various elements in the mise en scène. The pipeline itself even resembles a vast, alien infrastructure, with so many uncanny clicks, cracks, pops, and hums populating Rappmund’s soundtrack, which can never be quite stabilized as either organic or synthetic. Time also assumes a highly differential structure in Topophilia. Rather than chart a straight trajectory, time here bends and twists, expands and contracts. It even circles back on itself, for many of Rappmund’s “shots” are not time-​ lapse per se but repeated phrases of intermittently captured photographs placed alongside one another in a montage—​in other words, serial loops. All

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this temporal disorderliness extends to the film’s spatial purview as well, for while much of Topophilia is structured around the pipeline and its immediate surroundings, the film takes frequent detours, its attention repeatedly drifting to the periphery, where the pipeline’s presence is less conspicuous. Some of these brief intervals disclose microcosms, as in a sequence where the motion of plants at the margins of a wide shot seems to catch the attention of the film as it morphs into a series of dissolves between close-​ups of a miniature, vegetal world. Later, as if hypnotized by the strange and untidy movement of trees, the film takes flight again into a prolonged forest detour. These later images are uncannily still, as if to suggest a forest frozen in time. As each new shot draws us further into this wooded space, darkness gradually enshrouds the forest. A strange hum fills the soundtrack, and just before this detour proves too strange, the film takes leave, continuing along its circuitous path toward the pipeline’s terminus. If the Anthropocene is even remotely conceivable as a place, it is one where the two otherwise distinct domains of geology and humanity appear continuous and in whose twisting, imbricated movement we are caught as if in some “strange loop,” as Timothy Morton puts it.61 How to escape such a loop? The films I have explored here imagine the natural world as a site of radical difference, of separation and division. They enlist montage at once to emphasize the differential aspects of a given landscape and to posit nature itself as a differentiating medium. In this way, the function of montage, or what we might call the ecological cut, is to effect something like environmental estrangement, allowing us to separate ourselves from what we are doing, if only temporarily, and break out of this strange loop.

Coda: All That Is Cursed In an 1846 letter addressed to the editor and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, writing from Belfast during a lengthy speaking tour of the British Isles, permits himself a moment to rhapsodize about his country of birth: “In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky—​her grand old woods—​her fertile fields—​her beautiful rivers—​her mighty lakes, and star-​crowned mountains.”62 The writer’s tranquil reminiscence is short-​lived, however, for as soon as this montage of sentimentally rendered landscapes takes flight, it swiftly withers before the figure of the slave. “But my rapture is soon checked,” Douglass goes on, “when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding—​when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are

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borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.” Here, as elsewhere, Douglass offers a perspective on race in America that is at once perspicacious and profoundly distressed. This reveals two interconnected but irreconcilable visions of nature, two sides of a landscape, one being a bountiful expanse of natural splendor (rendered by and available to whites), and the other a veritable theater of cruelty animated by (Black) misery and dispossession. Douglass lays the groundwork here for a nature lyric, almost evoking the transcendentalists in his enthusiasm for the nobility and grandeur of the natural world, but what is remarkable about this passage is how he figures the inevitable interruption of this movement toward the sublime (“my rapture is soon checked”). We do not require a dissolve here to carry us into the present. We need only regard a film like Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (2019). The film opens on archival footage of a waterfall. It has been heavily modified, with large pieces of the print extracted so that the landscape itself appears fragmented. The visual track is beset further by tape marks, ink smudges, discoloration, and other forms of entropy to impart the sense of a natural space thoroughly out of balance. As the footage zooms in on the waterfall, the erstwhile chopping yields the occasional recognizable star-​like forms cut into the film print, which gradually becomes saturated with a bright red hue, further bespeaking a violent underside to this majestic landscape scene. The title of Gary’s film is a reference to a plot of land in the Giverny settlement in Normandy where Claude Monet lived and painted his most well-​ known landscapes. In a series of static frontal shots, we see a stately wall of green foliage, hedge branches swaying in the breeze, attended by the gentle hum of insects going about their business. Suddenly the booming voice of a white male announcer fills the soundtrack, and a J-​cut carries us over into black-​and-​white archival footage of a midcentury ethnographic documentary about Haiti. We see an Afro-​Caribbean woman dancing to the furious sound of drums, as the voice-​over describes resonances between these carnival dance practices and the Haitian Revolution of 1804. This shot lasts merely a few seconds before giving way to a close-​up of a fruit tree back in Giverny, even as an L-​cut carries the voice-​over commentary back into the space of the garden. After a moment, the same garden wall from before begins to reoccupy the visual field through a series of flash-​cuts. The Haiti documentary soon returns in the form of a square frame of black-​and-​white footage nested in the center of the wide digital frame as if to make a projection screen of this bright green garden wall. As before, and further advancing an abiding sense of spatial cross-​pollination, the voice-​over again slightly precedes the appearance of

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its corresponding imagery: aerial footage of the Citadelle Laferrière, erected after the successful Haitian Revolution as a defense against potential foreign incursion and built by thousands of former slaves. The voice-​over picks up with the narrator midsentence on the word “land,” heard over footage of the garden wall before the Laferrière imagery appears, at which point the narrator continues, “a brooding mass of masonry erected without concern for the abject poverty that has been the way of life for the average Haitian.” Midway through the earlier statement, Gary cuts to drone footage captured during an aerial bombardment of some anonymous patch of land. Here, a sound bridge again crosswires history, as the documentary announcer’s speech is displaced onto this disproportionate and senseless act of violent aggression. As we dwell on the aftermath of this act, the image cuts once more to Giverny even as the sonic wreckage of the drone strike persists on the soundtrack. This is followed by a series of shots depicting Gary herself walking in a grove of citrus trees. One wide shot in particular emphasizes the symmetrical and heavily manicured character of the gardens at Giverny, their straight lines and geometrical tidiness recalling the reticle of the drone’s optical targeting system. Simultaneously, an air of stately tidiness and unnerving dread fills this space as Gary moves through it. A series of jump cuts and intercuts teleport her among various points in the space, as if to suggest that she is the prisoner of some surveillant bucolic force field. Already, Gary’s film has attuned our senses to a series of underlying historical and geographical continuities that place colonization and maroonage, the garden and the plantation on the same relational map. The Giverny Document is a film concerned with the intersections of space and power. Spatial hegemony manifests here not only in the form of visual regimentation and symmetry but also as a kind of abstract vital lifeforce, which seems closer to impressionist painting or even Brakhage’s films than a heavily manicured garden. The impressionist landscape bespeaks a pervasive and interminable flux subtending natural phenomena. Brakhage’s films, too, convey such a sense of motion and change, but being even more dispossessed of a center or perspective they aim, as Michelson says, not only at a “suppression of objects, actors, and actions” but at a “radical transformation of the spatiotemporality which was their precondition: the elision of their determinant coordinates.”63 At turns in The Giverny Document, Gary borrows directly from Brakhage’s “cameraless” films—​most notably Mothlight (1963) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). The iconic footage of foliage and natural detritus taped to transparent leader gliding rapidly through the projection gate is set against short image bursts of Gary herself in Giverny and footage of Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, in the aftermath of

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his extrajudicial murder by a police officer in 2016 (Figure 5.3).64 Elsewhere, Gary superimposes over Brakhage’s footage black vertical columns of digital “leader” reminiscent of prison bars, which only furthers the sense that all of this movement is attended by a stillness coded as black, whether that of bodies like Gary’s or of the cinematic interstice itself, which is seen as an extension of the former’s suspension. Gary’s film offers the provocative suggestion that in an anti-​Black world shaped by and made for white movement, the spatiotemporal upheavals of abstraction and attendant freedoms do not extend uniformly to all bodies. Indeed, cinema’s “avant-​gardens” may be more allied with the gardens of empire or the plantation than one would like to imagine. In Gary’s work, landscape is less an invitation to aesthetic contemplation (i.e., pictorialism) or spiritual rejuvenation (i.e., the pastoral) than a means of agitating against the interwoven spatial and geographic coordinates of race, colonialism, and national identity. In this endeavor, Gary is part of a broader movement of Black artists and writers who have drawn upon a repertoire of expressive tools from the natural world to inveigh against white supremacy and its manifold forms of spatial tyranny. Such an “environmental double-​ consciousness” runs through much of Black literary and artistic tradition, from the abolitionist nature writing of Albery Whitman to the revisionist landscape photography of Ingrid Pollard.65 Perhaps nowhere is this dissident ecological imagination more conspicuous than in poetry. In the introductory remarks to her landmark collection Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Camille Dungy writes that, while “the traditional context of the nature poem in the Western intellectual canon . . . informs the prevailing views of the natural world as a place of positive collaboration, refuge, idyllic rural life, or wilderness,” Black nature writing confronts readers with a kind of antipastoral, “an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death.”66 As Dungy’s collection demonstrates, this is not an altogether pessimistic vision of the natural world, but a dialectical vision of the environment in which the domains of the natural and the human are inextricably intertwined and violently opposed. One especially pertinent manifestation of this radically unequal distribution of the American landscape lies in the historical disjunctions between the Black and white experience of the outdoors, where, as Carolyn Finney puts it, “[w]‌hiteness, as a way of knowing, becomes the way of understanding our environment.”67 Gary’s work can be seen as part of a new wave of landscape cinema emerging over the past two decades or so. Black and Indigenous artists are at the forefront of this new film discourse, which is poised to fundamentally reshape the cinematic avant-​garde’s conversations around place and the environment. These filmmakers include Christopher Harris, Kevin Jerome Everson,

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Figure 5.3  Stills from The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019). Courtesy of the artist.

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Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Zach and Adam Khalil, Karimah Ashadu, Ephraim Asili, Sky Hopinka, and Akosua Adoma Owusu. In contrast to the emphasis on duration, stillness, and meditative contemplation prevailing in much of experimental landscape cinema, works by these filmmakers are characterized by formally innovative techniques of editing, camera movement, animation, digital distortion, and sound that defamiliarize and distort the viewer’s perception of the nonhuman world, disambiguating landscape from Western aesthetic conventions—​from the picturesque and the pastoral to linear perspective itself. One of the central impulses behind this recent field of landscape cinema, and certainly one that underlies Gary’s films, is to pose the question of what constitutes a landscape in the first place, that is, of what spaces or places count, and what it means to behold them and be held by them. More broadly—​and the following chapter will elaborate on this point at greater length—​works by these filmmakers attest to the fact that experimental cinema, being at the very least minimally beholden to representational and narrative conventions, is uniquely capable of accommodating a political aesthetics of place.

Notes 1. “My work from the very beginning has always been invested in looking and listening, and I’ve always believed that to learn anything it takes time. And that means that one has to practice paying attention. . . . [M]‌y works provide that experience for an audience, where they can pay attention to things.” James Benning, quoted in AV Festival, “AV Festival 12: James Benning Interview,” YouTube, 10:14, filmed March 2012, posted April 2013, https://​ www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​1MqG​t7Ou​OxE. 2. James Benning, quoted in AV Festival, “AV Festival 12,” YouTube, https://​www.yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​1MqG​t7Ou​OxE. 3. Scott MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 19. 4. Stephanie Lam, “It’s about Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and Nature Cam Videos,” in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago De Luca and Nuno B. Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 217, emphasis mine. 5. MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience,” 19–​20. I do not take MacDonald’s statement here to be a wholesale repudiation of montage, since in his other writings he does not always favor extended duration. For instance, in his groundbreaking study The Garden in the Machine, MacDonald looks at works by filmmakers known for their liberal use of cutting, such as Stan Brakhage, Rose Lowder, and Marie Menken. See Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). MacDonald characterizes Menken’s films as a “retinal collage” wherein “images seem to pile onto the retinas, creating evanescent collages” (72), and posits an analogy between Lowder’s use of “limited space” or “minimal cinematic duration” (84–​ 86) and sustainable agricultural practices.

The Ecological Cut  141 6. James Benning in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 5:232 7. For an alternative reading of the ecological implications of Benning’s use of the long take, see Allison Butler, “13 Ways of Looking at a Lake,” in The Long Take: Critical Approaches, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 177–​192. 8. Alan Wallach, “Between Subject and Object,” in Landscape Theory, ed. Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 317. I was made aware of the connection between these early actualities and western landscape tradition by Charles Musser’s article, “A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 159–​180. 9. Iris Cahn, “The Changing Landscape of Modernity: Early Film and America’s ‘Great Picture’ Tradition (with an Appendix of North American Landscape Films in the Paper Print Collection of the Library of Congress),” Wide Angle 18, no. 3 (July 1996): 85. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico-​ World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 281. 11. I do not take Kracauer’s point here as bemoaning the loss of some erstwhile “authentic nature” or as denouncing cinematic representation wholesale as an extension of modern man’s will to natural domination. As Jennifer Fay has compellingly argued, Kracauer saw cinema as an “antihumanist” technology that could, “by defamiliarizing the world, enable us to experience it outside of ourselves.” Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 19. By Fay’s reading, cinema, even in its seemingly most extreme allegiance to industrial production, necessarily effects a rupture between signifier and signified, defamiliarizes nature by virtue of being produced by mechanical and synthetic means, making it “inhospitable,” in Fay’s intriguing terminology, thereby confronting us with the reality of a planet unsuited to human interests. Still, the obvious rejoinder to this idea is that it assumes a spectator already primed for productive alienation in the face of these anthropogenic constructs—​one for whom these mechanically or electronically generated landscapes have not become perfectly natural. 12. Frederick Brady Fletcher, “Experimental Ecocinema: Toward an Image of Ecology, 1950–​ Present” (PhD diss., New York University, 2019), 108. 13. Annette Michelson, “‘Where Is Your Rupture?’ Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” October 56 (Spring 1991): 46. 14. Laszlo Moholy-​Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 17, cited in Michelson, “ ‘Where Is Your Rupture?,’ ” 44. 15. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (Yonkers, NY: The Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946), 13. 16. Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision,” Film Culture, no. 30 (1963), unpaginated. 17. Michelson, “ ‘Where Is Your Rupture?,’ ” 46. 18. P. Adams Sitney, “Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Camera,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119. Sitney names a handful of historical factors as contributing to this movement, including the development of increasingly inexpensive and lightweight recording technology, a new generation of viewers primed for an aesthetic appreciation of film, and, perhaps most interesting, an “incipient crisis in the

142  Between Images world of painting [that] encouraged painters to try their hands at cinema and students in art school to consider the option of filmmaking” (119). 19. Scott MacDonald, Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967–​1977 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015), 204. 20. André Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:48. 21. Lucien Taylor, “Iconophobia,” Transition 69 (1996): 75–​76, emphasis mine. 22. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 130. 23. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 99–​100. 24. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000), 17–​18. 25. The term “ecosystem” refers to a community of living organisms connected to each other and their environment through the distribution of energy and nutrients. The British ecologist Arthur Tansley first used the term in the 1930s to describe what he characterized as a “whole system” that includes “not only the organism-​complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment.” Arthur Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (July 1935): 299. 26. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Lives: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (New York: Random House, 2021), 18. 27. Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2. 28. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 72. 29. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 81. 30. Christopher Uhl, Developing Ecological Consciousness: The End of Separation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), x–​xi, 206. 31. Simon West, L. Jamila Haider, Sanna Stålhammer, and Stephen Woroniecki, “A Relational Turn for Sustainability Science? Relational Thinking, Leverage Points and Transformations,” Ecosystems and People 16, no. 1 (2020): 305. 32. West et al., “A Relational Turn for Sustainability Science?,” 305, emphasis mine. 33. Laura J. Martin, “Proving Grounds: Ecological Fieldwork in the Pacific and the Materialization of Ecosystems,” Environmental History 23 (July 2018): 569. 34. Eisenstein writes, “Thus montage counterpoint as a form seems to correspond to that fascinating stage of the evolution of consciousness, when both preceding stages have been overcome, and the universe, dissected by analyses, is recreated once again into a single whole, revives by means of the connections and interactions of separate parts, and appears as an excited perception of the fullness of the world perceived synthetically.” Sergei M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 286–​287. 35. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 27. 36. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 216. 37. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 391. 38. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 389. 39. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Seagull, 1986), 3–​4.

The Ecological Cut  143 40. Eisenstein writes, “Strictly speaking, from the purely plastic aspect of film, any general surface of each shot is a distinct tonal or color ‘landscape’—​not because of what it represents but because of the emotional feeling the shot must bear, which itself is perceived as a whole within the consecutive course of the montage pieces” (Nonindifferent Nature, 391). 41. Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (New York: Routledge, 1989), 6. 42. Malcolm LeGrice, “Kurt Kren’s films,” Studio International, film issue (November 1975): 187, quoted in Gidal, Materialist Film, 10. 43. Mubarak Ali, “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Some Notes on Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis,” Mubi Notebook, June 14, 2010, https://​mubi.com/​noteb​ook/​posts/​eve​ryth​ ing-​that-​rises-​must-​conve​rge-​some-​notes-​on-​trees-​of-​syn​tax-​lea​ves-​of-​axis. 44. Here I agree with Tony Pipolo, who aptly labels Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis a “furiously condensed lesson in the passage from naturalism to modernism.” He goes on to observe that “the central tree is as much subject as ground, fixing our gaze at an axis to accommodate the hundreds (thousands?) of cuts, overlaps, and rest stops that reconfigure the forest of colors and foliage that seems to spring from and bear upon it as so many permutations of phrases in a poem.” Tony Pipolo, “Film Cool,” Artforum online film column, December 6, 2016, https://​www.artfo​rum.com/​film/​tony-​pip​olo-​on-​dai​chi-​saito-​65147. 45. Daïchi Saïto, Moving the Sleeping Images of Things towards the Light (Montreal: Les éditions Le Laps, 2013), 63. 46. James Benning in Danni Zuvela, “Talking about Seeing: A Conversation with James Benning,” Senses of Cinema 33 (October 2004). https://​www.sen​seso​fcin​ema.com/​2004/​ the-​suspen​ded-​narrat​ive/​james_​benn​ing/​. 47. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 391. 48. William H. Drury and Ian C. T. Nisbet, “Succession,” Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 54 (July 1973): 360 49. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 391. 50. Frédéric Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, trans. Drew S. Burke (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 12. 51. Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, 9. 52. Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, 14–​15. 53. Frédéric Neyrat, “Elements for an Ecology of Separation,” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl and James Burton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 121. 54. Neyrat, “Elements for an Ecology of Separation,” 121. 55. Rebecca Sheehan, American Avant-​ Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-​ between (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 87. 56. Sheehan, American Avant-​Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-​between, 88. 57. Sheehan, American Avant-​Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-​between, 89. 58. Sheehan, American Avant-​Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-​between, 92. 59. André Habib, “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: Engram of Returning,” Found Footage Magazine 2 (March 2016): 81–​83. 60. Neyrat, “Elements for an Ecology of Separation,” 101. 61. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6. 62. Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, January 1, 1846, in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Phillip Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 1:125.

144  Between Images 63. Michelson, “ ‘Where Is Your Rupture?,’ ” 60. 64. For an excellent discussion of Gary’s citation of and contention with Brakhage’s work to which my own analysis owes a debt, see Michael Sicinski, “Garden against the Machine: Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document,” Cinema Scope 81 (December 2019), https://​cin​ema-​scope.com/​featu​res/​gar​den-​agai​nst-​the-​mach​ine-​jato​via-​garys-​the-​give​ rny-​docum​ent/​. 65. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: Environmentalism and the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 245. 66. Camille Dungy, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), xxi. 67. Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 3.

6 Space Race Traditional geographies did, and arguably still do, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays “in place.” —​Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds The way in which a cut can disrupt or cohere our conscious experience of time and space never ceases to enthrall me. —​Cauleen Smith, 2013 interview

The centerpiece of Cauleen Smith’s major 2019 exhibition at MASS MoCA, We Already Have What We Need, was a moving-​image installation unlike any I had ever encountered (Figure 6.1).1 A long, cavernous main hall was divided by a series of tall projection screens extending some twenty-​two feet from floor to rafters, where they gave way to a row of ten clerestory windows treated with filters of varying colors, bathing the space in prismatic light. The screens were hoisted with heavy-​duty nautical ropes pivoting at the loft and held down by oversize, checkered laundry bags filled with sand. The screens served at once to partition the gallery space and as two-​channel projection surfaces, the lower quadrant of a given screen host to 35mm slide projections of photographs taken of earth from outer space, and on the upper, a live broadcast of one of five distinct scenes originating from miniature cameras arranged at ground level throughout the gallery. The cameras were mounted on small light stands with thick black wires extending from their slight bodies into a meshwork of ropes and cables above, and each stood before one of five long tables bearing a distinct ensemble of objects of obscure provenance (books, potted plants, Polaroids, figurines). At the opposite end of each table were LCD screens playing video loops depicting a variety of settings (a coral reef, a forest, a city street), furnishing what were in effect rear projections for the miniature theaters of each table. The sounds of wind, chirping birds, and the distant rumblings of a storm filled the atmosphere. Between Images. Ryan Conrath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197612293.003.0006

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Figure 6.1  Cauleen Smith, Every Sunrise and Every Sunset All at Once, in the exhibition We Already Have What We Need, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2019. Photo by author.

It is hardly possible for a written account to do justice to the sensory and spatial multitudes of Smith’s grandly ambitious installation. Wires and ropes were so many vectors pulling our eyes and bodies elsewhere from any given point in space. (Smith wasted virtually none of the hall’s horizontal or vertical expanse.) Tables, screens, and the spaces between them provided the architecture for such improbable shifts in scale as between a gathering of African figurines, a forest landscape, and the broader solar system. Even the screens with their breathtaking elevation evoked the sails of a ship, as if we had found ourselves on the deck of some wayward maritime vessel. Moving through that space felt like being pulled into the gravitational field of a mysterious cosmic body, with all its aspects conspiring to sustain a motion devoid of a center, origin, or destination. It was as if everything rested on this assemblage not being fixed, on its not being situated in a particular time and place, and that, since any exhibition environment tends toward the properties of a discrete setting, these processes be forestalled. Smith’s installation was an errant machine hell-​bent on repelling the seemingly inevitable workings of situatedness. In this way, it was but one manifestation

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of a problematic that has animated her practice for years, which has to do with the troubled and often obscure interplay between history, identity, and place. This problematic is perhaps best summed up in Smith’s video Triangle Trade (2017), made in collaboration with Camille Turner and Jérôme Havre, wherein a character wonders aloud, “Am I connected to a territory? Today, the answer is unimportant. I belong to this world. Do we owe a debt, we who are the creditors of a deportation?”2 These lines furnish an especially direct expression of how Smith’s discourse has sought to undermine the processes whereby the self becomes tied up with a particular location. The physical and psychic shaping of geography has always run parallel to the project of individual and collective self-​ fashioning, from the seemingly innocuous form of a garden to the conspicuous force of a border wall. Smith’s work reminds us that such endeavors are necessarily violent and exclusionary, and in the U.S. context have occurred at grave expense to Black and Indigenous people. Here the plantation, the reservation, the ghetto, and the prison are points on a spatiotemporal continuum of racial abjection vouchsafing the ongoing filiation of whiteness to the American landscape. Whatever claims to place or mobility one might make for Smith’s films would thus need to be seen amid the violent, world-​making prohibitions (at once historical and extant) that have rendered precarious virtually all forms of movement and emplacement on the part of Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. landscape. Ultimately, Smith’s work is less interested in whether that landscape may be redeemed or somehow made amenable to liberation than in how it may be dismantled, and what comes after. It is against this backdrop that this chapter frames Smith’s practice as a novel and ongoing elaboration of the limits and possibilities of cinematic space, place, and movement. Attending to her work from this vantage allows us to account for the productive frictions between, on one hand, the nation’s carceral landscape and its manifold means of immobilizing and capturing bodies coded as other, and on the other hand, the imaginative capacity of cinema to furnish alternative spatial configurations to mobilize and sustain such bodies. To this end, I trace in Smith’s work an aesthetics and politics of errantry that favors radically divergent forms of movement and spatial relation. Borrowing the term from Martinican poet and critic Édouard Glissant and drawing more broadly on his and other key thinkers’ elaborations of the spatial dynamics of colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives, I frame Smith’s errantry both as a formal and material operation as well as a political one grounded in a critique of place and movement as they are normatively construed. Smith’s work inveighs against the spatial tyrannies of white supremacy by resituating cinema’s language and technologies within the psychic, social, and historical milieu of the African diaspora and its attendant aporias.

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Notwithstanding the diverse range of approaches and concerns across Smith’s films, each in its own way interrogates the production of space and place from the dislocated positionality of Blackness. To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that Smith deploys Blackness as some quasi-​mystical antidote to traditional geographies, but more precisely that her work seizes upon what Katherine McKittrick has termed “the dilemma of black placelessness” at once to explain the violent erasures structuring traditional geographies, to redress that violence (however provisionally or partially) through acts of historical recovery and reconstruction, and to imagine an altogether different praxis of place.3 More than an appeal to inclusion within the prescribed coordinates of a given social order, such a spatial analytic is an inherently difficult and disorderly business, for it seeks to locate that which is without place. To again invoke McKittrick, it amounts to a “placing of placelessness” itself, or to “re-​ placing that which was/​is too subhuman, or too irrelevant, or too terrible, to be formally geographic or charted in any way.”4 I cast errantry in Smith’s cinema as a mode of expression keenly attuned to the overlapping histories of racialization and place making, born of the insight that Blackness cannot (and indeed should not) be incorporated within the normative spatial coordinates of dominant institutional, geographic, and social paradigms. Such a Black spatial analytic, as opposed to a spatial analytic of Blackness, does not seek to inscribe Blackness into the preexisting places of the world. Indeed, errantry seeks meaning, identity, and solidarity not in particular places but rather in their accumulation and continuity, or more precisely in the spaces between them. In short, what underlies Smith’s project is precisely the kind of fundamental reconceptualization of cinematic space necessary for a rigorous account of Black placelessness not only as an effect of white supremacy but also as an indispensable means of critiquing it, and finally as a mandate to think place otherwise. Finally, a word about perspective and framing. The films I examine here comprise only a small sampling of the substantial body of work that Smith has built over the past few decades. I center these works because I find that collectively they convey a sense of the sheer range of forms by which errantry is expressed in Smith’s work. Just as important, I have chosen works that showcase Smith’s deeply involved practice around particular representational techniques, from her unorthodox uses of conventionally cinematic devices such as chroma keying and montage to her repurposing of flag semaphores as a communications technology. By attending closely to her engagement with these and other technologies, I hope to show that errantry registers in Smith’s work not simply at a theoretical or conceptual level but decidedly also at the level of practice. I invite the reader to consider errantry broadly as a relational

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praxis animated by, and ultimately seeking to transcend, the disjunctures of race and place.

Errantry and Black Spatiality The more time I spend with Smith’s films, the less I feel I am on solid ground. This sensation of groundlessness reflects a basic way in which Smith’s films never seem to stay put, as if their very reason for being (both individually and together) were to repel any effort to fix them in place or, perhaps worse, to recognize them as innate settings for some aspect of Black life. In this respect, Smith’s work may be seen alongside a current of Black thought that has endeavored to critique the efforts of liberal humanist discourse to enclose Blackness. So out of place is this mode of thinking that it bedevils the very premise that Blackness constitutes a “discursive location” within the landscape of liberal humanist discourse at all.5 Hortense Spillers, a foremost figure of this dissident practice, attests to the “interstitial spaces” occupied by Black people, where “you fall between everyone who has a name, a category, a sponsor, an agenda.”6 For Spillers, Blackness is marked not by a particular space and time but by a movement of falling through the interstices of representational structures. In the spatiotemporal order extending from the abyssal event of the Middle Passage to the present, to be Black is to be socially dislocated, confronted at every turn by a “landscape of prohibitions.”7 Frank Wilderson ventures perhaps further in his assertion that Black life exists outside relationality altogether. In Wilderson’s analysis, the white-​Black relational dynamic bespeaks a structural antagonism, as opposed to a conflict, at the heart of civil society.8 Black suffering by extension is ontological because it cannot be resolved by means of civil discourse or legislative reform. The life of the slave is no life at all, but a social death that bears suffering without analogy, and which is constituted by “naked (or gratuitous) violence, general dishonor, and natal alienation.”9 In no small part due to the generative, structuring nature of social death, Wilderson finds it pervading virtually all aspects of Black life today.10 One of Wilderson’s claims that is especially noteworthy for our purposes is that Blackness exists “outside of relationality.”11 For Wilderson, this nonrelational or “anti-​human” nature (in the sense of negatively defining what it means to be human in the first place) of the slave has consequences not only for Black people vis-​à-​vis civil society but for the movement of Blackness more abstractly (or literally, depending on one’s perspective) within and across space and time. Wilderson writes, “[S]‌ocial death bars the Slave from access to narrative at the level of temporality; but it also

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does so at the level of spatiality. . . . [J]ust as there is no time for the Slave, there is also no place of the Slave.”12 For Wilderson, it is because the condition of the slave is indissoluble from that of Blackness that Black people are barred from assuming human coordinates within extant political and narrative systems. This in turn makes the “temporal and spatial logic of the entity (a character or persona in a narrative) and of setting untenable, impossible to conceive (as in birth) and/​or conceive of (as in assume any coherence).”13 Building upon the interventions of Spillers, Wilderson, and others, Tiffany Lethabo King posits “Black spatiality” as that which lies “outside of (ejected from living within) human space” but which is also “necessary (in its negation) for the production of human places.”14 If Blackness at once enables the spatial coherence of civil society and is exterior to it, Black movement would seem both a precarious and dissident thing. As we will see, Glissant suggests precisely such a dual conception of movement with the concept of errantry. Glissant’s philosophical project may be regarded as the articulation of a global, even cosmic interconnectedness among people and places while avoiding the pitfalls of a totalizing universalism, passive relativism, or fixation on negativity. In this way, his aim is to think difference as a concrete and inexhaustible source of mutual becoming, or what he calls relation. Glissant deploys relation against the prevailing notion of subjectivity in the West as a coherent and selfsame project across the discontinuities of time and space, where difference is neutralized in favor of linearity and totality. Relation takes numerous forms in Glissant’s poetics, but in terms of movement it is overrepresented as errantry (errance). Whereas Glissant aligns the totalitarian impulse of territorial expansion and colonial domination with a movement so linear as to be “arrow-​like,” errantry assumes a circular form. This “circular nomadism” does not work toward closure and is the very antithesis of plotting and trajectory, for its sole directive is to enter into a genuine relation with the other instead of overcoming otherness through conquest or comprehension. “One who is errant,” says Glissant, “strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this.”15 Even as errantry unfolds in view of some notion of the absolute or an experience of wholeness, it nevertheless rests on the utter contingency of encounters with obscure singularities, namely people, cultures, and places in the full consequence of their difference. Neither seeking to enclose nor itself susceptible to enclosure, errantry’s quest for meaningful connections to human and nonhuman agents renounces filiation as a means of doing so, for it has no origin or end in any given cultural or geographic situation. Errantry occurs not in or toward people and places, but between them. One could reasonably wonder what makes errantry any different from, say, exile in its most traumatic and inoperative sense, or even aimless wandering.

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Or for that matter, how does errantry avoid rehearsing or even (re)mystifying the wayward voyage of the conqueror? These are precisely the questions Glissant anticipates when he contends that “in contrast to arrowlike nomadism (discovery or conquest), in contrast to the situation of exile, errantry gives-​on-​and with the negation of every pole and every metropolis.”16 Errantry does not merely recast the totalitarian impulse of the conquering voyage or the violent uprooting of exile because its innermost movement cannot be reconciled with territorial thinking or any notion of identity as somehow contiguous with a given place. (Glissant calls this “root thinking.”) It is only next to concepts like intentional trajectories, center and periphery, and immanent belonging that errantry appears as aimless wandering. Betsy Wing aptly points out, “In errantry one knows at every moment where one is—​at every moment in relation to the other.”17 This copresence of a non-​teleological contingency on the one hand and a continuity (one could even say identity) on the other is perhaps what most clearly distinguishes errantry from the insurgent countermovement of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomatic thought (e.g., “lines of flight”) or even that of négritude, for, as Glissant attests, errantry “does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin.”18 Here, it is important to keep in mind that Glissant finds errantry in its most advanced form among people whose connection to the land is both immediate and visceral because they have shaped it with their labor, but also highly tenuous because they have been historically barred from forming substantive material and spiritual claims over it. Importantly, such a situation does not come about accidentally but is the outcome of a set of historical processes that impel a community to reckon with a history of violence inflicted upon land and people, wresting memory and imagination from the traumatic shards of history. Glissant writes: The consequences of European expansion . . . [are] precisely what forms the basis for a new relationship with the land: not the absolute ontological possession regarded as sacred but the complicity of relation. Those who have endured the land’s constraint, who are perhaps mistrustful of it, who have perhaps attempted to escape it to forget their slavery, have also begun to foster these new connections with it, in which the sacred intolerance of the root, with its sectarian exclusiveness, has no longer any share.19

As this passage makes clear, the shift from what Glissant calls “root identity” to “relation identity” is the function of a displaced and culturally alienated people’s tenuous connection to a given place. This unstable dynamic explains

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why errantry as “poetics” cannot be achieved through conventional expressive modes, for, as Glissant insists, the “misery” of the land is not merely self-​evident or transparent but “contains a historical dimension” for which “realism alone cannot account.”20 This notion that the land could be regarded as a kind of mutable text most acutely by those historically barred from it is explored at length in Smith’s short video Remote Viewing (2009). The idea for Remote Viewing came from a public radio story concerning an event that took place in Arkansas in the mid-​1950s, orally recounted by the Revered James Seawood, who was a boy of nine at the time.21 Faced with a federal mandate to integrate its schools, the town of Sheridan conspired to forcibly remove its Black population. Seawood and his mother, who was a teacher in the town’s lone Black school, ultimately left as well, but not before witnessing a bulldozer dig a giant hole and bury their schoolhouse. Regardless of the historical veracity of Seawood’s account, the image of a buried Black school has the basic power of elaborating the spatial hydraulics of racial abjection, whereby Black people are subjected to a radical contingency of space, deferred infinitely to an elsewhere (recall Spillers’s “falling”). In the 1950s, this often took the form of entire Black populations being exiled, as in the Sheridan case or the infamous example of Prince Edward County, Virginia, where leaders opted to defund their public schools rather than integrate them. Today, while racial abjection assumes such novel forms as district gerrymandering or the rhetorical gymnastics of white parents who repudiate busing as a “transportation” issue, its basic effects have hardly changed. The spectacular failure of desegregation in the United States bespeaks a prevailing conception of Blackness as a threat to the structural integrity of civil society, and this is no less true of the idea of a school itself. Seawood’s story is a reminder that success in the U.S. public education system is overwhelmingly aligned with whiteness, and that every exemplary school has a buried “Negro schoolhouse” as its foundation. Remote Viewing reimagines Seawood’s account less in narrative terms than in almost strictly audiovisual ones. In a wide shot we see a life-​size re-​creation of the schoolhouse situated in a desert landscape and framed by a wall of chroma-​keying fabric held up by scaffolding in the proximate background—​ effectively a giant green screen. A bulldozer enters the scene and proceeds to excavate the earth in front of the building. In the remaining fourteen minutes, a twenty-​foot-​deep hole is dug, the schoolhouse is pushed in, and earth is poured over it and flattened (Figure 6.2). Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Smith’s video is also most pertinent for the purposes of this discussion, namely, the fact of the green screen itself, which is conspicuous throughout Remote Viewing but strangely nonfunctional, almost unremarked upon.

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Figure 6.2  Stills from Cauleen Smith, Remote Viewing, 2009. HD video, sound, 15:25 min. Courtesy of the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; and Morán Morán, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

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The whole point of incorporating a green screen is that it allows for chroma-​ keying, a common postproduction technique used to layer two or more images into a single composite shot. Staging a scene before a green screen of course makes it possible to displace that content onto virtually any background. More broadly, however, chroma-​ keying enables a theoretically infinite number of configurations among otherwise distinct images within a given shot. This fundamentally loosens up the spatial dynamics of the frame, making for a basic interchangeability between character and setting, between figure and landscape, so that bodies may be moved from their “original” surroundings to any location. In a sense, a green screen provides an intuitive if manifestly inadequate spatial metaphor for the psychic and material economies of the plantation system and its afterlives. In her well-​known account of fungibility, Saidiya Hartman suggests that the captive slave’s value lies not in their labor power but in the “replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity,” such that their very body becomes “an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.”22 As Hartman’s study powerfully attests, a sentient being whose body is operationalized as fungible—​inexhaustibly malleable, exchangeable, modular—​is barred not only from obtaining the rights of civil society but from the very spatiotemporal coordinates preconditioning the subject’s social coherence in the first place. On one level, Remote Viewing suggests the green screen as a spatial figure of that economy of abjection where Black bodies are moved arbitrarily along the social, material, and psychic coordinates of the relational map of white culture. But if Remote Viewing casts the green screen under a critical light as a figure of white (spatial) power, it is because Smith does not engage the technology’s normative function as a postproduction compositing tool. Having framed the action with keying fabric, Smith could have easily extracted the schoolhouse from the landscape (or vice versa) with relatively basic postproduction software. Rather than seize upon this plasticity of figure and ground, Smith (re)casts the green screen simultaneously as a constituent element of the mise en scène and as a visual symbol of the psychic and symbolic processes that render Black bodies and places fungible. Consider the closing image of the video: a wide shot of the solitary green screen, resembling some monument in the desert landscape. To reiterate: a green screen is not merely a technological assemblage enabling certain visual effects, but the infrastructure of an arbitrarily expansive field of figure-​ground relations. In this way, a green screen reflects the basic human capacity to imagine one’s body, or those of others, in any number of spatial situations. Seen in this way, we could say that the final image with which Smith’s film leaves us is essentially that of place itself.

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By simply repurposing the green screen as a framing device for this theater of racial abjection, Remote Viewing confronts viewers with the violence underlying virtually any project of place making. The critical impulse of Smith’s film thus hinges on an invitation to regard space not only horizontally but (as it were) vertically, echoing Jared Sexton’s assertion that “Black life is not lived in the world” but rather “underground, in outer space.”23 This radically peripheral or interstitial positionality of Blackness in turn bears out in the way Remote Viewing depicts people, and this is where we find errantry more explicitly operative. The two principal actors portrayed in Smith’s video, presumably stand-​ ins for the young Seawood and his mother, are first seen together, blurry and backgrounded by vegetation, standing beside a mound of excavated earth, and framed from behind by a vertical keying wall. The staging and lensing here already suggest an air of fungibility, a pervading threat to any coherence of character, setting, and action, as if the two could be erased or displaced at any moment. In a subsequent (in-​focus) medium shot, we see the boy extract a magnifying glass from his pocket and bring it to his eye, gazing into the camera—​a gesture that quickly undermines the idea that he is merely a passive witness to this event of burial. At one point, the woman and the boy move together along various points in the landscape, their facial expressions and comportment bespeaking neither anger nor fear as they take stock of this violent incision into the earth from multiple angles. Later, we see the woman walking along the edges of the hole as though she were committing its shape and volume to some psychic map. Meanwhile, the boy, having found a perch atop a mound of excavated earth, gazes downward into the abyss. The last time we see him is at the end of an upward tilt of the camera from the hole’s interior, framed precariously between the upper edge of the frame and the chasm below. This upward tilt itself seems to risk reinforcing the course of falling charted by this violent act of burial in the first place. The boy stands still and meets the camera’s gaze for a beat, then turns around and takes his leave toward the upper edge of the unmoving frame. We are made to watch, to register this act of self-​removal as he gradually departs the space, becoming smaller in the frame as he straddles its edge. Throughout Remote Viewing, the mechanics of fungibility, which beyond the green screen itself manifest as excavation, burial, and stillness, are countered by moments of errant movement, detection, and flight. Smith mobilizes the Seawood figures within the landscape of this nonplace not only to enliven it but also to critique the means by which (white) space is stabilized through the erasure of Black bodies and places. The spatial mechanics of fungibility take on further historical and metaphysical implications in Smith’s film Egungun: Ancestors Can’t Find Me (2017).

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The sole figure in the piece is an incorporeal entity clad in shells and seaweed, wandering through an island landscape. Throughout, Smith subjects the film’s visual field to effects of fragmentation (e.g., jump cuts), distortion (such as sudden shifts in color grading and visual noise), and repetition to endow both the figure and the landscape with an elusive, tenuous quality. At one point, we see the creature emerge from the ocean and pick up a long ax as if embarking upon some unknown mission. As the entity moves toward land, static televisual noise enters the sound and image tracks, followed by a series of disorienting close-​ups of watery surfaces, the creature barely distinguishable below as an abstract, kaleidoscopic form. Gestures and movements such as these recur throughout the film without added clarity as to their meaning or purpose. While Smith inserts certain visual cues to give viewers the impression that something of narrative consequence is happening, the film ultimately suggests little beyond an arbitrary series of disjointed movements set on a loop, as if something were being tested but not working, as if the alchemy of character and setting were off. What is it precisely that falters? Consider the title of Smith’s film: a nod to the elaborate masquerades produced by the Yoruba of West Africa in ancestral reverence and invocation. This could support a reading of Egungun as itself a ritual act meant to bridge the spatiotemporal divides among Yoruba ancestors and their descendants. But the subtitle, Ancestors Can’t Find Me, complicates such a reading by positing an obstruction in the metaphysical relay between points on a genealogical map. “On the slave ship,” Glissant writes, “we lost our languages, our gods, all familiar objects, songs, everything. We lost everything. All we had left was traces.”24 Here is an inventory of loss resulting from the historical abyss of the Middle Passage—​one that dispossesses an entire population of its cosmology and, by extension, a sense of narrative continuity across time and space. By besieging the act of ancestral invocation with such an array of audiovisual abstractions, Egungun gives expression to the inevitable failure of any attempt to resolve the spatiotemporal caesura of the Atlantic. We could take such a pessimistic reading even further by pointing out the ways in which Egungun effects a series of slippages between human and natural domains. This occurs first through the figure of the ancestor, which, while coded in particular ways as Black and human, is a hybrid assemblage of various synthetic fibers, marine exoskeletons, and macroalgae. Human and natural registers are also mixed by the film’s jagged editing, which moves rapidly between images of the creature situated on the land and somewhat precariously embedded within its layers of water, vegetation, and soil. This turbulent movement between appearance and disappearance, between emplacement within and dissolution into the

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landscape, culminates in yet another act of burial, when the creature digs a hole and covers itself with earth. We should first acknowledge that the insistence with which Egungun blurs the borders between human and natural domains to some extent risks rehearsing a settler-​colonialist perceptual paradigm that, as King characterizes it, rests upon the imaginative capacity to see Black flesh as “part of the vegetation and the abstract space of terra nullius.”25 Confusing human and natural boundaries in this way divests beings of their social and historical coordinates, much as it severs a given place from its ecological context, thereby freeing up both human and nonhuman matter as raw, mutable material for consumption and exchange. From this perspective, it is ironically by means of the dynamic, swirling interplay between body and landscape that Egungun may be said to reproduce the violence of fungibility, acting as a cautionary lure into an optical prehistory of colonial violence and enslavement. Nevertheless, if I dwell at all on the perils of blurring human and nonhuman domains, it is not to cast Egungun as a violent or wholly pessimistic work but rather to bring its politics into sharper relief. Egungun was shot on Captiva Island off the southwest coast of Florida, which was inhabited by the Calusa Indians when the first Spanish explorers arrived there in the early sixteenth century. In the years that followed, the Calusa were besieged by disease carried to the continent by European colonists and invasions by warring tribes armed by the British, and some were even captured and sold into slavery.26 When the British acquired Florida in 1763, the few remaining Calusa are thought to have left for Cuba. Given the Calusa’s well-​documented practice of using shells for tools and ornamentation, it would be reasonable to read the shell-​adorned figure in Egungun as a hybrid assemblage of Calusan and Yoruban signifiers.27 One can find throughout Smith’s work a deep engagement with historical Indigenous relationships to the natural environment as a way of thinking through a whole ensemble of questions around place, identity, and belonging. Noting the tendency of English words to divide the world into (and distinguish between) people, places, and things, Smith alludes to those Anishinaabe languages of North America that confer the status of being onto a diverse range of matter: So water is a being, trees are beings, grasses are referred to as a being. Can you imagine our country if instead of eradicating this world view, we had studied it, incorporated it, and embraced it? Can you imagine? So that’s what I’m thinking about now. Imagining a country in which we are able to recognize the consciousness and life-​force of everything around you, people, places, things all alive and all worthy of respect and consideration and love.28

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Indeed, if we adjust our perspective slightly here, we could read the techniques of abstraction and nonlinearity in Egungun less as fixing human and nonhuman matter as fungible, and more as endowing both with the animacy of being. In this way, the blurring effected by Smith’s film, whether between indigeneity and Blackness or figure and landscape, appear less as acts of violent abstraction, a function of colonial optics, than as occasions for relation. Such a counteroptics would be in keeping with what Glissant refers to as “the right to opacity,” a basic sense of difference or otherness that propels errantry and sustains the thought of relation in the first place. In this sense, Glissant seems keen on forestalling a strictly dialectical conception of relation, urging readers to “give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures,” and thereby jettisoning the “obsolete duality” of “self ” and “other.”29 For Glissant, opacity’s mandate is a deferral at once to the totality of beings as well as to the fundamental singularity and obscurity granted to each being across the “weave” of relation. The right to opacity in Glissant’s thought applies not only to human agents but to the nonhuman domain as well. This includes the land itself. Take the following passage from one of his long discussions of Creole folktales: “The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from the land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character.”30 Note the almost animistic tenor to this account of landscape as it moves from passive, raw background material to agent in the fore. This is the product not of magical thinking but of a difficult and in some ways mutual history of oppression, of being rendered fungible, between a community and the natural environment. Elsewhere, Glissant notes the tendency of these stories to treat landscape not as a fixed locale or even set of geographic features but as “succeeding spaces through which one journeys,” since, the author insists, “landscape of the folktale is not meant to be inhabited” but to be regarded as “a place you pass through, it is not yet a country.”31 As elsewhere, here we find Glissant immersed in the thicket of relation, having set about the difficult task of imagining a form of being between people and places that not only resists claims to possession or ownership but in its very movement repels the lure of filiation. The arduousness and the patience required of such imaginative labor bears out in Smith’s own statements about the aporias of belonging and place, as when regarding her avatar’s volcanic domicile in Triangle Trade she suggests, with characteristic humor, “Really, the only place you can arrive at and settle in without doing harm is at a lava berg.”32 How is one to be in place but without power? How can a particular place be a site of gathering or community without perpetuating racial abjection, mystifying colonial violence, or

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even creating new filiations between identity and land? These are some of the questions Smith confronts us with, powerfully, and without resolving them. In the MASS MoCA exhibition, Egungun was set on a looped projection facing four chairs created by the artist from reclaimed polyester cord and artificial hair—​strange materials constituting strange seating for a whole cast of strangers who would find themselves in that projection space. This configuration, appropriately titled Quorum (2019), was in turn backlit by a series of LEE filters of various colors affixed to individual panes of glass comprising the room’s grand postindustrial windows. Titled Weather (2019), this assemblage cast the space in a bath of color depending on meteorological factors, leveraging the movement of the earth around the sun in service to the unknown and unplanned, just as Quorum seized upon the errant movement of bodies through the gallery in view of some emergent, collective deliberation around Egungun. These movements occurring at human, planetary, and even cosmological levels together furnished an ensemble of productive contingencies, which in turn made for an ever-​changing setting capable of sustaining the errant movement of Egungun. In the two case studies we have examined so far in this chapter, mobility assumes a tenuous and even precarious form. This is because both films are at once spatially constrained and geographically nonspecific, even abstract. Moreover, both films suggest a combustive and even violent dynamic between the bodies that populate them and a larger spatial order that constrains movement and threatens enclosure. We have also seen the other side of errantry in certain instances, whether in the steady peripatetic witness of the Seawood figures, the immanent ambiguity of the ancestor as a figure of captivity and fugitivity, Blackness and indigeneity, and even in the disorderly, contingent field of movement orchestrated in the gallery exhibition of Egungun. All of this is to say that we have so far remained in an early stage or nascent form of errantry. In Smith’s films Pilgrim (2017) and Sojourner (2018), discussed below, errantry manifests in a more advanced and even exultant form.

The Character of Setting During the end credits in Pilgrim, Smith jettisons the customary attribution of roles to performers and instead acknowledges the contributions of three distinct places or “Locations in Order of Appearance,” including a Vedantic center in California, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, and the onetime site of a Shaker community in upstate New York. Pilgrim is a film acutely focused on places and the relations between them. However, roughly its first half

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holds space for a single setting: Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura, California. For nearly three decades, this was the home of a multifaith spiritual community established in 1976 by the legendary musician and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane. In keeping with what William David Hart has characterized as the “Afro-​eccentricity” of Black spirituality, Coltrane built a hybrid and thoroughly global practice based on affinities between such ostensibly disparate discourses as gospel music and Hindu mysticism, while modeling an expansive vision of Black womanhood in virtually all aspects of her life.33 But if Coltrane and her Vedantic center take up much real estate in Smith’s film, this is due less to any geographic or even biographical features specific to a particular place or person than to the nature of Coltrane’s discourse as radically relational. Pilgrim opens on the sound of Coltrane introducing her track “One for the Father” at a live performance from the 1970s, and subsequently takes off as she launches into a booming, ecstatic piano solo that aspires to match the very rhythms and pulsations of the cosmos. Working as a visual accompaniment to Coltrane’s roving percussion, Smith’s editing carries us through the premises of the Vedantic center, including its meditation and performance spaces, a sun-​dappled room containing Coltrane’s electric organ, and a tree dedicated to her late husband, John Coltrane. Near the midway point of the film, we get a kind of retroactive establishing shot in a wide-​angle view of the premises: a stout white building tucked in the Santa Monica Mountains beneath a brilliant blue sky. This shot lasts a long time compared to those before it, but just as the film appears to settle into this image, another space—​namely, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles—​begins to populate the visual field by way of a gradual cross-​dissolve (Figure 6.3). Both shots subsequently cohabit the frame for roughly twenty seconds. Unlike that of the Vedantic center, the Watts Towers footage is immediately distinguished by the fact that it originated on motion picture film. (One notices, for example, the graininess, square aspect ratio, and visible frame lines.) This new imagery is also marked by a higher frame rate and shaky motion as the camera proceeds restlessly toward the structures. What happens here is an especially direct visual expression of what Glissant characterizes as errantry’s “anxious, chaotic quest,” over which “majestic harmony has no claim.”34 It is as if the film were impelled to take leave of the tranquil stillness of Coltrane’s ashram for the spiraling waywardness of Simon Rodia’s sculptures. Because the overarching point is that the film does take leave in this moment, that it does build and sustain momentum. But even as it does so, the distended nature of the dissolve undermines such a decisive sense of departure.

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Figure 6.3  Stills from Cauleen Smith, Pilgrim, 2017. 16mm film transferred to video, HD video, sound, 7:41 min. Courtesy of the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; and Morán Morán, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

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As mentioned in our discussion of the dissolve in Chapter 2, the classical function of the dissolve is to carry the viewer over a temporal chasm or into another setting in a syntactically “soft” manner by blunting the edges of the cut. But the conspicuous and graphic nature of the dissolve inherently poses a risk to the tidy operations of cinematic continuity, unburdening images of their obligation to preserve discrete spatial and temporal markers. The dissolve in Pilgrim is especially noteworthy for how long it dwells within that moment of travel. In its course, even as we remain oriented in the “here” of Coltrane’s ashram, the film insists upon the proximate “elsewhere” of Watts fifty miles southeast. By the time the shot of the Ashram does wink out, its evacuation feels tentative since our perception has been attuned to a prevailing totality that cannot be fully expressed through any orientational fixity on, or specificity of, a given landscape. As Glissant writes, “The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or to possess it.”35 Glissant perceived the workings of errantry in literary forms and also in visual ones, as when he characterized the work of Chilean painter Roberto Matta as effecting a “visible continuity between inside and outside, the dazzling convergence of here and elsewhere.”36 The dissolve in Pilgrim suggests precisely such a convergence. When Smith distends the space between shots in this way, we dwell there for long enough to get the sense of the dissolve itself as a location. Would dwelling anywhere else not risk falling captive to the lure of filiation? The Watts Towers in fact take up only a small portion of screen time, as the attention of Pilgrim is displaced in its second half to the Watervliet Shaker Historic District in upstate New York, which among other things is where the Black spiritualist and itinerant pastor Rebecca Cox Jackson became a Shaker. Again, the imagery here is distinguished from the film’s earlier footage by frenetic motion and a seemingly insatiable visual curiosity. In a tour-​de-​force sequence depicting one of the extant gardens, viewers are treated to a procession of floral imagery as Smith’s camera moves in close on hyssop, buttercup, indigo, rhubarb, and daisy as if to take in their scent. The editing also becomes more erratic during this sequence. Hard cuts accentuating Coltrane’s furious, staccato notes and multiple superimpositions of similar frames endow these moments with a euphoric, hallucinatory air as the landscape itself seems to come alive. Despite its content, Pilgrim resists the pastoral lure to see the rural as a space of calm rejuvenation far from the hectic centers of modernity, jettisoning binaries of center-​periphery and instead seizing upon the latent historical, conceptual, and aesthetic affinities between distinct landscapes to suggest their place within a larger totality thought and felt.

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Further advancing the aesthetic as well as political implications of errantry put forward by Pilgrim, Smith’s film Sojourner gathers an even broader and unlikelier array of landscapes. Roughly the first quarter of Sojourner consists of grainy but shimmering images rendered on 16mm film stock and unfolds to the questing, resplendent incantations of Coltrane’s electric organ. It opens on an inner-​city street, with Smith’s camera tracing the scenery in an extended, roving pan before settling on a horse pasture at the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in Philadelphia, the first of Sojourner’s procession of settings. Two landscapes otherwise held apart cohabit these opening frames, as so many boarded-​up windows, chain-​link fences, and involuntary parks generally coded as urban and Black swirl together with rural and rustic signifiers typically coded as white. By opening on such a capacious setting, Sojourner immediately announces its restless, errant drive to uproot ossified filiations between identity and geography. Even the title, a nod to the famed U.S. abolitionist Sojourner Truth, conceives errantry as an end in itself—​an almost sacred mandate in its own right. As with Pilgrim, these early sequences of Sojourner depict little in the way of people and focus primarily on places. As such, Smith’s editing becomes the principal source of errantry as she weaves together disparate locations in Philadelphia (including the onetime residences of John Coltrane and Sun Ra and the supposed site of Jackson’s Black Shaker community), upstate New York (again, Watervliet), and eventually California. Underscoring this emergent creative geography, on the soundtrack Coltrane and her chorus repeatedly chant, “When I told you to come to California/​you knew I would meet you in California.” The appeal to assembly implicit in Coltrane’s lyrics and the restless accumulation of disparate landscapes on the part of Smith’s editing both conspire to mobilize bodies and places in view of a larger totality. What “California” thus names here is less a discrete territory than an emergent, combinatory landscape of collective movement. The immanently mixed character of this geography is made apparent in an elegant series of transitions when Smith cuts from evening footage of a Shaker cemetery to a shot of the moon in the night sky, which dissolves to a wide shot of Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park outside of Los Angeles, the erstwhile “moon” now appearing in this sky as the “sun” (Figure 6.4). Through this dissolve, one celestial body is substituted for another, as if the film were leveraging the elliptical rotation of earth and moon as a means of bridging the otherwise vast geographic divide between New York and California. All this eventually leads into a sequence of images involving a central figure of Sojourner: the semaphore flag telegrapher. Something of an anachronism, this figure harks back to the nineteenth-​century maritime world, when flag

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Figure 6.4  Stills from Cauleen Smith, Sojourner, 2018. 16mm film transferred to video, HD video, sound, 22:41 min. Courtesy of the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; and Morán Morán, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

signaling was a primary means of relaying information between ships or from ship to shore. This technology initially took the form of an optical telegraph system developed by the French inventor Claude Chappe, in which signs coordinated by an assemblage of movable arms were transmitted between relay stations placed strategically at high points several miles apart.37 In flag semaphore, which later developed out of Chappe’s system and is still used today, though to a much lesser extent than in the 1800s, the principle is largely the same but depends on the positioning of two handheld flags (or similar instruments) to encode messages. Unlike the sorts of flags that predominate in schools, transportation hubs, government buildings, borders,

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and neighborhoods, these flags would be of little help when it comes to aligning a particular location with a larger identity, institution, or ideology. And because they encode information syntactically, in moments of stillness between motions, semaphore flags have little in common with those bearing national signs. Smith repurposes this relatively obscure and largely obsolete communications technology in Sojourner to orchestrate a cinematic communication relay between diverse groups of flag telegraphers positioned at various locations in a California nature preserve and the renowned South Side Community Art Center in Chicago.38 She cuts fluidly between the telegraphers as they signal back and forth across this two-​thousand-​mile divide rendered virtually negligible by montage. In the absence of a clear narrative or even thematic hinge between these disparate locales, Smith deploys semaphore telegraphy to hold the film’s turbulent accumulation of landscapes in balance. As if acclimating the viewer to the film’s ecstatic displacements and unfamiliar spacetime, these wordless gestures of navigational assistance posit the film itself as a kind of maritime vessel moving among islands of an imaginary archipelago. Following the telegraphy sequence, we find ourselves in Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram. As with Pilgrim, the Vedantic center serves as something of a portal to Watts. In this case, however, to make this leap Smith furnishes a medium shot depicting a framed photograph of Coltrane atop an altar in the Vedantic center. We infer that Smith was nearing the end of a roll of film as we see the light begin to leak in and overwhelm the image, at which point Smith cuts to a wide shot (the footage switching from 16mm film stock to HD video) of the sun setting over the Watts neighborhood. This transition from the light leak to the sun emanating golden light effects a graphic match cut of sorts coordinated at once by a visual rhyme and by the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun. This deceptively humble cut does much to convey a larger sense of a nonlinear but deeply consequential journey through time and space—​one that implicates viewers as much as the bodies and places that populate the film itself. Watts is the pivot point for the principal action in the rest of Sojourner. We witness the slow, discursive travels of series of banners created by Smith spelling out one of Coltrane’s fragments: “At dawn, sit at the feet of action. At noon, be at the hand of might. At eventide, be so big that sky will learn sky.” With each successive line, Coltrane’s divination evokes a body so large that it defies familiar spatial coordinates (“so big that sky will learn sky”). Such metaphysical visions of individual and collective movement abound in Sojourner, not least in the film’s soundtrack, which includes vocal recordings of writings

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by visionary Black women, including Rebecca Cox Jackson, the Combahee River Collective, and Coltrane herself. Another of Coltrane’s fragments is especially noteworthy in this regard. “In an astral body,” she reflects, “you can fly through glass, through a brick wall of a building, or through any material obstruction without pain or impact, and you can move on air smoothly and swiftly without stepping and foot pedaling like a human being.” To underscore this ecstatic vision of boundless movement, Smith cuts to a sequence of images showing the banner carriers on a California beach. At one point, they appear to take flight as Smith frames their ambulation against a horizonless blue sky. She then cuts to footage of a political rally in Chicago’s South Side organized by a Black-​led antiracist community activist group.39 Mediating this transition is a sound bridge containing more of Coltrane’s meditations: “When traveling through some of the astral worlds, I find a beauty that is rarely seen on this Earth. The health and vitality of departed souls from this Earth is remarkably good.” This unlikely detour from California’s rugged coastline to Chicago’s South Side is Smith’s cinematic interpretation of Coltrane’s boundary-​defying, Black feminist vision of movement. In a manifesto from 2012, Smith attests that “the true power of the Moving-​ Image is its resistance to plot. Images resist.”40 This is not a wholesale repudiation of story per se but rather of a narrative mode that affixes bodies to particular trajectories and draws boundaries around places. Smith’s insistence that “images resist” plot is thus essentially a mandate to move beyond the prescribed spatial coordinates of the Western realist narrative tradition. But this is a matter not only of form but also of politics. As Smith points out elsewhere, “Hoarding a plot of land for a tiny family while thousands of people live in tents on the streets of LA are linked on the spectrum emitted from our current social/​economic prism.”41 The above remarks reflect two seemingly distinct definitions of the word “plot”: the capitalist appropriation of land as property, and the narrative harnessing of space and time as setting. In an important sense, however, these senses of plot are fundamentally related. As Amitav Ghosh contends, setting is founded upon a “series of successive exclusions” whereby the “landscape is pushed farther and farther into the background.” A subtractive and extractive enterprise that fragments space and obfuscates the connections among places, setting for Ghosh furnishes a metaphor for the nation-​state itself, “that ultimate instance of discontinuity.”42 Not only the nation, but the neighborhood, the reservation, the colony, the plantation, the prison, the detention camp, the ghetto, the home—​these seemingly discrete but in fact interwoven spaces are the constitutive settings of a global racial capitalist order. That order is safeguarded by the fact that most of us, in our daily lived experience, do not perceive such spaces as part of a broader continuum.

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Our mental maps, our politics, and our stories are tailored more to atomization and separation than to relation. In a world increasingly divided, on edge, and striated, Smith’s cinema represents the possibility of charting a different course.

Notes 1. The exhibition was curated by Susan Cross and was on view from May 25, 2019, through March 15, 2020, terminating just as the COVID-​19 pandemic took hold in North America. 2. For an excellent discussion of Triangle Trade in particular, and more broadly of how the critique of humanism by Black and Indigenous artists and scholars may nuance the art historical/​new materialist discourse around nonhuman agency, see Rebecca Zorach, “‘Welcome to My Volcano’: Art History, New Materialism, and Their Others,” in Ecologies, Agents, Terrains, ed. Christopher P. Heuer and Rebecca Zorach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 147–​166. 3. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 34. 4. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 33–​34. 5. James Bliss, “Black Feminism Out of Place,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Spring 2016): 727–​749. 6. Hortense Spillers quoted in “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’ Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, nos. 1–​2 (Spring–​Summer 2007): 308, emphasis mine. 7. Hortense Spillers, “Peter’s Pans: Eating in the Diaspora,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. 8. Wilderson makes a general distinction between conflict and antagonism by designating the former as “a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved” and the latter as “an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions.” Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 9. Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright/​W. W. Norton, 2020), 227. Here, as elsewhere, Wilderson is elaborating on the research of Orlando Patterson, particularly as laid out in his groundbreaking book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 10. As Wilderson writes, the “time and space of chattel slavery shares essential aspects with the time and space, the violence, of our modern lives” (Afropessimism, 205). 11. Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 11. 12. Wilderson, Afropessimism, 227. 13. Wilderson, Afropessimism, 227. 14. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 121.

168  Between Images 15. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 20. 16. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 19. John Drabrinski clarifies, “Without a territory to be firstly deterritorialized, circular nomadology begins with something other than, as with Deleuze and Guattari, the compulsion to ward off the state apparatus. . . . Rather than liberate life from the death-​culture of totalitarianism and the re-​calcification of compact nation-​states, circular nomadism, in Glissant’s hands, forges Relation as an already creole and creolizing life. This life, which is already in Relation’s open and unexpected field of mixture and difference, is constituted as abyssal beginning.” John E. Drabrinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 132. 17. Betsy Wing, translator’s introduction, in Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xvi. 18. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 19. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 147. 20. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 105. 21. James Seawood and Katie Simon, “A Minister Recalls the Pain of Segregation,” StoryCorps, NPR, February 20, 2009, https://​sto​ryco​rps.org/​stor​ies/​rever​end-​james-​seaw​ood/​. 22. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in Nineteenth-​ Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, emphasis mine. 23. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-​Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions, no. 5 (Fall–​Winter 2011): 28. 24. Édouard Glissant, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (New York: Manthia Diawara/​ K’a Yéléma Productions, 2009). 25. Tiffany Lethabo King, “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly),” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1028. Also see King’s illuminating discussion of this imaginary in The Black Shoals, 124–​128. 26. See “The Calusa: ‘The Shell Indians,’ ” 2002, https://​fcit.usf.edu/​flor​ida/​less​ons/​cal​usa/​calu​ sa1.htm. 27. Smith herself invites such a reading in the accompanying text for the edition featuring Egungun of her #shutinfilmfestival on Instagram: https://​www.instag​ram.com/​tv/​B-​ F2G7WF​Xon/​. 28. Cauleen Smith quoted in Amanda Dalla Villa Adams, “Building Future Worlds: In Conversation with Cauleen Smith,” Burnaway, February 7, 2019, https://​burna​way.org/​ magaz​ine/​caul​een-​smith-​interv​iew/​. Also see discussion of “the animacy of grammar” in Anishinaabe languages in Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48–​59. 29. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. 30. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 105. 31. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 129–​130, emphasis mine. 32. Cauleen Smith, “Cauleen Smith Discusses Her Collaborative Work at Gallery TPW in Toronto,” Artforum, October 10, 2017, https://​www.artfo​rum.com/​words/​id=​71562, cited in Zorach, “ ‘Welcome to My Volcano,’ ” 160n21. 33. William David Hart, Afro-​Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (New York: Macmillan, 2011).

Space Race  169 34. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 107. 35. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 21. 36. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 117. 37. Chappe’s system was adopted widely in France but was also taken up by the British Admiralty and implemented in some form on every continent except Asia and Antarctica in the first half of the nineteenth century. See Geoffrey Wilson, The Old Telegraphs (London: Phillimore, 1976), chs. 2 and 3, cited in Alexander J. Field, “French Optical Telegraphy, 1793–​1855: Hardware, Software, Administration,” Technology and Culture 35, no. 2 (April 1994): 315–​347. 38. The South Side Community Art Center has been an indispensable hub for Black cultural production in Chicago since its inception in 1940 as the first Black arts institution in the United States. 39. The activist group depicted in Sojourner is the R3 Coalition: Resist, Reimagine, Rebuild. R3’s lead organizer, Dr. Barbara Ransby, features prominently in Smith’s film as well. 40. Kelly Gabron, The Association for the Advancement of Cinematic Creative Maladjustment: A Manifesto (New York: Nationsack Filmworks, 2012), 7. 41. Cauleen Smith in conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Song for Earth and Folk,” Vdrome, July 2018, https://​www.vdr​ome.org/​caul​een-​smith. 42. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 59.

Conclusion: Future Montages I maintain that the link to the real is the cut. The cut that separates images or sounds is the cut that separates reality from itself or again: reality is incomplete. But it is its incompleteness that allows us to connect, disconnect, and reconnect inferences of what merely appears to us, and perhaps produce something like a new Cogito proof. —​Isiah Medina, 2015 interview

One of the most visually spectacular demonstrations of editing that I have seen in recent years was a commercial: Wieden +​Kennedy’s ninety-​second “You Can’t Stop Us” 2020 video ad for Nike. The entire piece turns on a split-​ screen effect, where an unmoving “line” vertically bisects the frame between two separate channels consisting of found footage of multiple athletes engaged in their respective sports. The brilliance of the video consists not in any distinct way that the individual channels assemble bodies, but in how the otherwise disparate bodies mirror and fuse into one another across the line of this conjunctive split. On a basic level, this effect of “fusion” is enabled by a series of finely tuned graphic matches, which visually splice and synchronize the movements of distinct bodies across two given shots brought together in the same frame. “We’re never alone,” a female voice announces at the beginning of the video, “and that is our strength.” This affirmation of solidarity presides over the visual relations that follow. Early on, the movement of a white female track runner on the right matches perfectly with that of a Black female swimmer on the left. In the next sequence, an all-​male and an all-​female baseball team on separate sides of the split screen are consolidated by a splice that elegantly synchronizes the movement of their captains. Tennis fuses into baseball, figure skating into football, skating into surfing, dressage into BMX biking, success into failure, heartbreak into hope. In one especially poignant moment, a bilateral amputee on one side of the frame hoists herself from one wheelchair, one body, one shot to another. Elsewhere, a young woman in a niqab skateboards into a queer androgynous figure, as the narrator affirms, “If we don’t fit a sport, we’ll change the sport.” Even different forms of activism in

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the athletic world—​female soccer players advocating pay equal to their male counterparts’ or football players speaking out against anti-​Black violence—​ appear here as part of a unified movement. Even beyond the virtuoso “montage” and otherwise high level of technical achievement on display, there is something undeniably alluring about “You Can’t Stop Us.” This vision of human solidarity and connection across lines of nation, race, ethnicity, ability, sex, and gender—​it is all very stirring. The video might even remind us of the moment from Abstract when Hito Steyerl traverses the “cut” across shots and places. But to me such comparisons only obtain at a superficial level. After all, what remains when “You Can’t Stop Us” reduces to its most basic ingredients? What is given here, for and among ourselves, beyond the innermost tenet of neoliberal capitalism: that the freedom of markets and human beings are synonymous, that they share the same horizon of movement? All this coming and being together, all this united and unifying movement, all this transcendence—​it all occurs under the banner of Nike, which, even in the absence of its visible logo, constitutes the logos binding these images and bodies. What we find in this “creative geography” is nothing more than spectacle itself: an ideological supercut mystifying the fundamentally barbaric relations underlying today’s global financial markets. One suspects Guy Debord had something similar in mind when he characterized spectacle as a false reconciliation of the separate through the language of commonality: “What ties the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation, . . . [for] the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”1 In the past three decades, a series of world-​historical events have revealed the fundamental poverty of human relation. As one example, the revelations of the Edward Snowden files landed at the top of an already tall pile of evidence that the utopian aspirations of technologists and intellectuals in the 1990s for the World Wide Web as a new global commons were quickly undercut by state and corporate interests. So-​called social media, far from being a revolutionary force for change, revealed itself merely as another ruse of commonality, one that in fact exacerbates, by reifying, the real antagonisms underlying the circulation of global capital. The 2008 financial crisis, and the wildly unequal response by governments and financial institutions to mitigate its disastrous effects, particularly on the world’s most vulnerable populations, brought into sharp relief the punitive and unilateral shape of relation under global capitalism. In the second decade of the twenty-​first century, civil unrest in the Global South—​itself compounded by Western neo-​imperialism and a global climate crisis disproportionately affecting the

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developing world—​prompted a new wave of immigration to countries in the Northern Hemisphere, and with this, a resurgent right-​wing populism and authoritarian political rhetoric took hold across the Western world. The 2019–​2020 wildfires in the Australian bush killed or displaced as many as three billion animals, and as I write this, historic flooding following torrential monsoon rains has left nearly one-​third of Pakistan underwater, which, according to UNICEF, has put as many as ten million children in grave peril. Today the political field in the United States comprises two seemingly competing sides, most Republicans holding the belief, apparently intractable in the face of all evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, while Democratic leaders continue to peddle a fundamentally bland, moralizing, and technocratic vision of government. Our individual and collective responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic seemed to shuttle between insouciance and hysteria, and all that noise has made it easy to forget that we are very likely dealing with a zoonotic disease born of an utter derangement in how our species goes about relating to other animals. I was struck by an idea recently put forward by the filmmaker and sociologist Edgar Morin, who noted that the COVID-​19 pandemic racked focus on the extant “crisis of humanity,” which is that it is “unable to constitute itself as humanity” for it is bound by “interdependence” without “solidarity.”2 This is a better expression than any I could muster of the poverty of imagination behind humanity’s repeatedly fumbled attempts at relation. What better “medium” than a global pandemic to show us that our institutional, ideological, and economic structures are woefully insufficient to the task of acting collectively in ways that don’t bring about further suffering? A common refrain in our postideological time of November is that we have run out of big stories, that we have exhausted the “metanarratives” of relation that informed History’s great revolutions. Whether this metanarrative of the end of metanarratives is actually based in reality seems beside the point, since it doesn’t change the basic fact that relation, like reality, is by definition incomplete. Relation could only ever be deemed complete were it oriented in the first place toward a discrete end. But such a form would no longer be relation, at least not the kind we have pursued in this book, which is much closer to what Jean-​Luc Nancy calls “community,” in that “one does not produce it.” Rather, as Nancy elaborates, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would presuppose that the common being, as such, be objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discourses, institutions, symbols: in short, in subjects). . . . Community necessarily

174  Conclusion: Future Montages takes place [according to] that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension.3

If relation, like Nancy’s inoperative community, is being-​in-​common that repels the spectacle of the social, montage is its mode of expression. None of this, however, simply abandons us to the void. In the early 1970s, the American avant-​garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton and his students at SUNY Buffalo reenacted the legendary experiments conducted in Lev Kuleshov’s workshops in the early 1920s. Frampton’s account of the exercise later gave the impression that he and his students had taken part in some ancient and perilous rite. “We all felt a little fearful,” he recalled, “were bleeding, even, from a peculiar Heisenbergian trauma.” After all, they had endeavored to place themselves in the cut, which is to say in the suspenseful interval between conjecture and revelation, between theory and practice, where montage is (once again) turned into a question. As Frampton attests, relating to montage in this manner became a way of collectively entrusting themselves, as individual singularities, to the open of relation: Starting with the projector, we felt the walls of our minds shake. What if the whole thing were nothing but a Russian Revolutionary conspiracy? And then the cone of light mounted to radiance, inverted itself, thrust upon us, slid past lids and lenses, entered the mind, penetrated the eye of the mind. There was a prolonged gasp of delight in the room. For all of us, in the very midst of sifting our sight, ever so carefully, for signs of the Kuleshov Effect, had suddenly found ourselves overtaken by the rapture of experiencing it. Each of us had found his whole consciousness converging upon a point outside the boundaries of his imagination. After a time, when we felt more calm, we conspired to destroy our footage, or else lose it. Kuleshov had done one or the other: we would honor him by continuing a tradition of renewal he had founded. So, friends, if you need to see upon what foundation our art rests, I cannot show them to you. You must rebuild them for yourselves.4

Notes 1. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and White Press, 1970), unpaginated, emphasis mine. 2. Edgar Morin interview with Nicolas Truong in Le Monde, April 19, 2020, https://​www. lemo​nde.fr/​idees/​arti​cle/​2020/​04/​19/​e dgar-​morin-​l a-​crise-​due-​au-​coro​navi​r us-​devr​

Conclusion: Future Montages  175 ait-​ouv​rir-​nos-​espr​its-​dep​uis-​longte​mps-​confi​nes-​sur-​l-​immedi​at_​6​0370​66_​3​232.html, translation mine. 3. Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31. 4. Hollis Frampton, “Mental Notes” (1973), in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 256. These remarks were originally made by Frampton at the Buffalo Conference on Autobiography in the Independent American Cinema, State University of New York at Buffalo, March 1973, and subsequently published in CEPA Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Summer 1986).

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abstract (video), xxxii, 89–​90, 94–​95, 100, 172 editing, as spatial phenomenon, 97 eyeline matching, 99–​100 feedback loop, 106 indexical plasticity of, 97 Kurdistan and Germany, bridge between in, 99–​100, 102–​5, 106–​9 Lockheed Martin, 105–​6 shot and countershot, 97, 99–​100, 101–​5 smartphone camera, 97–​99, 101–​2, 105, 106–​7 soft montage, 101–​2, 105 “starchitecture” and missile launchers, link between, 106 video art and Gatling guns, link between, 106 walking through the cut, 107–​9 Wolf, death of, 105, 106–​7 Adams, Katherine, 85n.25 Alexander Nevsky (film), 90–​91 Álvarez, Santiago, 91–​92 Anderson, Patrick, 44 Anthropocene, 122–​23, 129–​30, 134 as place, 135 strange loop of, 135 Anti-​Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 67–​68 Arendt, Hannah, 76–​78, 85n.25 commonality through difference, 70 human artifice, 71–​72 interest, table as material manifestation of, 70 modernity, negative appraisal of, 70–​71 public and private worlds, distinction between, 70–​71 public realm, dissolution of, 73–​74 relation through separation, 70–​71 table as metaphor, 70–​72, 76–​78 “world,” 70–​71, 85n.29

world of things, as space of difference, 71–​72 Aristotle, xvi–​xvii Art Institute of Chicago, xxxi, 29, 54n.5, 106 Arthur, Paul, 27–​28 Ashadu, Karimah, 138–​40 Asili, Ephraim, 138–​40 Auerbach, Jonathan, 35–​36 Aumont, Jacques, xv–​xvi avant-​garde cinema American, 119–​21, 131 European, xxv–​xxvi French, xxv–​xxvi gardens of empire, allied with, 137–​38 landscape, treatment of, 125 part object, primacy of, 119–​20 Avedon, Richard, 12–​13, 18–​19 Baichwal, Jennifer, 121 Balázs, Béla, xxii, 37 Barthes, Roland, xiii–​xiv, 34–​35 Bazin, André, xx–​xxi, xxiii–​xxiv, xxv–​xxvi, xxix–​xxx, 121 false representation of relations, xxii–​xxiii Soviet film, relationship to, xxxvin.31 Bear (film), xxxi, 29, 30–​31, 35–​37, 38–​ 39, 42 Blackness, symbol of, 55n.7 relational ambiguity, 31 shots and bodies, transitions between, 32–​33 Benning, James, 3, 116–​17, 121, 128 “pay attention to things,” 115–​16, 140n.1 place, as intersection of space and time, 128 Bergson, Henri, xxvi–​xxvii Berlin (Germany), xxxii, 97–​100, 101–​ 2, 105–​7

178 Index Berlin, Brigid, 12–​13, 14–​15, 17 Berlin Wall as weightless, 49–​51 Between Two Wars (film), 65, 78 irrational cut, 65–​66 shot/​reverse shot, 65 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 15 Bitomsky, Hartmut, 74 Black bodies as fungible, 154–​55 Black nature writing antipastoral, steeped in, 138 Blackness, 55n.7, 149–​50, 158, 159 discursive location, 149 dislocated positionality of, 148 interstitial positionality of, 154–​55 as threat to civil society, 152 Black people, 146–​47, 149–​50 interstitial spaces, 149 racial abjection, spatial hydraulics of, 152 Blanchot, Maurice, xi, 49–​51 Blow Job (film), 26n.58, 27–​28 Blumenthal-​Barby, Martin, 66 B. See Berlin, Brigid Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 17–​18 Bolshevik revolution, 94 Bonitzer, Pascal deframing, 18–​19 Brakhage, Stan, 119–​20, 125, 137–​ 38, 140n.5 Branigan, Edward, 25n.53 Brinkema, Eugenie, xxii Bruno, Giuliana, 40 Buchloh, Benjamin, 14–​15 Bufferin (film), 27–​28 Bunuel, Luis, xxv–​xxvi découpage, xxiv–​xxv Burch, Noël, 84n.2 Burgin, Victor, 7–​8 California, 159–​60, 163, 165–​66 Calusa Indians, 157 capitalism, 116–​17 global, 60, 65–​66, 93–​94, 106, 172–​73 neoliberal, 172 privatization of work, 64–​65 surveillance, xxviii–​xxix Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 67–​68 Castaing-​Taylor, Lucien, 121 Castile, Philando, 137–​38

Chappe, Claude, 163–​65, 169n.37 Chelsea Girls (film), 27–​28 Chicago (Illinois), 165–​66, 169n.38 chroma keying, 148–​49, 152–​54 green screen, 152–​54 Chun, Wendy, 96–​97 Cinema 2 (Deleuze) xxvii–​xxviii cinema, 60–​61, 63, 89 as absence, 116 architecture, affinities between, 39–​40 black box, 118 body in, 35–​36 creating of worlds, 60 duration, 116 ecologically conscious, 121–​22 emancipatory capacity of, 64 human body on display, 30 imaginary spectator, 40 infancy of, 30, 31–​32 of landscape, 121, 131 landscape painting, in tradition of, 118 martial metaphor, 88 natural world, interest in, 118, 128 nature, 115–​16 obliteration of a whole, xxvii of place, 121 potentiality of, xxxiv problem of relation, xviii–​xix, xxiv–​xxv relation in, 61–​62 relational capacities of, 89–​90 reshaping of space, 60 revolutionary ideal of, 87–​88 separation of time and space, 60 signifier and signified, 141n.11 and war, 88–​92 CinemaScope, 132 cinematography, 76 and montage, 76–​78 cinematic cut, xv, 29–​30, 126 cinematic body, relations between, 29–​30 expanded field, xxx–​xxxi as technique of relation, xxviii–​xxix cinematic frame continuity and discontinuity, xviii–​xix cinematic interval, 60–​61, 76–​78, 107–​9 cinematic montage, xxii as “kino-​fist,” 40 and table, 69–​70 See also montage cinematic politics, 87–​88 camera-​as-​gun, 88

Index  179 duelist framework, 88 “war” question, 89 cinematic scale anthropocentric bias of, xix–​xx City of Fear (film), 74 climate change, xxviii–​xxix, xxxiv, 172–​73 close-​up, xix, 13, 22, 81–​82, 131–​32, 136–​37 as unruly, xix–​xx Cocteau, Jean, xxv–​xxvi Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 138–​40 colonialism, 138, 147 colonization and maroonage, 136–​37 Coltrane, Alice, 159–​63, 165–​66 Coltrane, John, 160, 163 Combahee River Collective, 165–​66 commonality, 172–​73 Constructivists, 62–​63 continuity editing human body and montage, and narrative logic, 31 Copjec, Joan, 16–​17, 24n.18 corporeality, 60 of knitting, 14–​15, 21 Costa, Pedro, xi–​xii Counter Music (film), 67 coupophobia, 27–​28 COVID-​19 pandemic, xxxiv, 172–​73 Created Surface of the Earth, The (Kuleshov), 59 creative geography, 59, 60, 67, 74, 105 of heavy industry, 64–​65 geographic imaginary, 107–​9 Crimp, Douglas, 11 Cronon, William, 122–​23 wilderness idea, critique of, 122–​23 Crow, Thomas, 3 Crutzen, Paul, 122 Cubism, xxv–​xxvi cut, xv–​xvi, xxiv–​xxv, xxxiv, 27, 30, 36–​37, 49–​51, 115–​16, 132, 174 as agent of conjunction, 117 as anthropogenic plundering, 116–​17 any-​image-​relation-​whatever, xxvii being-​with, xxviii cinema and politics, linking to, xxviii–​xxix as device of puppetry, xxiii as formative space, xxviii hard cuts, xiii place of relation, 61

short takes, 116–​17 significance of, 27 suturing operation, xxvi as technique of relation, xxviii–​xxix ubiquity of, in European avant-​garde cinema, xxv–​xxvi as unruly, xix–​xx will of the people, 91–​92 cyborg, 62–​63 Dadaists, 62–​63 Daney, Serge, xxiv, 93–​94, 110n.21 Dayan, Daniel, 7 Debord, Guy, xv–​xvi, 172 deconstruction, 123–​24 découpage, xxiv–​xxv deframing, 18–​19, 25n.53 Deleuze, Gilles, xxvi–​xxviii, 39, 150–​51, 168n.16 analogical vs. numerical variables, 66–​67 control society, 66–​67 deterritorialization, 67–​68 irrational cuts, xxvii–​xxviii movement-​image, xxvii–​xxviii movement-​image, and sensorimotor logic between shots, xxvi–​xxvii rational cuts, xxvi–​xxvii relinkage, xxvii–​xxviii time-​image, xxvii–​xxviii Delluc, Germaine, xxv–​xxvi Delsarte, François, xxi–​xxii Delsartian method of acting, xxi–​xxii Denson, Shane, 66–​67 Deren, Maya, 119–​20, 125 deterritorialization, 67–​68 capitalist globalization, 95–​96 coordinating function, 95–​96 here from there, 95–​96 inside from outside, 95–​96 Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, aka Walden (film), 119–​20 Dillon, Brian, 26n.57 Disney, Walt, 124–​25 dissolve, xiii, 37, 48, 160, 162 lap-​dissolve, 46–​49 Doane, Mary Ann, xix–​xx scale, as relational, xix, xxxvin.17 Dog Star Man (film), 119–​20 Donnie Darko (film), xiii–​xiv doors as cultural techniques, 95–​96

180 Index cybernetic, 95–​96 inside and outside, 95–​96 Douglas, Mary, 49 Douglass, Frederick, 135–​36 Douglas, Vernon, 30–​31 Drabrinski, John, 168n.16 Drury, William, 128–​29 Dungy, Camille, 138 Dziga Vertov Group (DVG), 92 Eat (film), 27–​28 ecocinema, 117, 121 patience and mindfulness, 116 ecocriticism, 122–​23 ecological cut, xxxiii, 135 separation, as necessary function, 117 ecological discourse, 121, 122–​23 separation between humans and nature, 122–​24 ecology, xvi–​xvii, xxviii–​xxix continuity, 122 interconnection, 129–​30 principle of principles, 129–​30 ecosystem, 123–​24 resilience, 132–​34 as term, 142n.25 Edison, Thomas Black Maria, 118 editing, xv, 30, 49, 72–​73 as spatial phenomenon, 97 as word, xiv–​xv editing process, xi–​xii solitary workplace and factory society, 72–​73 spatiotemporal whiplash, 73–​74 Egungun: Ancestors Can’t Find Me (film), 156–​57, 159 distortion, 155–​56 fragmentation, 155–​56 fungibility, 155–​56, 157, 158 human and natural domains, slippages between, 156–​57, 158 repetition, 155–​56 Yoruba masquerades, nod to, 156 Eisenstein, Sergei, xv, 27, 39–​40, 89–​90, 92, 94, 115, 125, 143n.40 cut acting, xxii ecstasy. 124–​25 landscape and montage, aligned with, 124–​25

montage, as conflict, 88, 90–​91, 109n.11 montage counterpoint, 142n.34 montage as path, xxxi relationships between shots, xxii Elsaesser, Thomas, 62, 72 embodied spectatorship, 39–​40 Empire (film), 27–​28 Engram of Returning (film), 132–​34 ecological thought, 132–​34 entanglement, 122 as long take, 117 environmentalism cinematic avant-​garde, xxxiii entanglement, 122–​23 interconnection, 129–​30 secondary successions, 128–​29 Enwezor, Okwui, 29, 31 Epstein, Jean rapid editing, criticism of as superficial, xxv–​xxvi errantry, 147–​51, 159, 163 chaotic quest, 160 circular nomadism, 150 as operative, 154–​55 as poetics, 151–​52 Everson, Kevin Jerome, 138–​40 evolutionary biology, 123–​24 expanded cinema, 96–​97 experimental cinema ecological thought of, 131 long shot/​plan sequence, 120–​21 long take over montage, 116–​17 political aesthetics of place, 138–​40 Expression of Hands (Der Ausdruck Der Hände) (film), 86n.52 valence of gesture, 81–​82 external relations, xvi–​xvii, xxi, 48 Eye/​Machine series (Farocki), 88–​89 fabric attachment, 15 separation, 15 fades, xiii, 37 Far from Vietnam (film), 94 Farocki, Harun, 64–​65, 67, 76, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 97 “Berg Film” genre, 82–​84 cinema, as technique for being in the world, 61–​62 cinematic interval, 60–​61, 82–​84 comparison and simultaneity, 88–​89

Index  181 coordination, 62 cut, phenomenology of, 72–​73 cutting room (Schneiderraum), 61–​62 editing, political possibilities of, 74–​75 editing process, 72–​74, 75 false hospitality, 73–​74 on film editing, 76 on location, 73–​74 montage, 74–​75, 76, 81–​82 montage, power of, 75 montage, praxis of, 72–​73 montage, as spatial and material, 61–​62, 72 montage, as technique of relation, 61–​62 monteur, 80–​81, 82–​84 operational images, 66, 67–​68 positionality, 62 power, concern with, 62 relation, 61–​62, 75 reterritorialization, 67–​69 Schnittplatz, (place of editing or cutting), xxxi–​xxxii, 61–​62, 72–​73, 75, 78, 80, 82–​84 shot/​countershot, as method of montage, 74–​75 soft montage, xxxi–​xxxii, 60–​61 succession and simultaneity, 76 tables, 61–​62, 68–​70, 76–​80 Fassbender, Michael, 44–​48 Fay, Jennifer, 141n.17 Fedayeen network, 92–​93, 94–​95 Feldman, Allen, 41, 42–​44 fetish, 15 photography, 7–​8 fetishism, 5 film editing, 61–​62 as invisible art, xiv See also editing Filmkritik (magazine), 72–​73 Film Sense, The (Eisenstein), 90–​91 Finney, Carolyn, 138 Five Easy Pieces (film), xxxi, 29, 35–​37, 38–​ 39, 42 hula hoopers, 35, 36, 38 irrationality of, 35 flag signaling, 163–​65 Flaherty Film Seminar, 87–​88 Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, 163 Fog Line (film), 121 Foucault, Michel, 66–​67 Frampton, Hollis, 174 French impressionist cinema, xiii–​xiv

Freud, Sigmund binding, concept of, 15 Fuller, Samuel “film is like a battleground,” 92 Futurists, 62–​63 Gance, Abel expressive editing of, xxv–​xxvi Ganis, William, 13–​14 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (film), 137–​38 Garden in the Machine, The (MacDonald), 140n.5 Gardin, Vladimir, xxi–​xxii Garrison, William Lloyd, 135–​36 Gary, Ja’Tovia, xxxiii, 136–​40 distance montage, xxxiii–​xxxiv graphic rhyming, xxxiii–​xxxiv split-​screen, xxxiii–​xxxiv strobing, use of, xxxiii–​xxxiv Gasché, Randolphe, xvi–​xvii Gehry, Frank, 102, 106 Gentino, Octavio, 91–​92 Geography of the Body (film), 119–​20 Germany, 69, 94–​95, 99–​100, 102–​5, 107–​9 Gesamtwerk, 119–​20 Geyrhalter, Nikolaus, 121 Ghosh, Amitav, 166–​67 Gidal, Peter, 125 Giddens, Anthony, 60–​61, 84n.4 Giverny Document, The (film), 136–​37 anti-​Black world, 137–​38 space and power, 137–​38 spatial hegemony, 137–​38 Glimpse of the Garden (film), 119–​20 Glissant, Édouard, xvii–​xviii, xxxiv, 151–​ 52, 156 Creole folktales, 158–​59 errantry, 147, 149–​50, 160–​62 relation, 150 right to opacity, 158 root thinking, 150–​51 visible continuity of, 162 globalization, 95–96, 172–​73 Global South, 172–​73 Godard, Jean-​Luc, 61, 89–​90, 92–​93, 94–​95, 110n.21 chain of images, 95–​96 counter-​cinema, 87–​88 time and space, 93–​94 Gopnik, Blake, 25n.36, 28–​29

182 Index Gorin, Jean-​Pierre, 92–​93 Gottheim, Larry, 121 Greaves, William, 119–​20 Green Fuse (film), 125–​26, 131–​34 Griffith, D. W., 76, 84n.2 Grundmann, Roy, 26n.58 Guattari, Félix, 150–​51, 168n.16 deterritorialization, 67–​68 Haitian Revolution, 136–​37 Hamlyn, Anne, 15 Harding, James, 23n.9 Harris, Christopher, 138–​40 Hartman, Saidiya bodies, as fungible, 154 Hart, William David, 159–​60 Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab, 121 Havre, Jérôme, 116 Heath, Stephen, 7 Heil, John, xvi–​xvii History, xxvii, 94–​95, 173 Hitchcock, Alfred, 82–​84 homogeneity of space, xxiv, 121 Hopinka, Sky, 138–​40 How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (video) concealment, 97–​99 Huillet, Daniele, xi–​ Human Condition, The (Arendt) commonality, by way of difference, 70 interest, 70 table metaphor in, 70 Hunger (film), xxx–​xxxi, 27, 51 black box, xxxi cut, as device that polices and animates cross-​pollution of bodies, 41, 42 dissolution of borders through montage, 46, 49, 54 dissolve, use of, 46–​49 distance montage, 44–​46 duration and cutting, orchestration of, 44–​46 excretory signifiers, 46 expanded cut, xxxi language of openings, 54 long takes of, 41–​42 montage in, 48, 52–​54 ornithological imagery, 48 relational poetics of, 41–​42 symbolic economy of excreta, 44–​46

Hutton, Peter, 121 Ici et ailleurs (film), 92–​93, 94–​95, 97, 110n.19, 110n.21 cut in, 93–​94 imperialism, 92 indigeneity, 158, 159 Indigenous people, 146–​47 Industrial Revolution, 122 Industry and Photography (film), 66 long take, 64–​65 Infinite Conversation, The (Blanchot), xvii–​xviii internet, xv, 94–​95 Intolerance (film) shot/​countershot, 76 irrational cuts, xxvii–​xxviii “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” (Steyerl), 105–​6 I Shot Andy Warhol (film), 22 Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 162, 163, 165–​66 James, David, 3–​4 jouissance, 22, 42 Jusqu’à la victoire (Until Victory) (film), 92 Just Above My Head (film), xxxi, 29, 35–​ 37, 42 body and frame, relation between, 33–​34 body as montage, 34–​35 frame-​as-​cut, 33–​34 montage in, 33–​34 Kabuki theater, xxii Kaufman, Mikhail, 67 Khalil, Adam, 138–​40 Khalil, Zach, 138–​40 King, Homay, 27–​28 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 157 Black spatiality, 149–​50 Kinoks, 63–​64 Kittler, Friedrich chronophotographic gun, 90 Knitting series (Warhol), 14–​15 Kracauer, Siegfried, CPP43 n.20, 118–​20 cinema, as antihumanist, 141n.11 Kren, Kurt, 125 Kuleshov, Lev, xxi–​xxii, 59–​60, 84n.2, 174 creative geography experiment, 74 Kuleshov Effect, 174 Kuppers, Petra, 12 Kurdish resistance, 94–​95

Index  183 Kurdistan, xxxii, 94–​95, 97, 99–​105, 106–​9 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 97, 100 Kusama, Yayoi, 11 Lacan, Jacques, xxix, 3, 6 mirror stage, xxix–​xxx Other, 17–​18 radical alterity (the Red), 17 La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (film), 91–​92, 110n.16 Lam, Stephanie, 116–​17 landscape, 125, 134, 136, 146, 156–​57, 158, 162, 163 in cinema, xxxiii, 40, 59, 115, 118–​21, 124–​ 25, 131–​32, 138–​40 as in-​between, 131–​32 duration, 116 long takes, 124–​25 montage, 124–​25, 135–​36 pastoral, 138 pictorialism, 138 pictorial tradition of, 131 unequal distribution between Black and white experiences outdoors, 138 whiteness of, 146–​47 wide angle shot, 131 La Roue (The Wheel) (film), xxv–​xxvi Latour, Bruno, 121–​22 partitioning, 121–​22 Leder, Drew, 34–​35 “dys-​appearance,” 34–​35 LeGrice, Malcolm, 125 Levi, Pavle, 7 Living Theater, 11 Lockhart, Sharon, 121 Lois, George, 24n.28 Lonesome Cowboys (film), 28–​29 long take, xxix–​xxxi, xxxiii, 27–​28, 34–​35, 41–​42, 64–​65, 131–​32 ecodidactics of, 116–​17 as ecological consciousness, signifier of, xxxiii ecological conversation within, 117 experimental cinema, 116–​17 interconnection, 130–​31 Los Angeles (California), 166–​67 Watts Towers, 159–​62, 165–​66 Lovely Andrea (film), 94–​95 Lowder, Rose, 140n.5 Lupe (film), 27–​29

Maas, Willard, 119–​20 MacDonald, Scott, 116–​17, 121, 140n.5 Magnolia (film), xiii–​xiv Makos, Christopher, 14 Man with a Movie Camera (film), 63–​64 creative geography in, 67 cut levels, 63 Marey, Étienne-​Jules photographic rifle, 90 Marker, Chris, 61, 94 Martins, Laura J., 123–​24 MASS MoCA, 145, 159 materiality, 60 Matta, Roberto, 162 Maze Prison Blanketmen, 44 H-​Blocks, 41, 42–​44, 51 hunger strike, 44–​46 McKittrick, Katherine, 145 dilemma of black placelessness, 148 McQueen, Steve, xxx–​xxxi, 27, 30–​31, 33–​35, 38–​39, 49, 54–​55n.6, 64–​65 expanded cut, use of, 29, 37, 41 filmed body and body of the film, 35–​36 film exhibition, as spatial montage, xxxi, 36–​37, 38, 51–​54, 54n.5 montage, use of, 29–​30, 36, 38, 39, 42 movement beyond walls, 51–​54 projection structure, as curtain, 38 wild walls, 51, 54 Medina, Isiah, 171 Mekas, Jonas, 119–​20 Menken, Marie, 119–​20, 140n.5 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 34–​35 Meshes of the Afternoon (film), 119–​20 “Metaphors on Vision” (Brakhage), 120 Metz, Christian, 5, 11, 46–​48 photographic effect, 7–​8 Meyer, Richard, 20–​21 Michelson, Annette, 3, 119–​21, 137–​38 Middle Passage, 149, 156 Miéville, Anne-​Marie, 92–​95, 110n.21 Miller, Jacques-​Alain, 6 mirror stage, xxix–​xxx modernity, 60, 65, 70–​71, 84n.4, 121–​ 22, 162 and isms, 62–​63 technology, and effect on human relations, 62–​63 Moholy-​Nagy, Laszlo, 119–​20 Monet, Claude, 136–​37

184 Index montage, xi–​xii, xiv, 19, 36–​37, 49, 63, 87–​88, 89–​90, 95–​96, 117, 121–​22, 134–​35, 148–​49, 174 allegiance to avant-​garde practices of shock and detournement, xiv–​xv anthropomorphizing tendency of, xxiii communism, xx–​xxi as conflict, 88, 90–​91, 109n.11 contact prints, 20–​21 corporeal character of, 29–​30 creative capacities of, xv creative geography, 27 determining meaning, 59 as deterritorialized, xxvii–​xxviii distance montage, 44–​46 double image, 69 as ecological cut, 135 as ecological estrangement, xxxiii–​xxxiv ecological relation, xxxiii European art cinema, xiv–​xv expanded cut, 29 experimental cinema, 116–​17 as false representation of relations, xxii–​xxiii as gravitational force, xviii haptic path, 40 homogeneity of space, xxiv ideas, 85n.13 internal to the image, xxii–​xxiii irrational dispositions, xx–​xxi as kind of simulation, xxvi–​xxvii of landscape, 124–​25, 135–​36 martial violence, analogy between, 92–​93 as matter of relation, xxviii as metaphor for change, xxxiv from monter, xiii–​xiv as narrative, xxv–​xxvi as optical device, xxv–​xxvi as path, xxxi, 39–​40 pervasiveness of, xv primacy of over shot, xxi through relation, xiii, 32–​33, 174 relational poetics of, 117 as relational process, xxviii relational promise of, 10 relationships between images, xxviii as reterritorialized, xxvii–​xxviii, 76 as selfsame “I,” 27 serious analysis of, xxvi–​xxvii site of, 61 soft, 101–​2, 105

space between bodies, 40 spacetime continuities, xx–​xxi suturing, 96–​97 as technique of relation, 61–​62 as technique of social jouissance, xxix as threat, xix–​xx Montage (Aumont), xv Morin, Edgar, 173 Morton, Timothy, 135 Mosjoukine, Ivan, xxi, 59 Mothlight (film), 137–​38 Moussinac, Léon, xxv–​xxvi movement-​image, xxvi–​xxviii movement-​image art, xxxiii–​xxxiv Moving the Sleeping Images of Things towards the Light (Saïto), 127–​28 Musketeers of Pig Alley, The (film), 84n.2 Musser, Charles, 141n.8 Muybridge, Eadweard locomotion studies, 31–​33 as master of illusion, 32–​33 wrestling sequence, 31–​33 Nancy, Jean-​Luc, 27, 115 community, 173–​74 Narboni, Jean, xxii–​xxiii nature cinema, 115–​16 of the gaze, 131 as presence, 116 as spatiotemporal bypass, 130–​31 sublime, 135–​36 poetry, 138 Neel, Alice, 12–​13 négritude, 150–​51 neocolonialism, xxviii–​xxix neoliberalism, 172–​73 New Left, xxxii Newsreel Collective, 91–​92 new wave cinema, xiii–​xiv Neyrat, Frédéric, 134 counterprinciple of separation, 130–​31 principle of principles, 129–​30 Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire) (film), 68–​69, 78–​80 Nightfall (video), 116, 125 signifier, 115–​16 Nike, 171–​72 Nisbet, Ian, 128–​29 Nonindifferent Nature (Eisenstein), 124–​25 North by Northwest (film), 82–​84

Index  185 Northern Ireland Belfast Agreement, 51 Maze Prison, 41, 44–​46, 51, 52–​54 November (film), 94–​95, 97, 102–​5 Now (film), 91–​92 October (film), 94 offscreen as endangered species, 96–​97 Olin, Margaret, 20–​21 On Construction of Griffith’s Films (film), 76, 97 operational images, 66 control society, aligned with, 66–​67 as postcinematic, 66–​67 Oudart, Jean-​Pierre “Absent One,” 6–​7 jouissance, 6–​7 shot/​reverse shot, 6–​7 signification and cutting, 6–​7 Owusu, Akosua Adoma, 138–​40 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 92 Palestinian Revolution, 92 Parker, Rozsika, 17 Patiño, Lois, 121 Patterson, Orlando, 167n.9 Peleshian, Artzvazd, 44–​46 Peretz, Eyal, xviii–​xix Performance Group, 11 Peters, Jean, 81–​82 Phelan, Peggy, 20–​21 Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The (Warhol), 9–​10, 12, 13 photography, 13, 65–​66 contact prints, 20–​21 death, association with, 7–​8, 11 fetish-​like quality, 7–​8 haptic potentiality of, 20–​21 performance art, 11 as physical objects, 20 signification, 11 smartphone camera, 96–​97 suture, 7–​8, 11–​12 touch, 20 Pickup on South Street (film), 81–​82 Pierrot le fou (film), 92 Pilgrim (film), 159, 163, 165 dissolve, nature of, 160–​62 Watervliet Shaker Historic District, 162

Watts Towers, 159–​62 place environment in avant-​garde cinema, 116 as intersection of time and space, 128 as relation, 117 poetry ecological imagination, 138 Pollard, Ingrid, 138 populism, 172–​73 postmodernism, 11 Premoderns, 121–​22 production relations, xiv, 62 Provisional Irish Republican Army Blanketmen, 41, 42–​44 hunger strikers, 49 no wash protest, 41, 42–​44 psychoanalysis, xxix–​xxx, 6, 123–​24 Purdy, Jedediah, 122–​23 Quorum (film), 159 race, 138 and place, 148–​49 racial abjection gerrymandering, 152 Rappmund, Peter Bo, xxxiii–​xxxiv, 134–​35 Rayners Lane (film installation), 51–​52 realism, xx–​xxi, xxiv–​xxv homogeneity of space, xxiv relation, xviii–​xix, xxxiv, 150, 173 between part and whole, xx body, rubric of, xxix in cinema, 61–​62 equivocal nature of, 117 through montage, xiii, 32–​33, 174 and place, 117 problem of, 60 through separation, 70–​71 subject, as signifier, 6 table, as figure of, 69–​70 things, xvi–​xvii of third kind, xvii–​xviii viewer-​filmmaker-​witness, 69–​70 as word, xvi Remote Viewing (video), 151–​52 chroma-​keying, 152–​54 errantry, as operative, 154–​55 fungibility, 154–​55 green screen, 152–​55 racial abjection, 154–​55 white spatial power, 154–​55

186 Index representation, xix–​xx, xxvi, 6–​7, 16–​17, 21, 33–​34, 35–​36, 65, 94–​95, 120–​21, 124–​25, 131 interstices of, 128 of object, xix rupture in, xxiv reterritorialization, 67–​68 table, 68–​69 Richardson, Emily, 121 Rocky (film), xiii–​xiv Rohdie, Sam, 32–​33 Saïto, Daïchi, xxxiii–​xxxiv, 125–​28, 131–​34 Sands, Bobby, 27, 44–​46, 48–​49, 52–​ 54, 56n.31 scale, xix–​xx distance, xix as relational, xix Scarry, Elaine, 17–​18 Schneemann, Carolee, 11 Schnittstelle (Interface) (film), 81–​82 assemblage, 78–​80 double-​image, as montage, 69 editing, depicting of, 80–​81 editing, as perilous process, 80–​81 exhibition in gallery setting, 80 montage, forms of, 78 montage, as form of mapping, 78–​80 positionality, emphasis on, 80–​81 relation in view of relation, 78–​80 relation between flesh and body as spectacle, 78 relations, images of at editing table, 80–​81 shot/​reverse-​shot movement, 78 solitary workplace and factory society, 72–​73 split screen, 69 tables, 78–​81 Screen Tests (Warhol), 27–​28 Seawood, Reverend James, 152–​54, 155, 159 Second World War, xxvii, 123–​24 Sedgwick, Edie, 28–​29 sensorimotor rationale, xxvi–​xxvii seriality, xxix Sewing Machine, A (Warhol), 14–​15 Sexton, Jared, 154–​55 Sheehan, Rebecca, 131–​32 Sheldrake, Merlin, 122 shot/​countershot, 42–​44, 74–​75, 76, 88, 100, 101–​5 “Shot/​Countershot” (Farocki), 74

Sicilia! (film), xi–​xii countershot, xii form of relation, xii Siegert, Bernhard, 59 doors, as cultural techniques, 95–​96 signification, 22 signifier, xxix, 6–​7, 17–​18, 66, 115–​ 16, 131–​32 and signified, 141n.11 Silverman, Kaja, 7 Simmel, Georg, 131 simultanéism, xxv–​xxvi Sitney, P. Adams, 121, 141–​42n.18 slavery, 135–​36, 147, 149–​50, 154, 157 chattel, 167n.10 Sleep (film), 27–​28 slow cinema, xv, 121 smartphone camera, 97–​99 altering structure of photography, 96–​97 Smith, Cauleen, xxxiii–​xxxiv, 145–​47, 149, 151–​52, 154–​56, 158, 159–​60, 162–​63, 165, 166–​67, 169n.39 belonging and place, 157, 158–​59 Black feminist vision of, 165–​66 Blackness, deployment of, 148 chromo keying, 148–​49 errantry, aesthetics and politics of, 147, 148–​49 Indigenous relationships, and natural environment, 157 montage, use of, 148–​49 Snowden, Edward, 172–​73 Society for Cutting Up Men, The (Solanas), 22 Sojourner (film), 159, 165–​66 editing of, 163 errantry, as end in itself, 163 Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, 163 R3 Coalition, 169n.39 semaphore flag telegrapher, 163–​65 Watts Towers, 165–​66 Solanas, Fernando, 91–​92 Solanas, Valerie, xxix–​xxx, 3–​4, 12, 26n.57 montage, 22 Soviet cinema, xiii–​xiv, 90–​91 Soviet film theory, xxii spatial relation, 60–​61 Speed and Politics (Virilio), 93–​94, 109n.5 Spillers, Hortense, 149–​50 falling, 152 Spinoza, Baruch, 39

Index  187 splice, xxxiv, 36–​37, 40, 52–​54, 80–​ 81, 171–​72 Steenbeck viewing monitor, xii Steyerl, Hito, xxxii, 76–​78, 87, 89–​90, 97–​ 106, 172 cinematic interval, 107–​9 cinematic politics, 87–​88 editing, as spatial phenomenon, 97 montage, call for new conception of, 96–​97 montage, as relation grounded in conflict, 87–​88 new ways of relating, 87–​88 offscreen, as everywhere, 96–​97 politics of montage, 107–​9 Wolf, presence in work, 94–​95, 97, 105, 106–​7 Stierli, Martino, 39–​40 stitched photographs, xxix–​xxx, 3–​5, 14–​15 curative impulse of, 27–​28 deferred multiplicity of, 20–​21 jouissance, 22 as long take, 27–​28 as montage, 20–​21 mortal symbolism of, 22–​23 as piece of fabric, 19–​20 precarious character of, 21 repetition, 22, 27–​28 suturing, 21–​23 theory of suture, as misreading, 5 vertigo, effect of, 19–​20 See also Warhol, Andy Stoermer, Eugene, 122 Strathern, Marilyn, xvii–​xviii Straub, Jean-​Marie, xi–​ Suicide: Fallen Body (film), 13 Sun Ra, 163 surveillance capitalism, xxviii–​xxix suture, xxix, 4–​5, 6, 13, 17–​18, 19, 22–​23 absence, 6–​8 as countermovement to death, 21 knitting, 17 lack, 7–​8 misinterpretation of, 7 montage, 96–​97 in multiple discourses, 7–​8 narrative discourse, 7 photography, 7–​8, 11–​12 shot/​reverse shot, 6–​7 spectator, 6–​7 Svilova, Yelizaveta, 63

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (film), 119–​20 Team America: World Police (film), xiii–​xiv techné, xxii technology, 64, 72, 87 automation, 64–​65 displacement of individual, 62–​63 effect on human relations, 62–​63, 64–​65 of war, smartphone camera, terraforming, 129–​30 territorialization, 67–​68 territory, xix, 19, 67, 163, 168n.16 Third Cinema, xiii–​xiv, 110n.16 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 67–​68 3/​60 Trees in Autumn (3/​60 Bäume im Herbst) (film), 125 Tillman, Lynne, 3 time-​image, xxvii–​xxviii Topophilia (film), 115–​44 landscape, 134 time, 134–​35 Touching Photographs (Olin), 20 “Towards a Third Cinema” (Solanas and Gentino), 91–​92 Trans-​Alaska Pipeline System, 134 Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (film), 126, 131–​34, 143n.44 Triangle Trade (video), 146–​47, 158–​59 Trinity nuclear test, 122 “Trouble with Wilderness, The” (Cronon), 122–​23 Tuan, Yi-​Fu, 60 UFA, 118 Uhl, Christopher, 122–​23 Ujica, Andrei, 80 Ukraine, 67 UNICEF, 172–​73 United States, 91–​92, 106, 135–​36, 169n.38, 172–​73 desegregation, failure of, 152 universalism, 150 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 123–​24 Velez, Lupe, 28–​29 Vertov, Dziga, 63, 64–​65, 67 Videograms of a Revolution (video), 80 Vietnam, 69–​70, 94 napalm, use of, 68–​69

188 Index Virilio, Paul, 60–​61, 88, 90–​91, 93–​94 displacement of architecture, 110–​11n.27 war model, 95–​96 Volkonsky, Sergei, xxi–​xxii Vuillermoz, Emile, xxv–​xxvi Walker, Joe, 52–​54, 56n.39 Wallach, Alan, 118 war and cinema, 88–​92 Warhol, xxx–​xxxi, 3, 8–​13, 27 Absent One, 18–​19 “blankness,” aspiring to, 10 Brillo boxes, 22 cinematic cuts, 27–​29 Coca-​Cola bottles, 22 contact prints, 20–​21 corporeality, of sewn works, 14–​15, 21 crisis of separation, xxix cut-​out dolls, 9–​10, 18–​19 cutting, 8–​9, 10–​11, 22 death and illness, attitude toward, 26n.57 Esquire assignment, 8–​9, 11–​12, 18–​ 19, 24n.28 as fetishist, 16–​17 fiber, as meaning of expression, 17 films of, and fear of cutting, 27–​28 hypochondria of, 26n.57 illnesses of, 9–​10 “intermission,” 9–​10 knitting drawings, 14–​15, 17, 22–​23 long take, cinema of, xxix–​xxx montage practice of, xxix, 10, 11, 19, 28–​29 photographs of, xxix–​xxx, 8–​9, 13–​14, 19–​21, 22 photography, as substitute for flesh, 21 photography, as substitute for missing body parts, 21 relation, xxix–​xxx scarred body, 10–​13, 18–​19, 22, 25n.36

shooting of, xxix–​xxx, 3–​4, 8–​9, 13, 22, 26n.57 strobe cutting, 27–​29 suturing, 19, 21, 23 trauma, expression of, 14–​15, 19, 21 See also stitched photographs We Already Have What We Need (exhibition), 145–​47 Weather (film), 159 Welles, Orson deep space, use of, xxii–​xxiii West Africa, 156 “What an Editing Room Is” (Farocki), 72–​73 Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (film), xi–​xii situatedness, repelling of, 116 Where No Vultures Fly (film), xxiii whiteness, 138, 146–​47, 152 white supremacy, xxxiv spatial tyranny of, 138, 147 Whitman, Albery, 138 Widmark, Richard, 81–​82 Wilderson, Frank, 167n.9 chattel slavery, 167n.10 conflict and antagonism, distinction between, 167n.8 white-​Black relational dynamic, structural antagonism of, 149–​50 wild walls, 51, 54 windows inside and outside, 96–​97 Wing, Betsy, 150–​51 wipes, xiii, 37, 46–​48 Wojnarowicz, David, 20–​21 Wolf, Andrea, xxxii, 94–​95, 97, 105, 106–​9 Wollen, Peter, 87–​88 World War I, 78–​80 Worster, Donald, 128–​29 Yoruba, 156, 157 “You Can’t Stop Us” (video), 171–​72