Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology 9789048543922

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Beyond the Essay Film

Beyond the Essay Film Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology

Edited by Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Heart of a Dog, Laurie Anderson, 2015 Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 870 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 392 2 doi 10.5117/9789463728706 nur 670 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To the memory of Thomas Elsaesser

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams

1. 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?

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2. To Attain the Text. But Which Text?

49

Raymond Bellour

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

3. Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative 75 Laura Rascaroli

4. ‘Every love story is a ghost story’: The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) 95 Deane Williams

5. Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance: The Multiscreen Array as Essay

111

6. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter

121

7. Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button

141

8. Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay

165

9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator

189

Ross Gibson

Katrin Pesch

Belinda Smaill

Julia Vassilieva

Richard Misek

10. The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea?Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking Catherine Grant

199

11. The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously 215 Thomas Elsaesser †

Index 241

Acknowledgments The editors would like to acknowledge the help of all the people involved in this project and, first of all, the late Thomas Elsaesser. Without his support and guidance, this book would not have become a reality. Our sincere gratitude goes to the chapter’s authors for their wonderful texts. We would like to thank Janice Loreck for her research assistance in preparing this volume and the editorial team at Amsterdam University Press – Maryse Elliot, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, and Danielle Carter – for contributing their time and expertise to this book. Special thanks are due to Adrian Martin for translating into English, for the first time, Raymond Bellour’s ‘Trente-cinq ans après: le “texte” a nouveau introuvable?’, written in 2009, and collected in Raymond Bellour’s La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. Catherine Grant’s ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’ was originally published as: ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 1.1 (2014), Web. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

Introduction Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams The essay film is in the spotlight. The last 25 years or so saw an explosion in audiovisual productions from across the globe that belong to this lineage. Ushered in by the watershed moment of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), other prominent examples of this recent development include Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Victor Erice’s La Mort Rouge (2006), Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010), John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project (2013), John Hughes’ The Archives Project (2013), and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015). But we can also think of Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational (2014), Boris Groys’ Thinking in Loop (2008), Richard Misek’s Rohmer in Paris (2013), and the critical audiovisual essay work of Kevin B. Lee, Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, Kogonada, Christian Keathley, and Jason Mittel. Another index of the current reinvigoration of interest in the essay film is demonstrated by the elevation of ‘essayistic’ documentaries in polls like the Greatest Documentaries of All Time. For example, in 2014, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) was rated first in Sight & Sound’s poll, with Chris Marker’s San Soleil [Sunless] (1983) in second place. As Brian Winston points out, this rating indicates much about the current status of the essayistic tradition: ‘Subjectivity is no longer forbidden to the documentarist. The Vertovian tradition opens the door to it and subjective “essayists” have, the poll insists, walked through in triumph. Varda, Marker, Guzmàn, for example, not only appear in the top 10 but they start to dominate.’1 This increased visibility of the essay f ilm has been followed by the reciprocal intensification of film and media scholarship, including such signal contributions as Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (2004), Michael Renov’s The Subject of Documentary (2004), Thomas 1 Brian Winston, ‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time: The Sight and Sound 2014 Poll’, Studies in Documentary Film 8.3 (2014), pp. 267-272 (p. 270).

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_intro

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Elsaesser’s Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004), Timothy Corrigan’s The Essay Film: From Montaigne to Marker (2011), Nora M. Alter’s Chris Marker (2006), and Laura Rascaroli’s The Personal Camera (2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017). More recently, Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s Essays on the Essay Film (2017) has anthologized key writings in the history of essay-film criticism to firmly establish the field, while Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić’s World Cinema and the Essay Film (2019) foregrounded the transnational reach of the format. These works have advanced the theorization of the essay film, attending to the issues of definition, classification, and the historical changes of the format. While stressing the difficulties of providing an exhaustive definition, scholars generally agree that the essay film occupies a liminal position between fiction, non-fiction, and experimental film; that, as a form, it is transgressive and heretical, both in terms of respecting genre boundaries and established authorities; that it is distinguished by the presence of subjective vision, authorial voice, and reflexive standpoint; and that it mobilizes a specific form of address, granting to the viewer a more involved and critical position. Our volume represents both a part of and a critical assessment of this recent upsurge of interest in the essay film. Raising the issue of ‘the beyond’ of the essay film, we aim both to mark this moment of saturation in the production of and reflection on the essay film and to speculate on the possible future of the format. Yet, it is not an attempt to ‘take stock’ or to suggest that the essay film form has exhausted its generative potential. On the contrary, we aim to follow the lead of Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about finalising and initiating art-forms, urging us to attend closely to the seeds of future developments which can be discerned in the present aesthetic configurations and thus putting in practice the ‘embryonic approach’.2 Stressing the continuous relevance of Bakhtin’s ideas at the turn of the 21st century, Mikhail Epstein (2004) has reiterated the productive value of theorising historical changes not in terms of post (postmodern, posthuman, post-industrial) but, rather, proto, to instigate the shift ‘from finality to initiation as our dominant mode of thinking’.3 By raising the issue of ‘beyond the essay film’, we thus seek to speculate about its possible transformation as we move forward into the uncharted waters of the 21st – digital – century. We focus on three specific axes that underpin and shape the articulation 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 139. 3 Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Unasked Question. What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge 10 (1) (2004), pp. 42-60 (p. 46).

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of the essay film as a specific cultural form – subjectivity, textuality, and technology – to explore how changes along and across these dimensions affect historical shifts within essay-film practice and its relation to other types of cinema and neighbouring art forms. In our introduction, we outline the pivotal role of subjectivity, textuality, and technology in the understanding of the essay-film format, demonstrating how analysis along these three lines opens the way for articulating the potential of the essay film for epistemic enquiry, political critique, and ethical reflexion; we also introduce the questions that contributions to this volume address. As Timothy Corrigan, Ross Gibson, and others have pointed out so clearly, the genealogy of the essay film can be best understood in relation to writing: Michel Montaigne, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. In his The Essay Film, Corrigan proposes that ‘the most recognizable origin of the essay is the work of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)’. 4 In setting out his own essayist lineage, Corrigan places Montaigne at the beginning of a literary mode of writing, something he terms ‘an evolution from Montaigne to the essay film’ that, for him, includes James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Borges, and Umberto Eco, but also ‘drawings, sketches […] even in musical forms’ as well as ‘photo-essays, essay films, and the electronic essays that permeate the Internet as blogs and other exchanges within a public electronic circuitry’.5 Yet, Montaigne proves to be significant not only for the development of an essayistic textual format, but also for the demonstration of how the very birth of subjectivity as a cultural and historical phenomenon is predicated on specific literary ways of shaping and expressing it. In his ‘What Do I Know?: Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’, Ross Gibson invites readers to consider the relevance of Montaigne in this regard: ‘The reason that Montaigne is still so fascinating and illuminating nowadays is that he was historically placed […] in an era of extreme change in the history of European ideas. He was a sensitive tablet upon which the complexities of a crucial phase of the history of ideas was scored.’6 As Gibson points out, Montaigne’s writings emerged in the late sixteenth century, a time ‘when the attitudes about subjectivity, which we now understand as the modern European ideas of personality and psychology were just beginning to develop’, as well as enormous technological shifts such 4 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (London, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 13. 5 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 14. 6 Ross Gibson, ‘What Do I Know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’, Filmnews 32: 134 (Summer 1987/1988), pp. 26-32 (p. 27).

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as ‘the first industrial printing presses, a time of refinement for systems of perspectival representation, and the era of the great oceanic explorations of the seafaring powers’.7 For Gibson, Montaigne and the essayistic mode is of interest to contemporary readers, because ‘Montaigne could discern a shift in subjectivity, therefore, toward the modern configuration which could contemplate itself as a distinct unit in a larger objective world’, of subjective, technological, and textual shifts.8 Subjectivity can be thought of in relation to the essay film from another angle – the genre’s dialogical structure. In ‘Le livre, aller; retour/The Book, Back and Forth’, Raymond Bellour stresses that the essay film’s specificity resides in its addressivity: it gives the right to speak – by giving the right to representation, or to the image – to a vast number of subjects within the film, and by doing so also demonstrates its ability to ‘address oneself in order to move towards others’.9 Reflecting on Chris Marker’s work, Bellour argues that the essay film’s ‘inner design is an address. […] for an address is as much a destination as a mode of discourse, it is a physical or moral quality as much as an informational sign’.10 Following Bellour, Laura Rascaroli in ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, argues that it is not only the prominent presence of the authorial I, inscribed in a distinctive enunciation position, that makes the essay film unique, but also that this personal authorial voice addresses directly a singular, concrete, embodied person and not a social subject or a generalized audience, inviting the individual into a conversation, ‘it opens up problems and interrogates the spectator’.11 Such conversation is only partially scripted, and therefore is always unfinished and open. Meanwhile, Timothy Corrigan defines the essay film as ‘figuration of thinking or thought as a cinematic address and a spectatorial response’.12 This connection between the essay film and dialogue might prove decisive not only in understanding the formal qualities of the genre, but also in unpacking the imbrication of the essayistic, subjective, and, perhaps, most importantly – its ethical implications. For Paul Ricouer in Time and Narrative, dialogue represents ‘a radically different structuring principle’ from monologue and marks the ‘final threshold’ of narrativity, beyond which the mechanics of mimesis – of actions, 7 Gibson, ‘What Do I Know?’, p. 27. 8 Gibson, ‘What Do I Know?’, p. 27. 9 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 111. 10 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, pp. 112-113. 11 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49. 2 (2008), pp. 24-47 (p. 35). 12 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film’, p. 30.

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characters, thoughts, and feelings – become abandoned.13 In dialogue, the principle of a coexistence of voices substitutes for the temporal configuration of actions. Consequently, the dialogical organisation brings with it the factor of incompleteness, condemning a composition itself to remain unfinished. This radical shift from monological narration, or history, to dialogical synchrony reconfigures textual structures while opening up new ways for the understanding of subjectivity; as Ricouer enthuses, ‘But who ever said that narrative was the first and last word in the presentation of consciousnesses and their worlds?’14 Indeed, for Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogical Imagination, the dialogical relationship with the other is a necessary condition for the very emergence of subjectivity: I need the other because the other will give form and meaning to my life, an acknowledgment and confirmation of my existence. Likewise, Bakhtin sees aesthetic activity as a form-giving activity, through which subjects actively produce each other. It gives a spatial, temporal, and axiological centre to one’s self. By ‘embracing’ the content of one’s life from outside, it externalizes and thus embodies subjectivity – it makes the subject exist. For Bakhtin, then, the other is a necessary condition of the self, and dialogue functions as a principal mechanism of properly being human in the world: we come to ourselves through such encounters with others.15 Yet, a dialogical encounter is predicated on the incommensurability of different human worlds and such incommensurability cannot be resolved, even dialectically, but can only presuppose a complex unity of differences. The logic of dialogue thus requires the move towards provisional synthesis, of simultaneously holding two positions without merging them into one. Meanwhile, for Emmanuel Levinas, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, the primacy of the other constitutes the basis of an ethical system. Just as for Bakhtin, so for Levinas, the encounter with the other becomes foundational for the theorising of ethics and, in particular, what Bakhtin calls ‘answerability’ and Levinas ‘responsibility’. Both thinkers ground ethics in otherness as something that is not only distinct from the self but that can never be assimilated by the self, in principle. As Bakhtin says, ‘there always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness’ in the dialogic interaction with others.16 For Levinas, social dialogue ‘has to be conceived as a responsibility 13 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988), p. 97. 14 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, pp. 97-98. 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 37.

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for the other; it might be called humanity, or subjectivity, or self’.17 Thus, if dialogical structure is, indeed, the most distinctive aspect of the essay-film form, then it makes it not only an ideal instrument of thought but also an ideal instrument for ethical reflection. This seems to be demonstrated by the history of the form, which, Paul Arthur argues, has frequently articulated ‘politically charged visions’.18 That ethical reflection is deeply characteristic of the essay film is evident in its characteristic thematic foci: ranging from the politics of memory and silence to postcolonial and feminist critique, the essay film has been used extensively to address issues of freedom and oppression, law and retribution, justice and violence, gratitude and debt, erasure and forgetfulness. Lately, its scope of ethical enquiry has been enlarged to acknowledge the fullness of otherness and address non-human others and the environment at large. Such concerns seem to confirm Adorno’s insight that ‘the relationship of nature and culture is its [the essay’s] true theme’.19 However, for Adorno, this relationship is not primarily about thematic focus – rather, it is about the loss of immediate access to nature as a price of developing human culture: ‘The essay quietly puts an end to the illusion that thought could break out of the sphere of thesis, culture, and move into the physis, nature. Spellbound by what is fixed and acknowledged to be derivative, by artefacts, it honors nature by confirming that it no longer exists for human beings.’20 Adorno’s point here resonates with the current debates regarding biopolitics, which, however, would take it not as a final diagnosis, but rather as a challenge for the political thought that strives to forge new paradigms to address nature and culture, bios and zoê in such a way that would refuse ‘capturing’ of bare life within predetermined semantic categories, social order, and juridical injunctions.21 It is perhaps from this juncture that the format of the essay film offers the most promising way to think through the current problematics concerning the human-animal distinction, as well as the issues inherent in the Anthropocene and the potential ecological crisis. In considering the essay film’s epistemic potential, the discussion has to take into account the relationship between the verbal and the visual. The 17 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 46. 18 Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Comment 39. 1 (2003), pp. 58-63 (p. 58). 19 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 19. 20 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 11. 21 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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first to raise the issue was Sergei Eisenstein during his period of ‘intellectual’ montage work, notably when he conceived his bold, albeit never-realized project of filming Karl Marx’s Capital. In his ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, Eisenstein argues that, while his third film, October, ‘presents a new form of cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes’, Capital would transform this method into a new type of ‘discursive cinema’.22 At stake in that project was the ability to communicate abstract thought through the juxtaposition of images and the possibility to render arguments visually. Eisenstein suggested that it is precisely the discontinuity, the gap between different images, images and sound, the visual and verbal flows in film that creates a condition of possibility for a cinematic thought to emerge. As Christa Blümlinger would later reiterate in ‘Reading Between the Images’, the essay film operates through rupture, break, and tear.23 For Jacques Rancière, the relationship between image and text is at the core of the greatest potential of cinema, as well as being responsible for its derailment. Rancière argued that, during the 20th century, text has tended to dominate image in cinema, accounting for what he calls the ‘thwarted cinematic fable’ – thwarted in the sense of not being able to fulfil the potential of the cinematic medium inherent in the power of image – and it is precisely the essayistic mode that proves cinema’s ability to live up to its promise – a mode that finds its paramount expression in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998). If numerous film-makers ‘subjected the “life” of images to the immanent “death” of the text’, according to Rancière in Film Fables, Godard salvages ‘the history announced by a century of films, whose power slipped though the fingers of their filmmakers’.24 Through his work, Godard asserts the power and importance of both image and text and demonstrates that neither is reducible to the other. By juxtaposing the logic of the visual and the verbal in this way, the essay film starts functioning as a proper tool of thinking, of grasping and insight, of generating new knowledge and understanding. As Godard famously declares via intertitles in Chapter 3A of Histoire(s) du cinema: ‘A thought that forms / a form that thinks.’ An underside of this statement, of course, is that thought is impossible outside of form – outside of its rendering through symbolic and expressive means. 22 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, trans. by Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, and Maciej Sliwowski, October 2 (Summer, 1976), pp. 3-26 (p. 9). 23 Christa Blümlinger, ‘Reading Between the Images’, in Documentary across Disciplines, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 73-91. 24 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (London: Berg, 2006), p. 171.

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This is also what Theodor Adorno stresses in ‘The Essay as Form’: in considering the epistemological possibilities of the essay form, it is important to remember that it takes the mediated nature of thinking as its condition and its horizon. ‘It does not insist on something beyond mediations.’25 Even though ‘for the essay all levels of mediation are immediate until it begins to reflect’, this makes the fact that the essay can only operate through ‘the historical mediation in which the whole society is sedimented’ only more obvious.26 As such, the essayistic mode is mediated through different modalities: language, conceptual frameworks, categories, and notions but also through physical apparatuses of self-expression and communication – whether paper and pen or camera and film. The evolution of essay-film production thus has to be considered in relation to changing cinematic technologies and techniques. The emergence of handheld cameras, which granted new mobility and access to subject matter, provided a major boost for the explosion of essay films in the 1960s in the wake of the emergence of what François Truffaut called la politique des Auteurs and the rise of cinema verité. Similarly, new digital methods of film-making open up rich possibilities for essay-film practice and its conceptualisation, by democratising not only production, distribution, and circulation of media products, but also facilitating critical engagement with film on an unprecedented scale. The rise of the audiovisual scholarly essay over the last ten years is just one, albeit arguably the most fascinating, development in this context. However, the digital shift also mounts new challenges to the theorisation of the essay film. Central to these theoretical debates has been the question of the digital medium’s realism. Compromising the causal or existential connections between images and their referents, digital technology also endangers the image’s long-assumed, as well as long-contested, ability to provide direct access to reality and its consequent ability to make truth claims. Yet, the debates about medium ontology might be fundamentally misplaced: as Stephen Prince argues in ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, ‘digital imaging exposes the enduring dichotomy in film theory as a false boundary’.27 Given the problematisation of the category of truth in postmodern debates in the humanities more generally (which lately found an uncanny echo in the new media economy termed ‘post-truth’), the issue of 25 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 11. 26 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p.11. 27 Stephen Prince, ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film Quarterly 49. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 27-37 (p. 34).

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truth arises as one of the key loci in which the form of the essay film proves its increasing relevance at the beginning of the 21st century. The continuous powerful engagement of the format of the essay film with the idea of truth post digital transformation demonstrates that the unique film ontology can never serve as the grounds of truth by virtue of the cinematic image’s veracity and authenticity, but rather, as Badiou argues, it is precisely the inherent aporia between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’ that guarantees that the issue of truth will remain at the very centre of the medium-specific concerns.28 This confirms the profundity of Adorno’s insight that, while the ‘essay thought divests itself of the traditional idea of truth’ as a utopian vision of clarity and completeness, it opens up a way of facing the truth of non-identity, incompleteness, and the fragmentary nature of the world, providing a means of engaging with the truth-project from a non-essentialist perspective.29 The digital shift reinforces another tendency, which, as thinkers from Eisenstein to Badiou have argued, has always been present in cinema: its impurity, or multimedial nature. From the early days of cinema theory, the idea that cinema would incorporate and integrate previously existing arts – literature, painting, music, theatre, ballet – has been prominent, but it is as a result of the injection of a new degree of digitally afforded freedom in incorporating elements and layers of various cultural expressions, as well as spreading the moving image to new platforms and screens, that the notion of intermediality has gained fresh currency in film studies. The essay film is arguably the form that has put the digital possibilities of intermedial work to maximal use: essay films not only frequently incorporate excerpts from other films, television footage, and theatrical and ballet performances, but also tend to commingle intertitles and newspaper clippings, diagrams and photographs, images of paintings and sculptures, justifying their usage by way of intertextual references, archival testimonies, or poetic association. Alexander Kluge’s magisterial nine-and-a-half-hour film Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike – Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital (News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx /Eisenstein/Capital) (2008), provides one of the exemplary demonstrations of how intermediality, enabled by the digital shift, expands possibilities of the essay film.30 But other examples demonstrating the imbrication of subjectivity, textuality, and technology in the essay film abound. It was the digital turn 28 Alain Badiou, Cinéma (Oxford: Polity, 2013), p. 207. 29 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 11. 30 See also Julia Vassilieva, “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011, Web.

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that enabled Alexander Sokurov to produce his monumental Russian Ark (2002) all in one famous extra-long take of 90 minutes, and thus to embody the aporia of mobilising the cutting-edge technology of reproduction to amplify the aura of the classical art. Though dealing with a different subject matter, the same aporia is at the core of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), which explores subjectivity in the digital age, on the cusp of the new millennium. As Homay King points out, following Adorno, Varda’s film is a paradoxical film that deals with the relationship between digital and material cultures: ‘a film in an [then] ultra contemporary format that is concerned with the expired and out of date’.31 In this paradox, it is also possible to see the capturing of a cultural moment where the obsolete and the discarded are, for Varda, very much part of her world, as is digital video. This paradoxical culture is rendered effortlessly, affectively, working, as Annette Hamilton tells us, with connections in a ripple effect. Images and sequences lead in many directions. Varda’s reality is cultural and she explores the cultural phenomenon of gleaning, through painting, through the history of cinema, through provincial life, urban asylum seekers and psychoanalysis. Ethics, the legal code, self-scrutiny and parody all jostle for position with the sweet taste of a ripened fig, the beauty of an afternoon light in an apple orchard and the experience of old age.32

This jostling Hamilton describes is redolent of the essayist mode in the digital era, but it is also a quality with which the mode prefigured the digital era, lending itself well to the era. In this regard, an essay film like The Gleaners and I mirrors the networked exchange of subjectivity, in relation to whatever is at hand, the digital bricolage at our fingertips. Arguably, though, nowhere is the potent imbrication of subjectivity, textuality, and technology in the essay film demonstrated as persuasively than in the work of Chris Marker. While Letter from Siberia (1959), La Jetée (1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), and others signaled the playful, ironic, and subjective nature of Marker’s oeuvre, with the release of San Soleil [Sunless] in 1983, the full force of Marker’s work as mediated thinking became apparent. A complicated play of fiction and non-fiction with possible topics such as 31 Homay King, ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (2007), pp. 421-429 (p. 421). 32 Annette Hamilton, ‘The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary That Gets Under the Skin’, Metro [Australia] 137 (2003), pp. 126-131 (p. 129).

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Iceland, Japan, San Francisco, Cape Verde, and Paris in the service of ineffable meta-themes such as memory, history, subjectivity, and cinema, San Soleil set a compass point for subjective cinema and documentary form, its closing images dissolving into electronic art, pure representation circa 1983. This historical point sees Marker at the cusp of electronic computer-generated representation, drawing on his own subjective history of 16mm filming and writing to fashion a persona, a film-maker, Sandor Krasna, through whom to essay modern subjectivity. Following San Soleil’s rendering of subjectivity at the dawn of the computer age, of a bunch of topics circling around a peripatetic, ruminative subject, it is possible to see the emergence of the World Wide Web, domestic computing, and hypertext in the late 1980s as a key moment in the essayistic tradition. In the years immediately succeeding the release of San Soleil, scholars sought not just to produce traditional scholarly work – essays, books, papers – but to engage productively with the possibilities the film and the moment in which it was released opened up. The 1980s saw the emergence of digital hypertext; in particular, Apple’s Hypercard, released in 1987, saw the domestic enthusiasm for database, hypermedia, and hypertext – as components of what was termed ‘new media’ – increase exponentially. One example which saw the coincidence of this new media and the ensuing engagement with Marker and San Soleil was Adrian Miles’ Chris Marker World Wide Web Site, an early interactive, collaborative, hypertextual database of words and audiovisual materials devoted to Marker. This scholarly site saw the melding of critical practice (the site was developed from Miles’ PhD) and hypertext networking that draws on the essayistic tenor of Marker’s work grounded in the emergent technology and subjectivity of the 1980s.33 In 1997, Marker himself made a signal contribution to this lineage again with his millennial CD-ROM, Immemory. In many ways, as Raymond Bellour points out in ‘Le livre, aller; retour/The Book, Back and Forth’, Immemory is a summation, a ‘repository of an oeuvre and a life which have taken this century as a memory palace for all the world’s memories’, at the same time as it belongs to the tradition we have been sketching here, ‘between the path of Montaigne […] and the path of Barthes’, where Marker ‘[…] invents an ambiguous path, which has as much to do with the logic of the media involved as with his need to write the rules of his own game.’34 Here, 33 Adrian Miles, Chris Marker World Wide Web Site, archived at [http://vogmae.net.au/works/ marker/index.html]. 34 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, in Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour, Qu’est-Ce Qu’une Madeleine? A Propos du CD-Rom Immemory by Chris Marker: Essays by Lauren Roth and

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Bellour commingles Marker’s oeuvre, and his fictional self-realisation, with the possibilities afforded by this millennial platform. In seeking an understanding of Immemory in relation to Marker’s earlier works, Bellour re-examines André Bazin’s seminal review of Letter from Siberia (1962), in which ‘Bazin invokes the idea of “horizontal editing” which moves not from one shot to the next one, but laterally as it were, to what is said about it’.35 For Bellour, Bazin’s description ‘underestimates the degree to which, in this address, the image has its own force of intelligence, its own gaze, even if it owes them to the speech that spurs on’.36 Bellour then understands Immemory’s procedure as a condition of the CD-ROM: This feeling that image speaks to us is perhaps even stronger in Immemory, where Marker is content to simply write on the screen that is no longer a screen, where the image seems to arrive immediately at the whim of the gestures by which we summon it. The feeling stems from the technical apparatus, its free and available address, whereby we close ourselves up with the author in a new pact between viewer and reader.37

As Bellour suggests, Immemory belonged to a broader utilisation of the technology as well as, invoking Umberto Eco, ‘an open work, or rather, a work in motion, Immemory is perhaps above all a work in expansion’ as it is transformed on an Internet site.38 This dynamic and transitive apparatus, at once culminative and all-encompassing, recalls characterisations of Marker’s earlier La Jetée (1962), and Sunless, as well as prefiguring later network models. As this discussion demonstrates, the essay film emerged as an heir to the essayistic literary mode critically implicated in the formation of modern subjectivity with its apparent interiority and singularity. Subjectivity, by way of being both expressed and constructed through the essay film, through the creation of a specific enunciation modality, through the use of first-person address, and by differentiating film essays from other, more objective or neutral forms of cinematic discourse is rightly acknowledged as one of the main distinctive features of this type of film-making. At the same time, the essay-film modality, with its noted protean tendencies and voracious appetite Raymond Bellour (Paris: Yves Gevaert Éditeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), pp. 124-125. 35 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 112. 36 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 112. 37 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 112. 38 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 112.

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in the cannibalisation of other cultural forms – literature, photographs, other films by way of quotation or pastiche – arguably represents an expression of postmodern subjectivity par excellence. As we enter the 21st century and move, in the view of some scholars, to modernism after postmodernism, presumably seeking once again to re-establish the boundaries around the subject and subjectivities, this volume seeks to hypothesize what new forms the writing and performing of subjectivity through the essay film will take. Furthermore, it seeks to investigate how this symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and textuality in the essay film penetrates and troubles other forms of film-making in the 21st century – from documentary to narrative feature film. If subjectivity places the essay film into a specific relationship with the world and our being in the world, textuality bears significantly on the essay film’s form and the kind of epistemological work that this type of film-making is uniquely suited to pursue. The essay film has been placed in both reciprocal and antagonistic relationships with such major textual forms as narrative, dialogue, and poetry, and minor forms, such as letter and diary writing. In all these different forms, the textual aspect has been functioning as the major tool allowing the essay film to work as an instrument of thinking, of grasping and insight, of generating new knowledge and understanding. At the same time, the cinematic mode of expression reshapes and purifies the very textual forms that provided a grid for the essay film in the first place. The digital shift pushes these intertwined relationships between the verbal and the visual even further. As we are coming to terms with and discovering new possibilities offered by the digital revolution, this volume suggests that it is vital to rethink what constitutes information, memory, and knowledge, reconfiguring traditional notions of authorship and spectatorship towards intensely dialogical, involved and critically ambitious notions of participatory media, interactivity, the prosumer, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Each chapter in this collection engages (to various degrees) with the three parameters foregrounded in the subtitle of the volume: subjectivity, textuality, and technology. Balancing theoretical discussions and film case studies, the authors address the transformation of the essay film from historical, thematic, aesthetic, ethical, and self-reflexive perspectives. The collection opens with two chapters that face textuality squarely. In the first chapter, ‘35 Years On: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, Raymond Bellour reflects on his own classic 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’. Moving into the 21st century, Bellour considers the paradoxical situation of cinematic art and film studies in the present, digital era: the filmic text may

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have become greatly ‘accessible’ (via DVD, etc.) and freezable, but is it truly ‘graspable’ in a more profound sense? By analysing cross-medial works by Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Danielle Vallet Kleiner, and James Coleman, as well as prominent examples of the scholarly ‘video essay’ format, Bellour gestures to the ways in which cinema, and the special experience of cinema, remain, in his terms, fundamentally and tantalisingly an ‘unattainable’ phenomena. ‘The Unattainable Text’ also serves as a point of departure for Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s chapter ‘To Attain the Text. But which Text?’. Álvarez López and Martin note that, whereas the film-text was once indomitably introuvable (Bellour’s original word) to scholars and artists alike – variously unfindable, inaccessible, unreachable, unquotable, unmanipulable – now the situation seems to have changed, placing the cinematic text within our direct reach. However, Álvarez López and Martin caution, there are challenges in ‘The Unattainable Text’ that are conveniently overlooked in this optimistic interpretation arising from our present era, and their essay teases out these challenges. Attending to a semantic complexity at work in Bellour’s piece, they explicate three different, principal meanings attached to the word text. Most simply, there is text in the empirical sense: an object, in this case, a film. Then there is text as synecdoche for language, especially written language. Finally, there is text in the expanded, semiotic, post-structuralist sense that Roland Barthes and many others gave the term at the end of the 1960s: the text as a ‘methodological field’, a weave of signifying processes.39 To attain this third type of text in the name of cinema and its creative analysis, Martin and Álvarez López argue, it cannot be a straightforward procedure of downloading and re-editing digital files. Their essay explores what more is at stake, theoretically and practically, which we need to make explicit in today’s discussion of the audiovisual essay – an exploration that draws on a range of historical examples as well as their own experience of producing audiovisual essays. The next two chapters shift their emphasis towards subjectivity. In ‘Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic CounterNarrative’, Laura Rascaroli explores the genre of lyric or poetic essay. Rascaroli notes that, while lyricism is acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe, as a type of the essay film, it is still substantially undertheorized. Rascaroli speculates that this may be explained by the impression that affect and sublimity are at odds with the essay’s characteristic 39 Raymond Bellour ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27, (p.21).

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rationalism. By contrast, she proposes to look at lyricism not as separate from, or subordinate to, logical thinking, but rather as enmeshed with and contributing to argumentation. Her discussion focusses on a case study, the essayistic cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello. Characterized by a distinctive syncretism of realism and elegy, Marcello’s cinema mobilizes the lyric not as stylistic cypher, but rather as a means to produce thought-images and meanings associated with affect. Drawing on Marcello’s cinema’s counter-narrative lyricism and its elegiac temporality, Rascaroli’s chapter refines our understanding of the relationship between narration, lyricism, and argument in the essay film. Deane Williams’s chapter ‘“Every Love Story is a Ghost Story”: The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)’ focusses on another example of the film essay produced in a poetic vein. While Anderson’s film has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’, 40 ‘a meditation on love and loss’,41 and a collection of ‘eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling’,42 Williams argues that the film can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multimedia technique and conceptualisation of the future, Williams explores the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Bardo thread through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson’s oeuvre, including her live performance work and the Downtown New York artistic milieu she emerged from. Williams positions the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular rendering of 21st century subjectivity. More radical forms of non-linear organisation of the essay film – brought about by technological affordances – are explored by Ross Gibson in his chapter ‘The Non-Linear Treatment of Disquisition: Multiscreen Installation as Essay’. Gibson’s analysis is prompted in the first instance by the gallery demonstration of Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1980-1995), the essay f ilm that documents the loneliness, tedium, and fear in the life of a squadron patrolling the battle lines of the USSR’s war with Afghanistan. Initially designed to be shown in a consecutive format, the five episodes of Spiritual Voices were presented on rare occasions as an installation displaying all five parts simultaneously and continuously on separate screens. Gibson 40 Steve Rose. ‘Heart of a Dog Review: Paean to a Canine Friend’, The Guardian, 29 May 2016, Web. 41 Susan M. Pollak. ‘A Meditation on Love and Loss: Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog’, Psychology Today, 17 June 2017, Web. 42 Justin Chang. Film Review: Heart of a Dog’, Variety, 4 September 2015, Web.

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argues that the complex multiscreen and polyphonous version changed the emotional dynamics, conceptual understanding, and embodied reactions of the viewers, evoking the convulsive, non-linear experience of war much more vividly than linear presentation. Taking Sokurov’s installation as a point of departure, Gibson examines the affordances of multiscreen installation in a documentary context. Also drawing on other works such as Doug Aitken’s Eraser, Chantal Akerman’s gallery version of From the East, this chapter analyses the insights that can be garnered from spatialized, multistranded exposition, as distinct from a conventional, long-form essay film viewed in a linear development. To grasp the complexity of the affects and ‘messages’ in the installation works, Gibson mobilizes Benjamin Libet’s theories of consciousness and the ‘ecology of mind’ principles articulated by Gregory Bateson. If ‘ecology of mind’ serves as one of the methodological approaches in Gibson’s chapter, the next two chapters place ecology at the centre of their inquiry. In ‘Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter’, Katrin Pesch proposes that, in a time of anthropogenic climate change, environment has become a contested concept in academic and public debate. Reflecting critically on the uses of ecological discourse, Pesch’s chapter puts Stratman’s essay film The Illinois Parables (2016) in dialogue with contemporary ecological thought and ecocritical approaches in film studies and investigates connections between environment and textuality. Without attending directly to environmental issues, the film evokes environment as a multifaceted, aesthetic concept that embraces natural and social surroundings and imaginaries as much as the sensuous and affective properties of filmic space. Pesch’s proposal is that The Illinois Parables treats the essay film form itself as an environment, and she demonstrates that, in the space that it opens up between local specificity and the allegorical reach of parables, the environment is not a passive backdrop to the human drama but is the force that animates the textual properties of filmic space. Belinda Smaill tackles the turn to the Anthropocene in the environmental humanities from a different angle in her chapter ‘Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button (2016)’. Smaill argues that, while the notion of the Anthropocene has focussed attention on anthropogenic climate change and the impact of human activity on the non-human environment, it is crucial that such a project does not cast humans as above and other to the environment, but, rather, that it acknowledges humanity’s entangled relationship with species, history, and environment. This is vital for understanding how, as a species, we fit into the

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world system in an age of accelerating species extinction. Smaill suggests that Patricio Guzman’s The Pearl Button elaborates a hermeneutics attentive to the non-human, in order to offer a powerful interpretive paradigm that decentres the human subject. While The Pearl Button focusses on the history of Chile, precolonial cultures, and the atrocities of the Pinochet regime, it recasts this history in a way that encompasses geography and evolution, employing an associative poetic style. Smaill explores the oceanic imaginary of The Pearl Button, demonstrating how the film’s essayist style offers a situated perspective that reflects on a history of human violence while also moving beyond the human, to place the history of Chile within a global ecosystem. As such, Smaill concludes, The Pearl Button offers one example of cogent film-making in the Anthropocene. The next two chapters explore in depth one of the most promising ways of going ‘beyond the essay film’ that we have witnessed over the last decade – the audiovisual scholarly essay, or videographic f ilm studies. In her chapter ‘Montage Reloaded: from the Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay’, Julia Vassilieva interrogates the relevance of early Russian montage theory and practice to new issues raised by the shift from the essay film to the audiovisual essay. Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of the new type of cinema of ideas formulated in his project for filming Marx’s Das Capital, Dziga Vertov’s foregrounding of subjectivity and reflexivity in The Man with a Movie Camera, and Esphir Shub’s practice of ‘compilation film’ all contributed to the emergence of the essay film as – to use Godard’s famous definition – ‘the form that thinks’. The audiovisual essay inherits from the essay f ilm its raison d’etre: to deliver critical interrogation, as poignantly foreshadowed by Eisenstein; at the same time, the rich arsenal of recently produced videographic works demonstrates the relevance of Lev Manovich’s argument that, while the principles of new media can be derived from The Man with a Movie Camera, the major challenge for digital media is not only to convey complex ideas, but to take the spectator ‘along the process of thinking’. Meanwhile, the audiovisual essay’s use of pre-existing footage and its creative reassembling, raising questions about the nature of authorship, harks back to Shub’s polemical use of the compilation film. Vassilieva’s chapter demonstrates that Russian montage cinema and theory remain critically important for the theorization of the audiovisual essay. The next chapter, Catherine Grant’s ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, is a careful consideration of the role of audio-video essayist as a researcher. Grant is a film scholar who, in the last seven years, has taken up the challenge

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of learning to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digitalvideo essays related to film and media-studies subjects, essays that use footage from the films studied as well as other moving image/sounds from existing media. Her chapter here considers the pedagogical, critical, theoretical, and philosophical threads that surround the audiovisual essay as it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the broader realm of creative practice. Similar to Grant’s contribution, the last two chapters are written by film scholars who have moved into creative practices and now speak from the dual position of critics and practitioners, bringing both their theoretical knowledge and practical insights to reflect on the issues of textuality, subjectivity, and technology of the essay film mode. In his chapter ‘“All I Have to Offer is Myself”: the Film-Maker as Narrator’, Richard Misek zooms in on the implications of audiovisual essayism for the issue of authorship. Reflecting on his own experience of making essay films, Misek asks, provocatively, who precisely is the ‘I’ referenced in so many essay film voice-overs? He suggests that, while it is easy to assume that the narrative ‘voice’ in an essay film is that of the film-maker, the narrator’s relation to the film is always ambiguous, even if the audience is, in fact, hearing the film-maker speak. Misek takes as his starting point Chris Marker’s contradictory claim that all he has to offer is himself, spoken first in Level Five (1997), and subsequently quoted by Marker in a letter about the oblique voice-over in Sans Soleil (1983). Misek’s chapter explores how the aspiration of open and direct address tends to be complicated through the various mediations involved in film-making. Adducing his own film, Rohmer in Paris (2013), Misek raises the paradoxical possibility that, while essay film-makers can only offer themselves, they are simultaneously prevented by the form of the essay film from being themselves. In the final chapter, Thomas Elsaesser essays his own position of author and subject in his essay film The Sun Island (2017). He takes a simultaneously historical and personal approach to the story and own posthumous life of his grandfather, architect Martin Elsaesser, as it has been constructed by the research, writing, advocacy and making of the film. For Thomas Elsaesser, the process of working towards a personal documentary essay film necessitates a consideration of the ‘posthumous constellation’ to which the film belongs; of both an ‘île de mémoire’ and lieux de mémoire and the historical pressures that these entail. Ultimately, it requires understanding the intensity of the relationship between the intimate private spaces of familial life and the complicated political and cultural forces that are invariably invoked when your grandfather is also a public figure.

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Thomas Elsaesser passed away on the 4th of December, 2019, while we were finalizing the manuscript. This book would not have been possible without his generous support, guidance and contribution. His essay titled “On Making Memory Posthumously” now acquires an uncanny aura of premonition and anticipation. In it Thomas writes: “The condition of the posthumous implies a special relation of past to present that no longer follows the direct linearity of cause and effect, but takes the form of a loop, where the present rediscovers a certain past, to which it attributes the power to shape aspects of the future that are now our present. In other words, we are in the temporality of the posthumous, whenever we retroactively discover the past to have been prescient and prophetic, as seen from the point of view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here and now. We retroactively create a past, to assure ourselves of the possibility of a future.” While the field has lost one of its greatest, and Thomas will be missed as a great and unique mentor, colleague, collaborator and friend, his presence will endure in the sense articulated by his essay. This book itself now will become a tribute to Thomas, bringing his voice back from that impossible point of loss that we all feel so acutely.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 3-23. Arthur, Paul. ‘Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Comment, 39. 1 (2003), pp. 58-63. Badiou, Alain. Cinéma. Oxford: Polity, 2013. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, in Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour, Qu’est-Ce Qu’une Madeleine? A Propos du CD-Rom Immemory by Chris Marker: Essays by Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour (Paris: Yves Gevaert Éditeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.

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Blümlinger, Christa. ‘Reading Between the Images’, in Documentary across Disciplines, ed. by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 73-91. Chang, Justin. Film Review: Heart of a Dog, Variety, 4 September 2015, Web. Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, trans. by Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, and Maciej Sliwowski. October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26. Epstein, Mikhail. ‘The Unasked Question. What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge 10.1, (2004), pp. 42-60. Gibson, Ross. ‘What Do I Know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’, Filmnews 32. 134 (Summer 1987/1988), pp.26-32. Hamilton, Annette. ‘The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary That Gets Under the Skin’, Metro [Australia] 137 (2003), pp. 126-131. King, Homay. ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (2007), pp. 421-429. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Miles, Adrian. Chris Marker World Wide Web Site, Web, archived at [http://vogmae. net.au/works/marker/index.html]. Pollak, Susan M. ‘A Meditation on Love and Loss: Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog’, Psychology Today, 17 June 2017, Web. Prince, Stephen. ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film Quarterly, 49. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 27-37. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables, trans. by Emiliano Battista (London: Berg, 2006). Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Def initions, Textual Commitments’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49. 2 (2008), pp. 24-47. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988). Rose, Steve. ‘Heart of a Dog Review: Paean to a Canine Friend’, The Guardian, 29 May 2016, web. Winston, Brian. ‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time: The Sight and Sound 2014 Poll’, Studies in Documentary Film 8.3 (2014), pp. 267-272. Vassilieva, Julia. “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011, Web.

About the Authors Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include narrative

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theory, cinema and the mind, cinema and philosophy, and the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of Narrative Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013). Her publications have also appeared in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola, Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology, and a number of edited collections. Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Austrlia. From 2007-2017, he was editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (Intellect, 2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane, Manchester University Press, 2009), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis, Intellect, 2013-2017), and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (Wallflower Press, 2016).

1.

35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable? Raymond Bellour

Abstract In this reflection on his classic mid 1970s essay, ‘The Unattainable Text’, Raymond Bellour considers the paradoxical situation of cinematic art and film studies in the present digital era: the filmic text may have become greatly ‘accessible’ (via DVD, etc.) and freezable, but is it truly ‘graspable’ in a more profound sense? By analysing paradoxical, cross-media works by Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Danielle Vallet Kleiner, and James Coleman, as well as prominent examples of the scholarly ‘video-essay’ format, Bellour gestures to the ways in which cinema, and the special experience of cinema, remain, in his terms, fundamentally and tantalizingly ‘unattainable’ phenomena. Keywords: digital era, filmic text, audiovisual essay, dispositif

It was 35 years ago, in the full flower of cinema semiology and the ‘analysis of film’,1 of Roland Barthes’ paradoxical reveries on this word text (definitively unfashionable today), that I decided to baptize the film text an unattainable text.2 Because this was a time before either VHS or DVD existed, when it took considerable effort to arrange (always precarious) access to film prints and Moviolas alike. But the film text was unattainable, above all, for the simple reason that it was not truly a text, and thus unquotable. Whereas it is quite simple, in approaching a literary text, to draw fragments of the studied work into the thread of one’s own commentary, easily incorporated Translator’s Notes 1 Bellour here alludes to his own collection of texts from the 1960s and 1970s, The Analysis of Film, first published in French in 1979, and in English in 2000. See following note for details. 2 ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, ed. by Constance Penley trans. by Ben Brewster (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27, p. 283.

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch01

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into the new text elaborated on the basis of the source text, in an endless accumulation. By contrast, we cannot cite, in the same way, this composite of images, music, sounds, and speech which is a film. Only, literally, its dialogues, intertitles, or voice-over commentaries. But the amazing thing is that, of all the arts, cinema is the only one to push this paradox of quotability and unquotability to such an extreme. For, if film is not a text, it nonetheless can become so by virtue of the simple fact that, of all the spectacles that it belongs with, it is the only one whose material, like that of the book, is forever fixed – variabilities of projection and print quality comparable, in the scheme of things, to the variability of printed editions across time. Whereas all the performing arts (theatre, opera, dance, etc.) are subject, by their very nature, to a continual variation that can only be fixed – in an ambiguous doubling which must draw upon cinema – by being filmed for one manifestation among their many manifestations. As for music, it is clear that the division at its heart – between the completed text of its notation (when such a thing exists) and its performance – declared, for a long time already, by the existence of records or CDs, is of an entirely different sort, to the extent that the separation in play between the text’s score and the heterogeneity demonstrated by the acts of writing that comment on it is legible only to those who can sight-read music (in the nineteenth century this was, among other things, a class privilege). Even with the music that we listen to, it is obvious that, in order to study it, we cannot freeze it – since then we hear nothing. The only kind of quotation that works, as in radio critiques, is sound quoting sound, the specific difficulty there pertaining to the very fact of quoting time. Very different in this regard is the heterogeneity that painting (and, to a lesser degree, photography) imposes upon the writing that seeks to approach it: image material that print reproduction reduces to the ersatz version of a unique original, but which is nonetheless testified to, and in a privileged way – for the work is at least given to us in its entirety, as well as in its detail, as we can attest in critiques from André Malraux to Daniel Arasse. Thus only film, of all the art objects assimilated to the status of text, finds itself in such a mixed situation in terms of the accumulation of materials that comprise it. Commentary can always cite, to the best of its ability, some part of the actual text; but it can only with great difficulty evoke sounds, music, the grain of voices; and, faced with the image, it forever finds itself in a highly strange entre-deux, whose paradoxical destiny is fixed by that basic gesture of film analysis: the frozen image. We are thus condemned to the craziest kind of ekphrasis, determined to reconstitute in written words a space-time form whose continuity makes it impossible to capture, since

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one can only ever fix it in the mind’s eye; or else we are constrained (and these two gestures are often inevitably paired) to grab hold, via photographic reproduction, of those fragments of space, too small and always misleading, that are known as photograms or screenshots. But these images are, by the same token, so very precious, in direct proportion to the lack they express. Unable to truly cite the image’s time-movement, they nonetheless allow us to capture its visible trace. Since 1975, we can also be struck by those still rare moments when, in special TV programmes in the vein of Cinéastes de notre temps,3 true moments of cinema are given to us – such as the movement, magical in its fullness and unfolding, of the masked dancer followed in his wayward path across a ballroom in Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952). 4 In such cases, criticism can offer us the full reality of image and sound, just as radio can offer us the full reality of music and sound. This is the potential that all those DVD bonuses have squandered, in the same way that so many DVDs and Internet downloads have trivialized our access to f ilm, at the risk of completely dissolving the inalienable singularity that is proper to the experience of the cinema-dispositif. Now let us examine what has happened since the two, basic ways of approaching a film – according to the film’s own time, or according to a commentary upon the film in the time-space of its reading – have coordinated with and completed one another, but without ever ceasing to be in conflict, thereby exposing the gaping rift in which each mode reveals itself to be in possession of what the other lacks. This is evident, for instance, in two analyses that Tag Gallagher has made of four shots showing the meeting of Donati (Vittorio De Sica) and Louise de … (Danielle Darrieux) at the beginning of Ophüls’s Madame de … (1953).5 These analyses are identical, in a certain sense, but each subtracts from the other what is most crucial to it. On the one hand, a little more than three magazine pages, covering seven screenshots: four for the first shot, following the stages of Louise’s 3 The celebrated French TV series Cinéastes de notre temps ran from 1964 to 1972, and was revived as Cinéma, de notre temps in 1989. A selection of episodes is available in a DVD box set from Potemkine. 4 Max Ophüls ou Le plaisir de tourner (Michel Mitrani, 1965). 5 Tag Gallagher, ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’, Senses of Cinema 22 (October 2002) [http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ophuls/]; Bellour specifically refers to the details of its translated presentation in the French publication Cinéma no. 4 (2002), pp. 4-19. In the screenshot illustrations accompanying Bellour’s essay in La Querelle des dispositifs, one further photogram from the first shot of the scene is added. Gallagher’s video essay can be found on the Second Sight (2006) and Criterion (2008 & 2013) DVD releases of Madame de ….

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passage through customs; and then one screenshot for each of the three remaining shots. The accompanying text elaborates the clever logic of the scene, underlining the subtle implications of movement and desire between the camera and the bodies of the two characters. On the other hand, one minute and fifteen seconds of film, attempting to convey the same analysis. An image frozen for five seconds at the outset establishes a basic idea of the scene and allows the critical commentary, spoken by the author, to begin its interweaving. Next, the four shots unfold at their normal speed, for 52 seconds. Then the filmic analysis works back over the shots, detailing, opposing, juxtaposing in order to illuminate them; but mainly concentrating its commentary on the first shot, accompanied by constant visual reprises, more or less detailed, of its successive stages of movement. Eleven lines here, equivalent to the magazine’s written text (its first 46 lines, comprising a whole section of the article), are thus joined to the whirling succession of these repetitions of the first shot. What is really captivating is the sense of vertigo thereby created. We can perfectly well feel the physicality of the shot, but to the detriment of the transparency of those words intended to illuminate it. It is as if these words were being uttered in the mobile time of the images, charged up by them, and therefore removed from themselves. Whereas written text develops the meaning clearly, and above all extends it across the totality of all four shots, in a way that exceeds the possibility of hearing it; but it is then unable to really render – beyond using equivalencies in prose aided by screenshots – the frisson of the dual movement of camera and bodies, at which Ophüls is such a master. We touch here the undecidable limit, relating once more to the historical privilege guaranteed for so long (a psychic as much as a material privilege) of the written over the oral at the heart of Western culture. In fact, we are now living through the start of a complete mix-up of these realms, following logics that are increasingly uncertain. A turning point, impossible to grasp completely – and so much so that we are spinning in a constant feedback loop, under the influence of widespread digitization and the unprecedented mixing of words and images, in line with the ever more immediate and diversified access to images of all kinds. We can imagine the day when a supposedly human creature (I’m trying not to say ‘spectator’) will actually believe they have seen Ophüls’s film on a mobile phone, along with Gallagher’s video essay – and maybe they will gain ever greater illumination from the latter, since the voice will help them see what they have only truly glimpsed in the former. One night in a taxi in Vienna, I remember hearing a low noise that apparently lacked any source – until the moment I perceived, to the right of

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the driver, amidst various devices, a small, extremely small, dark screen on which vague shapes moved and from which the voices that had intrigued me were blaring (it was, undoubtedly, an Asian action film). The driver certainly had a vision of his screen a bit less blurry than mine; but I’m still transfixed by the thought – not to mention the fact that he was driving at the time – that he was looking, or at least believed he was looking, at a film. It is clear that the experience of the cinema spectator is, above all, a process which is a mixture of memory and forgetting, determined by the requirement of continuous projection proper to the dispositif of theatre and screening, as much as the psychic and social space – this latter functioning almost independently of projection mode (mechanical or digital).6 It is this reality that DVD (or yesterday the VHS cassette, or today/tomorrow the mobile phone, or the day after that …) contravenes, despite the semblance of the film that it offers. We can never repeat often enough Chris Marker’s oft-cited words (from his CD-ROM Immemory): ‘On TV we can see the shadow of a film, regret for a film, the nostalgia for or echo of a film – but never the film itself.’ Marker then recalls Godard’s famous belief, to which he gives voice: ‘The cinema is greater than us, we must raise our eyes to look at it. In becoming a smaller object that we lower our eyes to see, cinema loses its essence.’ We can also recall Fellini’s strong words, deploring the domestication that has dispossessed cinema of its aura: The cinema has lost its authority, mystery, prestige, magic; this gigantic screen which dominates an audience lovingly gathered in front of it, filled with very small people who look, enchanted, at huge faces, huge lips, huge eyes, living and breathing in another unattainable dimension, at once fantastic and real, like that of a dream, this large magic screen no longer fascinates us. We have now learnt to dominate it. We are larger than it. Look what we have done with it: a tiny screen, no larger than a cushion, between the bookshelves and a vase of flowers, sometimes put in the kitchen, near the refrigerator. It has become a household appliance, and we, in an armchair, clutching our remote, wield over these little images a total power, fighting against what is alien to us, and what bores us.7 6 Bellour describes this ‘experience of the cinema spectator’ at greater length in Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21; and reprinted in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam University Press, 2012). 7 Giovanni Grazzini (ed.) and Joseph Henry (trans.), Federico Fellini: Comments on Film (Fresno: California State University, 1988), p. 207.

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So, these three filmmakers recall for us that seeing a film by oneself – with too few or too many people – in a fake, domestic silence, too close or too far from a screen that is never big enough (despite some ever more exaggerated simulations), simply cannot be the same experience of attention, perception, and memory as that of a theatrical projection, for it does not inscribe in the same way the appropriate shock induced by (above all) an initial viewing, which remains essential. (This explains the often makeshift nature of cultural sensibilities recently accelerated by the acquisition of DVD box sets.) And also that DVD can clearly, via all the reprises and diversions it allows, deeply serve this very experience, thanks to the reflection it immediately encourages when it seeks to join, as seems possible, the heart of the virtual effect of memory and forgetting that is responsible for the emotion experienced in a theatrical screening. It is in order to preserve the purity of this experience of the cinema spectator, and the idea to which it gives rise, that Michael Snow, for instance, has always been opposed until now to the distribution of Wavelength (1967) on video cassette or DVD. That’s why, some years back, I felt obliged to accost Snow, on the occasion of one of his exhibitions, in order to relive the bothersome experience of having to find a print of this film and look at it on an editing machine, freezing it at the points where, it seemed to me, I could verify or amend the notes previously taken in similar conditions. With his peerless knowledge of temporal movements and the variable destiny accruing to images, Snow even risked the extraordinary act of conceiving, almost 40 years after his inaugural masterpiece, a work with no equivalent, furnishing both an installation and a DVD: Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time (also known as WVLNT, 2003), in which the 45 minutes of the original film are divided into three sections of fifteen minutes each, and then superimposed atop each other. This new work, thus becomes manipulable at leisure on a player or computer, and can be understood as a vertiginous and ironic hypothesis, offered to new, pressed-for-time spectators, concerning the piling up of memory presumed to have been achieved, until now, by just as many real-virtual spectators of Wavelength. If we reflect on it, this limit-experience by Snow, taking to an extreme the aporias of the ‘unattainable text’, is not without analogy to what DVD (after VHS and before something else) has generally induced in relation to the reality of films experienced in the cinema situation. DVD in fact validates the illusion – entirely real in one sense – of a text becoming somewhat less unattainable, with a graspable familiarity, where the captivating proximity of film had for so long fallen within the realm of a necessarily distant experience. By the same token, the double destination of WVLNT – towards either

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the personal screen or the museum – provokes the desire for a reflection on the relations between DVD and installation. Or, more precisely, on the ways in which, under their diverse lights, contemporary art installations conceived as image projections can offer the renewed conception of a text that is otherwise unattainable. It is not so much a matter of a proper quality of distance, since in an installation, one can, on the contrary, regard the image according to the physical circulation that best suits it; but rather, we are confronted by the fact that every work of this type offers an irreducibly singular configuration, in which the singularities of space intersect with the fatalities of time. As projections these installations are, in part, only analogues for the film that they are not, displacing, one by one, according to their particular dispositif, the conditions of psychic and corporeal experience of perception and, thus, of memory. If we can claim to know something about what a cinema spectator is, and what is lost and gained according to the various positions to which this situation lends itself, we know far less about the installation visitor-spectator – in strict proportion to the singularity that accrues to each dispositif, as well as to the diverse treatments that they make in relation to whether or not the object will involve a process of recollection. 1. A first, emblematic figure is the projection environment. Emblematic because it sets up, at the outset, a conflict between the different screens that compose the work. Take, for instance, Bill Viola’s Going Forth By Day (2002), as displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. This immense, rectangular piece carefully arranges five projections. First, hanging above, framing the entranceway, is Fire Birth, an image of fire rising from the dark, a vast, variable, red glow, to which one could return, from time to time, while taking in the entire ensemble. Then, on the left wall, which tends to be the point of orientation (because the projection, in the way it unfolds, invites this), The Path, a long, straight image, showing, along almost the entire length of the wall, men and women of all ages – the human species, in short, walking in slow motion before the tree trunks in a forest. Opposed to these images, and escaping time by virtue of their purely symbolic nature, are the three remaining screens – one on the wall in front, the other two on the right wall, respectively The Deluge, The Voyage and First Light, regulated by a fixed duration of 35 minutes: for, while they draw upon an intense, spiritual metaphoricity, these compositions, at the same time, turn out to be fully narrative. In the sense that their simple, always

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surprising events occur and captivate us, as much in themselves as for the relations they suggest between the three parable-fictions that rediscover the classical format of the cinema screen (or of the rectangular painting frame from which that originates). The diff iculty – and the seductiveness – then comes from trying to follow these three image-narratives both individually, and all together. Thus the position spontaneously adopted by most spectators, sitting on the floor and forever spinning around, always, however, missing on one side what they catch on the other, and turning as well to the parading image of the forest, with which they presumably feel some solidarity. In the f ilm Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart (2003), which documents several of the artist’s installations, Kidel, while mainly commenting on chosen extracts from Going Forth By Day, has taken recourse to the simple principle of showing, in turn, according to a particular form of shot/reverse shot, spectators in front of the screens, and then the image that they have presumably just seen. But we keenly sense the problems that pertain to an in situ vision such as the DVD document proposes, by mentally reinstating a second screen, one that we can pretend to forget when faced with a film image on a TV screen or computer: for the unicity of this image as a simple face-to-face position takes us back, despite everything, to something of the theatrical projection situation. Then it is the very reality of the physical experience of the installation which eludes us – however precious the trace in such footage of what we have already experienced, and what we may also want to reincorporate. This is the case for all installation documentation, where the specific nature of the environment proves to be a little too complex (whether the document produced is the work of a filming visitor, an artist communicating the event in whatever way they judge suitable, or a commercial DVD). Consider the document made by Agnès Varda on the occasion of her exhibition at the Martine Aboucaya Gallery in 2005. At best we see here, for The Widows of Noirmoutier, the most complex installation, fourteen monitors framing the central screen, for an audience arrangement of fourteen chairs, each linked by headphones to one of the monitors, and we observe attentive spectators; we can fictively enter into this or that monitor or this or that widow, and then occupy the entire screen, while remaining a more or less pained witness of the whole experience. But nothing can convey what the document allows us only to imagine: the intense, social connection, which, for every in situ spectator, linking them through headphones to the monitors, can only pass from close-up to a distant view through the chosen link of the voice – the totality of the

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Les Veuves de Noirmoutier [Widows of Noirmoutier] at la Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris in 2005.

dispositif remains invisible, while everywhere so many relations, one by one, are tied and experienced in solidarity, creating the special conditions for this experience that invents the reality of another cinema.8 (We can add to this the televised versions of this or that installation. For example, for The Widows of Noirmoutier, there is the 70 minute documentary Some Widows of Noirmoutier [Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier, 2005] shown on Arte: on the basis of the existing material, but also filming for the occasion ‘three supplementary widows’, Varda conceived a film, by nature more linear, designed to ‘offer this life experience to a different, wider public than that which visits art galleries.’)9 Such delicate, ever paradoxical transpositions are the basis for Anne-Marie Duguet’s wonderful enterprise, her DVD collection ‘anarchive’.10 How, based on the singularity accorded to each artist, can one conceive an experimental memory capable of assembling those works, by nature dispersed in museum collections (and sometimes private collections), known as contemporary art installations? How to make them visible, imaginable, according to a process much closer to reading than to any spectacular reality, but able as well to allow us to experience virtualities that are sensory as much as conceptual? This is a process, in each case, according to the conception of 8 ‘On Another Cinema’ is the title of a 2000 essay by Bellour also collected in La Querelle des dispositifs, pp. 152-170. 9 This statement appears in the French press kit for the film, accessible at [http://download. pro.arte.tv/archives/fichiers/02571978.pdf]. 10 The full anarchive catalogue can be consulted at [http://anarchive.net/].

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the artist associated with the production, of finding an intelligent balance between texts and images, choice of works, invention of a pathway and programming options, tools of documentation. So we are both moved and amused to find in Digital Snow (2002) a long, contextualized extract from Wavelength (as there already was, a year earlier, in Teri Wehn-Damisch’s excellent film, On Snow’s Wavelength). Out of the four titles that have so far appeared in the anarchive series, it is Title TK (2006), a DVD-book devoted to Thierry Kuntzel, which pushes furthest, from the level of the image to that of the entire œuvre, the relation between archive, trace, and creation (thanks to the intimate collaboration between the producer, the artist, and the digital programmer, Andreas Kratky). At the outset, a first division brings together, on the one hand, a DVD and, on the other, a massive, bilingual book, which gathers across its 648 pages the continual work of texts, notes, and schemas that have accompanied, from the beginning of Kuntzel’s work, every conception of an image. For its part, the DVD is itself divided, in a way that is both clear and a little bit daunting. For, as soon as you enter, you must choose. Either you head directly for the index, which unfolds the entirety of the oeuvre, point by point, looking in each case (video tape, video installation, plastic work), the most precise strategy for enabling us to imagine the scarcely graspable reality of its space-time, with the critical documentary apparatus required. Or instead, you give yourself over to the random interactive pathway, which will unfold specific to each user, thus suggesting an individual life woven along the thread of his creations, ceaselessly reinventing itself, via image flashes and apparitions, traces, apparatuses, words, evoking everything that is unique in this work which tends towards disappearance, whilst never ceasing to make disappearance appear. In this case, absolutely, a DVD, turning in on itself, suddenly forms a work. 2. From the work of Danielle Vallet Kleiner, orientated to the biographical consciousness of the photographic document, and its quality as anthropological and political sign, we recall here, because of their provocative nature, two films: Escape from New York (1997-2001) and Le jardin qui n’existe pas … (The Garden That Doesn’t Exist, 2001-2005), installed respectively on two and three screens, and drawing from that their specific value as unattainable texts. For, in contrast to the numerous photos exhibited in a simple fashion (as so many traces of her travel-films), or other films by her, shown on monitors or, occasionally, projected within art spaces (such as Chemins qui ne mènant nulle part/Roads That Lead Nowhere, 1991-2007), her two films

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conceived in the format of a diptych and a triptych are only ever projected (and spectacularly so). Unattainable, these films have become, for me, even more so in that I have only been able to see them once, on the occasion of the projection organized at the Pompidou Centre (by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Catherine David) on 20 and 21 October 2006. And, as for all such works, their projection has meaning only under conditions that allow them to be presented in line with the specific dispositif that enables their effect. On the first of these violent, fascinating films – catalysed, like everything in her work, by the obstinate experience of decentring and travel – Kleiner has written: It is a film that works via perpetually reconnected fragmentations across non-communicating places and in non-chronological time, where layers of the past are multiplied thanks to the simultaneous reading of two film projections, one of which is the inverted arrangement of sequences from the other. The film presumes a rigorously symmetrical construction, where each sequence can be linked to the next as much through its beginning (first shot) as by its ending (final shot). A film which is, in a certain sense, without either beginning or end, where the single soundtrack counts as itself an autonomous image, inducing a linearity that is always changing.11

Escape from New York comprises eleven sequences, meaning that the sixth, in this doubled, inverted unfolding, is the same on both screens. It is, therefore, the only, temporarily reassuring moment in this contrasted défilement of images, allowing us to take stock of the whole work’s unusual nature.12 Memory finds itself directly taken apart by this process, accentuated by the fact that the two frames, their edges touching, are likely perceived as a single body. Every image, inscribed once on each screen, returns later on the other screen, cueing a recollection – but all the more unmasterable in that we never know at which point of the film this will occur, and in tandem with which other image that we have already witnessed. Then add to that the ‘characters absent from the image, speaking the same text in 11 Danielle Vallet Kleiner, ‘Projects/Projections: Description of an Inf inite Process’, 2000 conference delivered (in French) at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Nancy (unpublished). 12 Bellour’s use of the term défilement refers both to the technical process of f ilm passing through the mechanism of a projector, and to the theorization of this term offered by Thierry Kuntzel in his 1973 essay, ‘Le Défilement’, trans. by Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura no. 2 (Fall 1977), pp. 50-65.

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two different languages (one of which is the translation of the other)’.13 The film thus offers itself to us as a mimetic reconstruction, an excessive, highly formalized hypothesis of the memory-block that every film (as Kuntzel well saw) is in itself the index, in the physicality of the film-strip as in the fleeting reality of film- projection.14 Je Jardin qui n’existe pas … works differently; a Chinese garden forms the utopian model, the turning centre of a circular voyage around the Yellow Sea, punctuated by several cities: Nagasaki, Harbin, Peking, Vladivostock. The method, calling also to the deepening of a memory passing over from author to spectator, continually striving to construct and modulate itself, relates here to a variation in the appearance of screens, each in turn filled and emptied, ceaselessly oscillating from one to three images. Thus, from one film to the other, the paradox of a film-text that is doubly unattainable is accentuated – as much by the exceptional nature related to the material reality of each projection as by the particular difficulty of wresting hold of, for the purposes of citation or reference, some instant, more than ever tossed by the incessant swell from which we might dream of removing it. 3. We are familiar with James Coleman’s principle of ‘projected images’. Rosalind Krauss underlines the fact that this principle has been appropriated in such a way that we should describe it as ‘a “medium” that can only be practiced by one’ (as is also the case, differently, for Jeff Wall and his ‘light-boxes’).15 The slides which are the principal material of these fictions are ineluctably ordered, creating a singular film, according to a programme calculated with a projector that is as audible as it is visible. The theatre is bare, perfectly isolated, in order to enhance the quality of image and sound, and the captivating value of the screen – in relation to which each spectator must choose their own distance, find their own position. Rather than the usual exhibition stroller, the visitor becomes an obliged spectator, at least for the indefinite period of time in which they agree to submit to the narrated enigmas. 13 Kleiner, 1999 notes on Escape from New York (unpublished). For related documentation, see the artist’s website at [www.daniellevalletkleiner.com]. 14 Thierry Kuntzel [1976], ‘A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus’, in Title TK (Paris: anarchive, 2006), pp. 470-472. The ‘memory-block’ to which Bellour refers here is the metaphor for the unconscious proposed by Freud, and subsequently adopted by Kuntzel, of the child’s toy known in English as the mystic writing pad, and in German as Wunderblock. Kuntzel often used the term Wunderblock in the working notes for his video Nostos (1978-1979). 15 Rosalind Krauss, ‘“… And Then Turn Away?” An Essay on James Coleman’, October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 5-33 (p. 8).

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These enigmas are all the more mysterious for the fact that Coleman, on principle, never explains his work, and gives no interviews save for those private conversations in which he briefs the authors whom he has already chosen to comment on it. The images illustrating his many catalogues are few in number, and are almost always the same. There is no documentation to reinforce one’s memory. We recall Coleman’s anger, at documenta 12, over the texts posted on the Internet that revealed the nature of the text delivered by Harvey Keitel in Retake with Evidence (2008). So we are reduced to whatever, at the end of a particular exhibition, we can note down (or photograph, record, even film – depending on the degree of piracy permitted). Beyond the phobic nature of such prescriptions, this is all an attempt to preserve the purity of the desired, absorbing experience for each spectator that the medium presupposes. An experience whose value as enigma relates greatly to the wilfully self-reflexive nature of these sequences of images that contain a rare, plastic intensity; and it is equally related to the unique movement born of all these accumulated, concatenated images. If, from among Coleman’s ‘projected images’, we may like to hold a particular instant – from Charon (1989), for instance – that is because the mise en abyme has reached its most vital point there, at the same time as the f iction has been multiplying itself by virtue of the many variations and fragmentations it has undergone. Everyone who has written on Charon – Rosalind Krauss, Lynne Cooke,16 and the anonymous author on Tate Online17 – has been struck by the extreme, puzzling nature of these fourteen episodes devoted to the different states or modalities characteristic of photography: from fashion advertising and journalistic or witness reportage photography to simple amateur photography, not forgetting the contrasting techniques developed, at leisure, between the pose and the snapshot. The single, falsely detached voice of the narrator-protagonist comments on each episode; but in order to trust the meaning of everything it says, it would need to be, in turn, man and woman, young and old, white and black. We grasp that such a vacillation of identity is indeed at play in the experience of taking a photograph in the manner that Coleman practises it, so as to animate one of the strangest movements that has ever existed. A movement of sensation, a sensation of movement, becoming the movement of an idea. 16 See Cooke’s contribution to George Baker (ed.), James Coleman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 17 Author’s note: On the occasion of the exhibition whose suggestive title is inspired by a Gary Hill work: Between Cinema and a Hard Place (May-December 2000), in which Charon was featured.

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Of all these works, Charon rates among the most intense experiences of my life as a spectator of images, following the necessarily discontinuous thread familiar to every museum visitor. I was able to re-see it several times on the occasion of Coleman’s exhibition at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon in 2006. I was pulled between the desire to fully re-live the experience, and the desire to take notes in order to keep some record of it – to think through it later more effectively, and possibly to write about it. But I strongly felt that I was on the brink of a mission impossible, as the concatenated slides kept calmly, implacably clicking by and, above all, the voice-over kept expanding the circularity of its propositions regarding the very medium that these images incarnated, in the light of their changing attributes and diverse fatalities. Let’s imagine, for a moment, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) in a situation in which you could never consult its written text. But here, at least, is a suggestion of such a record of Charon, reconstituted (and translated) – an episode (the final one, I believe) of which, as I later realised – determined as I was then to seize the words – I retain no memory of the accompanying image: Photography, she believed, displayed the living proof that death does not exist. Paradoxically, she believed that death itself is an eternity, since at the last second, a person’s entire life flashes before their eyes in an uninterrupted series of images. Thinking and rethinking about that, she figured that this final moment of remembered images must have its own memory-image, then this image has its image, thus composing an endless series of remembered images, flashback upon flashback. And so she’s convinced that as close to death as we might be, we never get there. Sensing death’s approach, she got ready to photograph herself, in order to prove her argument.18

***

18 At yet a further remove, I have retranslated into English Bellour’s French rendition of these notes. The passage should thus not be taken or cited as an accurate, verbatim reproduction of the voice-over text for Charon.

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I hardly need to point out, once again, the extent to which these various examples constitute, in their diverse ways, more or less unattainable ‘texts’. But we should underline that, historically, it is at the very moment when film has itself become a text ever less unattainable, in danger of losing itself as a special gaze within a cinema projection, that projection-based installations seem to have come to occupy its place somewhat – at the expense (naturally) of certain possible nuances and gradations brought about by the major displacement associated with each person’s singular relationship to these art dispositifs. This is where we find, at the level of the identity of a real experience, a paradoxical relation of continuity and overlap being woven between cinema and this other cinema that is hidden or displayed in contemporary art. To conjure an image, by creating a point of absurdity also inherent in these paradoxes of the attainable and unattainable text, I recall the words of my friend Bert Rebhandl, an Austrian critic living in Berlin. We passed, at a lively pace, as part of the exhibition Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection (Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, 2007), Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993). The very excess of this work renders, by def inition, the text of Hitchcock’s f ilm attainable, in the process of making itself unattainable – since nobody, it seems, can pretend to have really seen the piece according to its predetermined duration. And so Rebhandl remarked: ‘We show up to cram 24 hours of film in the space of two seconds.’ This essay, written in 2009, is collected in Raymond Bellour’s La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. Original French text © Raymond Bellour and P.O.L, 2009; English translation © Adrian Martin, 2017.

Bibliography Anarchive: Archives numériques sur l’art contemporain, Web. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Ben Brewster (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27. Bellour, Raymond. ‘On Another Cinema’, in La Querelle des dispositifs: CinémaInstallations-Expositions (Paris: Paul Otchakovsky Laurens [POL], 2012), pp. 152-170.

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Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21. Christie, Ian (ed.). Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Cooke, Lynne. ‘A Tempered Agnosia’, in James Coleman, ed. byGeorge Baker (ed.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 113-138. Gallagher, Tag. ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’, Senses of Cinema 22 (October 2002), Web. Grazzini, Giovanni (ed.). Federico Fellini: Comments on Film, trans. by Joseph Henry (Fresno: California State University, 1988). Rosalind Krauss, ‘“… And Then Turn Away?”’ An Essay on James Coleman’, October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 5-33. Kuntzel, Thierry. ‘Le Défilement’, trans. by Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 2 (Fall 1977), pp. 50-65. Kuntzel, Thierry. ‘A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus’, in Title TK (Paris: anarchive, 2006), pp. 470-472. Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier un Documentaire d’Agnes Varda Press kit. ARTE France, Web.

About the Author Raymond Bellour is a French writer, film critic, and theoretician. From 1986, he taught in the department for cinema and audiovisual studies at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and he has also been a visiting professor at New York University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of Research Emeritus, Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), Paris. In 1991, he founded the renowned film journal ‘Trafic’ with Serge Daney. His published theory and critical work includes Le Livre des autres, entretiens, 10/18 (1978), The Analysis of Film (1979; English trans. 1995), Henri Michaux (1986), Mademoiselle Guillotine (1989), L’Entreimages: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (1990), Jean- Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974 – 1991 (1992), Oubli, textes, La Différance (1992), L’entre-images 2 (1999), Partages de l’ombre, textes, La Différance (2002) and Le Corps du cinéma (2009). Bellour has also organized several solo and group exhibitions, such as the landmark Passages de l’image in Centre Pompidou (1989-1990).

2.

To Attain the Text. But Which Text? Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin Abstract Raymond Bellour’s 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ has, in recent years, enjoyed new life as a founding text of the loose, global movement devoted to the making and theorizing of audiovisual essays. Where the film-text was once unattainable to scholars and artists, now we can get our hands on it thanks to the various technological waves that were once only a distant dream. However, there are challenges in Bellour’s text that are conveniently overlooked in its optimistic interpretation; in particular, the multiple meanings attached to the word text itself. Attaining this ‘text’ is not a straightforward procedure of downloading and re-editing digital files. What more is at stake that we need to make explicit today in discussing the audiovisual essay? Keywords: audiovisual essay, Raymond Bellour, textuality, post-structuralism, montage, film theory

The Revolution Has Been Televised Raymond Bellour’s short 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ (which first appeared in English in the same landmark issue of Screen journal as Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’) has, in recent years, enjoyed renewed life as a founding reference text of the loose, global movement devoted to the making and theorizing of the audiovisual essay.1 It 1 Raymond Bellour ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27. We wish to add that, in discussing several of Bellour’s essays here, we are not trying to reduce them to inflexible, totalizing positions or arguments; all his interventions are superbly written mixes of on-the-spot reportage in a swiftly changing cultural landscape, thought experiment, and exemplary analysis. That his work is so flexible and responsive is proven, yet again, by his most recent reaction to audiovisual essays

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch02

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has also, in a backlash action, provided the basis upon which to criticize this movement. Where the film-text was once indomitably introuvable (Bellour’s original word) to scholars and artists alike – variously unfindable, inaccessible, unreachable, unquotable, unmanipulable – now, as current wisdom declares, we can get our hands on it and do what we like with it, mainly thanks to the various technological waves (VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and, less legally, digital downloading of torrents), which were still only a distant dream for a film teacher, critic, analyst, or writer in 1975. Drew Morton, for instance, suggests that ‘videographic film scholarship can redeem visual analysis. We can play out sequences in real time, pause upon individual frames, weave in primary and secondary research, and formalize an argument via voice-over commentary’.2 In his account, audiovisual essays provide (among other things) a way of packaging the usually live, performative – and therefore also unattainable – practice of classroom scene analysis. Taking a somewhat different tack in her video essay ‘Quote Unquote’: The ‘Unattainable [Film] Text’ in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2009),3 Catherine Grant, one of the field’s major figures, offers a useful audiovisual survey of the various ways that film is now being used as (in Bellour’s phrase) ‘the medium of its own criticism’4 – whether respectfully or disrespectfully, in an unforced side-by-side display/dispositif mode, or through more interventionist, dissective analysis. However, there are further challenges in ‘The Unattainable Text’ that are sometimes conveniently overlooked in the generally optimistic interpretation arising from our present age of digital reproduction. Let us go straight to the heart of the difficulty: following brief consideration of a number of historic precursors of the audiovisual essay, such as segments on the TV programme Cinéastes de notre temps (1964-1972), Bellour’s essay concludes with an enigmatic, equivocal question: as recorded in the introduction to Pensées du cinéma (Paris: P.O.L, 2016); he refers to them as ‘new intelligent objects’, while nonetheless noting in them what he believes is evidence of an inevitable ‘fracture’ or a ‘back and forth’ between the films and their analysis (p. 11). 2 Drew Morton, ‘Though This Be Madness, Yet There is Method in It: Notes on Producing and Revising Videographic Scholarship’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and Moving Images Studies, September 2014. Accessible at [http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/ audiovisualessay/reflections/intransition-1-3/drew-morton/]. 3 Catherine Grant [https://vimeo.com/10059844]. Note that the author presents this video as the ‘not quite finished draft of my second ever video essay’. 4 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.

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Can or should the work, be it image or sound, in its efforts to accede to the text, that is, to the social utopia of a language without separation, do without the text, free itself from the text?5

That is, to boil it down more plainly: the work becomes a text by freeing itself of the text! But this seeming contradiction is not a contradiction at all (nor is the English translation faulty), because there is a semantic complexity at work here in Bellour’s piece: at least three different, principal meanings attached to the word text, all redolent of their era – but far less so of ours. We must therefore make the effort of imaginative, historical reconstruction/ recreation in order to grasp this complexity that has been variously both lost and refound today. Most simply, on a f irst level, Bellour intended text in its empirical sense: an object, in this case, a f ilm. That much, today, is (in the vast majority of cases) easily attainable. (Although let us note in passing, that the latest paradox introduced in the age of Netflix streaming and all similar services internationally: fewer people now seek to possess films materially, instead opting for the ease of simply watching them on demand. In a certain sense, f ilms have thus become, once again, unattainable, while being perfectly accessible!) Then, on a second level, there is text as synecdoche for language, especially written language – a nuance that comes to the fore in Bellour’s 2009 reconsideration, ‘35 Years Later: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, which explicitly considers some burgeoning practices of the audiovisual essay. We shall return to the argument of that piece. Finally – and most occulted today – is the third level of text. It is the expanded, semiotic, post-structuralist sense that Roland Barthes and many others gave it at the end of the 1960s, in the form that Bellour fondly recalls, in his 2009 retrospection, as ‘paradoxical reveries’ that are today ‘definitively unfashionable’.6 This is the notion of the text as a ‘methodological field’,7 a weave of signifying processes, a cultural miasma of potentiality (that ‘social utopia of a language without separation’)8 above and beyond any single, empirical text-object. To attain that type of text, in the name of cinema and its creative analysis, cannot be a straightforward procedure of downloading 5 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27. 6 Bellour, ‘35 Years On: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, see this volume, p. 33. This volume after completion. 7 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 21. 8 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.

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and re-editing digital files. And it may indeed remain, at some fundamental level, ungraspable (another translation of introuvable). What more is at stake, theoretically and practically, that we need to make explicit today in discussion around the audiovisual essay, in the light of these textual ambiguities and complexities? Although our contribution to this discussion here will be mainly theoretical, centred around the discussion of written texts that we take to be key reference points (some already judged canonical, others not) rather than the analysis of particular audiovisual works, we do insist, at the outset, that it is the actual practice of making audiovisual essays which has led us to these thoughts and positions.

Noli Me Tangere In 1979, only four years after the publication of ‘The Unattainable Text’, Bellour already declared a decisive step forward both in his thinking, and in the transitional state of play in the audiovisual culture that he was closely monitoring. It was the intervening years of video art that emboldened him to make this move. In the introduction (titled ‘A Bit of History’) to his collection The Analysis of Film, containing ‘The Unattainable Text’ as its subsequent, opening chapter, Bellour proclaims: ‘To the difficulties proper to all analysis, I see only one real, if partial, response: that of cinema itself.’9 Once its ‘bases, or at least a sort of intellectual imaginary’ have been established, he envisages ‘a keener, more precise and much more systematic possibility of a true discourse of film on film’ operating with a ‘greater freedom of approach from now on’.10 This practice will reproduce, he predicts, the ‘fusional doubling of discourse’11 that has long characterized the written analysis of literature. Fusional doubling may strike one as a paradoxical entity (is it one or two?), but it makes perfect sense within Bellour’s general frame of reference here: literary criticism is both its own writing, as well as the writing it contains, but from which it simultaneously marks its distance. Bellour (inspired by the early example of Thierry Kuntzel’s now lost 1974 video piece La rejetée, a reworking of Chris Marker’s short 1962 film La Jetée) goes on to evoke a 9 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, in The Analysis of Films, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Mary Quaintance, (Bloomington and Illinois: Bloomington University Press, 2000), pp. 1-20 (p. 18). 10 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, pp. 18-19. 11 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19.

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form for film-on-film in which, ‘within the apparatus itself, through its contrivance […] the work of thought is performed’.12 Over three decades on from that statement, the landscape has changed greatly. Bellour testifies both to the awesome – but also cheapening – availability of cinema (via video and digital supports), and to what he sadly sees as the squandering (in DVD bonuses and the like) of the type of filmthrough-film critique pioneered by Cinéastes de notre temps. Now another crucial aspect of Bellour’s thought comes to the fore: his somewhat surprising point (or wish) in 2009 that films remain unattainable – the very contrary of celebrating (as many audiovisualists do) their easy-to-hand graspability and manipulability. How does Bellour reach this position? Through an extended and intensive meditation on cinema itself (gathered in three books published between 2009 and 2016, Le Corps du cinéma, La Querelle des dispositifs, and Pensées du cinéma)13 as well as an integrated examination of both the aesthetics of the medium and the conditions of its spectatorship. As summarized in the essay ‘The Cinema Spectator – A Special Memory’,14 Bellour comes to defend (to some extent against the incursions of the digital era) the more-or-less classical, cinema-viewing experience: projection in a dark room, for a fixed period of time. At the level of sensory and psychic perception, this imposes an elusive richness, a combination of remembering and forgetting that can touch us to the core. All criticism, then – whether purely written or in more hybrid, audiovisual forms – seeks to capture, or recapture, the complex and evanescent experience of a film, tracking it (as Bellour so magisterially does in Le Corps du cinéma) to the tiniest material fluctuations and vibrations. It is this evanescence that now comes to saturate the idea of an unattainable text with a new and positive meaning. ‘35 Years Later: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’ is mainly about contemporary artworks that find ingenious ways to make themselves undocumentable – and hence also imposing, in their diverse ways, that special 12 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19. 13 Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, emotions, animalités (2009), La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (2012), and Pensées du cinéma (2016), all published by Paris: P.O.L. 14 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21; reprinted in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

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memory characteristic of cinema as a proudly and gloriously unattainable text. Whether it is Agnès Varda’s use of multiple monitors each linked to its own, audio headphone output; James Coleman’s nothing-but-the-show, media-blackout policy; Danielle Vallet Kleiner’s multiscreen projections; or (in a more conceptual and humorous vein) Michael Snow’s video stacking of three fifteen-minute parts of his classic film Wavelength (1967), something happens that is both – as in cinema – technologically fixed and yet unrepeatable, a unique moment demanding to be experienced again, but differently. The memory we hold of such works is the only guarantee of their fragile attainability. Bellour also considers, in this vein, some rare experiments in the inventive, digital presentation of an entire oeuvre, such as Thierry Kuntzel’s DVD Title TK (2006) – which evokes, in its possibilities for interactive engagement, another kind of experimental memory for the spectator. But what draws our attention here is Bellour’s discussion of the burgeoning audiovisual essay format of the 21st century – in its more individualistic and expressive forms, generally unconstrained by commercial or industrial dictates – and specifically the example of Tag Gallagher’s analysis of Max Ophüls’s Madame de … (1953).

Two Times, One Word Bellour wondered in 1975 whether ‘oral language’ – in the form of the type of erudite voice-over commentary used in some Cinéastes de notre temps episodes – will ‘ever be able to say what written language says?’15 He returns to this problematic via a comparison of a section of Gallagher’s written essay ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’ (2002) and the 2003 video adaptation of it – two texts Bellour asserts to be ‘identical, in a certain sense’.16 In the latter, Gallagher’s written text (delivered by him in a voice-over) is highly condensed and telegrammatic; as Bellour points out (and as many beginning video essayists fail to grasp), it is impossible to hear a densely written text when it is simply read out on a soundtrack (or gabbled at a conference!). In comparing the two pieces by Gallagher, Bellour is struck by a double lack: ‘each subtracts from the other what is most crucial to it’.17 The move15 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27. 16 Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 35. 17 Ibid., p. 35.

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ment that is so crucial to Ophüls’s cinematic art (‘the frisson of the dual movement of camera and bodies, at which Ophüls is such a master’)18 finds itself somewhat dissipated and drained when overlaid by commentary and fragmented by the analytic operations of editing; while the amplitude of argument in the written text (and even our basic apprehension of it as a text) is necessarily amputated. This leads Bellour to the crucial distinction that there are ‘two, basic ways of approaching a film’ and, specifically, two operative regimes of time in play here: ‘according to the film’s own time’ (as we view it in cinema projection), or according to ‘the time-space of its reading’, the act and process of its analysis.19 Bellour implicitly questions whether these two times can ever be successfully collapsed in the format of the audiovisual essay. Making such essays certainly brings one quickly to the impasse already made evident by audio commentaries for f ilms on DVD or Blu-ray: to simply follow or accompany a complicated, multilevel movement, in the mode of speaking in a voice-over as it plays through, never allows one enough time (or space) to remark on everything that is truly going on in the f ilm. Not even marking the cuts, as in a tabulated shot list, can easily or effectively be carried out in this verbal mode. This is the illusory folly, which also takes a literary form in criticism, dubbed as scanning: the notion that, if you rap along with a film from beginning to end, as it unfolds, you are somehow closer to its material and artistic truth than if you break it up and rearrange it in any of the classical, analytical ways.20 Gallagher (who uses, as Bellour notes, screenshots and reprises as well as integral play-through) has his own, personal variation of scanning: his commentary is almost always keyed to the unfolding mood, psychology, and viewpoint (real or projective) of the on-screen characters and what they are supposedly feeling from moment to moment.21 In this sense, it is absolutely true that a difference yawns open between the duration of a film and the time-space of its reading. But we are compelled to question the way in which Bellour has posed this comparative argument – even as he explicitly worries about ‘the historical privilege guaranteed for so long (a psychic as much as a material privilege) 18 Ibid., p. 36. 19 Ibid., p. 35. 20 See Adrian Martin, ‘Scanning Godard’, Screening the Past, no. 10 (2000), [http://www. screeningthepast.com/2014/12/scanning-godard/]. 21 For more on this point, see Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’, Sydney Review of Books, 1 February 2017, [http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/ writing-in-images-and-sounds/].

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of the written over the oral at the heart of Western culture’.22 Why is the central struggle at stake necessarily that between a written, poetic/literary analysis (which is ample) and a spoken/recorded oral analysis (delivered as a voice-over)? Why is the language of the word, whether written or spoken, privileged here, precisely? What Bellour sidesteps is the possibility (which he raised in 1975) of ‘do[ing] without the text’23 – and thus the question of what else could carry its multiple functions of argument, comparison, elucidation, style, rhythm, affect, and so on. Back in 1975, Bellour had entertained a bolder thought, half playfully and half seriously: ‘We might […] ask if the filmic text should really be approached in writing at all’.24 He then deepens the reverie: ‘This is a serious question – economic, social, political, profoundly historical – since it touches on the formidable collusion of writing and Western history in which the written alternately or even simultaneously performs a liberating and repressive function.’25 This dual nature of liberation and repression is another important 1970s legacy we have largely lost in our current debates and discussions. Writing is liberatory, in this context, because it allows and creates possibilities for textuality in the strongest sense: variously and simultaneously, writing incites invention, elaboration, play, distance, ornamentation, and reflexivity. But it is repressive because it imposes a stern hierarchy, with writing set on a top rung above all other possible modes of communications and their expressive means. This repression was already the central concern of f ilm-maker and theorist Jean Epstein, from the early 1920s to his death in 1953. In a section from his book The Devil’s Cinema (1947) that is startling to read today, Jean Epstein argues that our collective mind is coerced into ‘valuing only that part of itself formulated according to the classical rules of spoken and written expression’.26 However, as Epstein asserts: ‘In frequenting the cinemas, the public have unlearned to read and think as they read or write; it grows accustomed to looking and thinking and simply as it sees.’27 This is a marvellous, tantalizing formulation, suggesting there are more ways 22 Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 36. 23 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27. 24 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 26. 25 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27. 26 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 325. 27 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, p. 327.

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to ‘read and think’ other than through word-based reading and writing. Epstein relates this development to changes in media, such as newspapers and street posters: Already, the newspapers present their accounts rendered like ‘f ilms’ of this or that, composed in a telegraphic style, in which, moreover, as many words as possible are replaced by pictures. Already, wall abound with posters meant to be understood by passers-by who don’t have to stop or slow down, and which employ all methods of the moving image: close-ups, superimpositions, parts bigger than the whole, etc.28

What else can carry the effects of language? For us, at least, the answer to this question is crystal clear: it is montage, considered in all its diverse forms, or what we have elsewhere described (in reference to James Elkins’s pioneering but also cinema-less work in ‘visual studies’) as a ‘writing in images and sounds’.29 Of course, it is not a matter of now banishing language in any or all of its forms for the sake of some spuriously pure audiovisuality (which does not truly exist). By the same token, it does well to remember that one of the most celebrated essay-films in cinema history, namely Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), elaborates entirely lucid montage phrases progressively built into a complex but immediately comprehensible global montage structure, with scarcely the recourse to a single word! (For more on this, see Julia Vassilieva’s chapter in this volume). But let us now return to the theory wars.

Dazed and Confused In ‘A Bit of History’, you will recall, Bellour refers to the need for an ‘intellectual imaginary’ in order to reach ‘a true discourse of film on film’, adding that this discourse would thus ‘reunit[e] a bit mythically the conditions of commentary and the objects of its reading’.30 These implicit notes of tentativeness (concerning the imaginary and myth) are significant – an element of dream or fantasy-projection is involved, maybe even essential for the dream or utopia of audiovisuality to take place. 28 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, pp. 326-327. 29 Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’; James Elkins’ extensive website of writings is at: [http://www.jameselkins.com/]. 30 Raymond Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, pp. 18-19.

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This is the point where the complexities of the text concept begin to emerge in a theoretical and philosophical sense. Is what Bellour called fusional doubling – between anyone and anything – really possible, and in what sense? Let us mark the importance of an idea of fusion in the recent development of the audiovisual essay – another video by Catherine Grant, for instance, taking its inspiration from the haptic theory of Laura U. Marks, is titled Touching the Film Object? (2011).31 The call to haptically fuse with cinema is itself a polemical or revisionary gesture against the long-entrenched (and often gender-coded) tradition of critical distance in studies of all media.32 In a similar vein, critic-practitioners (including ourselves) have posed the ‘renewed intimacy with materials’33 afforded by digital re-editing against the prevalent tendency towards second-order abstraction in much mundane, written film criticism. Finally, what piece of richly descriptive or ekphrasistic criticism – film writing in its most expressive and ambitious forms – does not, in some sense, labour to be adequate to, to grasp and to evoke, or to fuse with its absent object? In all these cases, the hope to fuse is also a will to strategically confuse categories and positions normally held far apart. Yet, if we are to attempt to take on board the full poststructuralist load of the text as an idea and as a legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, we may well find ourselves at the antipodes of anything resembling fusion, or even give-and-take reciprocity (in which the filmic materials resist us as much as we manipulate them). Thinking now more of figures such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy rather than Barthes, we discover an elaborate (and itself often poetic) terminology of separation, spacing, interval, doubling, mise en abyme … Within this world-view, we cannot hope to touch or fuse with anything; all representation is doomed to fail; it is shadow play. This often rather melancholic model is something well (even inherently) accommodated by literary commentary, but it does not take so readily in the audiovisual domain, where closeness to the film is an eminently practical matter before it is anything else. Yet this hands-on experience of empirical-digital proximity cannot, in itself, entirely dispel theoretical doubt. 31 Catherine Grant, Touching the Film Object? (2011), accessible at [https://vimeo.com/28201216]; accompanying text essay at [https://f ilmanalytical.blogspot.com.es/2011/08/touching-f ilmobject-notes-on-haptic-in.html]. 32 See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 33 See Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘The File We Accompany’, in Martin, Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 385-412 (p. 385).

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Luka Arsenjuk’s 2016 ‘Notes in the Margin of the New Videographic Tendency’ offers, to date, the lengthiest, poststructurally orientated critique of the assumptions underlying audiovisual essay practice.34 Arsenjuk begins from two premises that, he claims, define our ‘post-Romantic, modern horizon’, and thus both the general field of the essay film and the particular case of the videographic (or, as we prefer to say, audiovisual) essay.35 The first (and, in this, Arsenjuk accords with the work of Tiago Baptista)36 is ‘formal reflexivity’, which amounts to an ‘attempt in which cinema is, from the perspective of its limit, turned upon itself in a manifest desire to bring to light its non-classifiable capacities’.37 Closely allied to this non-classifiability is Arsenjuk’s second premise, more finely poststructuralist than modernist, in which a ‘form presents itself as something possible only if it passes through or touches on the point of its impossibility’.38 This echoes Chris Fujiwara’s recent, richly paradoxical assessment of the future of every type of film criticism: ‘to apprehend and live through the experience of the end of criticism by becoming incapable of speaking of cinema […] it is still to happen, now that it has become impossible’.39 For Arsenjuk, as for many poststructuralists, ‘non-identity’ is a sweet agony, productive of a truly endless textuality: commentary will never touch its object, cinema cannot touch itself, we cannot touch the screen, the Imaginary will never meet the Real, etc, etc. His position goes, indeed, a step further than Baptista’s in its announced radicality: ‘Reflexivity does not name the form’s operation of circular closure. Any reflexive movement namely necessarily implies a certain doubling, division, splitting, heterogeneity – an impossibility of the reflected thing to ever simply coincide with itself.’40 Arsenjuk rejects what he sees as the cosy confusion between subject and object suggested, in the name of a reclaimed cinephilia, by practitioners such as Catherine Grant; instead – and this is an objection one often hears today in video essay forums – we must start (or restart) from ‘the critical 34 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”: Notes in the Margin of the New Videographic Tendency’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 277-301. 35 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 278. 36 See Tiago Baptista, Lessons in Looking: The Digital Audiovisual Essay, Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London (2016), [http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/]. 37 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 279. 38 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 278. 39 Chris Fujiwara, ‘The Critical Event of Director Ozu Yasujiro’, LOLA, 7 (November 2016), [http://lolajournal.com/7/hasumi_fujiwara.html]. 40 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 279.

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distance, which the negative gesture of thought assumes in relation to the aesthetic object’. 41 Only negativity, lack, and impossibility will save us! Arsenjuk’s assessment of the impossible in action is less flexible than Fujiwara’s. His two central premises are hardened into a relentlessly reiterated dogma: if it is not reflexive and if it is not (to some extent) impossible in its non-identical splitting, then it is not an essay in the truest and most worthwhile sense. This leaves us, predictably, with virtually a single, culturally approved, auteur masterpiece standing alone in the field when all other pretenders to the crown are vanquished: the generally rather overworked reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), which seems to us (for all its undoubted brilliance) an eccentric and quite unrepeatable model to which to hold all current efforts in audiovisuality. But, within the logic of Arsenjuk’s argument, it is the perfect exemplar, just as the category of desktop cinema becomes the perfect exemplar (and triumphant historic fulfilment) for Baptista’s art theory-influenced model of audiovisuality as (above all) the circular closure of modernist reflexivity. Arsenjuk wants to drive a wedge or ‘poke a hole’42 between the necessary trials of poetic essayism and the currently pervasive, institutional injunctions tied to measurable knowledge production within the bureaucratized university system. In this, we can certainly sympathize with him since, personally, we oppose, on principle, the new university economy based on calculable credit points for academic work. However, Arsenjuk further hardens his argument with an ironclad appeal to the – again, poststructuralist – truth of desire itself and its workings: ‘desire that must somehow take up a position in relation to this loss’ (i.e., loss of any stable referent or object).43 Audiovisual practitioners hence display a ‘relatively tame essayistic desire’ and revel in this desire’s ‘closure’. 44 This amounts to a veritable Law of Desire. Arsenjuk is right to criticize what he sees as a tendency (for instance, in Morton) to celebrate an already (and rather swiftly) achieved utopia of omni-attainability and manipulability, a utopia ‘taken as simply realised’. 45 But he then forecloses the issue by declaring: Why would the case of the film-analytic utopia be any different from the fate of other utopias, all of which suffer from the inherently paradoxical 41 42 43 44 45

Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 285. Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 286. Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 289. Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 296. Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 299.

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nature of fulfilment: namely, that the realisation of utopia abolishes the very desire which is was possible to sustain in its absence, while the reality of utopia remained merely an imaginary projection?46

Arsenjuk facilely mocks what he sees as a rhetoric of oneness, consistency, reassurance, comfort, and reconciliation in the works of and on audiovisuality by Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley – an overdetermined analysis, which tramples much nuance in the pieces he references. 47 ‘Notes in the Margin of the New Videographic Tendency’ is a classic example, to our minds, of a theory-driven (in fact, dogma-driven) argument with little or no purchase on what it is to actually make or create audiovisual works. To consider any possible rapprochement between theory and practice, we must skip to a style of poststructuralist thought that is less doxic and more poetic.

Ashes to Ashes The Australian-based scholar William Routt has always insisted on a poststructuralist perspective in relation to film analysis: ‘Getting closer to the essence of the film – everyone knows that is not how postmodernism or deconstruction really work.’48 The most complete statement of his position can be found in a 1985 essay co-written with Richard J. Thompson, in part formulated as a response to yet another oft-cited, short, and suggestive Bellour essay published in English in that same year, ‘Analysis in Flames’. 49 In an announced first gesture of their text ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’, Routt and Thompson endeavour to ‘bring back the ashes’ of the analytic enterprise.50 In their discussion, Routt and Thompson rightly identify a trait that, we believe, has metamorphosed considerably in Bellour’s work since 1985: the binding association (strongly influenced by the writings of Serge Daney throughout that decade) of the critical act with the moment of freezing, in 46 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 291. 47 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, pp. 285-287, 295-296. 48 Deane Williams, ‘“We Might Leave It There”: An Interview with William D. Routt’, Screening the Past, 26 (September 2010) [http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/’we-might-leave-it-there’/]. 49 Raymond Bellour, ‘Analysis in Flames’, reprinted in his collection Between-the-Images (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2012). 50 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals’, History on/and/in Film, ed. by Tom O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith (Perth: History and Film Association, 1987), pp. 31-44. Another, later version of this text appears under the same title in Journal of Film and Video, 42. 1 (1990), pp. 17-35.

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which the freeze-frame is to be understood not only literally but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a conceptual metaphor. All the same, there are ‘two kinds of time’ posited by Bellour’s 1985 discussion, a distinction of ‘absolute opposition’ that Routt and Thompson, for their part, find ‘invidious’: ‘duration, which is the time of the film, and serial time, which is the time of the analysis’.51 For Bellour, in that period, the analysis which does not manage to freeze a film is doomed to be ‘illusory’ because – and now the famous terms of ‘The Unattainable Text’ return – it pursues an ‘elusive body’ that ‘cannot really be quoted or grasped’.52 In fact, this distinction between ‘two kinds of time’ is another aspect of Bellour’s thought that undergoes a later evolution and elaboration in his trajectory. For what is here summarized by Routt and Thompson as serial time – comprised, as it were, of the laborious, discontinuous animation of instants of stillness – is quite different, we feel, from the more fluid, expansive, and creative ‘time-space of […] reading’ that Bellour proposed in 2009 as the alternative to the experience of film-time, and that he demonstrated magisterially in the 1992 text ‘The Film We Accompany’, a discontinuous, walk-through analysis of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960).53 Let us nonetheless stick, for a moment, with Routt’s and Thompson’s polemical insistence, because it opens some interesting paths. For them, the essence of cinema (and cinema criticism) is movement over stillness, or (as Routt put it in reaction to a presentation on audiovisual essays in 2015) process over object, event over text in any simplistically fixed and material sense. For us the base unit of analysis is the shot, not the frame. That is, for film as distinct from other cultural products, duration is a constituent of the basic unit (the shot is a wave as well as a particle). Film analysis, as distinct from the analysis of some other cultural products, should arise out of the irreducible duration of the shot, should be grounded in the elusiveness of its object, should eschew quotation or the attempt to fix a meaning.54 51 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31. 52 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31.In the fascinating, book-length interview conducted by Alice Leroy and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Dans la compagnie des œuvres (Aix-en-Provence: Rouge profond, 2017), Bellour remarks: ‘Generally, as is well known, every critical act presupposes a certain murder of its object; but, at the same time, this murder is the precondition for its resurrection. Critical texts have no vocation apart from reviving the object, by giving it new dimensions, perhaps another body’ p. 9 (our translation). 53 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Film We Accompany’, Rouge, trans. by Fergus Daly and Adrian Martin), 3 (2004) [http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html]. 54 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31.

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Indeed, Routt and Thompson go onto argue for the vital role of madness in film analysis, in the process détourning several phrases from Bellour’s 1985 essay: That analysis which has as its goal the production of a template of a film has, indeed, no future. Again we assert, it never did. But that analysis the goal of which is the recognition of the madness at the heart of the work does have a future, is the future. For it is the analysis which adopts the pose of its object, which moulds itself to iconicity and analogy, which pushes language into check, which respects and welcomes polysemy.55

Making audiovisual essays can directly cause any of its practitioners to relive, in this sense, the historic combat (and changeover) between structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to cinema and criticism. In this arena, the temptation to stillness directly confronts the seductiveness of movement. There are, in fact, dangers on both sides of this divide – traps of either dissecting to kill versus just going with the flow. But let us first take stock of what is at stake in this debate, within the imaginary parliament of a philosophical aesthetics of film. In an important text of 1981, Alain Masson proposes, in a somewhat surprising formulation, that film form can be grasped not at the typical, coded levels of découpage and montage (such as Bellour had worked with meticulously in the 1960s and early 1970s), but in the interplay between three domains: décor, as configured by camera angle; characters, ‘who only become intelligible through being followed’; and camera movements, ‘apprehended in their continuity or discovered across the intervals which separate successive shots’. ‘Form’, he concludes, ‘results from the changing relations between places, gestures, and camera viewpoints’. He prefaces this summary proposal with the assertion: ‘These elements can be rightly characterized by their various kinds of mobility within a mode of representation where movement constitutes the principal authority.’56 Masson’s approach here is backed up by the work carried out by his senior colleague at Positif, Gérard Legrand, concretized in the latter’s classic 1979 book, Cinémanie.57 As a whole, Masson’s critical work expresses the intuition that is given shape in this schema: form is fugitive in cinema, it can only be apprehended 55 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 32. 56 Alain Masson, ‘Le boxeur transf iguré (Raging Bull)’, Positif, 241 (April 1981), p. 48 (our translation). 57 Gérard Legrand, Cinémanie (Paris: Stock, 1979).

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on the run. Form dissolves at the very instant that it appears to coalesce or materialize, since the film itself always moves on, and thus scrambles its momentary, shape-making tendencies of symmetry, echo, inversion, and so on. Form is always a shape-shifting phantasm projected, at each instant, into the mind of the spectator – inaccessible (unattainable) in any one place, and yet a phantasm that has a material (and verifiable) basis. It is along this same line that Masson claims, 37 years later, in his review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017): ‘It can only exist in the spectator’s memory, i.e., over the hours and days in which the facts and things that occupied the screen become indistinct.’58 This is, of course, the paradox (of a type to which Bellour is himself keenly sensitive) common to all time-based art and media, whether re-playable, like cinema or recorded music, or not, like live theatre and performance. But, as the rich, many-media-in-one art that cinema is, and given that, as a material object, it can indeed be played, replayed, frozen, and broken down in so many analytical ways, it pushes this paradox to the limit. This is why cinema at once both invites and mocks all properly structuralist attempts to pin down the total system of a f ilm in a semantic table, dimensional diagram, or annotated shot-list – everything that falls under the heading of what Routt and Thompson call ‘the production of a template of a film’.59 For – as every teacher knows – the simple, brute fact of unveiling such a template or snapshot of a film’s formal system to even the most attentive spectator or listener achieves nothing but puzzlement or anti-climax; the only thing that matters is the patient labour – the extended time-space of reading – that goes into the individual or collective formulation of this kind of skeletal summary, the process that arrives at it. The analytical freeze, in whatever literal or metaphoric sense, can only be a provisional moment of closure, in the sense in which Hervé JoubertLaurencin describes this state of provisionality in the critical writing of André Bazin.60 58 Alain Masson, ‘Le couturier et la cuisinière’, Positif, 684 (February 2018), p. 10 (our translation). 59 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31. On the intriguing topic of structuralist diagrams, see David Plante, ‘The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss’, artcritical, 30 August 2013 [http://www.artcritical.com/2013/08/30/ rosalind-krauss-interview/]; and David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), online at The Internet Archive [https://archive.org/]. 60 See Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 200-202; and Adrian Martin, Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 371-375.

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Bellour’s more recent insistence on the dual psychism of memory and forgetting inherent in cinema viewing accords both with Masson’s belief in the principal authority of movement in this phantasmatic medium, as well as Josef von Sternberg’s remarkable statement in a 1960 letter sent to the scholar Rafael Bosch (helpfully titled ‘On Resonance’) of his core aesthetic principles as a film-maker, which are profoundly tuned to the matter of fugitive form: I attempt to make my work completely homogenous. Image, sound, abstraction, and the effect of these on the beholder are interlaced and must follow an inner rhythm and an orchestration which, though it vanishes with the film, remains as a Nachklang [literally: echo]. It is this ‘after-timbre’, this ghost-resonance I seek – though I may not achieve it.61

Yet how, ultimately, are we to deal with movement – other than merely to refer to it, eulogize it as an ideal, or quote it holus-bolus in an audiovisual essay?

The Permanent Text of Pleasure? There is another key text of film-thinking written in the mid 1970s that is far less referred to today than either Bellour’s ‘Unattainable Text’ or Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ – and never, so as far as we know, in relation to the field of the audiovisual essay, even though the main film it discusses, Vincente Minnelli’s musical The Band Wagon (1953), has often popped up in analytical videos, especially in the wake of the release of La La Land (David Chazelle, 2016). The text is ‘Show-Making’ by Dennis Giles, a gifted American scholar who died in 1989 at the age of 45. This study of musicals takes its place alongside similar psychoanalytically- informed studies he wrote concerning the genres of horror, pornography, melodrama, and the videophobia of the 1980s surrounding television and its assumed effect on children.62 The connection we sense between an article on (predominantly) Fred Astaire musicals and the field of audiovisual essays may not be immediately 61 Reprinted in Herman G. Weinberg, Josef von Sternberg: A Critical Study (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967), p. 138. 62 Dennis Giles (1975-1976), ‘Show-Making’, reprinted in Genre: The Musical, ed. by Rick Altman (London: Routledge/British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 85-101. Most of Giles’ work is gathered (with links to articles) in this CV tribute assembled by Kimberly Neuendorf of Cleveland State University: [http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/GilesVitae/GilesVitae.pdf].

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The Band Wagon (Vincente Minelli USA 1953), screenshot.

apparent – bear with us for a moment. Giles makes an intense and elaborate argument about the significance of showing something in cinema – in the strong sense (common to the musicals he discusses) of putting on a show. Showing is more than a mere spectacle or attraction; it is the entire act and action of mounting, presenting, offering to the gaze, a process that Giles names show-making or (after Freud) show-work – a series of steps he finely mimics in the ascending parts, stages, and levels of his own text. (‘The crime of the musical is not murder but love – a form of love that we must approach through circuitous routes until we can show it openly.’)63 There is an entire language or code for this aptly named show business, which all good performers know intuitively as well as in the particulars of their specific craft – an accumulated professional folk wisdom which film theory continues to ignore at its own peril. The type of show which Giles richly evokes in his essay is all about the particular experience or essence of fusion evoked in the highest moments of song-and-dance performance in cinema, typically associated with Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and other icons of what Giles perceptively tags the ‘pre-Fosse musical’.64 This erotic fusion between male and female performers does not rely upon narrative contrivance – he rejects, in a 1982 sequel essay to ‘Show-Making’, Rick Altman’s conventional ideal of the ‘integrated musical’ in which narrative and musical numbers are smoothly entwined – rather, for Giles, show trumps story in all the best cases.65 63 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, pp. 87-88. 64 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 101. 65 Dennis Giles (1982), ‘The Show of Love: Some Functions of Spectacle in the Hollywood Musical’, unpublished ms., p. 9. See note 62 for CV link.

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This show is not static; in fact, it moves and modulates itself a great deal. But it strives to attain the ultimate effect of a pose in the most elevated and imaginary sense: a moment of bliss and absolute fusion beyond time. The very first subheading in Giles’ essay is ‘The Permanent Show’. In his later consideration of these issues, he explicitly relates his idea of the pose as a sequence of positions to Roland Barthes’ uses of figures in his A Lover’s Discourse.66 Furthermore, Giles speaks of the show, in an almost philosophical sense, as a text, and of the drive ‘to freeze the moment of jouissance into a permanent text of pleasure’.67 This use of text again relates to the poststructuralist era (Giles used it often, as when he analysed pornographic ‘texts of desire’),68 but marks out a fourth meaning or inflection of the term related closely to Bellour’s three earlier meanings. Here, the permanent text is a virtually mythic state of being, the other-worldly realm of the gods – Giles quotes Plato’s The Phaedrus to the effect that Eros gives humans the power ‘to become like gods, to free themselves from the constraints of the everyday lived-world’.69 And, for him, the musical is finally no less than ‘the story – and finally the show – of Eros’.70 And yet worldly culture, too, seeps into this internalization of the mythic realm that movies (among other phenomena) encourage: it is a text, too, in the sense of a book (Giles refers to the narrative of a musical, in the language of theatre, as its book) that is learned and repeated by rote, over and over … Of course, this frozen text of permanent pleasure is impossible, an illusion: it must deny age, interpersonal difference, quotidian reality, and the inevitable waning of energies. But, as a dream, it is precisely that magnificent ‘idealisation of cinema’ that Godard once invoked (also, as it happens, in relation to the musical).71 This type of ecstasy is one of the affective experiences or dimensions that most defines cinephilia, with its magic moments and unforgettable, ever-replayable fragments. We stand apart here from Arsenjuk, in whose anti-videographic argument we find cinephilia as, in Grant’s phrase, affective knowledge, conventionally registered and dismissed 66 Dennis Giles (1982), ‘The Show of Love’, pp. 6-8; see Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 3-8. 67 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 101. 68 In 1976, Giles wrote ‘Angel on Fire: Three Texts of Desire’, and, in 1977, ‘Pornographic Space: The Other Place’. See note 62 for CV link. 69 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 101. 70 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 101. 71 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, trans. by Tom Milne (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), p. 87.

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as either ‘too full’ because it is purely subjective and thus untransferable, or ‘too empty’ for the exact same reason.72 Always too much and yet not enough! How can this be related to the audiovisual essay? For us, in the context of audiovisual essay culture, Giles’ critical parable of show-making is a lesson in rhetoric. An assembled essay – whether in prose or audio-vision – is a demonstration, a performance. It, too, seeks to evoke an eternally frozen moment: of pleasure, and also of knowledge, of appreciation. It is what our vernacular language calls the ‘ah ha!’ or light-bulb moment: when you are filled with the realization or recognition of an apparently timeless truth. And perhaps not even for the first or last time: maybe you have forgotten it from before, and maybe you will forget it again afterwards, precisely (unconsciously) in order to have the thrill of experiencing it again. Like many things in life, melodrama, as Giles has remarked elsewhere,73 is revolution, but the revolution that never comes once and for all, that must instead be aspired to and imagined ecstatically, over and again – that permanent revolution, like the permanent show, which the Surrealists consecrated. Giles asserts: [T]he search for love and the search for theatrical expression are both attempts to find an appropriate language which will ‘speak’ passion directly. Love can be properly expressed only when it is displayed – articulated as melodic and rhythmic spectacle.74

Giles’s ultimate aim is to discuss the workings of fantasy in the psychoanalytic sense – i.e., to circumscribe a complex that is impossible in reality, and achievable only in fantasy. Is the audiovisual essay, too – and the ideal experience of it that we crave and promote – a fantasy? A symptom of this might be the note of anxiety that constantly circles, at present, the production of audiovisual essays, even among the most fervent champions of the form. It is rare even to simply show (to screen) a work of this type and let it stand by itself. ‘Like all fantasies, this show is timeless’, writes Giles.75 But the show-making of the audiovisual essay seems to demand verificatory words that stretch out another time on the stage of rhetoric: 72 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 287. 73 Dennis Giles (1980), ‘Revenge and Revolution: A Study in Melodrama’, unpublished ms., pp. 13-14. See note 62 for CV link. 74 Dennis Giles, ‘The Show of Love’, p. 2. 75 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 100.

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verbal introductions, post-screening analyses, written explanations. Another version, in a sense, of the time-space of reading – or teaching. Arsenjuk faults [in]Transition journal (wholly devoted to audiovisual essays), for example, for heavily overdetermining the supposedly pure language of image and sound with curators’ introductions, makers’ statements, published referee reports, and, last but not least, user comments (usually also by insiders of the audiovisual scene).76 He has a point: certainly, there is a note of institutional anxiety – specifically, legitimation anxiety – involved in this overloading of the audiovisual with explanatory, written utterances; a worry that the fledgling form cannot stand on its own, which puts further stress on the ‘fracture’ between film and critique of which Bellour speaks today.77 But we would not employ these symptomatic, institutional behaviours as any kind of final, damning word on the possibilities of the audiovisual form itself. Increasingly, we encounter the complaint (in the vein of Arsenjuk) that audiovisual essays are merely illustrations of their accompanying written text (a text that is, certainly in our experience, often deemed obligatory by editors or publishers of such work, rather than initiated by its makers) – and thus epiphenomena of a rationalist, language-bound theory. James Elkins wields the following test or criterion to judge all manner of experimental visual study: if what it says can also be expressed or discussed in words, then it is not doing anything that is not already linguistic by nature.78 Yet, this reasoning seems to us a hierarchical fallacy of the sort that Bellour also, in passing, promulgated. Sure, anything can be written about, expressed, translated into words – but that will be, above and beyond anything else, a translation into the terms and domain of literature, not an equivalence to audiovisuality, and still less something inherently superior (as argument) to it. Why always this recourse to the literary as the highest court of appeal? For us, the crux of the matter – to lean on Giles one last time – is this ‘articulat[ion] as melodic and rhythmic spectacle’ that the audiovisual essay enables. Yes, there is an inevitable (even necessary!) element of fantasy in every dream of fusion with the object. Sure, rhetoric (written, spoken) is our indispensable ally at various moments and levels of the public life of these works. But there is also the material reality of the audiovisual show itself: its forms, textures, elements, and associations. 76 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 296. 77 See note 1. 78 See the Introduction in James Elkins and Kristi McGuire (eds.), Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (London: Routledge, 2013, p. 3-15); we also thank James for his personal correspondence on this point. Our position is outlined in ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’.

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Wind back to Bellour’s 1979 comment on Kuntzel’s La rejetée: ‘within the apparatus itself, through its contrivance […] the work of thought is performed’.79 30 years later, the same idea returns in his description of the unique slide-projections of James Coleman: ‘A movement of sensation, a sensation of movement, becoming the movement of an idea.’80 Bellour sets a good tone here. Because today, it seems, much workaday commentary on the audiovisual essay is fixated on the Kantian gesture of categorisation (into types, model forms, genres, subgenres … ), disputes over the correct genealogy of its influences (in experimental f ilm, art, advertising, pedagogy, criticism … ), and the mapping of its institutional coordinates (online, academic, commercial … ).81 A more useful intervention, at this time, would be to cut across these various categories, genealogies, or sites, and attempt to formulate the gesture (in the sense Vilém Flusser theorizes this word) of what it means to take and reassemble pre-existing images and sounds within the contemporary, digital landscape.82 A 21st- century gesture in which montage gives the movement of ideas. © Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, September 2018

Bibliography Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’, Sydney Review of Books, 1 February 2017, Web. Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. ‘The File We Accompany’, in Adrian Martin, Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 385-412 (p. 385).

79 Raymond Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19. 80 Raymond Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 45. 81 See, inter alia, Thomas van den Berg and Miklos Kiss (2016), Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Research to Academic Research Video [http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-inmotion/]; Conor Bateman, ‘The Video Essay as Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay’, 22 May 2016 [http://norbateman.co/11-ways-to-make-a-video-essay/]; and Jessica McGoff, ‘Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape’, 4:3, 27 February 2017 [https://fourthreef ilm. com/2017/02/text-vs-context-understanding-the-video-essay-landscape/]. Our response to the McGoff appears at [https://cristinaalvarezlopez.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/a-response-tojessica-mcgoffs-text-vs-context-understanding-the-video-essay-landscape/]. 82 See Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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Andrew, Dudley and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.). Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (London: Oxford University Press, 2011). Luka Arsenjuk. ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”: Notes in the Margin of the New Videographic Tendency’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 277-301. Tiago Baptista. Lessons in Looking: The Digital Audiovisual Essay, Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London (2016), Web [http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/]. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Bateman, Conor. ‘The Video Essay as Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay’, 22 May 2016, Web. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Ben Brewster, The Analysis of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27. Bellour, Raymond. ‘A Bit of History’, in The Analysis of Films, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Mary Quaintance (Bloomington and Illinois: Bloomington University Press, 2000), pp. 1-20. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Film We Accompany’, Rouge, trans. by Fergus Daly and Adrian Martin, 3 (2004), Web. Bellour, Raymond. Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, emotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009). Bellour, Raymond. La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012). Raymond Bellour. ‘Analysis in Flames’, Between-the-Images, ed. by Lionel Bovier (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2012). Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21. Bellour, Raymond. Pensées du cinema (Paris: P.O.L, 2016). Carrier, David. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport: Greenwood, 2002). Elkins, James and Kristi McGuire. ‘Introduction’, in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, ed. by James Elkins and Kristi McGuire (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 3-15. Epstein, Jean. ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 321-328. Flusser, Vilém. Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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Fujiwara, Chris. ‘The Critical Event of Director Ozu Yasujiro’, LOLA, 7 (November 2016), Web. Giles, Dennis. ‘Angel on Fire: Three Texts of Desire’, The Velvet Light Trap (Fall 1976): 41-45. Giles, Dennis. ‘Pornographic Space: The Other Place’, ‘Film: Historical-Theoretical Speculations’ in The 1977 Film Studies Annual. Part 2 (Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave Press, 1979), pp. 52-65. Giles, Dennis. ‘Show-Making’, reprinted in Genre: The Musical, ed. by Rick Altman (London: Routledge/British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 85-101. Giles, Dennis. ‘Revenge and Revolution: A Study in Melodrama’, (1980) unpublished ms, Web [https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/giles/giles80unpub.pdf]. Giles, Dennis. ‘The Show of Love: Some Functions of Spectacle in the Hollywood Musical’, (1982) unpublished ms, Web [https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/ giles/giles82SCS.pdf]. Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard, trans. by Tom Milne, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972). Grant, Catherine. ‘Quote, Unquote: The Unattainable Film Text in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, (2009), Web. Grant, Catherine. Touching the Film Object? (2011), Web [https://vimeo.com/28201216]. Grant, Catherine. ‘Touching the Film Object: Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographical Film Studies’, Filmanalytical (2011), Web. Legrand, Gérard. Cinémanie (Paris: Stock, 1979). Leroy, Alice and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: Dans la compagnie des œuvres (Aix-en-Provence: Rouge profond, 2017). Martin, Adrian. ‘Scanning Godard’, Screening the Past, no. 10 (2000), Web. Martin, Adrian. Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Martin, Adrian and Cristina Álvarez López. ‘A Response to Jessica McGoff’s “Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape”’, Cristina Álvarez López, 2017, Web. Masson, Alain. ‘Le boxeur transfiguré (Raging Bull)’, Positif, 241 (April 1981), p. 48. Masson, Alain. ‘Le couturier et la cuisinière’, Positif, 684 (February 2018), p. 10. McGoff, Jessica. ‘Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape’, 4:3, 27 February 2017, Web. Morton, Drew. ‘Though This Be Madness, Yet There is Method in It: Notes on Producing and Revising Videographic Scholarship’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videgraphic Film and Moving Images Studies, September 2014, Web. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

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Plante, David. ‘The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss’, artcritical, 30 August 2013, Web. Routt, William D. and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals’, in History on/and/in Film, ed. by Tom O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith (Perth: History and Film Association, 1987), pp. 31-44. van den Berg, Thomas and Miklos Kiss, Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Research to Academic Research Video (2016), Web. Weinberg, Herman G. Josef von Sternberg: A Critical Study (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967). Williams, Deane. ‘“We Might Leave It There”: An Interview with William D. Routt’, Screening the Past, 26 (September 2010), Web [http://www.screeningthepast. com/2015/01/’we-might-leave-it-there’/].

About the Authors Adrian Martin is Adjunct Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Australia and a teacher at the EQZE Film School, Spain. He is the author of eight books, most recently Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). His audio commentaries appear on BFI, Arrow, Masters of Cinema and Indicator releases; and he writes for Trafic, Metro, Sight and Sound and Caiman, among others. Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and teacher at the EQZE Film School, Spain. She was co-founder of the Spanish online film journal Transit: Cine y otros desvíos, and has written for Sight and Sound, MUBI Notebook, Shangrila, LOLA, Screening the Past, and Screen Education, and in books on Chantal Akerman, Bong Joon-ho, Philippe Garrel and Paul Schrader. Her solo audiovisual essays have appeared in The Third Rail, the ICA (London) website, and Indicator DVD/Blu-ray releases. Álvarez López & Martin’s collaborative audiovisual essays appear regularly in De Filmkrant (Holland) and MUBI Notebook (USA); as well as in Sight and Sound, The Third Rail, [in]Transition and 16:9; on DVD/Blu-ray releases from Criterion, BFI, Kino Lorber, Carlotta, Masters of Cinema and Belgian Cinematek; and online commissions for Queensland Art Gallery and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

3.

Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic CounterNarrative Laura Rascaroli

Abstract Both artists and critics refer more and more to a diverse range of contemporary films as lyric or poetic essays. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially undertheorized. This chapter aims to refine the theoretical and analytical tools that are at our disposal to think about the lyric essay film, and to expand our understanding of how lyricism is used by film-makers to create audiovisual spaces for thought. In doing so, it draws on a specific case study, the cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello, whose experimental essayistic work is elegiac and political all at once. Keywords: Lyric essay film, poetic essay film, elegy, Pietro Marcello, The Mouth of the Wolf, Lost and Beautiful

Artists and critics increasingly refer to a diverse range of contemporary films as lyric or poetic essays – from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Forgetting Vietnam (2016) to Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (2015), from Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia (2015) to Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015), to cite some of the most recent and better-known examples. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially undertheorized. This may be explained by the impression that distinctive features of the lyrical, such as affect and sublimity, are at odds with the essay’s characteristic rationalism. While acknowledging that the

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch03

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essay film’s voiceover can include the lyrical mode, for instance, Timothy Corrigan describes the lyrical as being almost at odds with the essayistic: With a perplexing and enriching lack of formal rigor, essays and essay films do not usually offer the kinds of pleasure associated with traditional aesthetic forms like narrative or lyrical poetry; they instead lean toward intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure principles.1

The lyric, however, may be said to be at the root of the essay as form, if we consider that linguistic eloquence is one of its constitutive features, so prominent that Max Bense, in a 1947 contribution, described the literary essay as existing on the frontier between prose and poetry.2 In ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’, György Lukács refers to poetry as the ‘sister’ of the essay,3 and to essays as ‘intellectual poems’. 4 From Horace, with his Epistles and Ars Poetica, to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man, from Thomas de Quincey to Virginia Woolf to Aleksandr Blok, many are authors who wrote essays in the form of poems or in a lyrical prose. In film, then, the lyric is clearly distinguishable throughout the history of the form, as testified by the examples of Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Forough Farrokhzad, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Agnès Varda, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Joris Ivens, and Manoel de Oliveira, among others. The apparent contradiction between lyricism and argumentation – also emphasized by literary critics, who believe the term ‘lyric essay’ carries a ‘slight implication of literary nonsense’5 – may promote a view of the lyric as a simple addendum, an aesthetic surplus that does not partake of the logical argument. A similar attitude of relegation may be observed 1 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 5. 2 Max Bense, ‘From “On the Essay and Its Prose”’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), pp. 71-74. (p. 72). 3 György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul & Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 16-34, (p. 29). 4 György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul & Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 16-34, (p. 34). 5 John D’Agata, ‘Introduction’, in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay, ed. by John D’Agata (New York: Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2014), pp. 5-10 (p. 7).

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in relation to the narrative component of essay f ilms, which is often characterized as a mere f ictional layer superimposed on documentary matter – a layering that has frequently been described as the essence itself of the essay f ilm, in a way that presupposes the primacy of the nonfictional. Conversely, I argue that the essay film is not merely a hybrid, a documentary film with an added fictional ingredient; rather, narration is a constitutive element of the essay’s epistemological and signifying strategies. Argumentation and narration are not in contradiction; as Harun Farocki has remarked: ‘to me, narration and argumentation are still very closely linked. I strongly hold that discourses are a form of narration’.6 Narration, indeed, is discourse. Needless to say, narration is not simply equivalent with narrative voice and, thus, written text; narrative mode and style, point of view, focalization, ordering of events, and temporality are some of the elements that participate in the telling of a story. And this telling can, of course, be shaped by its encounter with the lyric. But what is the relationship between narration, lyricism, and argument in the essay film? With its effects of textual fragmentation, incompleteness, and lacuna, and its emphasis on affect and sublimity, the lyric may be described as a counter-narrative mode. Here, I will discuss how lyricism works at once with and against the essay film’s narrative strategies, thus contributing to essayistic discourse. In so doing, I wish to expand on a first reflection on this topic, which I began elsewhere, to examine lyricism as a locus of textual affect, seen as a powerful epistemological tool, and as a mode that runs contrary to the essay’s scepticism, thus creating a dialectics that contributes to argument.7 The aims of this chapter, accordingly, are to refine the theoretical and analytical tools that are at our disposal to think about the lyric essay film, and to expand our understanding of how lyricism is used by filmmakers to create audiovisual spaces for thought. In so doing, I will draw on a specific case study, the films of contemporary Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello, whose experimental essayistic work is elegiac and political all at once. I will begin by briefly discussing lyricism in cinema, and in the lyric essay film in particular.

6 Harun Farocki and Rembert Hüser, ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard. A Conversation with Harun Farocki’, in Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 279-314, (p. 313). 7 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 143-163.

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Thinking Poetically I have submitted above that the impression of an inherent contradiction between lyricism and essayism may, in part, explain the lack of theoretical work on the lyric essay film. Another reason could be the difficulty in pinpointing the lyrical itself, in literature and even more so in cinema, with its characteristic multichannel textuality. The discussion of the poetic in film has often relied on analogy. Filmmakers and film historians alike have most frequently associated the lyric with avant-garde films made since the 1920s, although this association becomes less prominent by the late 1960s. Abstract, experimental films without apparent or strong narratives have been likened to poetry, an analogy based on the fragmentation, symbolism, and evocative aestheticism of these films, which seemed to be more akin to poetic composition than to narrative. Although most of the existing literature focusses on avant-garde cinema, a lyrical tone or approach is not confined to these forms, and the term lyrical has been paired to many narrative films, especially those that include poetry in verse, or in which narrative is de-emphasized. Writing on Andrej Tarkovski, for instance, Stephanie Sandler comments that ‘the judgment that a film is poetic usually means that the story-line has been displaced by an emphasis on mood or atmosphere’.8 Indeed, lyricism and narrative in film have often been deemed to be at odds. These discussions, however, have tended to remain impressionistic, with some notable exceptions that display attention for structures and the specificity of film language, starting from Maya Deren’s famous distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ meaning in literature and in film, ‘horizontal being the forms of meaning made clear through the developing narrative of a work, and vertical the multiple layers of meaning that accrue in forms of expression normally considered poetic’.9 One of the most thorough (and controversial) readings of lyric cinema is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s article ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, which, with its focus on film semiotics and the ‘free indirect point-of-view shot’, corresponding to free indirect discourse in literature, attempted a theorization of an authorial art cinema.10 Through the crafting of obsessive techniques that coalesce into a personal 8 Stephanie Sandler, ‘On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky’, The Russian Review 66.4: (2007), pp. 647-670, (p. 649). 9 Scott MacDonald, ‘Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication’,
F ramework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 47: 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 37-58, (p. 40). 10 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The ‘Cinema of Poetry’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed. by Louise K. Barnett, trans. by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.

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style, the cinema of poetry, for Pasolini, allows for a counter-narrative subjective expression in which the ways of seeing character, camera, and author are aligned in the optical point-of-view shot. P. Adams Sitney then drew on both Pasolini and Gilles Deleuze to analyse poetic temporal and camera techniques in narrative and experimental films that mediate individual consciousness.11 The accent, as can be seen, is always on the expression of a singular authorial stance and a personal poetics that places the director at the centre of a creative discourse of idiosyncratic individual expression. It must be noted that none of these reflections pertain to documentary as a discrete category. Literature on poetic nonfiction has tended to highlight its connections with the modernist avant-garde. In particular, Bill Nichols describes the ‘poetic mode’ of documentary, an example of which is Joris Ivens’s Rain (Regen, 1929), in terms of its renunciation of the conventions of continuity editing and of the construction of a clear spatio-temporal narration, and its reliance on patterns, rhythms, and associative links: The poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution. This mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion. The rhetorical element remains underdeveloped.12

In relation to the essay film, then, references to a lyrical component may be traced as early as André Bazin’s article on Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, 1957), famous for being one of the earliest critical interventions on the form. Bazin therein describes Letter from Siberia as ‘an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well’.13 For Bazin, Marker’s film places the intelligence of language at the core of its essayistic argument; however, Bazin does not comment further on the lyrical aspect. A recent article, also on Chris Marker, offers, to the best of my knowledge, the most articulated discussion to date on poetry and the essay film. 11 P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 103. 13 André Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker’, trans. by David Kehr, Film Comment 39.4 (2003), pp. 44-45 (p. 44).

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Focussing on Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1993), David Foster claims that, in this film, ‘Marker interweaves analysis of historical and political issues with the metaphorical connections, reflexivity, and lyric subjectivity characteristic of poetry’.14 In his discussion of Marker’s practice, Foster draws on Gerhard Richter’s definition of Denkbild, or ‘thought-image’, as practised by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, a method that ‘brings together the critical and philosophical mode of essayistic writing with the personal and experiential mode of lyric poetry in dialectic tension’.15 Foster stresses that Denkbild is, firstly, a practice employed to produce a subjective voice (and it must be noted that the subjective voice is key, not only to the experience of the lyrical, but of the essay, too). The lyric’s function, however, extends beyond it: ‘One of the central lyrical features of the Denkbild that Richter identifies in Benjamin’s work is the negotiation of the rechten Abstand or the “right distance” and the richtigen Bickwinkel or the “proper perspective”.’16 Distance is crucial to the adoption of a critical stance that must mediate the subjective involvement of the essayist in the subject matter. Thus, for Foster, the notion of Denkbild can support an understanding of the function of lyricism in the essay film as a way to guarantee a balance between subjectivity and critique – the same balance that Marker strived to reach in his portrait of his friend, Soviet filmmaker Alexandre Medvedkin, in The Last Bolshevik. Foster’s discussion is a useful starting point for two reasons; first, because it references dialectics, which I have come to understand as central to the workings of the essay film.17 Dialectics is also a resource of poetry. In an article on the blog, for instance, Sven Birkerts uses the term ‘lyrical’ to refer to essays that, do not necessarily march forward logically but present their elements associatively, sometimes without obvious connective tissue; or they combine their materials more in the manner of collage, juxtaposing several themes or kinds of narrative sequences. In some ways, they adopt the resources of poetry.18 14 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau d’Alexandre’, Image & Narrative 10.3 (2009): 3-14 (p. 4), Web. 15 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms’, p. 6. 16 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms’, p. 5. 17 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 18 Sven Birkerts, ‘For Cyberwriters, a Lyrical Link’, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20 October 2006, Web, accessed 30 July 2016.

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Indeed, I see lyricism in the essay film as a counter-narrative strategy, one of the many strategies that the essay may use to create a dialectical tension and, as a result, textual interstices within which new audiovisual thinking can emerge. And poetic fragmentariness is a structure of gap that can be imitated by the essay, as Ander Monson has indicated: In order to accommodate gap, the essay must ape the poem – it must create an openness, an attention to beauty rather than meaning, at least on the micro-scale, it must jump through gaps and continue on, an elision of the white space on the page.19

The second reason for which Foster’s article is useful is because it emphasizes the question of the fashioning of subjectivity, ultimately attracting attention to further important gaps: those between essayist and narrator, and between narrator and subject matter. The subjective stance is crucial to the essay film, which must embrace a contingent perspective, yet also attain critical distance. The lyric, then, is shown to have a structural functioning in the special textuality of the essay film. Starting from these premises, in what follows I will make sustained references to the literary theory of the lyric with a view to advancing our understanding of just such structural function. My interest lies in understanding the role of lyricism in shaping the essay film’s thinking – hence, in its capacity for thought. As already mentioned, my hypothesis is that the lyrical in the essay film is not subordinate to logical thinking or separate from it as an addendum or a supplement; rather, it is argument and instrument of argumentation.

Learning from Pietro Marcello: Lyric Counter-Narrative, Elegiac Reversibility My discussion will draw on the cinema of Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello. Since 2003, when he directed his first shorts, Marcello has authored several nonfictions, including Crossing the Line (Il passaggio della linea, 2007), first presented at Venice Film Festival; The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo 2009), Best Film and FIPRESCI Award at the 27th Turin Film Festival, and recipient of a number of other prizes including the Teddy Award – the official queer award at the Berlin International Film Festival; The Silence of Pelešjan 19 Ander Monson, ‘Essay as Hack’, 2008, Web, accessed 30 July 2015.

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(Il silenzio di Pelešjan, 2011), on the cinema of Armenian auteur Artavadz Pelešjan, first presented as a special event at the 68th Venice Film Festival; and the docu-fiction Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015), which screened in the main competition at the 2015 Locarno International Film Festival. Frequently described as neither wholly documentary nor wholly fictional, with its noteworthy mix of vérité, performativity, and lyricism, Marcello’s work raises questions, on the one hand, on the nature of nonfiction in its relationship to the historical world and, on the other hand, on the conception of the essay film as a form of logocentric and rational audiovisual thinking. Before I start to examine the role of the lyric in his films’ thinking, I want to debunk the conception that poems are a highly subjective form that is in radical contradiction with documentary. In doing this, I draw on Jonathan Culler who, in his major intervention on the theory of the lyric, writes that ‘Poems are real-world utterances, albeit of a special kind’.20 Lyrics offer truths about our world, and, in this, they are not unlike documentary: The epideictic element of lyric, which certainly involves language as action but not of a fictionalizing kind, is central to the lyric tradition […]. Lyrics do not in general performatively create a fictional universe, as novels are said to do, but make claims (quite possibly figurative ones) about our world.21

This concept is key to my understanding of the lyric essay, and of Marcello’s nonfiction cinema. Lyricism, in this sense, is part of his films’ real-world utterances, though it is different in status from their vérité components. I will focus here on two of Marcello’s films, starting with The Mouth of the Wolf, commissioned by the Genoese Jesuit community Fondazione San Marcellino. Most reviewers touched upon its poetic images, its soundtrack, and its elegiac tone. The film was mostly seen as a hybrid of documentary and fiction containing two distinct narratives. It was described as follows, for instance, for its exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 4 – 10 August 2011: Pietro Marcello’s hauntingly beautiful debut feature interweaves two love stories: the 20-year romance between a Sicilian tough guy [Vincenzo Motta aka Enzo] and a transsexual former junkie [Mary Monaco] whom he met in prison, and a poetic reverie of the Italian port town of Genoa, 20 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 128. 21 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 128.

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depicted in all its mysterious, fading glory. […] The Mouth of the Wolf masterfully combines documentary with fiction and melancholy home movies from the past century with poetic images, sounds, and music of the waterfront today.22

The so-called ‘poetic reverie’, which is made up of three sections placed at the beginning, middle, and end of the film, has generally been seen as the fictional part of the film, versus the nonfictional story of Enzo and Mary. This description, however, is unsatisfactory, given that the real story of Enzo and Mary is told not only via traditional, vérité documentary elements, but also with fictional tools such as stylized reconstructions and re-enactments, and references to narrative cinema and popular culture, for instance in the presentation of Enzo almost as a figure out of a gangster film. Conversely, the visual track of the reverie sequences is entirely nonfictional, based on documentary images and archival material, in particular amateur and industrial films. Lyricism, however, is confined to the reverie sequences, and this seems to be the reason why critics have described them as fictional – in accord with the assumption that the lyric is at odds with documentary. The presence of the lyric in the film is most evident in the poetic voiceover commentary, written by Marcello and voice acted by Franco Leo. As Culler writes, ‘The production of first-person speakers has been central to the lyric tradition’.23 Poems are the statement of a subject; such speakers, of course, are not a personal ‘I’, but a linguistic function, although, as Paul de Man has argued, ‘The principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice’.24 In the cinema, of course, such a phenomenalization is not just performed by the spectator but can be actualized by the film through voice-over, as happens in The Mouth of the Wolf. The male voice-over, which opens the film, re-emerges in its middle (which I will refer to as the ‘Intermezzo’ sequence), and closes it, is clearly situated. It speaks with elegiac pathos and a Genoese accent, and posits itself as a lyric ‘I’ stemming from the city, implying that the film as a whole emanates from such an ‘I’. The text it recites is inherently lyrical. Published as verses in the book that accompanies the Feltrinelli-published edition of the DVD, it may be described as an epic. The pathos with which the voice actor delivers it only strengthens the impression. This poetic text 22 ‘MoMA Presents: Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf ’, 2011, MoMA, Web, accessed 30 June 2017. 23 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 19. 24 Quoted in Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 35.

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is oracular in character and delivers truth statements about our world, such as, in relation to a group of homeless people who find fragile shelter on a beach: ‘The new cave dwellers: / They are no fishermen / Neither are they sedentary / They are men who migrate. / We do not know their stories / We know they have chosen […] found this place, and not others / To feel safe, not far off a road which turns into city’.25 The lyric, however, does not just reside in the pleasure of the words, figures of speech, alliterations, images, and metaphors. The poetic text is filmically woven with images and sounds. The image track draws both from original footage of the Genoa shore, with its ‘caves’ inhabited by ‘abandoned castaways’ (as the voice-over also calls the homeless), and from grainy archival footage of the town, its seashore, its port and factories, extracted from a range of amateur and industrial films. The soundtrack includes music that intensifies the pathos of the sequences, as well as the sound patterning of sea waves. The sound of rolling waves is indeed central to the film’s lyricism, as it produces rhythm, which is a fundamental component of the lyric. Images also create rhythm; this can be seen, for instance, in the grainy archival footage of the opening title sequence, with the repetitive gesture of diving bodies in slow motion, which may be said to operate as a rhyme. In the Intermezzo sequence, then, the images shot from a train travelling on a bridge create patterns of light and shadow and evoke the sound of carriages on tracks, even without including it. The train sequence, incidentally, is reminiscent of another film by Marcello, Crossing the Line, which exploits the rhythmic sound of travelling trains for lyrical purposes. In The Mouth of the Wolf, the reverie segments are characterized by an oracular, meditative rhythm made up of words, sounds, and image patterns. The repetitiveness of rhythm, like refrain, ‘disrupts narrative and brings it back to a present of discourse’, as Culler writes.26 Similarly, the production of a lyric ‘I’ attracts attention to the act of enunciation, as does the breaking of continuity, contributing to the film’s self-reflexivity. The Mouth of the Wolf is, indeed, a profoundly self-reflexive text, which nods to a number of genres and forms, including realism, melodrama, the gangster movie, cinema vérité, the cinema of peripheries and slums, Fassbinder, and Pasolini. Here, however, I am not interested in highlighting the components of the film’s self-reflexivity, rather, I stress the effect of narrative disruption introduced by the lyrical, and reflect on how this disruption contributes to the film’s thinking. 25 Daniela Basso, ed. Genova di tutta la vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2018), p. 167 (my translation). 26 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 24.

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The story told by the film is that of Enzo and Mary’s extreme marginality, of their relegation due to their outcast, lumpenproletariat status, and, especially in Mary’s case, non-normative sexual and gender identity. The film constructs a slow, progressive revelation of their story, and of Mary’s voice and body in particular. Mary’s voice, indeed, floats, unanchored to a body, until the very last section of the film, when she finally appears on screen as herself, next to Enzo. In his discussion of Marcello’s film, Oliver Brett
has described this process of revelation as a ‘désacousmatization’, connecting it to Mary’s lack of diegetic speech in the first part of the film (for much of the film, she is only heard in voice-over) and her concomitant occasional, inconspicuous visual appearance as ‘an unnoticeable “object among other objects”’27 – a strategy that makes it impossible for the spectator to connect her voice to her body until late in the narrative. Narrative construction and dramaturgy, then, underline the issue of the inaudibility of queer voices and invisibility of non-aligned bodies, while telling Enzo’s own story in a linear fashion. His is a chronological biography of lost childhood, early involvement in crime, a fateful shoot-out with the cops, a series of convictions, as well as the unconventional, redeeming love story with Mary, and his present life with her in their shared house. But the film comes across as much more than a documentary on Enzo, his biography, and his relationship with Mary. So, the film’s argument is made somewhere else. I argue it is the disjunction between the lyrical, on the one hand, and the vérité elements and re-enacted scenes, on the other hand, that delivers what I will describe as a utopian political argument. The lyric, accordingly, is not a supplement, or aesthetic excess, or individualistic stylistic marker, but is necessary to the essayistic argument, which would not be in the film without it. At a first, self-evident level, the lyricism of the film, with its high register and aestheticizing power, lends nobility to the social actors and their stories, which would normally be regarded as belonging to the realm of the unsightly and the grotesque, and thus deserving of a lower register. The reverie sequences, then, with their oracular force, hyperbolic language, and the sublime power of rhythm, break the documentary narration and its chronological temporality, with its dramaturgy of progressive revelation, thus connecting Enzo’s biography not only to the history of Genoa, which is a linear story too, but also to the eternal, circular struggle of human life. Enzo and Mary, and Genoa and its inhabitants, therefore, become the representatives of the cyclical human story of homelessness and 27 Oliver Brett, ‘The Performance of (Dis)orientation; A Queer Reading of Pietro Marcello’s La Bocca Del Lupo (2009)’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, no. 2. (2015), p. 53, Web, accessed 30 July 2016.

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precariousness, displacement and fight for survival. Furthermore, Enzo, Mary, and the ‘abandoned castaways’ are not the only fragile, unsightly subjects aggrandized by the film’s lyricism. The Mouth of the Wolf, indeed, places the ephemerality of humans and that of film on the same level, thus raising the aesthetic dignity of amateur and industrial footage, normally seen as banal, imperfect, and even unsightly. So, the invisible bodies and inaudible voices of both outcast characters and outcast footage are redeemed by the lyric. Such redemption is part of the film’s broader reflection on time and the passing of all human things, including the end of the historical epoch of the industrial expansion of the port of Genoa. This is a meaning that develops in the gap between the reverie sequences and the documentary parts of the film. If the narrative constructed by the documentary sections is chronological, the reverie sections break and reverse the narrative order by going back in time, from today to the 20th-century history of Genoa, to the history of the unification of the country, back to a mythical past. Through the reveries, the film reverses its forward narrative movement, as becomes visible in the Intermezzo, in which a piece of amateur footage, shot in the old city’s alleyways at night, is literally reversed, so that the camera moves back from its subjects, some prostitutes waiting for clients. This literal and narrative backward movement of the reverie sequences, a form of counter-narration that undoes the forward chronological movement of the documentary narration, replicates the structure of elegy, which ‘replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the movement from life to death, with a reversible alternation between mourning and consolation, evocations of absence and presence’.28 The human beings’ stories, thus, are at once situated in the historical time that produced the conditions of their existence and woven into the cyclical temporality of human experience. With this, the film does not refer to an a-historical condition, however, but to a perpetual situation of exclusion and marginalization of the weakest subjects in society, from the humble redshirts who answered Garibaldi’s call and did not return from Sicily, to the homeless of both the past and the present building fragile shelters to cope with the winter, to Enzo who was introduced to illegality as a child by his father, to Mary who was exiled by her middle-class family on account of her gender transgression. I claimed earlier that the lyric gives a voice to the inaudible, as well as visibility to the unsightly and the unseen. With this, I did not mean to say that the voice-over replaces the marginal subjects’ voices with a display 28 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 227.

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Lyricism of found footage. La bocca del lupo [The Mouth of the Wolf] Pietro Marcello, Italy, 2010) Indigo Film. Screenshot.

of rhetorical prowess. The film emanates from a collective lyric subject that uses the first-person plural, ‘we’. This collective subject could be seen as the voice of the city, or of humanity itself, or of the poet as cantor or chorus, and calls on us, the audience, to feel at one with the lyrical voice, which speaks for us too, as we speak through it. Thus, when a recording of Enzo’s voice addressing his loved one starts straight after the first reverie, it is instantly lent the authority to speak and to be listened to, in a film in which voices are allowed to tell their own stories, entirely in their own words. So, the lyrical in the film is at the core not of an aestheticizing/ consoling function, or of the construction of an authorial style, but of a political argument about the inaudibility of marginal voices and, ultimately, of the value even of lives that are always in danger of being swallowed by the mouth of the wolf. The redemption of inaudible subjects is equally at the core of Lost and Beautiful. The voiceless here are, primarily, Sarchiapone, a young male buffalo who is literally meat for slaughter, because it cannot produce milk and is, therefore, unprofitable and unwanted, and, at a broader level, the beautiful and lost country of the film’s title, an echo of the fatherland invoked in Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco (‘Oh mia patria, sì bella e perduta’ / ‘Oh my country, so beautiful, and lost’), as well as the title of an important historical

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treatise by Lucio Villari on the Italy of the Resurgence.29 With ‘country’, however, the film refers not so much to nation, but to a multilayered entity that includes the nature and culture of a territory. These terms, too, require clarification. Nature, in this film, is the natural world deeply wounded by human exploitation and, specifically, the so-called Triangle of Death (Terra dei fuochi), an area in the Italian province of Campania poisoned by Camorrarun illegal landfills and fires of toxic refuse, which registers higher levels of cancer-related mortality than the rest of Italy. Meanwhile, culture refers to both the regional culture of agricultural and artisanal traditions, dialect and expression, habitus and worldview, and the artistic patrimony, here represented by the Bourbon Royal Estate Reggia of Carditello, an abandoned seventeenth-century hunting lodge designed by a pupil of Vanvitelli, and by hidden antique treasures subtracted by tomb raiders. Another inaudible subject in Lost and Beautiful is Tommaso Cestrone, known as the Angel of Carditello, a local herdsman who took care of the Reggia on a voluntary basis starting in 2011, finally dying of a heart attack there on the night of Christmas 2013, after fighting, amidst threats to his person and family, to protect it from looting and to keep it clean of the refuse that littered the estate. Cestrone repeatedly attempted to sensitize the Italian authorities to the importance of restoring the Reggia and open it to the public, which eventually happened after his death, in 2017. The film is a startlingly hybrid text that mixes vérité, fable, and lyrical elements. The documentary material includes footage of public protests, archival and amateur images of farm work in the area and of the theft of archaeological artefacts, and images of and interviews with Tommaso Cestrone, who is followed around the Reggia by the camera. After Cestrone’s sudden death, however, the dominant tone of the f ilm became that of the fable. The Neapolitan mask of Pulcinella was introduced, in his original role of intermediary between the dead and the living. Pulcinella (Sergio Vitolo) is tasked to take Cestrone’s young buffalo Sarchiapone to safety, and accompanies him north, f inally leaving him with Gesuino Pittalis, who plays himself as a poet and a shepherd of the Maremma region. Pulcinella, who is f irst seen in a liminal world in the depths of Mt. Vesuvius, is designated as a servant without free agency, but is able to hear Sarchiapone’s voice and talk to him. Once Pulcinella decides to break free from his servitude and become a man, however, he loses his faculties, and Sarchiapone is abandoned to his destiny of certain death in the slaughterhouse. 29 Lucio Villari, Bella e perduta: l’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome: Laterza, 2009).

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If the fable as a genre typically anthropomorphizes and animates inanimate objects, thus giving a voice to the voiceless, the purpose and tone of Marcello’s film is not moralistic. The lyric too, of course, is a form that gives voice to those who lack one, and, in this film, it sides with the fable, while also going beyond it, thus pushing Lost and Beautiful into the realm of elegy. The most evident lyrical elements of the film include poetic language, in the form of both poetry (in particular, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poem ‘Settembre’, recited by Gesuino Pittalis) and of lyrical prose, which characterizes Sarchiapone’s speech, as well as an excerpt of ‘Il silenzio della ragione’ (‘The Silence of Reason’), a short story by Anna Maria Ortese originally published in 1953, here read by a woman from the past most likely representing Ortese herself (Anna Redi), who appears one night in a farmhouse bedroom where Pulcinella lies asleep.30 The ghostly woman describes the ‘hidden ministry for the defense of nature from reason’, a ‘maternal genius of unlimited power’. The lyrical may also be said to reside elsewhere, for instance in the use of a different grain of the image, due to expired 16mm stock, or to the insertion of newsreel and amateur footage, and in the elegiac use of classical music. The lyric import of the film was broadly recognized by critics. Claudio Panella, for instance, identified in the lyrical both the dominant tone and the underlying structure of the film, suggesting that it is precisely the lyrical that keeps the radically hybrid materials and formats of Lost and Beautiful together: At a visual level, Marcello bravely manages to hold together the POV shots of the buffalo, made with an old crank camera, the travelling shots in the meadows in front of the Reggia, some inserts from amateur archives and various other shots in different formats. All this is accompanied by a soundtrack comprising mainly classical music that, more than re-formalizing the ‘wilderness’ of nature and of the casting of peasant non-actors, aims to support the purely poetic taste that dictates the pace and development of the film.31 30 Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milan: Edizioni Adelphi, 1994). 31 Claudio Panella, ‘Lost and Beautiful. Un film di Pietro Marcello’, CultFrame (November 2015), Web, accessed 30 June 2017 (my translation). Original Text: ‘Sul piano visivo, Marcello riesce coraggiosamente a tenere insieme le soggettive del bufalo realizzate con una vecchia macchina da presa a manovella, le carrellate nei prati davanti alla Reggia, alcuni inserti provenienti da archivi amatoriali e altre varie riprese in differenti formati. Il tutto è accompagnato da una colonna sonora comprendente prevalentemente musica classica che più che ri-formalizzare il ”selvaggio” della natura e del cast di non attori contadini e pastori ha lo scopo di sostenere il gusto prettamente poetico che detta l’andatura e lo sviluppo del film.’

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In what follows, however, I will focus not on the unifying function of the lyric, but on its disruptive potential and its ability to produce argument. The tone of the f ilm is deeply elegiac. As mentioned, elegy replaces the irreversible temporal disjunction caused by death, and the forward linear progression of narrative, with a reversible temporality, thus creating an alternation of mourning and consolation. Lost and Beautiful fully embraces such reversibility. Death is a pervasive element of the film – from the placards with photographs and names of the ill and deceased of the Triangle of Death region, carried by their protesting relatives, to the death of Tommaso Cestrone, which threatens to put an end to the film itself, to the ultimate fate of Sarchiapone, which dominates the entire narrative from the start. Yet, neat divisions are subverted, first and foremost by the character of Pulcinella, who can equally communicate with the living and with the dead. We also see a dead tree on a hill that is said to be a shortcut to the underworld, and tomb raiders from both the present and the past enter and exit graves, defying separations. Evocations of absence and presence, then, are the context of the apparition of the ghostly female figure from the past. Beyond the fable-like elements of the film, however, the most significant infringement of the linear temporal progression from life to death is that of Tommaso, who continues to inhabit the Reggia even after his passing, becoming a silent figure that haunts the film, as an elegiac counter-narrative element. Tommaso reappears, for instance, at the end of the ‘Silence of Reason’ sequence, as if evoked by Ortese’s words. He also appears at the very end of the film, in images from his screen tests. In these images, his silence is eloquent and his image powerfully interpellates us. Voice and voicelessness are central to the film’s narrative and argument, if we only think that Sarchiapone is abandoned to his destiny of death in the slaughterhouse once Pulcinella is no longer able to hear him speak. If, in The Mouth of the Wolf, the lyric voice was a singular though collective one, in Lost and Beautiful, it is multiform and distributed; it emerges from a range of subjects, from Tommaso to Sarchiapone, to the ghostly woman. A key point in the film is made by Sarchiapone, when he remarks on the absurdity of man’s conviction to be the only being with a soul in the immensity of the universe. It is a conviction with fateful consequences, for it delivers man from his responsibility towards non-human animals, nature, and the territory, all of which can be enslaved and exploited as non-verbalizing and, therefore, supposedly non-sentient entities. The film’s utopian counter argument is made precisely through the creation of a multi-voiced lyrical subject. By creating a distributed lyrical ‘I’, that lets nature, as well as both

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human and non-human animals’ voices be heard, Lost and Beautiful redeems the voiceless, endowing them with an oracular poetic power that lifts them above their enforced inaudibility. This poetic power, in both The Mouth of the Wolf and Lost and Beautiful, does not change the contingent reality in which the marginal subjects of these films live and die – like Enzo and Maria, Tommaso and the buffalos, Genoa’s abandoned castaways and the inhabitants of the Triangle of Death. Nonetheless, elegy inserts their lives and deaths into a different, broader reversible temporality, which subverts their finitude while denouncing the forces and institutions that silence and relegate them.

The Aestheticizing Power of the Lyric Essay Film Marcello’s cinema is essayistic in the tradition of an experimental, intellectual cinema of test and trial, which combines hybrid materials, from original footage shot both in digital and celluloid, to amateur, industrial, and archival films, and radically different modes, from cinema vérité to re-enactment to fiction. Its powerful lyrical components reside not only in words and voiceover, but also in the rhythm of image and of sound and in an elegiac arrangement of temporality. The lyric in Marcello’s cinema is not supplement, tone, or stylistic signature, but goes right to the core of the essayistic gesture. An elegiac lyricism is introduced as a form of counter-narration, an undoing of the logic of documentary storytelling and its progressive linear narrative; as such, it produces gaps within which a multi-voiced, utopian political argument on the invisibility and inaudibility of marginalized subjects can emerge. Marcello’s cinema, in other words, provides a compelling, though by no means unique or exhaustive, example of the role of the lyric in the essay film. The lyric is a real-world utterance of a special kind, to use Culler’s expression, and, as such, I have argued, it is not in contradiction with the essay in its role of commentary on our world. It can be used to shape the nature of subjectivity and enunciation, audiovisual rhythm and temporality; it can work against a film’s linearity and/or logic, undermining its rationality and its scepticism, and mobilizing affect (on a spectrum that goes from rage to mourning) to produce intelligence. In all cases, the lyric is endowed with an aestheticizing power that introduces in the essay film ineffable visual and auditory pleasures for the spectator; such pleasures, however, are not simply an addendum, a superimposed fictional layer, but are inextricably enmeshed in the essayistic argument.

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Bibliography Basso, Daniela, ed. Genova di tutta la vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2018). Bazin, André. ‘Bazin on Marker’, trans. by David Kehr. Film Comment 39.4 (2003), pp. 44-45. Bense, Max. From “On the Essay and Its Prose”, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), pp. 71-74. Birkerts, Sven. ‘For Cyberwriters, a Lyrical Link’, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20 October 2006, Web. Brett, Oliver. ‘The Performance of (Dis)orientation; A Queer Reading of Pietro Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (2009)’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, no. 2. (2015), p. 53, Web. Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). D’Agata, John. ‘Introduction’, in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay, ed. by John D’Agata (New York: Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2014), pp. 5-10. Farocki, Harun and Rembert Hüser. ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard. A Conversation with Harun Farocki’, in Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 279-314. Foster, David. ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris Marker’s Le Tombeau d’Alexandre’, Image & Narrative 10.3 (2009): 3-14, Web. Lukács, György. ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul & Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 16-34, MacDonald, Scott. ‘Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication’,
 Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 47:2 (Fall 2006), pp. 37-58 ‘MoMA Presents: Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf ’. MoMA. 2011, Web. Monson, Ander. ‘Essay as Hack’. 2008, Web. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001). Ortese, Anna Maria. Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milan: Edizioni Adelphi, 1994). Panella, Claudio. ‘Lost and Beautiful. Un f ilm di Pietro Marcello’, CultFrame (November 2015), Web. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed. by Louise K. Barnett, trans. by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.

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Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Sandler, Stephanie. ‘On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky’, The Russian Review, 66:4 (2007), pp. 647-670. Sitney, P. Adams. The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Villari, Lucio. Bella e perduta: l’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome: Laterza, 2009).

About the Author Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower Press, 2009) and, with Ewa Mazierska, From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (Wallflower Press, 2004), and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (Wallflower Press, 2006). She has edited The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations (Peter Lang, 2010), with Patrick O’Donovan; Antonioni: Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2011), with John David Rhodes; and Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (Bloomsbury, 2014), with Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan. Her most recent book, How the Essay Film Thinks, was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. She is general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.

4. ‘Every love story is a ghost story’: The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) Deane Williams

Abstract While it has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’ and ‘a meditation on love and loss’, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multimedia technique (foregrounding technology) and conceptualizing of the future, this chapter explores the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Bardo course through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson’s oeuvre, Williams positions the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular rendering of 21st-century subjectivity. Keywords: network, sashaying, subjectivity, ghosts, the Bardo, voice

In an article entitled ‘Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’ in The New Yorker, D.T. Max writes, For much of the time I worked on my biography of David Foster Wallace I had no title. Then, in 2011, Alice Elman, the wife of the late writer Richard Elman, sent me copies of the letters David had written to Richard, with whom Wallace studied in the University of Arizona M.F.A. program. In a letter from 1986 I found the phrase ‘every love story is a ghost story.’ I was smitten; it smote me. When you write a biography, there are moments when you feel that your subject is thinking things just for you to find them out.1 1

D.T. Max, ‘Tracing the Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’, The New Yorker, 11 December 2011, Web.

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch04

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Max goes on to describe the trail he followed to locate this phrase, back to Elman, to Virginia Woolf via Johnny Carson and her biographer Hermione Lee, to Australian author Christina Stead, and to Stanley Burnshaw via Jonathan Franzen and Stead’s biographer Hazel Rowley, not so much to find an origin for it, to authorize it, but to invoke a network of forces, a collection of spectral figures.2 The title of Max’s biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, was also the working title for Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) an essay film drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multimedia performance technique, lending itself well to this network model. Commissioned by Luciano Rigolini for Arte – France’s La Lucarne creative documentary series, Anderson’s film is structured around a collection of stories principally about the deaths of her and partner musician Lou Reed’s pet rat-terrier dog, Lolabelle; Anderson’s mother; Anderson’s long-time friend, conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark; and ultimately, although less directly, Lou Reed himself. Adopting the essayist filmic mode, Heart of a Dog also ranges across ideas about the rise of surveillance society, cloud and data mining, the Buddhist concept of The Bardo, but also deeply personal issues of language, knowledge, identity, death, and love.

Downtown Scene For Laurie Anderson aficionados, Heart of a Dog is a strangely familiar audiovisual work. Some of this familiarity stems from the film’s use of images and songs gleaned from Anderson’s earlier works (more of this later) but also a mode and set of concerns that we have seen from Anderson since the 1970s. Roselee Goldberg links Anderson’s practice back to the 1970s New York City downtown scene: ‘Downtown artists encouraged one another not to choose between disciplines. Composers, choreographers, architects, film-makers, sculptors and painters borrowed freely from various media.’3 Alongside friends choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Gordon Matta-Clark (invoked in Heart of a Dog), performance artists Barbara Dilley and Tina Girouard, musicians Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham, and many others, and centred around venues such as The Kitchen in lower Manhattan, Anderson began reworking, reimagining, and re-invoking a series of works in music, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, spoken word, and more. Goldberg locates in 2 Special thanks to Thomas Elsaesser, Gertrud Koch, and Michael Renov for invaluable feedback on some of the ideas in this chapter. 3 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 12.

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this ‘downtown’ moment a prefiguring of Anderson’s autobiographical work, an inkling of her examination of contemporary subjectivity in the digital era, and possibly a description of her essayistic mode: Scrutiny of appearances and gestures, as well as the analytical investigation of the fine edge between an artist’s art and his or her life, became the content of a large body of work loosely referred to as ‘autobiographical’. Thus, several artists recreated episodes from their own life, manipulating and transforming the material into a series of performances through film, video, sound and soliloquy. […] Anderson used ‘autobiography’ to mean the time right up to the actual presentation of the performance, so that a work often included a description of its own making. 4

This self-reflexive, performative, autobiographical aspect of Anderson’s work is central to understanding Heart of a Dog, not only in an authorial sense but in a structural and philosophical one as well.

Sashaying Goldberg describes Anderson’s oeuvre after witnessing a 1983 performance of United States I-IV at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York: [Anderson] had utilized a variety of media with ease and invented a repertory of her own. She had sashayed between disciplines, creating seamless borders by frequently crossing them, and she had provided an iconography of visual references that would keep art historians busy for years to come – houses, the sea, mountains, dogs, airplanes, telephones, televisions, metronomes, violins, the face of a wall plug, a light bulb, clocks, maps, the American flag, the open road, clouds, sky, the head of a president engraved on a coin […] each had appeared in her earliest work, whether in the handmade books of the early 1970s or in performances that she toured continuously on several overlapping circuits to American and European art schools, museums, and galleries throughout the decade. And each was a signpost for the future, since every one of them has continued to appear in Anderson’s work to the present day.5 4 Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), p. 111. 5 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, p. 12.

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Goldberg’s use of the word ‘sashayed’ to describe Anderson’s transdisciplinarity is also a lovely term for the manner in which she proceeds in Heart of a Dog and, in combination with her description of Anderson’s early autobiographical temporality, makes for a couple of useful spatial and temporal analogies. To sashay, a derivation of the French term chasse, meaning to chase or hunt, refers to the ways in which a dancer’s feet follow each other in a two-step motion in order to glide across the floor effortlessly. It also refers to the resulting diagonal or sideways pattern resulting from a sequence of sashays such as in an American Squaredance.6 I like that ‘sashaying’ sounds a little like ‘essaying’. This idea of sashaying rhymes well with two ways that we can think about Heart of a Dog as an essay film as it belongs to Laurie Anderson’s spectral performance work. These are: first, the essay film’s hybrid, non-linear effect, and, second, the temporal unorthodoxy that is evident in the essay film, and is redolent of Anderson’s oeuvre.

Anderson’s Voice As I have suggested, a key element of Heart of a Dog’s essay mode is Anderson’s voice. It is, at once, an organizing element, but one that puts into play, as we have seen, a host of figures – some personal, such as Lou Reed, Matta-Clark, Julian Schnabel, and Anderson’s family – invoked through the repurposing of 8mm family movies. In tandem with her own musical pieces, Anderson’s voice draws on these figures, at once to sketch out her own personal history – for example, her being at art school with Gordon Matta-Clark, that Schnabel is a friend, that Anderson herself is also a Midwesterner – but also as a means to play off the downtown scene with her upbringing. In her ‘The Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie Anderson’s Stage Work’, Silvija Jestrovic proposes that, ‘the theatricality of Anderson’s performances springs from two sources: the storytelling tradition and the new electronic media. Although her narration is fragmented and double-voiced, it preserves the storytelling pattern in the minimalist performances and hi-tech operas alike’.7 Anderson herself has located her storytelling within a tradition that includes Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Laurence Stern, while 6 The sashay patterning has, of course, more recently, coming out of hip-hop culture, been used to describe an elaborate, assertive, or ostentatious moving of the hips from side to side in order to attract attention. 7 Silvija Jestrovich, ‘The Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie Anderson’s Stage Work’, Body, Space, & Technology Journal 1.1 (2000), Web.

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her embrace of digital technology, particularly in live performance, is apparent.8 We need only think of her use of a vocal filter to lower the octave of her voice to create The Voice of Authority in United States I-IV, which developed into the figure of Fenway Bergamot, the mustachioed masculine alter ego in Homeland (2010). As Henry M. Sayre points out, the utilization of a harmonizer to alter her voice into The Voice of Authority was ‘an attempt to create a corporate voice, a kind of “Newsweekese” […] the product of “high tech” manipulation that its authority becomes synonymous with technology’.9 In Heart of a Dog, the electronic filtering of her voice is subtler yet is similarly conditioned, contributing to a voice that has a naïve, yet ironic tone, described by Michelle Orange as being ‘plush (sometimes too plush), intimate, oddly syncopated’.10 But it is also, in its digitized treatment, voicing a spectral persona, in its breathy immediacy radiating a certain intensity, particularly over extended periods, when accompanied by emotive music and sound effects.11 Some of this immediacy and intensity may stem from the proximity of Anderson’s mouth to a microphone and/or to the volume at which it is recorded. In this immediacy and naïve ironic tone, Anderson brings from her performance work a variation to the essayist voice-over. In ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Laura Rascaroli points to how the ‘presence-absence of the enunciator is a key point of the essay film’.12 In describing this ‘inscription of subjectivity’, Rascaroli insists on the direct address to the receiver of the essay film in contrast to the kind of the narration described by Bill Nichols as ‘the voice of God’ in his expository mode of documentary.13 While the address is direct, it is not necessarily uncomplicated. In Heart of a Dog, the figure of Laurie Anderson is ever-present, directly addressing the spectator. Her ironic, electronically treated voice-over, between traditions in storytelling and digital filter, and between larger historical events and personal fragments is at the forefront of the filmic elements, yet its irony and playfulness in its sing-song quality 8 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, p. 25 9 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 150. 10 Michelle Orange, ‘Dog-Seeing Eye: The Cinematic Work of Laurie Anderson’, Virginia Quarterly Review 92.1 (Winter 2016), pp. 193-196 (p. 194). 11 A 2007 performance of Anderson’s Homeland that I attended was punctuated by an exasperated, untimely scream from an audience member in the depths of Melbourne’s Hamer Hall, when, it seemed, an audience member couldn’t cope with the intensity of the stories, of the images and sounds all organized around Anderson’s distinctive narration. 12 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 24-47, (p. 38). 13 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film’, p. 38.

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undermine the kind of authority that can be associated with the voice-over. Anderson’s personal tone could be understood as unreliable, not necessarily conveying facts about the historical world but of a world filtered through Anderson’s particular storytelling. The voice-over emerging as it does out of Anderson’s avant-garde, mixed-media, and performance background further destabilizes the documentary intent of the film, locating it at the edge between the essay film and, in tandem with fragmentary montage method, the experimental digital audiovisual work.

Essay Film’s Non-Linearity As Laura Rascaroli tells us in How the Essay Film Thinks, the essay film has a ‘tendency to use hybrid materials, to be transmedial, and, indeed, to be nonhierarchical and nonsequential’.14 Following on from the sashay analogy, and with Anderson’s ethereal voice-over in mind, Heart of a Dog, like many essay films, such as Chris Marker’s San Soleil [Sunless] (1983), moves effortlessly from topic to topic and medium to medium. Across Heart of a Dog, we hear stories about Anderson’s dog Lolabelle, the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan, Gordon Matta-Clark’s death, Anderson’s mother’s death, Anderson’s rescue of her brothers from drowning; these are the major ones while many more minor ones emerge. Heart of a Dog is also composed of mobile-phone footage, 8mm home movies, domestic-grade digital video, found footage, animation, digital graphics, and more. In one sequence, we shift from a story about the United States government’s data-collection storage facilities to one about the biblical figure Moses working as a telephone repairman, separated by a brief ellipsis combining the images of clouds with the notion of ‘the cloud’, an idea that lends itself to a cynicism about the contemporary digital age, something that would probably appeal to Anderson in her suggestive remix procedure. As we have seen, Anderson’s essayistic mode, inherent in all her work, emerged in the 1970s, prefiguring the digital era’s intensification of this tradition in the cinema. In a mirror to Anderson’s own interest in spoken and written language, Rascaroli points to the essay film’s ‘textual interstitiality’ as it ‘creates discontinuities that subvert the sequentiality of film language’.15 For Rascaroli, interstices draw attention to the textuality of images and, in their separation, as critique, the relationship between 14 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 1. 15 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 5.

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images. In this instance, Anderson’s rhyming of ‘the cloud’ with images of clouds in the sky brings together an ineffable imaging of the digitization of enormous amounts of data with the dream-like image of clouds, recalling the earlier sequence about Lolabelle’s learned fear of predators from the sky as an analogy for the terror sparked by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Rascaroli describes these kinds of montage moments as ‘encounters’ that lie at the heart of the essay film’s raison d’etre. These are multivalent and important to the mode’s critical unorthodoxy. These are encounters between the past and the present, between cultures, between value systems, between species, of a narrator with an image.16

Essay Film’s Temporal Unorthodoxy Anderson’s insistence on putting, side by side, images and stories of our contemporary world and the ancient world, as in a telephone repairman named Moses or a comparison of the Egyptian pyramids and the American government’s Iron Mountain data-collection storage facilities, is also indicative of the temporal unorthodoxy of Heart of a Dog. As Goldberg suggests, Anderson’s work prefigured the possibilities afforded by the digital era, and it is possible to see in the film how she draws on the past and projects into the future on her oeuvre. It is also characteristic of Anderson’s use of dialectical images as a subtler critical mode. Heart of a Dog utilizes the songs ‘Beautiful Pea Green Boat’ from her 1994 album Bright Red, ‘The Lake’ and ‘The Flow’ from Homeland (2010), and excerpts from the 2012 recording of Landfall with the Kronos Quartet. It also uses the lines from Søren Kierkegaard about how ‘life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards’; it seems of interest to Anderson as much for its allusion to hip-hop and remix culture as it does to theories of history. Kierkegaard’s words are juxtaposed with CCT footage of figures in public played in reverse, while Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘If you can’t talk about it, it just doesn’t exist’, revisited from United States I-IV Live (1982), is compared to the advice from Homeland Security instructions, Anderson says: ‘If you see something, say something.’ Sounds like something the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein might say. And his books are full of cryptic sentences about logic. And about

16 Jean Luc Godard’s essay film Adieu au Langage [Goodbye to Language] (2014) is structured as a set of encounters between, for example, a man and a woman and the city and the country, all facilitated by a dog.

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how language has the power to actually create the world. ‘If you can’t talk about it,’ he says, ‘it just doesn’t exist.’ In Anderson’s use of ancient history and immediate contemporary events; in her use of her own songs, stories, and aphorisms; in her use of quotes from philosophers; in her use of an evolving method that commenced in the early 1970s that prefigured and now revels in the affordances of digital technology, a contemporary bricolage method emerges, one that is suggestive of what we are subjected to in digital culture. In these ways, Heart of a Dog aligns itself with Rascaroli’s characterization of ‘the essay film as a metahistorical form, which critically and self-reflexively comments on its own activity as it reorders, reframes and reinterprets history’.17 Across a varied, multimedia essay film, the film-maker foregrounds the ellipses between the stories as much as the stories themselves that, following Rascaroli again, drawing on Roland Barthes and Michael Renov, emphasizes the temporal and spatial in-betweenness of the essay film.18

The Bardo In his ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, Germano Celant writes, Every event, musical or visual, is for her an open transparent instrument not only bound to her identity, but ready to dissolve to give way to a powerful current of real energy. She thus keeps a distance from the visual ostentation of self and narcissistic self-gratification and favors instead the irruption of a hidden condition of being. This brings Anderson in her relationship with theatricality, to conceive of the stage space is a participatory perimeter, in which the profound reality of life offers itself to perception and to the gaze of all.19

This suitably ghostly usage of an ‘open transparent instrument […] ready to dissolve to give way to a powerful current of real energy’ that Celant proposes recalls a kind of luminosity, a supernatural presence, as well as sharing the same spectral etymology. Following Celant’s terminology, the 17 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 18. 18 Anderson thanks Chris Marker Alan Berliner and Philip Lopate in the credits. Lopate’s ‘In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film’, published in the Threepenny Review in 1992 was one of the early signal writings on the essay film. 19 Germano Celant, ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, in Laurie Anderson, Dal Vivo, ed. by Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998), n.p.

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derivation of the term ‘spectral’ is close to the word ‘speculate’, from the Latin verb specere, to see or to look at. Speculate is closely linked to the essay mode, but also to terms such as perspective, spectrum, and prospect.20 This speculative mode of Heart of a Dog draws on the three principal ghost stories: Lolabelle’s, Anderson’s mother’s, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s. Most of the first part of the film concerns stories based on Lolabelle: her birth, the trip to the ‘northern mountains of California’, Lolabelle and industrial puppy breeding, Lolabelle’s family, Lolabelle and the West Village, Lolabelle’s piano lessons and concerts. Anderson’s mother’s death, the second story, is introduced early in the film, when the phrases ‘tell all the animals […]’, ‘is it a pilgrimage? Towards what?’ are first heard before they form the coda to the film. Gordon Matta-Clark’s life and death is the central story of the film, because it initiates a lengthy (nearly ten-minute) sequence and develops into a reflective hiatus or interlude, an audio-visualization of the Buddhist concept of the Bardo (or the gap) as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a time after death and before rebirth, where we witness images and sounds from earlier in Heart of a Dog, reworked and projecting forward to what turn out to be later images in the film. This ‘Bardo’ sequence is fundamental to the film’s spectral network. The first part of the film works through the roughly sixteen stories alluded to above, including those about Lolabelle, the 9/11 attacks, Matta-Clark’s death, Anderson’s mother’s death, Anderson’s rescue of her brothers from drowning, with some brief interludes or gaps, which include moments where fragmented typewritten text appears. Following the introduction of minimalist artist Matta-Clark through a couple of biographical stills at around 38 minutes, Anderson tells us ‘Gordon Matta-Clark died young and he died in an amazing way. Gordon was a good friend of mine and he was a sculptor’. She then tells us about Matta-Clark reading to his friends in hospital and how the two lamas stood beside his deathbed and shouted into his ears as part of a ritual invoking The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Immediately following this sequence, the film shifts slightly at 39:46 as the image of the spinning Tibetan Prayer Wheels fades. Over the black-and-white image of an interior with an open window on the right and a closed door on the centre-left, Anderson tells us ‘I’ve seen three ghosts in my life now and the first was Gordon a few hours after he died. He appeared on the back porch of a commune I was living in. “Every love story is a ghost story”, said David Foster Wallace’ (voice-over accompanying the text of these words). This last phrase, rhyming with an early epiphany about love and death, is accompanied by muttered echoed voices as an image of 20 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

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‘Lolabelle in The Bardo’ in Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson USA France 2015) Canal Street Communications. Screenshot.

a sprightly dog leaping onto a platform behind a water-drop-coated glass appears. Anderson continues over industrial sounds, murmurs, After death, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, all creatures then spend 49 days in the Bardo, and the Bardo isn’t a place, it’s more like a process, that lasts 49 days as the mind dissolves and, as the Tibetans believe, the consciousness, or let’s say the energy, prepares to take another life form. Leap, leap. All goes to darkness and the next thing you see is your next life, a slow awakening to this world or another world. [over colour 8mm images of children in red-and-white striped tops playing in and around a boat] Now you’re in another form without a body. Recognize this. The cities, the mountains, [sepia-toned images of skyscrapers shot from below] the rooms, the trees, the trains. Optical illusions. [image of a man in a kayak moving through reeds on a lake with dog aboard] Not there. Like dreams made of nothing. [cut to image of chef Kurt Gutenbrunner] Things that you love, living things, move with a different speed. They disappear, echo, repeat. [images of cloth floating in the breeze on a wire followed by a single prayer wheel against a gold backdrop with audio of voices in reverse] Anger turned to liberation. Earth into water. Water into fire. Fire into air. Air into consciousness.

For the consideration of space, I will leave the description there, suffice to say that this haunting, poetic sequence continues for some time, including images of tigers, horses being ridden in reverse, Lolabelle’s point of view

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of as a dog in the West Village and playing the piano in concert, power lines, Lou Reed in extreme close-up, a shot of Matta-Clark in mock threat towards Caroline Goodden taken from Food (1972),21 and much more. The phrase ‘recognize this’ recurs several times. This sequence utilizes the Bardo as an audiovisual network of Anderson’s personal history (family, Food, Matta-Clarke, Reed). These last few lines – ‘Anger turned to liberation. Earth into water. Water into fire. Fire into air. Air into consciousness’ – paraphrase The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s ‘The Great Liberation by Hearing’, encapsulating the dissolution of the five elements. According to the Book, these words are to be uttered ‘by a spiritual teacher, a student, or a spiritual sibling who was a close friend’ to remind the dying person of ‘the introduction to inner radiance of the ground’ by a spiritual teacher.22 The dying person is reminded to recognize (‘recognize this’ as Anderson’s voice-over intones) ‘the inner radiance of the ground, attain the uncreated Buddha-body of Reality’ in order to arrive at liberation from a cyclic existence of death and birth and, consequently, all forms of suffering.23

Bardo as Interstice: ‘Beyond Logocentrism’ The Bardo section of Heart of a Dog can be understood as a representation of the transition between death and liberation, a kind of ghost story. It is also a structural gap, or, following Rascaroli, an in-between space, interval, or interstice: the dialectical disjunction that is at the basis of the essay form creates in film in-between spaces that must be accounted for, inasmuch as they are central to the essay film’s functioning. It is this in-betweenness that calls for investigation […] my interest […] lies in addressing the dialectical tension between juxtaposed or interacting filmic elements and, more precisely, the gaps that its method of juxtaposition opens in the text. Studying these in-between spaces is key if we wish to move beyond 21 Food (1972) is a documentary, shot by Robert Frank, about Matta-Clark, Goodden, and other members of the Anarchitecture collective such as Anderson, Tina Girouard, Richard Landry, and others who established the eponymous restaurant in Soho in 1971, adapting the space for the needs of experimental art. 22 The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation by Hearing in The Intermediate States, comp. by Padmasambhava, ed. by Graham Coleman with Thuuten Jinpa, trans. by Gyurme Dorje, intro. by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (London and New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 226-230. 23 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 227.

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logocentrism and to understand how the essay film thinks – because its thinking capitalizes on discontinuity.24

Rascaroli’s insistence on shifting scholarship ‘beyond logocentrism’ by focussing on the dialectical characteristic of essay films, is instructive in examining Heart of a Dog. As alluded to already, Anderson’s film is replete with dialectical images and has been a mainstay of her work. One of the most explicit dialectical images in Anderson’s oeuvre is the song ‘The Dream Before (For Walter Benjamin)’ from the Strange Angels album (1989). The first part of the song is a tale about ‘Hansel and Gretel are alive and well and they’re living in Berlin. She was a cocktail waitress. He had a part in a Fassbinder film’, while the second part is a paraphrasing of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, including the lines ‘She said: what is history? History is an angel being blown backwards into the future’. Australian film-maker John Hughes’ dialectical film essay One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992) takes up this dialectical approach, bookending his film with the two parts of the song.

Hauntology In seeking what I think of as a cultural understanding of Heart of a Dog, a speculation on why this film operates in the way it does, it is useful to invoke some ideas about hauntology through the work of Steven Shaviro and Mark Fisher, both drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx.25 Drawing on Rascaroli’s notion of in-betweenness, of Anderson’s work ‘between disciplines’, ‘between an artist’s art and his or her life’, between storytelling and digital media, of the essay film’s in-betweenness, of Heart of a Dog’s elliptical structure, of the Bardo and of Lolabelle, Matta-Clark and Lou Reed, as in-between figures, Heart of a Dog lends itself to the deconstructionist character of the spectre, the presence and non-presence that Derrida proposes as a way of thinking about, in his case, the deconstruction of Marxist thought as well as the ever-present legacies of Marx. Steven Shaviro tells us that: What draws these two strands – the deconstruction of Marx’s metaphysics, and the welcoming nonetheless of a Marxist inheritance – together is the figure of the specter, or ghost: a figure that Derrida traces throughout 24 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, pp. 10-11. 25 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).

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Marx’s texts and many others (most notably Hamlet). The specter is something that is not present, not real, not there, but that nonetheless enters into (and disrupts the closure and self-presence of) whatever is present, real, and there. The ghost addresses us, interrogates us with its voice and its gaze; it’s a call from Otherness to which we must respond, even though we are unable to adequately respond.26

Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, of course, draws on the non-Western Buddhist figure of the Bardo, a space between the recently departed life and the next life, which, in its opaqueness and influence, takes in the whole of Heart of a Dog. It may be possible to think about the whole film in terms of the Bardo as a deconstructive figure. Similarly, Lolabelle, a dog that, in a dream, Anderson had sewed into her stomach, so that she could give birth to her, is a dog that is canine but not canine, not human, but non-human, posthuman, between Anderson and her barely present, ever-present, husband, Lou Reed. Both the Bardo and Lolabelle, and Lolabelle in the Bardo, are hauntological/ deconstructive figures. Mark Fisher proposes that Derrida’s work can be used to understand what Fisher calls the disappearance of the future, writing, The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. What hauntological music mourns is less the failure of a future to transpire – the future as actuality – than the disappearance of this effective virtuality.27

Writing about electronic music, of Burial, The Caretaker, Philip Jeck, the Ghost Box label, but also about cinema, Fisher proposes that the inability of electronic music to sound futuristic, signalled a ‘cultural impasse’ whereby the futures we were encouraged to anticipate, by various cultural forms in the 20th century, have been lost and that, More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.28 26 Steven Shaviro, ‘Specters of Marx’, The Pinocchio Theory, Web. 27 Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012), pp. 16-24. (p. 16). 28 Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, p. 16.

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Fisher’s conception, for me, is productive in thinking about Heart of a Dog, particularly because of what I had understood to be Anderson’s future orientation, her use of digital technologies and avant-garde sensibility. Yet Anderson’s work, following Fisher, may be as hauntological, as nostalgic for modernism, as much as postmodern (as she was incessantly characterized in the 1980s), or at least nostalgic for modernist dialectical approaches. As Julia Vassilieva, in ‘Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx’, reminds us, the cinema is always spectral, and we could understand the Bardo sequence in particular as experimental cinema par excellence: ‘Cinema as a dying medium has its own ghostly underside – as an art of light and shadow, disappearing images and ever dying sounds.’29 As we have seen, the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan figure strongly in Heart of a Dog, signalling, as Anderson’s voice-over tells us, that ‘we had passed through a door and we’d never be going back’. In this schema, the 9/11 attacks, the ultimate media event, provided not so much the break, the rupture of the continuity of neoliberal capital, but in its collapse of time and space, its inevitable acceleration. I wonder, following Heart of a Dog’s speculative mode, if Anderson’s nostalgic overtone, in tandem with her hauntological deconstruction, is orientated towards the future, or more of a mourning for a time that never was.

The Future Following the release of Heart of a Dog, Lolabelle in the Bardo went back on tour and, at the time of writing, is currently on show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Prior to the film’s release, Anderson and Reed performed their Concert for Dogs on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, one of a series of concerts that she continued until 2015, encouraging everyone to bring their pets along. More recently, Anderson has released a CD of Landfall, her cycle of songs about Hurricane Sandy, a project commenced in 2011, which was also included on the soundtrack for Heart of a Dog and released in its fullest form yet in a 2018 CD release. To accompany the music, Anderson also released All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code30, a collection of writings, 29 Julia Vassilieva, ‘Capital and Co.: Eisenstein, Kluge, Marx’, Screening the Past 31 (2011), Web, accessed 10 August 2018. 30 Laurie Anderson, All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code (New York: Rizzoli-Electa, 2018).

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photos, images, and drawings in what some commentators have called a summation of her work to date. Anderson is currently touring a live version of the book. I wonder if it will become something else? A film, an installation, an exhibition? Over the last 40 years, it could be said that Laurie Anderson has been essaying (or sashaying) across music, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, installation, spoken word, software design, and more, working backwards, forwards, and sideways. Heart of a Dog is merely one aspect of a continually overlapping, remixed, multimedia spectral network that will continue to unfold in coming years.

Bibliography Anderson, Laurie. All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code (New York: Rizzoli-Electa, 2018). Celant, Germano. ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, in Laurie Anderson, Dal Vivo, ed. by Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998), n.p. Coleman, Graham with Thuuten Jinpa (eds.). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation by Hearing in The Intermediate States, comp. by Padmasambhava, ed. by Graham Coleman with Thuuten Jinpa, trans. by Gyurme Dorje, intro. by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (London and New York: Penguin, 2008). Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). Fisher, Mark. ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012), pp. 16-24. Goldberg, Roselee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979). Goldberg, Roselee. Laurie Anderson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Jestrovich, Silvija. ‘The Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie Anderson’s Stage Work’, Body, Space, & Technology Journal 1.1 (2000), Web. Max, D.T. ‘Tracing the Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’, The New Yorker, 11 December 2011, Web. Orange, Michelle. ‘Dog-Seeing Eye: The Cinematic Work of Laurie Anderson’, Virginia Quarterly Review 92. 1 (Winter 2016), pp. 193-196. Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 24-47. Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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Shaviro, Steven. ‘Specters of Marx’, The Pinocchio Theory, Web. Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Capital and Co.: Eisenstein, Kluge, Marx’, Screening the Past 31 (2011), Web.

About the Author Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Austrlia. From 2007-2017, he was editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (Interllect, 2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane, Manchester University Press, 2009), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis, Intellect, 2013-2017), and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (Wallflower Press, 2016).

5.

Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance: The Multiscreen Array as Essay Ross Gibson

Abstract Referring to artworks such as Doug Aitken’s Eraser, Chantal Akerman’s gallery-version of From the East, Kogonada’s split-screen essays, and my own installation entitled Street X-Rays, this chapter analyses the insights that can be garnered from spatialized, multistranded exposition, as distinct from the linear disquisition afforded by the conventional film essay. To grasp the complexity of the affects and ‘messages’ generated by the installation works, the chapter draws on ‘ecology of mind’ principles, as best represented by the writing of Gregory Bateson and Vannevar Bush. Keywords: installation, non-linearity, complexity, ecology, multiple screens

Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices was shot during an 18-month period in the mid 1990s. In this extraordinarily patient and compassionate work, Sokurov accompanies an army platoon patrolling the battle lines of Russia’s war with Afghanistan. Scrutinizing the gestures, rituals, and emotions of the homesick young soldiers, he develops a deep understanding of squadron life, compiling a meditation on tedium, fear, and a cognitive static that scratches and randomly flares into occasional paroxysms of excessive alarm igniting every soldier’s sensorium. The themes are philosophical, existential, and political, but the viewer comprehends them in a mode that is – remarkably – as emotional as it is intellectual, as felt as it is thought. Even so, the feelings that Sokurov captures and evokes are structured rather than scattershot. Spiritual Voices is exquisitely composed and analytical.

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The five instalments of Spiritual Voices were originally shown in a serial programme spanning consecutive sessions, as a long, poetic video essay displayed in cinema festivals and on television. Then, during a brief period in the early 2000s, Sokurov endorsed some experimentation into how the work functions when it is encountered as a multiscreen installation that displays all five channels simultaneously and continuously. He granted once-only exhibition licences to two museums – the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne – permitting display of the work in the five-screen format so that the images were spanned in a concave configuration stretching to the edges of the spectator’s peripheral vision. With its polyphony and its interlacing panoply of imagery, the five-screen array generates a pulsive and sometimes convulsive representation of war as a non-linear phenomenon. Scanning the five screens, trying but failing to take in all the information at once, the viewer bounces attention from screen to screen – sometimes prompted by noises, sometimes by movement, sometimes by stillness, sometimes by conscious deliberation – piecing together an appropriately discontinuous and selective but aesthetically integrated representation of war. In consonance with the soldiers rendered on the screens, the viewer experiences versions of the low-level fear, plus the sudden flares of terror bursting out of dull repetition and deprivation, plus the bewilderment, the personal rituals (and the anomie) as well as the squalls of urgent action and reaction. Each viewer’s assemblage of the replete experience is unique within the overall design of the work. One is reminded of James Agee’s great description of human consciousness in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: here at the center is a creature: it would be our business to show how through every instant of every day of every year of his existence alive he is from all sides streamed inward upon, bombarded, pierced, destroyed by that enormous sleeting of all objects forms and ghosts how great how small no matter, which surround and whom his senses take.1

Within the arc of the five screens of Spiritual Voices, one discerns thematic patterns that are radically different from the topics of concealed executive power and endured futility that emerge as the main concerns of the long-form linear version of the work when it is viewed serially over consecutive nights. 1 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988 [first published 1941]), p. 110.

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Installation view of Spiritual Voices, Alexander Sokurov. Installed at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2002. Photograph by the author.

To the extent that it ‘tries out’ the idea of war in a startling new way, the installation version of Spiritual Voices is definitely part of the essay tradition, albeit a peculiar innovation. One of the most striking peculiarities is the way the installation presents an experience that feels like a memory charged daydream that floats adrift from mundane sequential experience. This contrasts with the long-form version, which carries the viewer in a more focussed line of selective causation and step-by-step disquisition. The installation version is more of an experiment in sensory impressionism that blends memory with cognition to immerse the viewer in a distilled, survivable version of war, while the long-form version is more like a traditional essay unfurling a singular thesis about power, servitude, and the role of warfare in nationhood.2 Even so, the installation version is 2 On this issue of nationalism and warfare: in a public conversation that I conducted with Sokurov via a video link at a symposium at the Australian National University in 2004, he

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an essay too, an essay about apprehension in extremis, an essay that tries out the notion that the understanding of intense, dynamic, and complex experiences necessarily blends inspective, retrospective, and prospective time frames all at once, as the viewer makes sense of the experience by selecting details from the perceived present moment and conjoining them with personally stored memories of past signif icance to conjure instantaneous projections about imminent prospects. So, yes, the installation version of Spiritual Voices is also an essay, but a new kind, an essay that activates a mode of cognition that is not linear and disquisitional so much as it is spatial, associative, and endlessly hypothetical. Some context: I was creative director at ACMI at the time of the Sokurov installation. Not only did this give me the thrill of corresponding with Sokurov; it also meant that I spent dozens of hours with the multiscreen version of Spiritual Voices and gained some insights into the way a spatialized and multistranded image system works in ways that are different from the long-form single-screen essay. My deep encounter with Spiritual Voices was unfolding at the same time as I observed the rise of multiscreen video and cinematic installations in art galleries and education-focussed museums around the world. In many instances, the projects were in the traditions of ‘expanded cinema’ and ‘world-fair’ and ‘expo’ extravaganzas from previous decades. But there was clearly something new happening as well. It was not just that the new technology made it easier to mount, align, and synchronize multiscreen arrays, it was also evident that audiences were craving and becoming evermore adept at a new kind of apprehension and cognition availed by the relational, heuristic protocols of the World Wide Web as well as by lifelong habituation to the constant slippages of multicultural value settings in immigrant and cosmopolitan communities. While ACMI was developing its own policies and programmes for displaying screen culture in all its formats, older, more traditional museums everywhere were staging impressive exhibitions celebrating and investigating the rise of multiscreen video art. Paramount among these was the superb Stedelijk Museum show Cinema Cinema: contemporary art and the cinematic experience, which was staged in 1999 and spotlighted the crucial work of artists such as Eija-Lisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe, and Sharon Lockhart. At this time, too, gallery visitors around the world were encountering immensely

mentioned how centuries of Russian involvement in warfare have produced a situation in which the men from his society look truly ‘Russian’ only when they are in military regalia.

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impressive multiscreen installations such as Chantal Akerman’s The East and Doug Aitken’s Eraser. More than art-world modishness, there was something real-world and philosophical galvanizing all these multiscreen installations. A zeitgeist was afoot and it was animated by a couple of big, inextricably entwined themes: complexity and human consciousness. Complexity was addressed in all these installations not only to the extent that the viewer was always encouraged to be an immersed participant rather than a detached appreciator, but also in the ways the works repaid frequent revisitation and showed how every perceptible phenomenon effects different meanings and affections depending on the points in space and the strands of time from which the possible meanings are apprehended. Again and again, I was struck by the canniness of David Rokeby’s observation, in his celebrated essay ‘Transforming Mirrors’, that immersive, multifaceted installations were proliferating and were avidly embraced, because they afford participants the means of abiding safely and reflectively within emergent-dynamic situations; such installations helped participants grasp how complex systems tend to emerge as the perceiver shifts around in the space and time of the phenomenon while observing and also influencing the non-stop braiding together of the experience. (Let’s not forget that the word ‘complexity’ is derived from the Latin plectare: to braid many constituent parts together continuously within the frame of a loom.) As Rokeby so pithily writes, ‘rather than creating finished artworks, the installation artist strives to create relationships’.3 Once aware of the array of relationships within an aesthetic and semantic system, the participant is more or less obliged to behave in a restlessly heuristic manner, testing out particular conjunctions, then essaying new interlacings of interpretation, then others, then others again, and so on, to see what can be learned by such selections and combinations amongst the arrayed screens. This is exactly how one becomes immersed in the five-screen version of Spiritual Voices. (Ditto with Akerman’s The East, and with Aitken’s Eraser.) Over time, via extended heuristics – by testing how this selected factor relates to that selected factor within an experimental period of time, and by testing the cogency of such durational conjunctions repeatedly but always with variations that lead to cross-referencing of new delineations against previous ones – a participant in the installation begins to develop 3 David Rokeby, ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media’, Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. by Simon Penny (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 152.

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a rudimentary wisdom about the multifarious causes that give rise to the complex phenomena being investigated. To emphasize a notion that I will return to with more attentiveness soon, the essayistic participant in a multiscreen installation draws a line of sequential experience out from the field of options that are afforded by the artwork. Then, another line is drawn out whilst the previous line is remembered; then another line, with memory still operating; and another; and so on, such that, over time and with the application of memory allowing all the lines to interweave within one’s curious consciousness, the investigator generates a relational and ever-evolving understanding of the worldly phenomenon that is being evoked by the artwork and which is necessarily always relationally meaningful and ever evolving within the ceaseless dynamics of complex circumstances. As for the second theme – human consciousness – installations such as Spiritual Voices encourage participants to become increasingly adept at operating within what the neurologist Benjamin Libet has dubbed ‘the conscious mental field’ or CMF. 4 A particular subset of the neuroscientific research enterprise known generally as ‘field theories of consciousness’, CMF theory describes a kind of generative faculty that seems to be universally deployed by human beings when they enact conscious responses to the stimuli of lived experience. To explain less abstractly: Libet contends that consciousness arises within every individual as a result of a broiling and continuous interplay amongst three time-governed faculties that entangle within every sense-seeking consciousness: (1) perception of the ever-unfolding present, conveyed via all the senses; (2) remembrance of all previous experiences that the perceiver has lived through thus far in their life; and (3) an imaginative postulation of ‘what might be imminent’ as the present stimuli roll into the future while each perceived moment passes. Let’s use visual metaphors to help clarify this tripartite action: a conscious person is constantly commingling inspection with retrospection in order to experience the continuously flickering prospection that allows conscious, decisive actions to occur at the bequest of the actor. Libet’s crucial contention is that the inspection occurs within a field of present stimuli at the same time that retrospection is drawing on a field of memory, even as each specified remembrance tends to try to play out as a sequential line of event. As one inspects a field of present stimuli, a field of retrieved memories stipples responsively in one’s preconscious or intuition. This 4 See, especially, Benjamin Libet’s, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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latter, mnemonic f ield is dense and highly compressed; and, mostly, it broils not as reasoned thought but as agitated feelings that are energetic, outbursting, non-hierarchical and non-perspectival, constellated across an array of urgent availability within an alerted consciousness. All these feelings present themselves out of the past while the decision-making person applies what Libet terms ‘conscious veto’, deliberately declining to give play to memory after memory as a legion of retrospection flickers in the f ield of consciousness until one particularly relevant memory or stored interpretation is allowed to cash out in the imagination so that the endorsed memory changes from being a compacted and urgent memoryfeeling and becomes a more attenuated and f inessed line of thinking. It becomes a prospective narrative, in fact. This endorsed memory is then adapted to the specif ics of the present moment as it becomes the consciously speculative version of what is about to happen, the version upon which the person makes their willed, interpretive decision to act in a particular manner. For the purposes of our study of multiscreen artworks, the crucial idea is Libet’s insistence that cognition, which arises from consciousness, is inherently and inextricably both spatial and delineated. As are multiscreen installations. Whether in the larger world or within a multiscreen installation, a curious and conscious person is constantly ‘snapshotting’ from fields of stimuli whilst also trying to stay wide open to a field of constellating memories even as one is also driven to extract a line of narrative or disquisition for the overlaid fields. The most dramatic instance of such cognition is on display in speed-based sporting performances – basketball or football, let’s say – when the athlete is constantly hoping to slip into ‘the zone’, to be graced in that place-and-time where perception (of the present situation) and remembrance (of training and past actions) are lucidly wide open to their respective fields and where the line of sequential, eventful action occurs with maximum speed, optimal eff iciency, and complete efficacy. To be ‘in the zone’ means to be at the apogee of acumen, to be laser-focussed but never overthinking, to be carried along in a homeostatic poise amongst the fields and lines that are the prerequisites of consciousness. From such poise, interpretations flow out so that cognition coheres, interpretation insists, and informed actions can follow. Amidst such ‘zoned’ poise, each interpretation is a kind of essay, a trying-out extracted from an array of fields, a trying-out that is enacted by the participant in the hope and expectation that the inspected world has been properly parsed and the ensuing action will resonate to the generative code that impels experience. When this parsing works effectively, a kind of aesthetic and semantic

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homeostasis occurs within and around the interpreting participant. And, in this homeostasis, the participant experiences what Gregory Bateson has called an ‘ecology of mind’,5 a continuously active and adaptive, functionally coherent consciousness that eventfully unfurls as a line of experience traced through a highly complex and dynamic stratification of fields that host coruscating present stimuli as well as glimmering stored memories. So this is what occurs in a well composed multiscreen essay: a judiciously designed array of fields is offered by the artist in such a manner that the immersed participant is able to generate and examine an unstinting flow of interpretive lines that sequence out from the profusion of audiovisual relationships prevailing across the gestalt of the installation. These lines of interpretation are drawn out by the immersed investigator once they have been filtered through two selective modes: (i) firstly, through an inspective focus that has been applied to all the stimuli percolating in every snapshotted field appearing in the present, (ii) and, secondly, through a process of conscious veto that has been applied to the profuse memories that offer themselves all at once, out of a participant’s stored past, as soon as the participant has focussed on the selected present stimuli. This is happening at quite a prodigious speed, considering how much cognitive processing has to operate in order for this to happen. And, even more prodigious and impressive, when such interpretations get generated within an artwork such as a multiscreen installation, the sense-making is not only semantic but also aesthetic, perceptible not only by ratiocination but also by pattern-seeking emotions. In effect, a well composed multiscreen essay helps participants gather and try out the optimal skein of interpretive lines that can be extracted from the fields both of perception and of remembrance that the on-screen content activates. Therefore, a good multiscreen essay helps participants braid as many lines as they need so that some wise comprehension of the complex world – a comprehension that is both felt and thought – can begin to emerge and cohere. Complex and galvanizing of consciousness, the multiscreen audiovisual essay is an art form germane to right now.

5 See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London: Intertext Books, 1972).

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Bibliography Agee, James and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London: Intertext Books, 1972). Libet, Benjamin. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Rokeby, David. ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media’, Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. by Simon Penny (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 133-158.

About the Author Ross Gibson is Centenary Professor in Creative & Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, Australia. His work spans several media and disciplines. Recent projects include the multimedia installation ‘Protection’ (University of Queensland Art Museum, with Carl Warner, 2011, re-installed 2016); the books, The Summer Exercises (2008), 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012), Changescapes (2015), and Memoryscopes (2015), all published by UWAP; and the public-art installation ‘Bluster Town’ at Wynyard Rail Station, Sydney (five-year duration from 2017).

6. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter Katrin Pesch

Abstract This chapter analyses how geographic modes of telling in Deborah Stratman’s film The Illinois Parables (2016) unmoor the essay film from its anthropocentric bearings. Rather than reading the essay as a form of subjective expression, as is often the case, I argue that Stratman’s film embraces a mode of telling that includes human and non-human voices alike, thus shifting the focus from individual subjectivity to a distributed form of agency. Looking at the film through a new materialist lens allows me to show how The Illinois Parables moves the essay’s alleged humanism toward an understanding of a posthumanist essay. Keywords: subjectivity, agency, new materialism, non-human, posthumanism

The camera quivers as it slowly lifts up over the Illinois landscape. Soon, we look down on a familiar pattern of chequered land, rectangular fields in a pallet of browns and greens and ochres of all shades, shaped by industrial agriculture’s need for efficiency. The geometric pattern is cut through by streets and broken up by patches of forest and lakes. A bit further, grids of residential areas are framed by industrial parks. The suburban structure of single-family home subdivisions is laid out in roads leading through parcels of land. Straight lines with branches ending in circles, that, at least from above, look not unlike geoglyphs or ancient ground drawings, prehistoric inscriptions onto the land, especially in those places where roads lie waiting for homes that have yet to be built. The sound of cello music sets in,

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half-foreboding and half-melancholic. Image and sound are severed. While the natural movement of the camera draws us into the image, the music shuts us out. Up above the land – not quite disconnected but not integrated either – we are floating in between earthly and spiritual spheres. Dusted in mist, the horizon is slightly curved. The view conjures an image of the discrete object that, in English, is referred to as Earth. The flight seems to set the tone and to reveal the premise. Landscape appears as ‘a “social hieroglyph”’, as W. J. T. Mitchell has put it elsewhere, channelling Marx, ‘an emblem of the social relations it conceals’.1 The film, the opening shots suggest, will take us on a journey across landscapes waiting to be deciphered and read like a book. But, while the scene evokes the sovereign gaze associated with Western landscape traditions, it also undermines the subject position identified with this perspective.2 The subtle movement of the camera, placed on unsteady ground in a hot-air balloon, envelops the viewer in the air’s motion through the atmosphere. Rather than prompting us to see the earth below as a disconnected other in an exercise of visual control, the film promises an embodied, dialogic experience. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables visits eleven sites connected to communities or events on the land that, today, is called Illinois. Historically charged places kick off an interlocking suite of ‘regional vignettes’ that question the ideological forces crystalizing in the guise of morality.3 Though concerned with human struggles and convictions, the parables are anchored in particular places, attentive to encounters between human and non-human beings that often span long stretches of time. Vignette II, set in Alton, for instance, involves a dragon-like creature painted on a cavernous bluff. Signs on a closed forest path warn of the deer that may have inspired it some 350 years ago. It is not clear whether the bird creature and the deer are guarding or haunting the territory, or both. Inside the cave, we can hear the sound of water and feet touching rocks. Rays of light illuminate the scene. A montage of old etchings cut like a film is accompanied by a voice-over narration reading a missionary’s encounter with the original painting. Judging from Father Jacques Marquette’s detailed description from 1 W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), p. 5. 2 For a comprehensive summary of the notion of landscape as ideology, see Alan Wallach, ‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312 (p. 317). 3 Deborah Stratman, ‘The Illinois Parables, 2016, 60 min, 16mm: Synopsis’ [http://www. pythagorasfilm.com/the-illinois-parables.html].

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1673, the creature has since lost its companion and acquired wings. It also moved, I learn later, to another bluff about 100 yards upstream. The Illinois Parables does not orientate us in these places through explanation. Historical information is distributed sparsely, in fragments. Instead, the film recounts, reimagines, or facilitates encounters. More than mere background to human drama, physical environments step to the fore; parts of the vignettes are told in long static shots of the sites and surrounding areas, while elaborate soundscapes capture the atmosphere. At once terrain and territory, the land captured in The Illinois Parables is both affective and deeply political; it may instil hope or amplify despair, it may be imbued with promise or violence. Exodus, the mass movement of peoples or religious and social communities, emerges as a central theme of the film. Whether it is motivated by religion, utopia, or the struggle for survival, faith too becomes a theme. Forcibly removed from their homeland in the south-eastern United States, the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears cross the Ohio River at Golconda, where the dead of winter took its toll. Mormons fleeing religious discrimination in neighbouring Missouri founded the city of Nauvoo; faced with more violence, they passed it on to the Icarians, French emigrants who sought to build a utopian commune. Another vibrant community that populated Nauvoo more recently is not composed of people but of insects – ‘Nauvoofun’ a billboard promises. Thousands of mayflies have followed the invitation and have temporarily taken over an otherwise deserted go-cart ring. They gather around a floodlight, a huge swarm buzzing with an energy that borders desperation. Like the Mormons and Icarians before them, they’ll soon disband, in this case, facing collective death. The go-cart ring perished too, a quick Internet search shows. Sitting at my desk about a thousand miles away, I wonder who inhabits the land now. Shifting registers from the triumph and tribulations of community to the belief in technology and its corresponding military climate, Vignette VII begins with a re-enactment showing a nuclear physicist – no less than the Nobel Prize-winning ‘architect of the Atomic Bomb’ Enrico Fermi – writing a mathematical equation on critical mass and nuclear fission. The equation presented a scientific breakthrough that led to the construction and testing of the first nuclear reactor in 1942.4 Moving from the manicured lawns and stately buildings at the University of Chicago, where the reactor was first conceived, the vignette takes us to the former test site, an overgrown park reached on a trampled path where its remains lie buried underground. 4 The New York Times, ‘Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of the Atom Bomb’, The New York Times, 29 November 1954 [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/ onthisday/bday/0929.html].

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Over the course of the sequence, abstract thought materializes in white chalk marks on a blackboard and then takes on new life in animations and technical drawings. The actual reactor itself – an underground structure built from stacked uranium-fitted and dead-uranium graphite bricks – remains unseen.5 All that is left to the human eye is a formation of stone markers indicating its location. The reactor’s by-product, deposited in the earth, is invisible as well. Though the presence of radioactive material, far from reaching its half-life, is literally written in stone. An inscription on one of the boulders cautions the public not to dig. In relinquishing part of the narration to places, critters, and climates, The Illinois Parables makes temporal landscapes and political temperatures palpable, inviting us to partake in encounters with places, and the ideas, animals, and people that populate them. Yet, beyond the call emanating from landscapes and things, viewers are confronted with layered images that combine multiple modes of representation. Viewers are constantly made aware of the filmic construction as they process a dense mix composed of records of actual spaces; voice-over narration; historical and contemporary sound recordings; reproductions of paintings, maps, graphs, official documents, and newspaper clippings; chance encounters and re-enactments. As in the opening sequence, we are simultaneously drawn into the image and kept at bay. The Illinois Parables can be situated at the junction of documentary and experimental film, and it has been referred to as an essay film. Stratman herself is wary about the question of distinct genres. ‘I wish we could just say “film”’, she answered when asked about the different designations.6 Her film employs strategies frequently associated with the essay film, such as textual layering and the combination of different forms of representation. But it also makes moves the essay film is said to avoid, for instance, following a chronological order.7 Already judging by its title, The Illinois Parables seems fundamentally at odds with the idea of the essay, as parables usually tell rather than probe, instruct rather than attempt. Indeed, the parable’s function to simply illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson contradicts the essay’s tendency to ask questions that are left unanswered. And yet, no lessons are told in the film. Inquisitive in nature, Stratman’s parables are 5 Dead uranium bricks are extracted from depleted uranium mines. 6 Erika Balsom, ‘The Illinois Parables: Deborah Stratman on her Histories of the Land’, Sight & Sound, 10 October 2016 [https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/ deborah-stratman-illinois-parables]. 7 Arthur Paul, ‘Essay Questions’ in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171 (p. 163).

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The Illinois Parables (Deborah Stratman, USA, 2016). Film still courtesy of Deborah Stratman.

not expressions of spiritual or moral values. The chronology of moments in the state’s history merely presents a ‘structural ruse,’ as she puts it, for an investigation of how communities shape and are shaped by underlying systems of belief.8 Manoeuvring in the space that opens up between local specificity and allegorical reach, the film’s dominant mode, then, is one of enquiry. And, just as the essay film relies on the spectator to make meaning, the film’s parables ultimately leave it for the viewer to decide what lessons there are to take away. In this, the film takes up the essay’s dialogic quality. Authorship is partially transferred to the audience, which assumes the role of co-creator. Beyond camouflaging its inquisitive spirit and dialogic commitment as morals drawn from history, The Illinois Parables also complicates another characteristic of the essay film, its particular manifestation of subjectivity. In the vein of Michel de Montaigne’s famous self-assessment that his essays are more about himself than any other topic, the essay film is often conceptualized as a form of subjective expression that reflects on its own mode of utterance. Christa Blümlinger, for instance, has described the

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Stratman, ‘The Illinois Parable Synopsis’.

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essay as an ‘intellectual vagabond’ venturing across unknown paths.9 Along the way, the essay f ilm reflects on its own journey, inviting the viewer to participate in thinking through the social realities they encounter. Within this exchange, the division of thinking between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ dissolves. Two influential contributions on subjectivity in the essay film come from Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan. With a focus on spectatorial address and self-conscious meditation respectively, both look at how the essay f ilm stages a dialogic encounter between the interior self and the world outside. As a reflection on the human condition and a shared human experience, both authors situate the essay film within the project of humanism.10 Rascaroli, in The Personal Camera, discusses the essay film as a form of dialogue in which an enunciator who represents the director directly addresses an embodied spectator. The essay’s authorial voice, though it might be articulated through multiple personas, represents an individual voice rather than a collective. ‘The “I” of the essay film always clearly and strongly implies a “you”’, Rascaroli argues, ‘called upon to participate and share the enunciator’s reflections’.11 In The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Corrigan describes the essay film as an encounter between the self and the public sphere.12 Rather than an expression of the autonomous Cartesian subject, the figure of self-performance in the essay is one that is fragmented and unstable, while the essay itself straddles different forms and genres. Placed on unsteady ground, the viewer is invited to partake in thinking through worlds and ideas.13 9 Christa Blümlinger, ‘Zwischen den Bildern/Lesen’, in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum Essayistischen Film, ed. by Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulf (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), pp. 11-31 (p. 17), (my translation). 10 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework 49.2 (2008), pp. 24-47 (p. 37); Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 199. 11 The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 35. 12 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 17. 13 While the subjective dimension of the essay film as theorized by Rascaroli and Corrigan is still an important touchstone, I would be remiss not to point out that both authors have since conceptualized the essay from vantage points less concerned with the subjective expression of an enunciator. In How the Essay Film Thinks, Rascaroli shifts her focus on how the essay film’s formal construction enables expressivity in modes of perception and affect, including non-vococentric modes of telling. In a different approach, Corrigan has explored how ‘essayism’ as a form of intellectual, digressive inflection can emerge within the constraints of conventional narrative film. See Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Corrigan, ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics,

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While enunciation in The Illinois Parables is equally shifting and unstable, probing and inviting, the essay’s narrating ‘I’ is absent from Stratman’s film. Neither expressive nor self-reflective, subjectivity in the film is not individually located. Instead, subjectivity always refers to a collective. This is not unlike Bill Nichols’s idea of the ‘social subjectivity’ performed in documentary, which goes beyond that of the individual.14 Here, we can see Stratman’s affinity with documentary traditions. What The Illinois Parables takes from the essay is its dialogic structure and mode of spectatorial address. However, what makes thinking about the film as an essay particularly productive is its treatment – or, rather, dissolution – of subjectivity. While the fixed gaze of the camera, often at eye level, suggests a universal subject, forms of knowing are distributed among a multiplicity of voices on- and off-screen – ranging from missionaries to nuclear physicists, from FBI agents to a girl endowed with supernatural powers – but also among human and non-human actors – from prehistoric mounds to riverbanks, from the ice floating in the Ohio River to the northern cardinal, the bird chosen to symbolize the state of Illinois. Social subjectivity, The Illinois Parables suggests, is not limited to a human collective; the voices speaking through the film are more than human. The Illinois Parables visits places charged with history, where the living might sense the historical weight residing in these sites. Stratman calls them ‘thin places’, although not in the Jesuit sense, which describes places where the border that separates the living from the divine as malleable.15 Seen from a secular perspective, thin places such as the Cahokia mounds or the Trail of Tears are animated by civilizations long gone or peoples dispersed. Stratman’s film can be read in the lineage of the political landscape film, which is characterized by its attention to socio-historical inscriptions that mark the physical environment. Indeed, as Leo Goldsmith has pointed out, landscape in Stratman’s film wears history on its sleeve.16 How, then, does materiality figure in a film concerned with how expressions of ideology, morality, and faith shape the history of a state, its land and inhabitants? As we shall see, The Illinois Parables does more than laying bare man-made Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 15-27. 14 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 179. 15 Nick Pinkerton, ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’, Film Comment, 17 November 2016 [https:// www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-deborah-stratman/]. 16 Leo Goldsmith, ‘The Face of the Earth: Surface and Image in Landscape Documentary’, Documentary Surfaces panel, SCMS conference, Toronto, 14-19 March 2018.

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traces inscribed in the land. Instead, the film is attuned to agency of the natural environment, which takes on the role of an interlocutor and storyteller. If the historical weight of the past is particularly palpable in the places visited in the film, as Stratman says, so is their hybridity. The border between present and past is as porous as that between nature and culture. This questioning of the nature of subjectivity positions The Illinois Parables in conversation with recent new-materialist thought on agency, or, more specifically, the question of who or what expresses agency and – by extension – counts as a subject. Contesting the modern notion of nature as passive, new materialisms are concerned with the entanglements of living and non-living matter and the collaborative actions of human and non-human beings. Jane Bennett’s notion of a ‘distributive agency’ is particularly useful here. In her proposal for a vital materialism, Bennett urges us to divert attention from human subjectivity to the agential force of things. ‘Another way to cultivate this new discernment’, she writes, ‘might be to elide the question of the human. Postpone for a while the topics of subjectivity or the nature of human interiority’.17 Stratman’s essay film concurs with this assertion. In listening to the land rather than giving it a voice, The Illinois Parables sidelines subjectivity and reflection in favour of a more encompassing understanding of agency and knowledge. Admittedly, looking at the essay through a new-materialist lens may seem misguided, given its much commented-on discursive and logocentric traits. Based on the essay’s commitment to language and intellectual discourse, Arthur Paul, for instance, has framed his thoughts on essayistic expression blatantly under the heading ‘Mind over Matter’.18 In The Illinois Parables, however, the material and the discursive are intertwined. In speaking about the film, Stratman frequently describes its cinematic language as connected to the earth’s physical features and substance. Indeed, Stratman seems to share new materialisms’ scepticism about the centrality of language in post-structuralist thought. ‘But its telling doesn’t have to involve language’, she says about her film, ‘the mounds, the scouring of the tornado or the Trail of Tears are geographical or physical modes of telling’.19 The Illinois Parables’ trust in the expressive capacity of things and natural forces may allow us to regard, for a change, the essay less as an intellectual 17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 120. 18 Arthur Paul, ‘Essay Questions’, in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171 (p. 162). 19 Balsom, The Illinois Parables.

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vagabond and more as ‘vagabond matter’, to evoke another materialist concept used by Bennett.20 Focussing on the terrain of the human body, Bennett refers to the transient quality of matter in her discussion of the metabolization of food. She describes the process of digestion as an intimate encounter of human, organic, and inorganic substances, thus defying the hierarchical understanding of the human body’s power to shape edible matter. Bennett takes the idea of a vagabond materiality from Gilles Deleuze. In a meditation on brass music and metallurgy, Deleuze describes matter as ‘a bearer of active traits of expression’, capable of handling information rather than being given form.21 Leaving musical performance and digestive processes behind, the present encounter with vagabond matter occurs in the realm of essayistic enunciation. More specifically, the following discussion of essayistic expression shifts the focus from individual subjectivity to a distributed form or agency. Looking at the film through a materialist lens allows us to see how The Illinois Parables unmoors the essay film from its anthropocentric bearings. *** From the slight swaying movement in the opening sequence that had smoothed the borders of the frame, we are thrown behind the camera at the edge of a field of combed earth that is arrested in a static shot. The music has stopped, wind and insects are now responsible for the sound. The small mound in the centre of the image touches the horizon. The grey plane of a cloud holds it in place between earth and sky. It’s a relic left from another time, holding its ground. The mound, which seemingly has no purpose, is juxtaposed with the uniform furrows of the ploughed field. Altogether, four mounds in varying sizes are shown, captured centre frame. Two are covered under thick blankets of grass, embedded in their surroundings. The fourth one reveals the magnitude of the complex. Like a tall building, the majestic structure overlooks the land. A parking lot in the foreground confirms it as a destination. While the panoramic view from the top of the mountain is withheld, the mound is clearly presented as a vista itself. And yet, the mounds appear to withhold something, something in their material being – just as their historical function – escapes the camera’s grasp. ‘Landscape’, as Jennifer Jane Marshall points out, ‘invites the projections of cultural 20 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 49. 21 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’, Les Cours des Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes (1979), trans. by Timothy S. Murphy [https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/186].

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fantasies, while never fully capitulating to their ideological imperatives’.22 While the mounds provoke speculation about their purpose in an ancient civilization long since passed, they also withdraw and remain inaccessible. Where, then, does land – as the solid matter of the earth’s surface – end, in these images, and where does landscape – as a specific type of scenery or, in a less textual and more materialist sense, temporality – begin? It’s not history that is speaking to us, but something else. The mounds are man-made artefacts and objects of representation, but they belong to a more-than-human world. In a place that is, at the same time, ruinous and alive, their material being speaks of more than the civilization that created them or the meanings we assign to them. Moving back and forth between the material and the discursive, The Illinois Parables constantly changes its alliances. On the one hand, it foregrounds the agency of the land, merely recording how the natural environment inserts itself into a cultural product that is not of its own making. On the other hand, the film is concerned with systems of representation and carefully puts in place its own framing devices. Well into the first vignette, for instance, a black frame, cut in half by a white bar, interrupts the sequence. It’s only when we arrive at the second graphic insertion that the abstract shape becomes legible as a Roman numeral that announces, belatedly, the film’s second vignette.23 The ordering gesture is delayed in more than one way. Though organized chronologically, the film withholds periodization, as the geographic location and dates of all sites and historic events are revealed only at the very end of the film. The earthen mounds are remains of an urban complex of the prehistoric Mississippian culture (600-1400 CE) in what is today the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and a UNESCO-designated World Heritage site. But, for the time being, the explanation is left to the mounds themselves. The Illinois Parables doesn’t rely on linguistic or graphic representation alone to provide historical data. In its sketching of distinct events in the state’s history, the film is just as attentive to material, physical forms of telling. In these instances, the landscape looks back, directly addressing us. This challenges common 22 Jennifer Jane Marshall, ‘Toward Phenomenology: A Material Culture Studies Approach to Landscape Theory’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 195-203 (p. 196). 23 Throughout the film, vignettes are identified as such only after they begin. The soundscape associated with a particular vignette sets in over the last images of the previous one. While the numerals piercing the screen clearly distinguish each section, the way they flow into each other suggests historical continuity. Beyond keeping viewers on their toes, the film’s formal structure contradicts the idea of neatly packaged ‘historical lessons’.

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understandings of landscape as a form of representation that assigns the spectator a privileged position in a fixed, binary relationship: ‘“me – it”, self and other, viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle’.24 The mounds’ epistemological function, then, is not dependent on the spectator. Instead, they are shown as active participants in the production of knowledge. Distributed among human and non-human beings, knowledge – and, by extension, subjectivity – is co-created in an encounter where the material and the discursive meet. However, highlighting the agency expressed through the mounds’ material properties does not diminish their historical import or cultural significance. Beyond their plain materiality, the mounds carry a record of social organization and the interconnection of place and power, a central concern of Stratman’s practice. Her film echoes media theorist Jussi Parikka’s contention that geology can’t be thought of apart from morality and the world of thought.25 With a focus on the geological foundations of media, Parikka joins writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett in rethinking the modern division between natural and social realms. As an academic discipline, geology is part of the sciences, while the critical analysis of social values and morals is relegated to the already assailed humanities. Not only are these disciplinary boundaries constantly – and necessarily – overstepped, Parikka notes, they also hold on to a separation that is not tenable in view of the current environmental crises affecting the Earth. In vignettes such as the ones on the Piasa Bird, the mounds in Cahokia, the Manhattan Project, or the Trail of Tears, The Illinois Parables makes palpable the inseparability of geophysical and geopolitical space and the cultural practices that help forge these connections: cavernous cliffs and missionary ambitions, earthen mounds and outstanding universal values, dead uranium graphite bricks and military climates, hazardous terrains and legal documents are all shown as deeply intertwined. While the first part of Vignette I invites the viewer to engage with both the material and discursive potentialities of the site, the second part listens to those inhabiting the space and emphasizes the ethical dimension of this encounter. Preceded by the sound of his song and his drum, a man appears in the frame and walks past the mound, reclaiming the space. His song and his initial words, the first spoken in the film, are in a language I – and presumably the majority of viewers – can’t understand. He introduces himself 24 Alan Wallach, ‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312 (p. 317). 25 Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015), p. vii.

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as Ravenwolf. Looking straight into the camera, at us, he throws back the ordering gaze that takes stock of the landscape. It’s a corrective that leaves its mark on the film and helps guide the viewer as well. For Ravenwolf is not here to claim, he is here to receive. ‘I come here to Monks Mound to gain strength and energy’, he states, ‘to gain their acceptance, and their guidance. The song that I play is to receive, to receive their honour, to receive their gifts, and to receive their strength and wisdom’. It’s left open who the ‘their’ is that he refers to here: the ancestors or the ancestral lands. Ravenwolf’s voice comes from off-screen, he is speaking at his own image. Yet, his performance – or re-enactment, as Stratman calls it – carries on. While his space as a Shaman may be invaded, his aura stays intact. Looking at us, silently, he illuminates his ritualistic practice, addressing us from a different space. In the background, barely visible, visitors explore the top of Monks Mound. By employing geographical modes of telling, the first vignette relies on material forms of knowing in pro-filmic space. In Vignette V, which is dedicated to the 1925 Tri-State Tornado, material potentialities issue from the layering of different soundtracks in the post-production process. Here, sound emerges as a manner of thinking. In general, sound plays a crucial role in for Stratman, who does the sound design for most of her films herself. In The Illinois Parables, densely packed layers of voice and music, location and abstract sounds take on a material quality. Vignette V is ushered in by off-screen voices speaking over the shots of the buzzing swarm of mayflies in Nauvoo. Speaking with a strong dialect, they recount the first-hand experience of a devastating natural disaster that erased their homes: the tornado that crossed Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri in 1925. Moving at an average speed of 60 miles per hour, the storm cut a swath through the landscape that was up to a mile wide, erasing whole neighbourhoods in its path. At first sight, the vignette mostly uses conventional documentary strategies: a montage of testimonials of survivors, headlines and newspaper articles pulled from the archives, and aerial views of the aftermath in pixilated black-and-white footage of old newsreels salvaged from YouTube. Yet, more than reconstructing the aftermath of a major natural disaster through archival documents, The Illinois Parables attends to the storm by creating a soundscape from a variety of sources and shifting intensities. As in other sequences, the event is brought to life acoustically, in a process Stratman describes as the ‘geological layering’ of different soundtracks.26 The story of a parrot singing Sweet Hour of Prayer amidst the rubble prompts a rendition 26 Pinkerton, ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’.

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of the song. The evocation is interrupted by sirens and talked over by the official emergency response. The main actor is the one to appear last. The vignette reaches its end with the growling of a tornado that is interjected by the desperate shouts and cries of two people caught in the midst of a storm. One enunciator among others, the tornado joins a cacophony of human and non-human voices. A driving force of the film, the soundscape in The Illinois Parables not only participates in world-building but also carries part of the narration.27 In his critique of the essay film’s vococentric tendency, David Oscar Harvey contends that, one can not only ‘essay via images’ but also through a ‘cinematic voice cultivated outside the linguistic register’.28 The Illinois Parables certainly doesn’t relinquish the essay’s verbose inclinations completely; throughout the film, the intellectual vagabond makes her voice heard in testimonials and voice-over narration. Even so, Stratman’s film strongly supports Harvey’s assertion that the ‘subjective expressive (sic) needn’t solely be addressed linguistically’.29 For instance, the transition from the first to the second vignette, to use another example, also happens acoustically: as Ravenwolf’s voice melds into the surrounding sounds – wind, maybe, or cars passing by on a nearby road – a woodwind sets in with a restrained melody, slowly moving back and forth between two bars. There are other sounds supplementing the instrument woven into a sonic carpet that transports us to a new place, a new imaginary. As occurs often in the film, sounds are indistinguishable, and the information they share is unstable. There’s something that resembles the creaking of wood, maybe caused by steps on squeaking floorboards or the slow opening of a door. Yet the sound is severed from the scene unfolding on-screen, which shows the series of etchings that open the story of the missionaries’ encounter with the Piasa bird in Alton. Deprived of referentiality, the sound takes on an eerie quality. Once we enter a stone cave in Alton, sound approximates the image again and becomes concrete: small pebbles roll over 27 The analysis of the film’s musical score is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 28 David Oscar Harvey, ‘The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris Marker, Hans Richter and the Essay Film’, SubStance 41.2, Issue 128 (2012), pp. 6-23. I am thankful here to Laura Rascaroli for her reference to Harvey’s text in How the Essay Film Thinks, which introduced me to his writing. Rascaroli explores how complex sound environments in films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Santiago Alvarez allow us to move beyond the logocentric conception of the essay. In contrast to my attempt to rethink instances of subjective expression in the essay film, Rascaroli focusses on how sound activates meaning and mobilizes affect in the viewer, rather than embodying a non-human form of expression and practising meaning-making itself. 29 Harvey, ‘The Limits of Vococentrism’, p. 19.

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rocks and the dripping of water sculpts the domed, reverberating space. An intricate non-vococentric narration precedes the voice-over of Father Marquette. Sounds acquire agency and assume a subjective dimension. While Vignette V exemplifies the geological layering of sound at play in The Illinois Parables, the opening sequence of Vignette III, focussing on the Trail of Tears, allows us think about the materiality of media more broadly. The images that transition into the third vignette are among the most haunting in the film. A fluoroscopy, or real-time radiograph, of a living bird is juxtaposed with a fabricated Northern Cardinal that accessorizes a serene diorama of Cherokee Indians. Scientific and cultural representations clash in a gesture that is incommensurate with the erasure of life on the Trail of Tears. Fluoroscopic imaging of animals is typically performed for biotechnological research or for diagnostic reasons. No matter the purpose, the act that produces the image is incredibly violent: a living, moving creature is penetrated by X-rays that are converted into visible light. The camera not only reveals the bone structure of the bird but also records its movements and pumping heart as the bird flutters back and forth in a constricted space. The circular mask evokes the technical apparatus producing the image; the numbers inscribed on the frame show the scientific categorization that is retrospectively assigned to the action. Watching the bird’s efforts to thwart the machinic gaze that turns living things into facts is excruciating. Its hectic movements tell of its struggle to resist the eye of the machine that inscribes the bird into a social order, that strips it of its autonomy. The piercing electronic sound heightens the intensity of the image seen. A synthesizer wails over what sounds like a collage of human and non-human vocal expressions: I register the shrieking of a bird, the muffled breathing of a mammal, and the mutter of a human voice. But actually, I’m not sure what I am hearing at all. In their obscurity, the sounds are even more disturbing than the image. The contrast to the diorama is extreme. The sound stops abruptly. The cardinal, stuck on a branch, is immobile. Before the scenes of domestic Indian life are presented in their entirety, mannequins and props are shown in fragments. Each shot is heralded by the sound of a bell, which accentuates the funereal nature of a museum space that renders culture dead rather than bringing it to life. Body parts and tools hover in space: a branch, a pot, a foot, hands holding a basket with a f ish whose hard, plastic body reflects the artif icial light. The torso of a mannequin is turned gracefully as if in a dance pose, thick black shiny hair covers the side of the head. Drops of paint have dried on its chest, and now look like beads of sweat, or tears. Time is frozen, arrested in the colonial fantasy

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of a past that never existed. The soft gradation of the celluloid film stock brings out the nostalgic charm of the colour scheme: warm shades of reds and brown with subdued blues and greens. After the sensory shock of the X-ray vision, I f ind myself relieved to be on stable ground again. Soothed into a false sense of harmony, I also find myself complicit in the continuing erasure of Native American history. This visitor space in front of the brightly lit diorama is dim. The lighting produces a cinematic effect and establishes a hierarchal relationship between those who are viewing and those who are seen. Watching from the safe space of their privileged viewing position, spectators are forced to assume the paternalizing gaze with which the colonizers of this land othered Native bodies. In contrasting two technologies of seeing, the diorama and the fluoroscopy, the vignette’s opening sequence records the fallacies of historic and f ilmic representation and brilliantly plays on the viewer’s susceptibility to media manipulation. The gesture brings to the fore media’s capacity to act as a framing device embedded within the technoscientific and cultural regimes of dominant society. It also provides a striking example of the film’s engagement with the materiality of non-human agency. We are presented with technologies of seeing that are employed to represent animate and inanimate bodies, a living animal as in the case of the fluoroscopy and mannequins depicting humans and animals in the diorama. A paradoxical tension ensues, as the containment is both successful and forever bound to fail: while the bird is trapped and the image of the Indians arrested, the bird actively escapes the static gaze and the plastic material of the mannequins silently exposes the failure to visualize a fantasy. The fluoroscopy, but also the diorama, call to mind Parikka’s concept of medianatures. Parikka proposes a geological media model that is twofold: on the one hand, the earth is mediated through technology – Parikka lists mapping, for instance, or sonification, but we might as well add here fluoroscopic imaging and dioramas. On the other hand, media technologies are dependent on material resources – say, minerals, rocks, or physical structures. The sphere of medianatures thus exists in a double bind, creating a permanent tension between ‘the materiality of the uncontained’ and the ‘operations of framing’.30 While media technologies have an ordering function, they are enabled first by the very material substances they help to frame. Part of Parikka’s argument is that media itself is manipulated matter. Scholars such as Nadja Bozak and Sean Cubitt have also pointed out the 30 Parikka, Geology of Media, p. 13.

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different ways in which film and media depend on geology and the earth’s natural resources.31 This, of course, is true for f ilm in general, not just Stratman’s. But the materiality of media, whether analogue or digital, visual or acoustic, carries particular weight in The Illinois Parables. We can see this from the textual and ‘geological’ layering of the individual vignettes down to the choice of the film’s material base. The assemblage of plastic, gelatine, and silver crystals that constitutes the film stock, for instance, was chosen for its particular sensitivity to light. Stratman, who works with both film and video, selected 16mm for this project, because of ‘the way celluloid acts as a witness. It’s the light from that place, at that time, physically hitting and altering the film’. Her word choice to describe f ilm’s sensory faculty seems pertinent here: witness derives from wit, which denotes ‘the faculty of thinking and reasoning in general; mental capacity, understanding, intellect’.32 More than a medium or an aesthetic choice, celluloid is a sensing actor, which speaks about place with and through light. As a technology, film exists in the sphere of medianature. It simultaneously relies on and frames geophysical substances that sustain and inspire us. The Illinois Parables consciously operates in this collective material-discursive space. Furthermore, Parikka’s medianature is based on Donna Haraway’s influential concept of natureculture, which emphasizes the inherent interconnection and inseparability of nature and culture.33 Natureculture thus contests the Cartesian framework that uses binary structures, such as nature versus culture and mind versus matter, as its ordering principle. Natureculture (as well as medianature) considers the material non-human realm as inextricably linked to sociopolitical and economic power structures. Importantly, natureculture is also an effort to decentre the human subject. It’s a gesture that calls into question the privileged space of the human in favour of a broader understanding of who and what belongs to the social collective. In Stratman’s case, the film elides questions of human subjectivity in favour of a form of agency that is distributed among people, animals, and the earth as well as the beliefs, moral values, and creative practices that connect and sustain them. 31 Nadja Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 32 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘witness, n.’. 33 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 9.

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The Illinois Parables thus moves the essay’s alleged humanism toward an understanding of a posthumanist essay. Building on the literary essay’s foundation in Enlightenment traditions, which presumes an autonomous, self-determined human subject, the essay has generally been situated – whether explicitly or implicitly – within a humanist tradition. As a recent feature in Sight & Sound put it, the essay f ilm exemplif ies ‘the spirit of humanistic inquiry’, a statement that echoes Rascaroli’s and Corrigan’s earlier pronouncements.34 As is often noted, the term essay derives from ‘assay’, which connotes a trial or attempt. Nora M. Alter has pointed to the etymological lineage of this term to agens, which anchors the essay within the ‘problem of human agency’.35 The agency performed in the essay film is commonly validated and historicized through both representatives and critics of humanism, ranging from Michel de Montaigne, Giacomo Leopardi, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Marquis de Sade, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, to borrow Alter’s list – a gendered directory that any history of the film essay could easily help extend.36 Even though the essay’s alliance with humanist thought may be an uneasy one, the essay’s anthropocentric bearings remain largely intact. In contrast, The Illinois Parables can be seen in light of recent posthumanist thought that questions the universal subject implicit in humanism. Rosi Braidotti, a major proponent of this emerging approach, describes life as something that surpasses the individual and presents a non-personal force of creativity Building on critics of humanism’s anthropological dogma, a posthuman theory of subjectivity postulates a continuum of human and non-human nature. This interconnection is a crucial feature of The Illinois Parables, where agency is distributed among natural and social realms. Going beyond the essay film’s dissolution of the border between self and the other where the implied other is human, the subject position put forth in the film is more than human. As I have argued here, Stratman’s film embraces a material-discursive mode of telling that includes human and non-human voices alike. In its essayistic journey through sites and events in the state’s history, The Illinois Parables joins the intellectual vagabond with vagabond matter. 34 Andrew Tracy, Ginette Vincendeau, Katy McGahan, Chris Darke, Geoff Andrew, Olaf Möller, Sergio Wolf, Nina Power, and Nick Bradshaw, ‘The Essay Film’, Sight & Sound, 2015 [https://www. bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film]. 35 Nora M. Alter, ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’, Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007), pp. 44-57 (p. 45). 36 Alter, ‘Translating the Essay’, p. 45.

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Bibliography Alter, Nora M. ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’, Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007), pp. 44-57. Balsom, Erika. ‘The Illinois Parables: Deborah Stratman on her Histories of the Land’, Sight & Sound, 10 October 2016, accessible online at [https://www.bfi. org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/deborah-stratmanillinois-parables]. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). Blümlinger, Christa. ‘Zwischen den Bildern/Lesen’, in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum Essayistischen Film, ed. by Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulf (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), pp. 11-31. Bozak, Nadja. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Corrigan, Timothy. ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 15-27. Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016). Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’, Les Cours des Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes (1979), trans. by Timothy S. Murphy. Web. [https:// www.webdeleuze.com/textes/186]. Goldsmith, Leo. ‘The Face of the Earth: Surface and Image in Landscape Documentary’, Documentary Surfaces panel, Society of Cinema Studies annual conference, Toronto, 2017. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). Harvey, David Oscar. ‘The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris Marker, Hans Richter and the Essay Film’, SubStance 41.2, Issue 128 (2012), pp. 6-23. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. ‘Toward Phenomenology: A Material Culture Studies Approach to Landscape Theory’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 195-203. Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

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The New York Times, “Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of the Atom Bomb”, The New York Times, 29 November 1954. Web. [https://archive.nytimes.com/www. nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0929.html]. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘witness, n.’, (Oxford University Press, online edition, 2018). Parikka, Jussi. Geology of Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015). Paul, Arthur. ‘Essay Questions’, in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171. Pinkerton, Nick. ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’, Film Comment, 17 November  2016. Accessible online at [https://www.f ilmcomment.com/blog/ interview-deborah-stratman/]. Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework 49.2 (2008), pp. 24-47. Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Stratman, Deborah. ‘The Illinois Parables, 2016, 60 min, 16mm: Synopsis’. Web. [http://www.pythagorasfilm.com/the-illinois-parables.html]. Tracy, Andrew et al. ‘The Essay Film’, Sight & Sound, 5 August 2015. Web. [https:// www.bf i.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/ essay-film]. Wallach, Alan. ‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312.

About the Author Katrin Pesch is an artist, film-maker, and writer. She received her doctorate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice from the University of California San Diego, USA, and has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Situated at the intersection of material culture studies and the environmental humanities, her work engages with questions of nature and the social, ecology, and cultural memory. She has exhibited work and curated exhibitions and film programmes at international institutions. Her writing has been published in Studies in French Cinema and Anthropology and Humanism, and several edited collections. Her films are distributed by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video in Berlin.

7.

Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button Belinda Smaill

Abstract In the essayistic mode, the performance of selfhood frequently questions the logic of subjectivity and its relation with the world. Taking up this core property of the essay f ilm, this chapter explores its potential to further ecocritical approaches in film studies. It asks how grappling with non-human themes and aesthetics might further complicate and rethink not just the sovereign subject in documentary, but the status of the human more fundamentally. These questions are taken up through a close reading of Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, Chile, 2015), a film that examines post-dictatorship Chile by criss-crossing multiple spheres of interest, including the events of the military dictatorship, cultures and the impact of colonialism, astronomy, Chilean natural geography, with water as structuring concern across all. Keywords: essay f ilm, water, non-human, memory, humanism, cosmopolitics

Near the beginning of his essay ‘On Repentance’, Michel de Montaigne contemplates the interaction between the subjective experience of time passing and the inevitable flux of the world: Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ‘tis not, however, unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch07

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a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness […].1

Montaigne’s sixteenth-century essay brings into focus one of the central propositions of the essayistic form, demonstrating Timothy Corrigan’s point that ‘the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity’.2 In the essay film, the performance of selfhood, whether as embodied narrator, diarist, archivist, or sojourner functions as a hinge that links fragments of external reality, narrative, and a direct appeal to the viewing subject. Montaigne’s words are significant for my purposes, moreover, because they express not only the encounter between self and public, but also between self and the materiality, conditionality, and planetary magnitude of the natural world. Over the last decade, popular commentary about and awareness of climate crisis has produced a critical new cultural imaginary. Further, allegiances between the sciences and humanities are newly confronting the problems of the Anthropocene in ways that denaturalize and recontextualize the Anthropos, a project that, in many ways, builds on the 20th century’s critique of Enlightenment humanism.3 Working to situate the f ield of animal studies in relation to the humanities, or the ‘posthumanities’, Cary Wolfe proposes that, rather than break with the legacy of humanism, we need ‘to attend to that thing called the “human” with greater specificity, greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind and so on’. 4 For Wolfe, this allows us to consider attributes, such as language, as indicating the work of evolution in ways that resist the ontological separation of the human and other living creatures. This signals the possibility of perceiving the human in ways that move beyond (human) subject-centred paradigms. 1 Michel de Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays (Dover, MA: Courier Corporation, 2013), p. 172. 2 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 6. 3 The term ‘Anthropocene’ was f irst introduced by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist, and Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, in 2000. It designates a new postHolocene epoch marked by human-induced geological change. For an insightful account of the multidisciplinary circulation of this term, see Jamie Lorimer, ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science 47.1 (2017), pp. 117-142. 4 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 120.

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Describing the recent shift in the humanities towards a ‘geo-centred perspective’ as a ‘conceptual earthquake’, Rosi Braidotti offers a further context for rethinking our conception of nature and subjectivity: The earth or planetary dimension of the environmental issue is indeed not a concern like any other. It is rather the issue that is immanent to all others, in so far as the earth is our middle and common ground. This is the ‘milieu’ for all of us, human and nonhuman inhabitant of this particular planet, in this particular era. The planetary opens onto the cosmic in an immanent materialist dimension. My argument is that, again, this change of perspective is rich in alternatives for a renewal of subjectivity. What would a geo-centred subject look like?5

I am interested in how this represents a challenge for understanding how the human subject might be constituted in non-anthropocentric ways, whether through considering a relationship with posthumanism, geocentred subjectivity or another similar formation.6 The ramifications for the essay film are significant – now is the time to call for an ecocritical consideration of the speaking subject that is pivotal to the form. Such a project is necessary to bring the study of the essay film in line with other areas of the humanities, which are interrogating what Donna Haraway refers to as ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics’.7 The subjective voice of the essay film is frequently a questioning one and, in this respect, it contrasts with expository documentary’s authoritative and universalizing voice of God, and thus challenges dominant notions of how voice-over functions in non-fiction. As Laura Rascaroli writes, the ‘antisystematic, subjective, nonmethodic method’ inheres with radical potential.8 With evocative juxtapositions, ruminative tonality, and a focus on ideas rather than factual information, the subjective compass of the essay already undercuts settled understandings of the sovereign subject. Due to this, examples of the form are frequently employed in the service of generating a new logic and often crafted into politically significant ways 5 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013), p. 81. 6 This term signals a move that understands human as not only social agents but as geological agents, with their actions impacting on the non-human environment as well as the human one. 7 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 30. 8 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Cinema: Subjective Cinema and The Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), p. 38.

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of seeing. The explicit performance of personal vision or voice in film is already decentred in the sense that it is situated and perspectival. For this reason, there is great scope to probe the heuristic of essayistic subjectivity further, asking how the context of the non-human might further complicate and rethink not just the sovereign subject, but the status of the human and human exceptionalism more fundamentally. I refer to this as an approach that endeavours to move beyond anthropocentrism in ways that explore how essayistic examples might contest or refigure humanism. This is not a move to institute a new mode – scholars such as Rascaroli, Corrigan and others have accomplished much in mapping the various distinctions between, for example, travel film, diary films, interview films, or personal and essayistic films. The essay film ‘beyond anthropocentrism’ potentially extends across all of these, offering an epistemological provocation, rather than a stylistic category. This opens an avenue to investigate how our place in relation to what Braidotti describes, as noted above, as our earthly ‘common ground’, might also compel a reconsideration of the precepts of non-fiction film and media more broadly. While the essay film already challenges the assumptions that underpin orthodoxies of classical documentary, such as objectivity and authority, I am interested in how a close consideration of non-human nature might incite a challenge, particularly to the expository documentary, in ways that expand our understanding of the essay film. While Montaigne provides a useful sixteenth-century precedent for my discussion, there are a range of more recent essay examples, indeed essay films, that might generate the epistemological provocation that I describe. Werner Herzog’s oeuvre presents the most well-known essayistic contemplations of the non-human. His films frequently feature individuals who are defined by their relationship with nature, whether the landscape or animals. Herzog is not concerned with exploring the ecological place of Anthropos. Instead, his approach begins with what might be considered a romantic impulse, exploring how the natural world can be rendered in ways that express the complexities of human psychology and sociality. Grizzly Man (2005) is the most discussed model of this impulse. It sits alongside other examples such as Encounters at the End of the World (2006) and The White Diamond (2004). All convey a natural world that is indifferent to the many humans who are drawn to it. Other filmic examples that also highlight the human as a site of enquiry include Georges Franju’s Le San Des Bêtes (Blood Of The Beasts, 1949); Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962); and, more recently, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015); Jennifer Baichwal’s film about the work of Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes (2006); and Peter Brosens and Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh’s State of

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Dogs (1998). It is not my intention to suggest that all these examples institute a reconsideration of the anthropocentric subject in the same way or with equal intensity, but rather that they all press further investigation of the place of the human as the primary concern for politics. From this archive of examples, I choose to focus on the work of Chilean film-maker Patricio Guzmán, specifically his 2015 film, The Pearl Button. The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), while over, has left an ongoing legacy of political conflict, unsolved crimes, and enduring suffering and trauma for the Chilean people.9 El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button) returns to the problem of how to represent the meaning of the suffering that still characterizes post-dictatorship Chile. It would be a mistake, however, to understand the film as only, or even primarily, focussed on the legacy of Pinochet’s regime. The film’s lyrical essayist form crisscrosses multiple spheres of interest, including the events of the military dictatorship, the culture of Indigenous people and the impact of colonialism, astronomy, Chilean natural geography, and the way water is a structuring concern across all of these things. In what follows, I explore how each of these different threads and their formal expression recasts the relation between the human and human events, and the non-human environment. I focus specifically on subjectivity and humanism, drawing out the ecocritical potential of The Pearl Button and the essay film more broadly. 9 As Antonio Traverso observes, in post-dictatorship society, ‘it has been documentary filmmakers who have most readily and extensively embraced the public memory project in this South American country’. Antonio Traverso, ‘Nostalgia, Memory, and Politics in Chilean Documentaries of Return’, in Dictatorships in the Hispanic World: Transatlantic and Transnational Perspectives, ed. by P. Swier and J. Riordan-Goncalves (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 49-78, (p. 50). Patricio Guzmán’s long and prolific film-making career spans five decades and, although working largely in exile, he has become Chile’s most internationally renowned f ilm-maker. His epic three-part documentary, La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1975-1979), cemented a place for him not only in Latin American cinema, but also in the canon of documentary film history. The film encompasses the rise of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the political tensions that led to a coup d’état, and the establishment of Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship. His more recent films, those that Traverso describes as ‘memory films’ (Traverso, p. 51), include Salvador Allende (2004), Chile: Memoria obstinada (Chile: Obstinate Memory, 1997), El caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case, 2001), and Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light, 2010). There has been a significant amount of scholarship attending to Guzman’s oeuvre. Studies that address his more recent films include works by Antonio Traverso and Kristi Wilson (eds.), Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2016); Juan Carlos Rodríguez, ‘Framing Ruins: Patricio Guzmán’s Postdictatorial Documentaries’, Latin American Perspectives 40.1 (2013), pp. 131-144; David Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’, Third Text 27.6 (2013), pp. 707-722; and Nilo Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2011)’, Discourse 39.1, (2017), pp. 67-91.

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The Pearl Button: Framing Humanism The Pearl Button begins with an ancient drop of water that, as the narrator (Guzmán) describes, is trapped in a 3000 year-old block of quartz that was found in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Set against blackness and removed from any identifiable context, the quartz, with its square edges, resembles a block of ice. The beginning of the film registers its focus on water, place, and time (whether historical time or memory). From the block of quartz, The Pearl Button then expands outwards to a commentary on the galaxy and then returns to the islands and ice formations of western Patagonia. As sequences progress, the viewer is gradually introduced to the other threads that weave through The Pearl Button, principally the precolonial water-bound histories of Indigenous cultures, the decimation brought by Chilean settlers, and the present-day recollections of individual interviewees. Following this, the atrocities of Pinochet’s military come into view, in particular the practice of tying murdered prisoners to steel rails and interring them deep in the Pacific Ocean. The different elements and entities in the film continue to weave together as the viewer is challenged to find clear pathways through Guzmán’s narration, a series of interviews, archival photographs, and striking images of the natural world. These images encompass glaciers and ice floes, satellite photography of the Chilean coast, and constellations of stars. Meditations on geology, astronomy, and personal recollections infuse the representation of national political history. This inclusive logic could easily be read as one that produces indulgent tangents that distract from the documentary focus on the Pinochet regime and its human rights abuses. In reviewing the film, Max Nelson alludes to this possible reading: ‘It may be curious that the 1973 coup that overthrew Allende happened to coincide with the birth of a supernova, but insisting on this coincidence, as Guzmán does at one point in the new film, does more to cloud the coup’s complex nexus of economic, social, and political causes than to clarify them.’10 This reading, I suggest, rests on an assumption that a non-fiction film that confronts the national political weight of a military dictatorship will take up the tools of expository documentary. Following this stylistic expectation, a film about the Pinochet regime would draw out the clear logic of human rights, with 10 Max Nelson, ‘In Dreams begin Responsibilities: The Films of Patricio Guzmán’, Cinema Scope 63, 2015, pp. 13-15 (p. 15). However, when Guzmán was asked about the poetic style he has adopted in films that address the Pinochet era, he responded by saying that, as time passes, leaving that era behind, new ways of representing its repercussions are needed. See British Film Institute, Patricio Guzmán talks about The Pearl Button: BFI London Film Festival [online video], 2015, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF2-kCU7wz0], accessed 18 December 2017.

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the narrator positioned as the subject or source of knowledge explicating the meaning and detail of historical events, fulfilling the documentary ‘desire for a certainty of the knowable, of the world as testable’.11 This style, and the expectations that accompany it, are tied to a particular humanist project that places the sovereign subject in a God-like position – the transcendental ground, the sovereign originator of meaning and truth. It should be noted that this conception of documentary holds true only for expository modes and then only in very orthodox cases. Documentary is not a singular category, nor does it transparently represent the real of the historical world. As Michael Renov describes, ‘nonfiction contains a number of “fictive” elements, moments at which a presumably objective representation of the world encounters the necessity of creative intervention’.12 The degree to which this intervention is exercised exists as a spectrum, with essayist forms and expository documentary sitting well removed from one another. Nevertheless, observing the relationship between the two, I wish to pursue the analytical possibilities that emerge when the essay film, and The Pearl Button in particular, is posed as a challenge to the humanist project associated with documentary. I marry this with, moreover, an ecocritical approach that challenges human exceptionalism. From the ancient drop of water, the opening sequence of the film inaugurates a sensibility that is anchored in nature and devoted to the lines of association that place Chile geographically, from the coastline to the stars. Images of the powerful telescopes located in the Atacama Desert and featured in Nostalgia for the Light begin the sequence and reference the earlier film, hinting at the ties that bind the two. The narration explains: ‘There’s water in the planets. There is water vapor in some nebula. There is water on other celestial bodies. On earth, it is vital for life to exist.’ There is a visual dynamic that occurs here through editing and images, one that takes the viewer from the desert telescopes to the stars and gradually back to terrestrial concerns when we see the coastline of Chile through layers of clouds from a satellite perspective. The narration turns to the geomorphology of the nation: ‘Water, Chile’s longest border, forms an estuary known as western Patagonia. Here, the Cordillera of the Andes sinks into the water and reemerges as thousands of islands. It is a timeless place, an archipelago of rain.’ The camera brings the viewer closer to Earth and in greater proximity 11 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 86. 12 Michael Renov, ‘Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction’, in Theorizing Documentary, ed. by M. Renov (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-12 (p. 2).

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to different textures of water: ‘When water moves, the cosmos intervenes. Water receives the force of the planets, transmits it to the earth and to all living creatures. Water is an intermediary force between the stars and us.’ The narration subsides for a few minutes as the striking environment of western Patagonia fills the frame, from the mountains of the Andes amongst the clouds, wind, and cliff rock, to still glaciers, to an iceberg-like crystals, with violin music accompanied by the sound of cracking ice as it melts. This initial sequence announces that the natural world is a critical concern in the film. Moreover, it hints at what is to come by emphasizing the ontology of water and drawing it into the metaphysical ruminations of the essay. The cinematography also, inevitably, evokes associations with the visual vocabulary of blue chip nature documentary. These associations present a suggestive comparison: the nature documentary, or natural history film, offers perhaps the purest contemporary form of expository documentary. With spectacular images elucidated by a consistent voice-over, the narrator of a blue chip nature series is not only the source of knowledge, but also the classifier, authorized to name and to categorize, as well as to narrate the scientific story of other species and geological events. As a classifier, they take a place above nature. Yet, unlike an example such as the BBC’s Frozen Planet (2011), The Pearl Button eschews explanatory detail. Guzmán’s voice-over makes proclamations that are impressionistic, personal, and leap from earth to space and back, exploring the poetics of geography rather than explicating its conditions. Guzmán is in nature, alongside it. He adds his own sensory experience of water when he says: ‘Some distant relatives of mine lived here. They had a zinc roof and the raindrops made a noise that reassured and protected me. That sound has followed me all my life.’ In The Pearl Button, the authorial subject of science is replaced by the impressionistic leaps of the narrator, for whom ‘It seems that water comes from outer space, and life was brought to earth by the comets that shaped the seas’. In an interview with Eric Hynes, Guzmán describes how the voice-over is distinct from more authoritative modes: ‘It’s a voiceover that’s not pedagogical, not something clearly defined. Sometimes it’s like an ornament, it’s part of the landscape. It’s not like voiceovers that are very concrete, rational, specific and direct. It’s completely the opposite.’13 Rather than above nature, as its classifier, Guzmán’s words encompass nature as partly observed reality (including memory), partly science (whether anthropology or astronomy), and partly mythical. 13 Eric Hynes, ‘Interview: Patricio Guzmán’, Film Comment [website] 2015, [https://www. filmcomment.com/blog/interview-patricio-guzman/], accessed 4 December 2017.

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The opening sequence of The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Atacama Productions, 2015) draws associations between the terrestrial, the cosmic and vast expanses of time by emphasizing the ubiquity of water and drawing it into the metaphysical ruminations of the essay. Screenshot.

With this movement across a seemingly disjunctive thematic terrain, The Pearl Button offers a ‘lyrical’ formulation of the essay film, one that, as Rascaroli writes, ‘apparently contradicts both rational thought and narrative structuring’.14 With a style closer to poetry than the prose, for Rascaroli, the lyrical presents one manifestation of the essay film as a ‘form that thinks’ – the idea also developed in her chapter in this volume. Drawing on Harun Farocki’s notion that ‘discourses are a form of narration’, Rascaroli expands on how the discourse of the lyric essay film includes not only the voice-over but a combination of interviews, images, sound, and other formal elements.15 The disjunctive poetry of The Pearl Button allows the film to think in a specific way, enabling a rethinking of humanism through, in the first instance, a commentary on natural history that displaces the pedagogical narrator. Thus, the film institutes a narration that is ‘part of the landscape’ rather than above it.

Ecological Existentialism and the Speaking Subject Jettisoning the certainty of the sovereign subject, the lyrical essay film might be understood as a highly existential endeavor, one that questions the meaning of human experience. I am interested in Deborah Bird Rose’s 14 Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 163. 15 Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 162.

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adoption of this term, highlighting its implications that ‘there is no predetermined essence of humanity, no ultimate goal toward which we are heading, and that we experience what appears to be astonishingly open ways of being and becoming human. My use of the term is clearly situated within the intellectual history that asks what humanity is and can be.’16 Elaborating humanism’s existentialism as a collective loneliness in the face of a recognition of the absence of God and an indifferent universe, Rose proposes an ‘ecological existentialism’. This term signals a recognition of how, rather than being isolated, we are entangled in the connectivities of life on earth. Although connected, there remains no predetermined essence or destiny within this ‘kinship of becoming’.17 I want to draw out two crucial consequences of Rose’s notion of ecological existentialism. It signals a move away from the dualistic thinking that places humans as separate and above all else on earth. With a focus on uncertainty as part of the existential condition, it also challenges modes of determinist prediction, or the absolute knowledge of the speaking subject. It is tempting to consider the formal elements that contribute to the lyricism of The Pearl Button as a kind of ecology. However, this would be erroneous – ecologies have particular spatio-temporal qualities. They are of ongoing duration and are of unfathomable complexity, making them a poor metaphor for cinema. It is more fruitful to explore how the values and agency of human existence might be rethought in the film and placed within a planetary, geomorphic frame in a way that references ecological existentialism as a condition of the essayist subject. The past and present of the Indigenous culture of Patagonia is a central concern in the film. Like every other concern in The Pearl Button, it is blended with the ontology of water, highlighting the connectivity between human and non-human. The representation of Indigenous culture also comes with the commentary provided by various non-Indigenous experts. However, these experts are ambivalently positioned – they are both the source of knowledge and yet this knowledge is undercut by the film’s discursive structure. As the film shifts from a focus on the spectacle of nature to the Indigenous histories of Patagonia, a chronology that includes human events starts to crystallize in the film. Beginning with references to precolonial times, the narration states: ‘Before the white man arrived, the first inhabitants of Patagonia lived in communion with the cosmos. They carved stones 16 Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 43. 17 Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, p. 44.

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to ensure their future. They travelled by water. They lived submerged in water. They ate what the water supplied.’ The accompanying images show the textures of stone implements, possibly museum pieces, and black and white photographs of Indigenous peoples posed in traditional dress, before returning to the mountains and the oceans. The rhythm of the voice-over is broken with the first interview of the film. The viewer sees Martin G. Calderón sanding his canoe before his face enters the frame. A descendent of the Kawésqar peoples of Patagonia, Calderón describes how, even though he crossed Cape Horn in a boat with his father at the age of 12, the small vessel he has built is prohibited on the water due to maritime regulations. ‘I grew up by the sea. I’d like to be able to travel by boat but there are too many restrictions […] We are barely allowed in the sea.’ Guzmán’s voice follows later in the sequence: ‘We still don’t know how they were able to predict the weather. It is estimated that in the nineteenth century, there were 8000 people with 300 canoes.’ The Kawésqar interviewees, Martin G. Calderón, Gabriela Paterito, and Cristina Calderón, recount stories about their lives and their families, mostly stories tied to the oceans. Guzmán does not ask them to describe Indigenous mythologies or philosophies. In this respect, he avoids the formulation Rose describes as the temptation ‘often labeled Romanticism, that would see others as having insights that civilization has occluded for us. According to the Romantic vision, the primitive, like the child, has a clearer vision of reality than does the civilized person or the adult.’18 Rather than explications of (more) authentic reality from an Indigenous point of view, the insights Guzmán seeks from Calderón are largely experiential. It is Guzmán’s narration, in this instance, that offers historical anthropological knowledge, yet in ways that also point to gaps in the anthropological record. The recurring reference to water is given a different, more sonic tenor when anthropologist Claudio Mercado appears in the film. Mercado (a scholar of Indigenous culture, the viewer is informed) is filmed amongst trees and bushes, with consistent cutaways to flowing water, which harmonizes with his words. He offers philosophies about water that dovetail with Guzmán’s own poetic commentary, linking the earth, water, and the stars. Rather than a conventional interview setting, he moves about amongst grasses and trees, his embodied presence congruent with his discussion of nature. Then he notes, ‘I listened to the sound of water and suddenly heard music. A river sounds like a thousand sounds at the same time.’ In a medium shot, Mercado stands with his eyes closed and begins to chant in 18 Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, p. 111.

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a consistent tone. Other sounds chime in on the soundtrack, including an electronic rendering of water trickling. The frame is filled with the motion movement of drops of water. In the hands of Werner Herzog, this moment would be conveyed as a parody of the eccentric expert, but, for Guzmán, it becomes an evocation of the sonic beauty of water. It blends the formal potential of sound and image with the narrative focus on the ontology of water. Moreover, it re-modulates the human voice into a human, technological, and aquatic synthesis of sound. A different tone of chanting takes the viewer into the next sequence, which soon morphs into whispering, as eerie black and white images fill the screen, images of men with stars, dots, and stripes painted on their bodies. Guzmán’s narration informs us that these Selk’nam men lived in the remotest part of Patagonia and believed they would become stars after death. But, he states, ‘We still don’t know the meanings of these drawings. Perhaps Chilean poet, Raul Zarita, might be able to help us […]’ Zarita then appears on screen, in a garden setting, speaking to the camera. Trinh T. Min-Ha argues that interviews in a documentary function ‘in terms of authenticating information; validating the voices recruited for the sake of the argument the film advances […]; and legitimating an exclusionary system of representation based on the dominant ideology of presence and authenticity – [these] are actually sophisticated devices of fiction’.19 The interviews in The Pearl Button are orientated away from legitimizing a particular ideology and exist more to contribute to an expressive weaving together of ideas. In this sense, they might be described more as explicitly partial, rather than fictional. Rather than absolute knowledge, the film’s voices speak to science, experiential knowledge, and mystery.20 In Rose’s terms, this is a process by which ‘mystery is brought back into human thought as an essential element of our lives, a part of thought rather than an enemy to be vanquished’.21 Just as it eschews scientific explication of the natural world, the film references but does not convey settled anthropological knowledge about Indigenous peoples. Nor does it turn to the romantic ‘pre-modern’ knowledge of the native. Instead, it turns to the chanting anthropologist, the poet, the Indigenous boat builder, and Guzmán’s own questioning voice. 19 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Framer Framed (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 13. 20 This mystery should be considered not as contrary to the earth and biological sciences, but integral to its processes. Scientific enquiry is characterized by partial knowledge, uncertainty, and estimations of probability. Science does not fully understand the complexity of ecosystems, with its many biological and microbiological processes. 21 Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, p. 46.

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In her discussion of environmental documentary, Helen Hughes identifies how the image and its frame not only represents the landscape, but also the place of the human within it. She draws on the well-known chart by film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson that describes various shots, from extreme long shot to extreme close-up, only in relation to the frame of the human body. Hughes describes how ‘a shift in the spectrum is created by the increasing use of more categories in which the distance between the body and the camera are increased. These categories are: the aerial shot, satellite photography and space photography.’22 The long shot enables greater attention to that which is beyond the human, but, with space and satellite photography, humanity, in the case of the former, disappears or, in the latter, ‘pattern and broad contrasts become more dominant and humanity begins to appear as a species’.23 The Pearl Button begins by cycling through images of the stars, the ocean, and the coastline of Chile. Human scale is dwarfed in ways that require a reimagining of human agency and scale, thus offering visual representation of Rose’s notion that we are enmeshed in a larger process. I suggest that the sequence of interviews that follows extends this existential contemplation of scale to a metaphorical as well as visual representation – rather than the capacity to sit above nature that epistemological certainty brings, the human is decentred by Guzmán’s refiguring of the interview subject of documentary. While these voices eschew transcendental knowledge, that is not to say that The Pearl Button forgoes fact purely for the stuff of mystery. Central to the film is the violence of Chilean history and, in this respect, it is concerned with human politics and conveying knowledge about the realities of the past.

Matter and Politics Early in The Pearl Button, Guzmán describes how the five tribes of Patagonia, the Kawésqar, Selk’nam, Aoniken, Hausch, and Yámana, navigated the country’s coasts and waterways. It is not until halfway through the film that the viewer is told that there are only 20 direct descendants of these peoples left. Guzmán describes the decimation of those who died of disease on missions or were murdered by ‘Indian Hunters’ seeking the trifling bounties that were awarded in return for body parts. Black and white photographs of the missions are replaced by others that depict men in a field with guns. One 22 Hughes, Green Documentary, p. 49. 23 Hughes, Green Documentary, p. 50.

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shows a corpse at the feet of hunters. All images appear with the measured pace that structures the rhythm of the film. Colonial culture and nature are violent in different ways. This is also a point of investigation for Guzmán: ‘I ask myself, have the same things happened on other planets? Have the strongest dominated everywhere?’ To understand the human, he looks beyond the human, and even beyond the earth. However, the most obvious hinge in the narration, one that brings the elements and entities of the film together is apparent in Guzmán’s statement about the sea as an alienating force in his own life: But I as a Chilean don’t feel so close to the sea. For the ocean I feel admiration, and at the same time, fear. This is because of a childhood memory. One summer, one of my friends was swept away by the sea. He was jumping from rock to rock, amongst the waves, that rushed, in claw like, between the reefs. His body was never recovered. He was my first disappeared person.

Following on from the sequences detailing the violence of colonialism, the recollection brings together this violence, Guzmán’s subjective experience of the sea, and the ‘disappeared’ victims of Pinochet’s regime. As Guzmán describes the memory and how it has shaped his relationship with the ocean, images fade between old photographs of a group of boys and a moving, glistening sea. At times superimposed on one another, the surface of the photos move like the sea or like ocean spray against rocks. The textures and movement of the surface of the ocean animates the archive (the photographs) while also offering visual representation of the unrecovered remains of the boy that lie beneath the surface. I propose that this scene encapsulates the ways in which visible evidence is pivotal to its address to the viewer. This evidence serves to rethink humanist paradigms further by evoking, in material ways, the continuity between the human and the non-human. If Rose advocates an ecological existentialism, and a kinship with life on earth, the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ extends this connectivity to a consideration of politics, and the politics of the Chilean dictatorship more specifically. Rather than the universe beyond earthly concerns, the notion of the cosmos I refer to encompasses human politics in nature’s full diversity. Bruno Latour understands cosmopolitics as a process not yet realized but one in which a ‘common good world’ is at stake, one that embraces infinite entities:

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The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. […] if cosmos is to mean anything, it must embrace, literally, everything ‒ including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act.24

The history and legacy of the politics of colonialism are part of this cosmological frame. Details about the Pinochet regime that are expanded in the later part of the film should also be understood as part of the interconnected cosmopolitical world the film elaborates. The Pearl Button turns its attention to the brutality of the Pinochet regime most fully in the final third of the film. After having directed numerous films concerned with the dictatorship and its legacies, in this film, Guzmán casts this period in relation to colonial histories and Chile’s expansive coastline and proximity to the sea. Indeed, the ocean is tied into the cause and effect of national political history. This sequence begins with a group of survivors of the Dawson concentration camp (once an Indigenous mission), gathered in a room. As they pose for a photo, the voice-over states: ‘They were victims of the violence the Indigenous peoples knew only too well. In Chile, impunity accumulated over centuries.’ Shifting to a satellite view of the Chilean coastline, Guzmán’s voice-over goes on to describe how, during the years of the regime, a body washed up in the same region where his friend had vanished: It wasn’t the body of a child. It was the body of a woman. Nobody knew who she was. People began to suspect that the ocean was a cemetery. Thirty years later, several off icers of the dictatorship confessed that perhaps a few people had been thrown into the sea. One of them was Maria Ugarte, the woman from the beach.

The lawyer hired by Maria’s family describes the body, ‘Her eyes are open, and she is looking at us. Her eyes are intact, which is unusual for a body a long time underwater.’ A black and white photo of Maria’s face appears on screen for a few seconds. The body of Maria Ugarte mirrors the body of the unnamed Indigenous man shown earlier in The Pearl Button at the feet of an Indian hunter. 24 Bruno Latour, ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge, 10.3 (2004), pp. 450-462 (p. 454).

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Both appear to the viewer in grainy, static monochrome. Photographs of corpses do not produce images of the dead in the manner that images of death in process do. As Vivian Sobchack describes, the abrupt action imposed on the lived body to bring about death is a ‘transformation of the animated body into an inanimate corpse [that] denies formal reason’.25 The photograph of the corpse, while equally jarring, highlights the lived body’s status as matter. In Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán presents traumatic human experience through the spoken word in the form of interviews with the relatives of people who had disappeared or with those who had been imprisoned. In The Pearl Button, however, there are no such interviews. Instead, evidence relating to the Pinochet regime revolves around the material verif ication of death and dying. This is evident in the lawyer recounting the appearance of Maria’s face and eyes. This description is echoed by an even more macabre sequence, one in which Guzmán asks a journalist (who clearly has some knowledge of the process) to re-enact how prisoners were killed by lethal injection, tied to a steel rail, and then wrapped up, ready to be dropped into the ocean from a helicopter. Three men carry out this ritual on screen. They are in a room with a dummy dressed in a blue shirt and jeans laid out on a trolley. The dummy is eventually wrapped in plastic bags and sacks. The journalist then recounts how Maria, to wash ashore, must have regained consciousness in the helicopter, been unwrapped, killed, and then not rewrapped properly before being interred in the sea. Guzmán then tells us that ‘According to judicial reports, the Chilean Armed Forces dropped between 1,200 and 1,400 people into the ocean, dead or alive. They were assisted by many civilians. They hoped the sea would keep a secret of the crime.’ The visual exploration of matter – objects, bodies (real or virtual), and the process of dying combines with the spoken descriptions to compel the viewer to contemplate mortality. The statistics that follow must then be seen in the light of this individual death, multiplied. At the outset of the sequence, Guzmán states that he ‘decided to reconstruct the last moments of a victim in order to believe it’. The purpose of the re-enactment, I suggest, is to believe the ‘truth’ of what happened and to make it knowable. Extending the existential questioning of the essay film, this focus on materiality is also about how people die, as well as how they look when they are dead or decaying. Pivotal in this context is death 25 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9.4 (1984), pp. 283-300 (p. 290).

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as the result of murder, the brutality of human actions, and our material existence in the face of this. This existentialism becomes ecological or cosmological in the way it is tied to the ocean. This is particularly evident later, near the end of the film, when a diver tasked with finding the rails decades later finds a rail with a button fused to the steel. With underwater photography, we are taken into the depths of the ocean, and, in this otherworldly place, the button, joined to encrusted rusted metal, fills the screen. The camera lingers on a rail after it is brought ashore, an artefact that is richly textured with colours of corrosion as if they are sedimented layers. The voice-over states, Forty years later the rails have become covered with marks. Water and its creatures have engraved these messages. Here are the secrets that the bodies left on the rails before melting into the ocean and taking on the shape of the ocean. Observing each of the rails, other remains were discovered. […] This button is the only trace of someone who had been there.

The person attached to the rail has long since decayed, their matter becoming part of the ocean. The button evokes multiple meanings – the loss of an individual, the savage way they died and their remains disposed of, and the constancy and secrecy of the deep sea. Most significantly, however, it evokes a humanism, and a way of being human that highlights mortality, a lack of agency in the face of the cosmos, and the continuity between humans and other forms of life as matter. The Pearl Button again adjusts human scale by reducing human existence to matter, suggesting the process by which victims are absorbed by the ocean’s volume. This sits against the references to the actions of the armed forces, which register darker ways of being human. In his discussion of Nostalgia for the Light, Nilo Couret describes the debates that have criticized Guzmán for shifting away ‘from the more explicit radical politics of his early work to […] an introspective filmmaking defined by a nostalgia symptomatic of the isolation and privatization of neoliberalism’.26 Couret describes how this is also posed as a move away from collective identity and towards the experiential and the personal. As Couret appropriately argues, ‘This supposes that the politics of the image is only a function of its explicit content; that is, presenting the public and the

26 Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form’, p. 72.

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collective is enough to make the film and its politics public and collective’.27 The problem of politics is again tied to the formal structures of the lyrical essay, a mode that is ruminative rather than explanatory. Like any art form, it invites the viewer to participate in the construction of meaning, interpreting the relationships that contribute to its entanglement of ideas, images, and questions. In The Pearl Button, even more than in Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán attempts a far reaching political project. Not only does he represent Chile’s difficult and violent past, he does so by reframing and exploring ways of being human, linking the two in a cosmopolitics. Questions of human scale and materiality, and knowledge about both, interact to tie existential questioning to ontological concerns, to the problem of what exists and the ongoing relationships between and across the human and the non-human.

Simultaneous Duration In closing, I return to Montaigne and his reflection on how the ‘the world eternally turns round’, as his own corporeal reality shifts and changes with time. This not only poses the subjective experience of time passing against the observable change of the natural world, it also indicates the essay’s capacity to grapple with complex notions of time. Expository documentary, to return to this comparison again, often conveys history as a series of past events that are retrieved in their fullness upon retelling, presenting a more or less linear account of cause and effect. The imaginative form of the lyrical essay, as Sarah Shoenburn notes, ‘sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of ideas, circumstance, and language ‒ a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning’.28 Inevitably, such an ‘uncharted course’ will unsettle the notion that history is composed as a singular arrow of time. My discussion of The Pearl Button has referred to the past in relation to the film’s movement from a representation of nature, histories of colonialism, and then the military dictatorship. This infers a chronological notion of the past in which one event follows another. While The Pearl Button follows this chronology, to understand the film via a linear course would be misleading – the film 27 Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form’, p. 72. 28 Sarah Shoenburn, ‘The Seneca Review: Introducing, Def ining, and Promoting the Lyric Essay’, Essay Daily [website] 2010, [http://www.essaydaily.org/search?q=Stephen+Kuusisto+a nd+Ralph+James+Savarese], accessed 4 December 2017.

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also, I suggest, asks the viewer to perceive these histories as a simultaneous duration. By way of conclusion, I build on the points I have made so far about the unsettling of humanism and the centrality of the human subject, and extend them into a consideration of the film’s temporal address. Not only does The Pearl Button offer memory an important place in its discourse (the recollections of interviewees and Guzmán himself), it also, as I have noted, forgoes the expert accounts of historical events and replaces them with subjective commentary about the meaning of Chile’s past. Moreover, it ties this meaning into the ontology and past of the non-human world. Memory (and nostalgia) has been a key concern of Guzman’s work and scholars have theorized this focus in his film-making. Nostalgia for the Light has garnered perhaps the most intense scrutiny in this respect due to its explicit meditation on time. With its essayist style, a concern with astronomy and the relatives and survivors of the Pinochet regime, it stands as a companion piece to The Pearl Button. Couret discusses Nostalgia for the Light in terms of the intersection between cinema and astronomy, exploring how the film plays with issues of scale: ‘its thematic and formal registers, toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic in order to tease out the corporeal implications of scale and its relation to the past’.29 While I am also interested in scale, I understand The Pearl Button, as I have noted, as more concerned with rethinking the centrality of the human rather than posing scale as a transcendent measure. David Martin-Jones asserts a more non-anthropocentric function for Nostalgia for the Light, observing how memory is a ‘much larger phenomenon’, encompassing the different elements of the film, from the Chilean diaspora, prehistoric humans, and the origins of life on earth: ‘It is not simply that the personal extends into the political in terms of a collective or national identity, but into a universal (in the literal sense) concern with history, and humanity’s place in it.’30 I take Martin-Jones interpretation even further, exploring how The Pearl Button not only figures the place of humanity in history, but recasts and displaces it through a particular evocation of duration. The Pearl Button begins with the block of quartz with a drop of water trapped in it, signifying a 3000-year relationship of stasis and mutuality. It ends with references to water and the stars. The different and mutable states of water fill the screen as Guzmán narrates: ‘They say that water has memory. I believe it also has a voice. If we were to get very close to it we’d be able to hear the voices of each of the Indians and the disappeared.’ This 29 Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form’, p. 69. 30 Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’, p. 710.

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is followed by shots of the Kawésqar interviewees looking silently at the camera as it zooms out. The haunting faces of the Selk’nam men again fill the screen as the narration states: The Indians of Patagonia believed that souls didn’t die, and that they could live again, as stars […] Not long ago, very far away, a Quasar was discovered full of water vapour. It holds 120 million times more water than all of our seas. How many wandering souls might find refuge in this vast ocean that’s drifting in the void?

These statements are not simply about the past, they are also about the present and durational time, or time passing, in ways that perceive the past as a condition for the present. The memory that Guzmán attributes to water is not an anthropomorphic fantasy, but rather refers to controversial research into how water molecules change depending on the objects they have come into contact with.31 For Guzmán, there is the possibility that water carries the ‘memory’ of the humans it has come into contact with, and he bends this with an aural apparition (the voices of the disappeared) in ways that echo the earlier sequence exploring the sonic synthesis of the human and the aquatic. With memory and voices attributed to water, the film’s ending suggests that there is an aquatic continuity, one that maintains awareness of and testifies to the violence of human events. Likewise, the faces of the Kawésqar interviewees affirm, even challenge, the viewer not to recognize that, rather than lost and past, their cultures exist in the present, either as watery voices or living descendants. The photographed faces of the Selk’nam men are static in comparison but Guzmán’s treatment, because it unquestioningly conveys the possibility, that they might persist, existing as part of the Quasar, suggests they are also not relegated only to the past. The different human entities in this cosmopolitics exist alongside one another, with the relation between nature and culture one of consequence and elaboration, a form of mutual emergent complexity in the present. Henri Bergson, a philosopher primarily concerned with the metaphysics of time, holds that duration must always be regarded as a continuity in 31 In 1988, French immunologist, Jacques Benveniste, published findings in the prestigious science journal Nature that water retained a ‘memory’ of substances previously dissolved in it even after multiple dilutions. This supported the premise of homeopathy. The f indings were controversial and, despite numerous attempts, the findings have not been replicated by subsequent studies under controlled conditions.

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the present instant. The ‘present necessarily occupies a duration’ that is a singular whole.32 When duration is interrupted, it becomes time. I am interested in how the final sequences point to the multiple durations of the film, with Indigenous culture, the events and atrocities of the Pinochet regime, and the continuities of geography, ocean, and the stars registering interlocking duration, an unbroken present moment. Elizabeth Grosz’s description of Bergson’s duration encapsulates this possibility: Duration is both singular and a multiplicity. Each duration, each movement, each act forms a continuity, a single indivisible whole; and yet, there are many simultaneous durations, as many perhaps as there are actions, which implies that all durations participate in or can be linked through a generalized cosmological duration, which allows them to be described as simultaneous.33

If the film asks the viewer to register simultaneous duration where geological or evolutionary duration is concerned, as Grosz also notes, we ‘may def ine the present in terms of centuries or even millennia’.34 What are the ramifications of understanding The Pearl Button’s conception of time as a simultaneous cosmological present? For my purposes, one of the most significant issues is the decentring of human duration, understanding it to be subordinated to, and witnessed by, the open duration of the non-human. The focus on the matter of the rails, the button, and the corpse (and the objects that facilitate death) infer the concrete duration of ‘things’, rather than memory, tying them into the continuum of material universe. If the expert and their incontrovertible knowledge is disrupted by the film, this is done in ways that locate their subjectivity alongside nature not only spatially (in the garden settings Guzmán prefers), but also temporally, in a simultaneous duration, rather than suspended in time, above, removed, and classifying nature. I suggest the lyricism and associations of the essay film allow this simultaneous duration to emerge precisely because it elaborates a web of ideas, juxtaposing different events rather than seeking the causal relationships that structure linear history. 32 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 137. 33 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004), p. 183. 34 Grosz, The Nick of Time, p. 177.

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Bibliography Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988). British Film Institute. ‘Patricio Guzmán talks about The Pearl Button: BFI London Film Festival’. BFI YouTube Channel. 16 October 2015. [https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HF2-kCU7wz0], accessed 18 December 2017. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013). Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Couret, Nilo. ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmáns Nostalgia for the Light (2011)’. Discourse 39.1 (2017), pp. 67-91. Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). de Montaigne, Michel. Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays (Dover, MA: Courier Corporation, 2013). Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crow’s Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2004). Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Hughes, Helen. Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014). Hynes, Eric. ‘Interview: Patricio Guzmán’. Film Comment, 22 October 2015. [https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-patricio-guzman/], accessed 4 December 2017. Latour, Bruno. ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck’. Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004), pp. 450-62. Lorimer, Jamie. ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’. Social Studies of Science 47.1 (2017), pp. 117-142. Martin-Jones, David. ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’. Third Text, 27.6 (2013), pp.707-722. Nelson, Max. ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: The Films of Patricio Guzmán’. Cinema Scope 63 (2015), pp. 13-15. Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009). Renov, Michael. ‘Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction’, in Theorizing Documentary, ed. by Micheal Renov (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-12. Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. ‘Framing Ruins: Patricio Guzmán’s Postdictatorial Documentaries’. Latin American Perspectives 40.1 (2013), pp. 131-144.

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Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Shoenburn, Sarah. ‘The Seneca Review: Introducing, Defining, and Promoting the Lyric Essay’. Essay Daily, 10 November 2010. [http://www.essaydaily.org/search? q=Stephen+Kuusisto+and+Ralph+James+Savarese], accessed 4 December 2017. Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9.4 (1984), pp. 283-300. Traverso, Antonio. ‘Nostalgia, Memory, and Politics in Chilean Documentaries of Return’, in Dictatorships in the Hispanic World: Transatlantic and Transnational Perspectives, ed. by Patricia Swier and Julia Riordan-Goncalves (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 49-78. Traverso, Antonio, and Kristi Wilson (eds.). Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2013). Trinh, T Minh-Ha. Framer Framed (London: Routledge, 1992). Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

About the Author Belinda Smaill is an Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests encompass women and cinema, Australian film and television, and documentary film. Most recently, she has been researching non-fiction screen media, animals, and the environment. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (SUNY Press, 2016), and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

8. Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay Julia Vassilieva

Abstract In this chapter, I explore the relevance of early Russian montage theory and practice to new issues raised by the shift from the essay film to the audiovisual essay. I investigate how, specifically, Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of the new type of cinema of ideas formulated in his project for filming Marx’s Das Kapital, Dziga Vertov’s foregrounding of subjectivity and reflexivity in The Man with a Movie Camera, and Esphir Shub’s practice of ‘compilation film’ contributed to the emergence of the essay film and continue to stimulate the theory and practice of the audiovisual essayism. Keywords: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Esphir Shub, montage, audiovisual essay, compilation film

One of the most promising ways of going ‘beyond the essay film’ that we have witnessed over the last decade is that of the audiovisual scholarly essay, or videographic film studies. Taking the field of audiovisual production as its sole, albeit complex and diverse, object of interest, the audiovisual essay uses the possibilities of the medium itself to conduct a range of analytical, critical, reflexive, or aesthetic procedures on this object, resulting in an impressive array of ‘works’. Its genealogical link to the essay film in all these respects is evident and has been widely acknowledged. Arguably, the audiovisual essay has emerged from the productive encounter between cinephilia and the analytical impulse to investigate those parameters of cinematic experience, that, in Paul Willemen’s words, often ‘escape the existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks’.1 Capitalizing on the new technical 1 Paul Willemen, ‘Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered’ (interview with Noel King), in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 228.

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch08

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possibilities afforded by the digital revolution, the burgeoning and varied field of audiovisual criticism operates at the intersection of film theory, pedagogy, and creative practice, producing hundreds of works, dedicated online platforms that curate and present such works, and an ever growing array of names carrying an impressive cache of audiographic auteurism. However, theorizations of the audiovisual critical essay have been lagging behind its practical experiments. This chapter therefore aims to situate current discussion of the genre within a longer history of 20th-century film-making and scholarship and asks, specifically, how the legacy of the Russian montage school of cinema can inform an understanding of the audiovisual essay. Montage, indeed, has emerged as one of the key factors in the production of the audiovisual essay. Regardless of the taxonomies used to differentiate types of audiovisual essays – ranging from Christian Keathley’s simple binary division of the f ield into ‘explanatory’ and ‘poetic’ audiovisual essays2 to the more complex taxonomies suggested by Thomas van den Berg and Miklós Kiss3 – audiovisual essays in each and every category rely on the radical, resolute, and challenging use of montage procedures. As Tony Zhou puts it in his audiovisual essay ‘F for fake’ (1973): How to structure a video essay (2015): ‘It’s not what you get, it’s how you cut it.’ In order to situate this discussion more specifically in the landscape of contemporary debates on the genealogy and transformation of cinematic language, I want to place my ideas in dialogue with David Bordwell’s notion of ‘intensified continuity’, a notion that Bordwell introduced to describe the changing character of narrative film style at the beginning of the 21st century. I would like to propose that the strategies of the audiovisual essay can be aptly characterized as intensified discontinuity. Just as intensified continuity is produced through the use of fairly traditional techniques at a different level of intensity, the audiovisual essay uses a well-established technique of montage; however, in this case, the montage is amped up and raised to a higher pitch of emphasis. Yet, if, in introducing his polemical term, Bordwell aims to defend feature films against accusations of narrative incoherence and stylistic fragmentation, likewise, I want to demonstrate that 2 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia’, in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 3 Thomas van den Berg and Miklós Kiss, Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (Scalar, 2016).

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the intensified discontinuity of the audiovisual essay achieves a remarkable synthesis of meaning despite its apparently disjunctive nature. 4 Given the possibilities of non-linear editing afforded by the new generation of software, the format of the audiovisual essay allows the author to recut footage of the film under scrutiny, often with the addition of textual commentaries either in the form of intertitles or voice-over narration, to explore, demonstrate, and comment on a range of interesting or significant features of that film or to make more complex arguments concerning film aesthetics, history, reception, or politics. For the audiovisual essay, montage thus serves not only as a formal strategy or as a representational device, but also as a distinct meaning-making analytics. It is both the aesthetic and the conceptual possibilities of montage as a strategy in a broad sense that I investigate in this chapter. What interests me is how uses of montage are changing with the transition from the essay film to the audiovisual essay, and how the recourse to early theory and practice can help us understand better the advantages and limitations of the audiovisual essay genre. I specifically focus on the legacy of three Russian early montage practitioners: Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Esphir Shub.

Vertov It has become customary to include The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as a major reference point in the genealogy of the essay film. The film is often described as a ‘city-symphony’, and yet, Vertov announces in the opening credits of the film that is an ‘Excerpt from a diary of a cameraman’. As John MacKay’s analysis demonstrates, Vertov originally conceived it as a film about film – so much so that it was ‘justified to the Ukrainian censorship board as another film on the “production” thematic – that is, as an educational film about film production’.5 As MacKay argues further ‘it turns out that an interest in the dynamic interaction between camera/film and reality’ informed Vertov’s ideas from the outset. He first proposed the title Man with a Movie Camera in a notebook jotting from 27 December 1925, where he suggested ‘subsuming the rest [of the film’s] themes to [the theme of “man with a movie camera”]’.6 Hence, the heightened, carefully planned self-reflexivity of the film, in which 4 David Bordwell, ‘Intensified Continuity. Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly 55. 3, (2002), pp. 16-28. 5 John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), An Introduction, [https:// www.academia.edu/4090580/_Man_with_a_Movie_Camera_An_Introduction_], p. 7. 6 John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 11.

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the cinematic apparatus is itself the main theme, visual motif, and narrative motor. From shooting to editing and projection, the processes of cinematic production are given the same weight, screen presence, and significance in the film as the various aspects of early Soviet life depicted in it. MacKay remarks that ‘Few films, […], are so effective at making us aware of their representational and “constructed” or rhetorical levels simultaneously’.7 Moreover, in Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov investigates and, at the same time, constructs new kinds of vision and perception. It is in this sense that the film is radically experimental – beyond the narrow definition of ‘experimental cinema’ developed in the disciplinary context of film studies. As Vertov states in the opening credits: ‘This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of observable events.’ Vertov interrogates the role of cinema as an instrument of vision and tests hypotheses about how the sensual sphere is transformed as a result of the increased mediation, instrumentalization, and acceleration brought about by modernity. The new vision mediated by what Vertov famously called the ‘cine-eye’ heralds new ways not only of perceiving the world, but of engaging with it more broadly in mechanically empowered, socially liberated, and aesthetically creative ways. Covering various spheres of contemporary Soviet life – from industrial production to recreation and sport, and from transportation to commerce and domestic arrangements – Vertov integrates them within a unified image of life on the go, in its unfolding, in its perpetual movement forward, as registered by the camera. As MacKay suggests, this is achieved to a large degree through the use of rhythm – the legacy of Vertov’s preoccupation with sound, music, and poetry early in his career: Vertov uses visual rhythms as a strategy for binding viewers together and to the new, ‘superhuman’ tempi of modern industrial technology. Rhythm in Vertov’s films – which I would define simply as a demonstratively rigorous patterning of film footage, involving any number of configurations of difference and similarity – this rhythm mediates between free creativity and productive labor, to be sure, but also between people as social beings, and indeed between human beings and non-human things.8

If these three aspects of Vertov’s work – its heightened self-reflexivity, its experimental nature, and its use of rhythm as a broad aesthetic and philosophical strategy – exerted a significant influence on the development 7 8

John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 22. John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 32.

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of the essay film, their relevance to the format of the audiovisual essay can be seen as definitive. The audiovisual essay capitalizes on the potent way in which self-reflexivity can be achieved through montage methods heralded by The Man with a Movie Camera. While montage, of course, is not a sole means of achieving self-reflexivity in cinema, from Bergman and Godard to Kiarostami, film history provides many powerful examples of mobilizing montage’s ability to juxtapose and contrast points of views and perspectives, to rapture the film texture by inserting an authorial figure or voice to achieve self-reflexive distancing. The audiovisual essay takes this attitude even further, dramatizing the split between being and observing even more radically: epistemology, in this case, precedes ontology, as powerfully demonstrated by Richard Misek’s The Definition of Film (2015). For the audiovisual essay, self-reflexivity is not just a strategy, it is its raison d’être. The audiovisual essay announces itself unambiguously as a commentary, an investigation, or an analysis of a media text delivered from a distance. And yet, it is also always driven by another tendency, which can be described as a desire to ‘inhabit’ the media text under investigation.9 Thus, the practice of the audiovisual essay tends asymptotically towards merging with the film it reflects upon but never quite reaches that vanishing point, always remaining at least once removed from the original – an ‘unattainable text’ in Raymond Bellour’s terminology.10 Furthermore, while the essay film has often been loosely subsumed under the category of experimental cinema, the audiovisual essay returns us to experimental practice in this early Vertovian sense. Armed with their ‘digital stylos’, the practitioners of audiovisual essayism often set out to explore what can be seen with the use of the new technological instruments and which couldn’t be seen before. And they often explicitly describe their practice as an experiment whose hypotheses are only vaguely formulated at the outset, if not altogether absent, such that the experiment takes the form of an open-ended exploration. As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin note about the work of Catherine Grant, one of the leading practitioners of audiovisual essayism: For Grant, ‘essay’ means ‘experiment’ – as in the laboratory-like assembly of film/media samples, music, and text in various formats (graphic as well 9 I am drawing an analogy here with Timothy Corrigan’s use of the term ‘inhabit’ to describe the essay film’s relationship to its theme. See Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, trans. by Ben Brewster, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.

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as spoken). Her experiments frequently take a very contemporary artistic form: the dispositif, a game-structure in which parameters are set and then patiently carried out, with the results to be studied and sometimes tinkered with and taken further, perhaps in a future audiovisual piece.11

Finally, rhythm, in the form pioneered by Vertov in The Man with a Movie Camera and described by MacKay ‘as a demonstratively rigorous patterning of film footage, involving any number of configurations of difference and similarity’, has become one of the main strategies of the audiovisual essay. It facilitates the exploration of specific regularities in a film-maker’s style and visual motifs as, for example, in Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s Melville Variations (2013), Kogonada’s Ozu//Passageways (2012), or Kogonada’s Breaking Bad//POV (2012). Rhythm has acquired such a powerful role in structuring the audiovisual essay precisely because of its ability (highlighted by MacKay in relation to Vertov) to mediate between different sets of materials, transferring ‘patterns’ from one to another ‘without abolishing their differences’.12 However, if for Vertov, this capacity of rhythm has broader anthropological, social, and political meaning, the audiovisual essay typically mobilizes rhythm as an aesthetic strategy, often to reinforce the aesthetic potential of the material it explores. Vertov’s expertise in music facilitated his virtuoso use of rhythm in film, and it was also from music that he derived his notion of the interval as an organizing principle of montage. As in music, the concept of interval in Vertov’s cinema simultaneously implies difference and similarity, break and resonance. Vertov argues that: ‘Film-Eye’ builds ‘film-things’ out of shots according to the ‘theory of intervals’. This theory is based on the perceptual relationship of one shot composition to another; on the transition and juxtaposition between visual impulses. This connection between the shots based on ‘intervals’ is very complex, and consists of many interactions. Among the most important are: (1) the interaction of shot scales (close-up, medium-shot, etc.), (2) the interaction of angles, (3) the interaction of movements within the shots, (4) the interaction of light and dark, (5) the interaction of shooting speed.13 11 Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘The audiovisual essay as art practice’, NECSUS, Spring 2015, ‘Animals’, Web. 12 John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 32. 13 Quoted in Vlada Petric, ‘Dziga Vertov as Theorist’, Cinema Journal 18.1 (1978), pp. 29-44 (p. 36).

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In her recent book How the Essay Film Thinks, Laura Rascaroli invokes Vertov’s concept of interval as the first attempt to foreground, investigate, and mobilize filmic ‘in-betweenness’ as an instrument of thinking. For Rascaroli, in-betweenness as a condition of disjuncture is at the very core of the essay film. She writes: ‘It is through a disjunctive practice, I argue, that the essay film articulates its thinking and, in particular, its nonverbal thinking. […] What I want to investigate in this book is how disjunction is to be found at the core of the essay film’s diverse signifying practices, among which the verbal is only one of several levels of intelligence.’14 In-betweenness is also central to the practice of the audiovisual essay and, arguably, it works by stretching and amplifying the intervals that can be found in the original text while preserving some correspondences of the initial organizing principles. Such ‘disjunctive practice’ works by mobilizing not only intervals between shots within the same film but often ‘intervals’ between different films, turning gaps into radical breaks that become the sources of new dialectical juxtapositions and new resonances. Margarida Leitão’s Gestures of Realism (Gestos do realismo, 2016), which explores Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di dio, Roberto Rosselini, 1950) and At Land (Maya Deren, 1944), and Cristina Álvarez López’s Games (2009) on Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1948) and Ivan’s Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo, Andrei Tarkovski, 1962) use this strategy to establish powerful and unexpected resonances between the films coming from what is customarily believed to be vastly different traditions.

Eisenstein At this point, we might invoke another great master of cinema and the most profound theoretician of montage: Vertov’s perennial opponent, Sergei Eisenstein. While producing his early silent films – Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1927) – Eisenstein also formulated and developed the tenets of his montage theory. In doing so, he strove to elaborate a taxonomy of montage methods and also to account for the mechanisms, both cinematic and psychological, of montage’s effectiveness. Eisenstein differentiated five types of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual montage. Introducing metric montage, Eisenstein states that ‘The fundamental criterion for this construction is the absolute length of the pieces. The pieces are joined together according to their lengths, 14 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), p.17.

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in a formula-scheme corresponding to a measure of music. Realization is in repetition of these “measures”’.15 Examples of metric montage can be found in Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (Odinadzatyi, 1928), in the scene of patriotic demonstration in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (Konetz St Peterburga, 1927), and in the ‘lezginka’ sequence in Eisenstein’s October. Eisenstein’s second montage method, rhythmic montage is based on both length and content. Eisenstein explains: ‘Here the actual length does not coincide with the mathematically determined length of the piece according to a metric formula. Here practical length derives from the specifics of the piece, and from its planned length according to the structure of the sequence.’16 The most famous use of this type of montage is, of course, in the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence in Potemkin. According to Eisenstein, tonal montage, as his third type of montage, departs from strictly mechanical movement that is instrumental in both metric and rhythmic montage, and is instead based on dominant mood: ‘In tonal montage, movement is perceived in a wider sense. The concept of movement embraces all affects of the montage piece. Here montage is based on the characteristic emotional sound of the piece – its dominant. The general tone of the piece.’17 Such emotional effect is generated by light and graphic movement within the filmic sequence, and Eisenstein argues that he achieved the clearest realization of this type of montage in the ‘fog sequence’ (preceding the scene of mourning) in Potemkin. The stillness, the ‘optical light-vibrations (varying degrees of “haze” and “luminosity”)’, and a minor harmony in music are artfully combined in this sequence to produce the sense of a pause filled with tragic anticipation.18 Eisenstein was fully aware, however, that it is neither possible nor desirable to employ just one montage method. Indeed, in film-making practice, they overlap, with each consecutive method subsuming, integrating, and reconfiguring the economy of the previous one. These considerations led him to examine the issue of the ‘dominant’ as a method of controlling meaning produced through montage. He came to the conclusion that, while ‘orthodox montage is montage on dominant’, his work required a more nuanced, complex, and diversified use of montage.19 15 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 72-83 (p. 72). 16 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, p. 74. 17 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, p. 75. 18 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, p. 76. 19 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, in Sergei Eisenstein, Writings, 1922-1934, Vol. I, ed. by Richard Taylor, pp. 181-194, p. 182.

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For this reason, Eisenstein introduced the notion of the overtonal method of montage, based on the more subtle expressive resonances of ‘overtones’ and ‘undertones’ – a method he pioneered in his Old and New (Staroye i Novoe, 1929) also known as The General Line. Eisenstein argued that overtonal montage ‘is not constructed on the individual dominant but takes the sum of stimuli of all the stimulants as the dominant’,20 and he conceptualized such organization in political as well as aesthetic terms: ‘The “aristocracy” of unambiguous dominants was replaced by the method of “democratic” equal rights for all the stimulants, viewed together as a complex.’21 This definition anticipates Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the political implications of vertical (centralized) versus horizontal (decentralized) discursive arrangements, whereby he describes the latter as a ‘topography that does not presuppose [a] position of mastery’.22 For Rancière, as for Eisenstein before him, the horizontal arrangements are valuable because they facilitate new distributions ‘of the visible’, allowing things that were previously invisible to come into focus, both literally and metaphorically. There is thus a tension inherent in montage, as the meanings produced through montage are not stable. Eisenstein himself acknowledged this indeterminacy when he emphasized that the dominant aspect of a shot is not ‘independent, absolute and invariably stable’ but ‘variable and profoundly relative’, concluding: ‘A shot will never become a letter, but remains a polysemous hieroglyph.’23 The polysemous nature of montage juxtaposed with its didactic intention to convey a specific message can be thought of both as the greatest aporia and the greatest potential of montage. While considerable emphasis has been placed on the role of montage editing in Eisenstein’s films in realizing a didactic intention, or concretizing a particular theme or idea, montage could also facilitate opening up an indeterminate range of potential readings, thus being inherently disruptive.24 The distinct advantage of using montage as an organizing principle of the audiovisual essay can thus be related to montage’s ‘capacity to generate analytics and anti-analytics while maintaining a space for the invisible’.25 20 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, p. 183. 21 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, p. 182. 22 Jacques Rancière (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 49. 23 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, p. 182. 24 See also Julia Vassilieva, ‘Sergei Eisenstein and Philosophy’, Film and Philosophy, ed. by Bernd Herzogenrath, Minnesota University Press, 2017. 25 Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev, ‘Introduction’, in Transcultural Montage (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), p.1.

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For many authors and consumers of audiovisual essays, this ‘invisible’ that the format allows to capture goes to the very core of cinematic experience – variously described as cinephiliac moments, epiphany, or photogenie. The format of the audiovisual essay allows the essay to address them effectively and precisely by creating the space for the invisible and the unsaid, which is achieved, by and large, by using montage procedure. Eisenstein’s methods can be easily recognized in contemporary audiovisual criticism, which routinely uses the metric, graphic, and rhythmic techniques of montage to demonstrate recurrent stylistic patterns, while mobilizing tonal and overtonal montage to explore regularities in subject matter across a number of films. Richard Misek’s Mapping Rohmer (2012) exemplif ies how tonal montage can be used to explore a f ilm-maker’s thematic concerns across a body of works, while Catherine Grant’s Ne Me Quitte Pas (2018) amps up ‘subtle expressive resonances of overtones and undertones’ already established between Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) and Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) in her earlier work Therese & Carol & Alec & Laura (A Brief Encounter) (2017) to intensify the dialogue between the two films separated by 70 years. Returning to Eisenstein’s original conceptualization of montage methods can be helpful in understanding the implications of their use, especially when considering how an audiovisual essay can be caught between its author’s desire to make an argument – to provide a strong structure based on dominants – and their attempt to capture and convey what Roland Barthes described as a ‘third’ or ‘obtuse’ meaning, beyond the information or symbolism that the film imparts – a meaning that resists signification (and which Barthes first identified while writing about Eisenstein’s cinema).26 Arguably, however, most relevant to the form of the audiovisual essay is the fifth principle of Eisenstein’s montage theory: intellectual montage. The idea of intellectual montage occurred to Eisenstein while he was working on October and beginning to consider how he could possibly film Karl Marx’s Capital.27 Commenting on Eisenstein’s efforts to present montage as a privileged mode of analytic investigation, Annette Michelson writes: Eisenstein worked in October to develop, as ‘a ladder to a completely different idea of cinema’, the technique which could induce a cognitive grasp, 26 Roland Barthes (trans. Stephen Heath), Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana), 1977. 27 See also Julia Vassilieva, “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011, Web.

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not only of abstract concepts as such, in the material concreteness of their class determination, but of the very forms and methods of discourse.28

Eisenstein saw October as a departure from narrative descriptive cinema towards discursive cinema, which paves the way for a future move towards the ‘film treatise’– cinema operating with abstract concepts: After the drama, poem, ballad in film, OCTOBER presents a new form of cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes that constitute OCTOBER. Assuming that in any film work, certain salient phrases are given importance, the form of a discursive film provides, apart from unique renewal of strategies, their rationalization which takes these strategies into account. Here’s a point of contact already with completely new film perspectives and with the glimmers of possibilities to be realized in CAPITAL, a new work on a libretto by Karl Marx. A film treatise.29

Here Eisenstein identifies the radical difference between this new, ‘treatise’ cinema and previous forms of cinema: the new films would provide not only new strategies but also ‘their rationalization which takes these strategies into account’. Such cinema becomes reflexive in a fundamental sense – it is the film that simultaneously ‘thinks’ its theme, capital, and ‘thinks itself’, or the possibilities of its own medium. Eisenstein’s early thoughts regarding intellectual montage thus anticipated what Lev Manovich describes as a challenge of multimedia writing: ‘Not only to convey complex ideas through multimedia, but to take the reader along the process of thinking.’30 In its most radical experiments and theoretical reflections, the contemporary audiovisual essay strives to put Eisenstein’s ideal of intellectual montage into practice. An impressive example of getting close to intellectual montage can be found in Christian Keathley’s Pass the Salt (2017), which combines the multifaceted and multimedial exploration of material elements and historical laws to illuminate the hidden semantics of the mise en scène. Yet, Eisenstein’s epic failure to realize this project himself by filming Capital can be taken as a lesson here: intellectual montage may mark the highest point in the development of montage theory, its limit case, but, at the same time, its impasse. For all the calls to supplant analytical, discursive, 28 Annette Michelson, ‘Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital’, October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-38, (p. 31). 29 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26, (p.4) (bold  in original). 30 Lev Manovich, ‘Jump over Proust: Toward Multimedia Writing’ (1997). Web.

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rational construction of arguments by the visual, the phenomenological, the representable in film studies, Eisenstein’s failure to do so in the realm of political economy and philosophy can serve as a cautionary tale. Further cautions can be derived from the practice of Esphir Shub.

Shub An editor and, later, a documentary film-maker in her own right, Esphir Shub’s name is most commonly associated with the notion of the ‘compilation film’, which is recognized as a significant predecessor of the audiovisual essay. Compilation film is also one of the oldest cinematic genres. Film history shows that compilations appeared almost as soon as cinema itself – as films left the production laboratory and entered the realm of commercial circulation, they were often recut and rearranged as ‘new products’. As Jay Leida observes in Films Beget Films: ‘As the sources multiplied with the growth of the new business, such second hand uses proliferated with astonishing speed, making combinations in which the cameramen of Edison and Pathé were later hard-pressed to recognise their own work.’31 Shub, however, took compilation to a new level, demonstrating rich possibilities inherent in re-editing for the purposes of historical, political, and philosophical commentaries. A friend of Mayakovski, Eisenstein, Vertov, Shklovsky, and Pudovkin, Shub entered the Soviet film industry in 1922, focussing initially on reediting and subtitling foreign films and pre-revolutionary Russian films for Soviet audiences. As Yuri Tsivian noted, such activity was widespread in the young Soviet film industry: the shrinking production of local films had to be compensated by imports, yet, these imported films had to be re-edited to make them ideologically compatible with the Bolshevik political vision.32 This was achieved in a variety of ways. Subtitles, for example, were of crucial importance: by changing dialogues and commentaries, the meaning of a film could be changed markedly. But narrative development in the imported films was routinely mutilated as well: the happy ending had to be eliminated as a positive resolution was deemed impossible under capitalism. Often, however, re-editing went beyond the ideological agenda and reflected more subtle aesthetic differences and choices. For example, 31 Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 13. 32 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s’, Film History 8.3 (1996), pp. 327-343.

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discussion raged over whether Soviet re-editors should adopt the faster cross-cutting favoured by American film-makers or the slower editing pace preferred by the Europeans. The re-editing culture also served as a fertile ground for the formulation of ambitious projects capitalizing on the possibilities offered by re-cutting, some of them strikingly similar to the ideas of audiographic film criticism that have blossomed in the early 21st century. As Tsivian noted, in 1926, the LEF film critic Viktor Pertsov published an article entitled ‘Film as Review’ (Film-retsenzija), which can be read as prophetic of audiovisual essayism. Pertsov proposed that, alongside fiction cinema, the film industry should produce films about fiction films that can be used as a visual means of educating cinema audiences. His article suggested specific strategies for conducting film criticism with visual means: The shots of such film will be similar to quotations, analogies, emphases or examples of regularities. Each intertitle of a film like that will work as a thesis. By intercutting some most representative fragments, this film-as-review will be able to compare different styles of direction and add filmic commentaries to them.33

The early Russian re-editing culture not only directly anticipated the emergence of audiovisual criticism, but gave birth to theoretical debates that rehearsed many issues that the practice of audiovisual essayism is currently grappling with, such as authorship and creativity. One such issue falls within the domain of philosophical inquiry into what is known as creativity under constraint. It could be said that, in their practical work, re-editors were testing the claim that creativity finds a condition of possibility in constraints – in this case, constraints imposed not only by various ideological demands, but also by a delimited, pre-existing material. For the authors of audiovisual essays today, constraint similarly functions as a given, at once a limitation and a challenge. In this respect, their experience corresponds to the wide spread understanding of re-editing as a quest or a salvation, as when re-editors were called upon to ‘save’ the film ruined by the studio directors. Victor Shklovsky, a famous literary critic and an author of the influential concept of defamiliarization, in particular developed a reputation for being talented in finding effective and unorthodox ways to salvage ruined films, with various studios competing for his help.

33 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game’, p. 338.

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Another notable aspect of the early Russian re-editors’ work that anticipated contemporary audiovisual essayism was their understanding of re-cutting as a game, their acknowledgement of the playfulness inherent in montage. Eisenstein characterized re-editing as ‘a wise and wicked game’, emphasizing how much ‘wit’ went into effective re-editing solutions.34 His assessment foregrounds montage’s subversive potential as a source of reinvention, rebellion, and freedom. As Eisenstein recalled, there was always a sense of dare, of an almost impossible challenge, and an exhilarating sense of triumph in producing a successful re-cut that would be narratively plausible, aesthetically coherent, and ideologically sound under the tightly constrained conditions of the Soviet regime. Enjoying the privilege of laptop digital sampling and editing software, today’s audiovisual essay makers have embraced the ‘game’ and ‘dare’ of re-cutting with a vengeance, turning long frustrated desires to explore alternative arrangements of the film material into reality. Eisenstein himself had a taste of re-editing working alongside Esphir Shub when, in March 1924, they re-cut Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) together for Russian release under the title Golden Rot.35 The fact that Eisenstein undertook this project in 1924, prior to making Strike, attests to the importance of re-editing as a laboratory, a learning experience, and as an experimental space for montage theory and practice. It is also significant that Eisenstein collaborated in this re-cutting with Shub, indicating that he had a deep appreciation and respect for her craft. Indeed, Shub quickly accumulated a wealth of experience; according to several sources, she re-cut approximately 200 films during the early years of her career. However, Shub’s most significant works were the three compilation films on Russian history which she conceived, researched, and produced. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Padenie dinastii romanovykh) of 1927, The Great Road (Veliky put’) also of 1927, and The Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoi (Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoi) of 1928 explore and provide a visual account of Russian history from the end of the nineteenth century through the October Revolution to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The production of the films was a major research exercise: as Vlada Petric reports, prior to producing these films, Shub located and viewed almost a million metres of newsreel footage, from which she selected shots to be included in the final 34 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game’, p. 337. 35 Golden Rot was screened in Russian cinemas, but the print didn’t survive. Two versions of intertitles in Russian that Eisenstein and Shub produced for the film are preserved in the Russian Government Archive of Literature and Art and were published in Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, no. 58, 2002.

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versions of her three films, compiling 6000 metres of eight hours’ duration altogether. As Petric notes, Shub structured these films as ‘cinematic essays’ and, in this respect, her work differed radically from other compilation films of the period: while the film chronicles were composed of newsreel footage merely illustrating various contemporary events, Shub’s compilation films were informed by ideological attitude or a broader theme.36 Shub had to recode the pre-revolutionary newsreels produced to create a picture of a prosperous country under the enlightened and benevolent rule of a monarch, into a persuasive picture of imperial Russia’s decline and disintegration, leading inevitably to the communist revolution as the only possible historical solution. She explained her objectives unambiguously: ‘The intention was, not so much to provide the facts, but to evaluate them from the vantage point of the revolutionary class. This is what made my films revolutionary and agitation – although they were composed of counter-revolutionary material.’37 Shub’s success in this enterprise was at once impressive and chilling: it demonstrated clearly, and ahead of the debate in film scholarship concerning ‘documentary’ truth and cinematic access to reality, that representations are not only constructed but can be reconstructed radically, altering the understanding of historical ‘facts’ fundamentally. In celebrating the freedom and power of re-editing afforded by the new generation of digital tools, the video essayists should perhaps take Shub’s example as a cautionary tale, demonstrating that, while new perspectives can be opened up by re-editing, there is also a real danger of losing the original vision of the film under investigation. Yet, on the other hand, one has a powerful sense in watching Shub’s compilation films that history, ‘irreducibly complex, full of details, and objectively existing outside of artistic will’,38 can shine through her re-editings, overcoming a circumscribed ideological meaning imposed on the footage and testifying to Shub’s commitment to the ‘ontological authenticity’ of the medium.39 Shub’s practice is instructive for contemporary audiovisual essayism in yet another regard. Uninterested in theorizing montage in the ways that Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein did, Shub developed what can be described as a ‘montage mode of thinking’ – a practical, embodied, intuitive way of 36 Vlada Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Cinema Is My Life’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.4 (1978), pp. 429-448 (p. 441). 37 Quoted in Petric ‘Esther Shub’, p. 431. 38 Anastasiya Osipova, ‘Difficult Facts. Esfir Shub and the Problem of Realism’, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2011, Web. 39 Shub insisted: ‘Authentic material [podlinnii material] is something that gives life to a documentary film, regardless of the fact that it might be composed of archival footage or shot by the filmmaker’, quoted in Petric, ‘Esther Shub’, p. 437.

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working with footage on the editing table, where ‘manual thinking’ often went ahead of rationalization. While she was never able to formulate the rules of effective montage, she insisted that the only way of mastering it was through practice: I began by simply watching films in the auditorium, then analyzing them on the editing table, which is essential for every director. This helped me to learn how to judge correctly the technical execution and composition of the shot. Slowly, I developed the capacity of memorizing each shot, particularly its inner content, rhythm, movement and tempo in general. Then, there always arrived a moment when I began to feel sure at what point it was necessary and imperative to cut from a long to a medium shot, or from a medium to close-up, and vice versa. Finally, I became fully aware of the magic power of the scissors in the hands of a man who uses montage to express himself visually as he uses the alphabet to express himself verbally.40

Shub’s investment in working manually with film anticipated the rethinking of the relationship between the optical and the haptic in film practice and theory that would emerge much later through the work of such theorists as Vivian Sobchack and, especially, Laura Marks, whose notion of haptic visuality has influenced the field of audiovisual essayism. As Catherine Grant suggests in her essay ‘Touching the Film Object’, Marks’s ideas resonate within the field because the new editing software provided unprecedented opportunities for manipulating the film material, making ‘touching’ the film-object possible. While, for Marks, ‘touching with the eye’ implies a largely metaphorical displacement of hapticity onto the faculty of vision, however, for the authors of audiovisual essays, vision is displaced non-metaphorically into hapticity, into a possibility of slowing down, pausing, eliminating, or modifying footage, bringing an audiovisual author close to position of mastery previously available only to professional editors. Yet, despite the euphoric fantasy of total control over the film that this close contact produces, access to film footage generates more questions than it does answers. As Catherine Grant asks: But, are there other ways in which “touching film” is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of,

40 Quoted in Petric, ‘Esther Shub’, p. 438.

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or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?41

Shub would probably have responded to such questions with the title of her only book, Cinema is my Life, implying that experience and reflection, practice and theory, the personal and the professional, were for her not separate but, rather, soldered together – an attitude that resurfaces time and again in the contemporary field of audiovisual essayism.

Coda In conclusion, I offer some reflections on how the legacy of the Russian montage school can inflect our understanding of the issues of subjectivity, textuality, and technology raised in the contemporary practice of audiovisual essayism. In doing so, I’ll be drawing on the ideas of contemporary media theorists and philosophers, Lev Manovich, Giorgio Agamben, Sean Cubitt, and Mikhail Epstein. In his watershed study, The Language of the New Media, Lev Manovich used Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera to demonstrate how montage cinema anticipated and foreshadowed the five basic principles of the new media. These principles can be summarized as follows. First, new media utilize numerical representation: new-media objects exist as data. Second, new media are organized according to a modularity principle: the different elements of new media exist independently. Third, new media rely on automation: new-media objects can be created and modified automatically. Fourth, new media are characterized by variability: new-media objects exist in multiple versions. And, fifth, new media mobilize transcoding: a direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another. 42 As distinctly new-media objects, audiovisual essays illustrate how Manovich’s principles operate in action, and, while some of these f ive principles provide what can be described as affordances on a technical level, others have some interesting and profound philosophical implications. Naturally, an offspring of the digital revolution, the audiovisual essay breaks away from its celluloid – as well as its paper – antecedents and exists only in the digital (data) format. Yet, the ontology of the audiovisual essay has 41 Catherine Grant, ‘Touching the Film Object? Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographical Film Studies’, Filmanalytical, Monday, 29 August 2011, Web. 42 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

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attracted little attention so far – surprisingly so, given anxieties about the death of cinema due to its relocation onto digital platforms. While the shift towards the digital has been problematized, questioned, and, at times, catastrophized as undermining the very capacity of cinema to produce truthful statement, the use of digital technology in the case of the audiovisual essay has been glorified, celebrated, and militantly advocated as a major breakthrough for film studies as a discipline. The underlying assumption here – one that should itself be problematized – is that while digital (in contrast to analogue) means lead to the ontological break between the reality of the world and its cinematic representation, the essayistic use of the same digital technology is seen as guaranteeing the ontological continuity between the film-object and its critical appropriation (despite the fact that many films that are subjected to audiovisual criticism were initially produced on celluloid). The second new-media principle outlined by Manovich, that of modularity, has equally interesting ramifications for the audiovisual essay. For the most part, audiovisual essays are constructed of excerpts, or modules, extracted from films, rearranged and brought into a new configuration with sound and text. The presence of these relatively independent modules and their rearrangements – which rely heavily on associative thinking, recombination, and parallel simultaneous processing – can be thought of, not only as representing the principle of modularity, but also as embodying the more general ‘data-base’ logic outlined by Lev Manovich. However, these modules, as excerpts, have a peculiar, ‘double’ nature. The analytical procedures used to extract elements from a film for the audiovisual essay and to assign them different meanings include fragmentation and splintering. As a result, the excerpts have a double function: while they represent a quotation from the original film, they simultaneously acquire a metonymic or metaphoric meaning, standing for the whole film and serving as a marker of regularity or offering a comparison or a sign of exception. To paraphrase another new-media theorist, Mikhail Epstein, we are dealing here not with translation or description but with a stereo-textual effect: one and the same module or sign is brought simultaneously into at least two different contexts creating multidimensional, multilingual, ‘culturally curved’ discourse.43 The reading of an audiovisual essay thus relies, by necessity, on a parallax effect: an acknowledgement and negotiation of a displacement in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight. 43 Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge 10.1 (2004), pp. 42-60.

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While, at first sight, the primary function of extracting an excerpt is to give an example, the practice of audiovisual essayism demonstrates that this process is far from straightforward. Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the relationship between example and paradigm can provide further insight here.44 Agamben points out that the act of giving an example is semantically rich and analytically complex, because it entails simultaneously constituting the set to which an example belongs (a paradigm) and defining its intelligibility. Yet, the paradigm is based on analogical rather than on deductive or inductive reasoning, reasoning which moves from singularity to singularity, eliminating the dualism of the general and the particular. Locating an example within a paradigm allows us to establish novel groupings and envision new patterns of connection without reassigning those singular objects into rigidly fixed sets or classes. Giving an example is therefore not a simple procedure of extracting and demonstrating, but rather involves establishing the borders of a particular phenomenon – in our case, most often, thematic, stylistic, or narrative regularity – and suggesting a way of conceptualizing this regularity. The decision of the audiovisual essayist to mobilize a particular excerpt as an example thus becomes a critical and creative – in a deepest sense of the word – act. Significantly, if we follow the logic of paradigm and example outlined by Agamben, such a decision is always provisional – provisionality being the ethos to which audiovisual criticism aspires. In placing excerpts alongside one another, the audiovisual essay often disregards linear, cause-and-effect narrative logic and leans, instead, towards the logic of the database. In doing so, the audiovisual essay not only corresponds to Manovich’s principles of new-media organization but also reveals their implications for reading and writing. Sean Cubitt notes that, in digital objects, the data storage and retrieval are not structured in time linearly, as in narrative, but spatially, as a matrix or thesaurus. The kinds of operations that this data organization presupposes – such as navigation, search, and surfing – are radically different from the literary principles of textual organization – and this is, as Cubitt concludes, for two reasons: ‘First, […], they are spatial rather than temporal metaphors; and secondly they are eschatological not teleological.’45 Drawing on these ideas, I suggest that the semantic field that the audiovisual essay creates is not a field of narrative but rather that of a thesaurus, which produces not a progressive 44 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is a Paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009). 45 Sean Cubitt, ‘Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines’, in New Screen Media: Cinema/ Art/Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 7.

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movement towards a preconceived goal but a field of meaning pulsating with new possibilities, offering renewal through a (partial) annihilation of the original meaning. Further implications of audiovisual essayism for textuality, subjectivity, and authorship can be unpacked by referring to the work of Mikhail Epstein. Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas, Epstein has recently articulated a vision for the humanities in the 21st century in a manifesto that is a call to arms to mobilize their transformative potential. A contemporary of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Shub, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about finalizing and initiating art forms, foregrounding their potential for radical renewal. Epstein’s manifesto is helpful for placing the practice of the audiovisual essay in the broader context of the digital turn in the humanities. Epstein has proposed to reconceptualize the current historical moment, largely defined for him by the digital revolution, by using not the prefix post (postmodern, posthuman, post-industrial) but, rather, proto. Such a shift of perspective allows him to see changes in the cultural sphere as emergent, future-orientated, and in need of attentive, yet flexible reflection. Among a number of proto developments that Epstein identifies, two are particularly relevant for my discussion: the transformations of textuality and authorship. Epstein raises the question of ‘whether the traditional notion of text, central to the humanities, remains intact in the digital era’.46 He suggests that it might be that ‘the immutable, self-identical text now gives way to more flexible, dynamic, nomadic text-like formations that wander from site to site and are modified by their users’.47 Rather than lamenting such a loss of stability, authenticity, and originality, Epstein sees it as the seed of a promising development and argues that, ‘while preserving their loyalty to textuality, the humanities can offer a synthetic, rather than analytic, approach to language and initiate language games of their own designed to expand the field of the speakable and thinkable. Language is approached here as a form of life that needs permanent expansion and revitalisation.’48 This shift is paralleled by radical changes in the conditions of authorship. ‘The death of the author’ announced by post-structuralist critique is not the end for Epstein – rather, it is the ‘beginning of a new epoch of hyperauthorship’, achieved through the proliferation of multiple avatars and conceptual personae.49 Such a transforma46 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 19. 47 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities, p. 19. 48 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities, p. 19. 49 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities, p. 31.

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tion of authorship is reinforced by the redistribution of intellectual resources, including information, memory, and access, allowing Epstein to speculate that, ‘The future of humankind can be envisioned as noocracy – that is, the power of the collective brain rather than separate individuals and social groups’.50 Epstein’s ideas can be extended to consider the implications of audiovisual essay practice for the issues of textuality and authorship in cinema studies. If the notion of an immutable text has been questioned in film scholarship for a long time – as the existence of multiple film versions historically made the use of the concept of ‘the text’ tenuous – the practice of audiovisual essayism, which physically disassembles the original and releases its parts into independent existence, stages an even stronger challenge to the idea of the text. Similarly, if the notion of authorship in cinema theory has long been a vexed one, since collective conditions of authorship have often been seen as compromising the notion of the author as a singular, creative individual, audiovisual essayism forces the problematization of authorship even further. Yet, the notion of ‘hyperauthorship’ achieved through audiovisual criticism redeems the questionable position of those who work alongside the director and introduces a constructive way to re-conceptualize authorship rather than lament the loss of the original authorial vision. Together, these two key transformations bring about a much-needed revitalization of film studies and, indeed, contribute to an expansion of the speakable, the demonstrable, and the thinkable in this field.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What is a Paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009). Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana), 1977. Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, trans. by Ben Brewster, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27. Bordwell, David. ‘Intensified Continuity. Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002), pp. 16-28. Cubitt, Sean. ‘Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines’, in New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, ed. by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp (London: British Film Institute, 2002).

50 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities, p. 35.

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Grant, Catherine. ‘Touching the Film Object? Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographical Film Studies’, Filmanalytical, Monday, 29 August 2011, Web. Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, October, no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26. Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, in Sergei Eisenstein, Writings, 1922-1934, Vol. I, ed. by Richard Taylor, (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010) pp. 181-194. Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Methods of Montage’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 72-83. Epstein, Mikhail. ‘The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge 10.1 (2004), pp. 42-60. Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 19. Keathley, Christian. ‘La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia’, in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964). López, Cristina Álvarez, and Adrian Martin. ‘The audiovisual essay as art practice’, NECSUS, Spring 2015, ‘Animals’, Web. MacKay, John. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), An Introduction, [https://www.academia.edu/4090580/_Man_with_a_Movie_Camera_An_Introduction_], p. 7. Manovich, Lev. ‘Jump over Proust: Toward Multimedia Writing’ (1997), Web. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Michelson, Annette. ‘Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital’, October no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-38. Osipova, Anastasiya. ‘Difficult Facts. Esfir Shub and the Problem of Realism’, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2011. Web. Petric, Vlada. ‘Dziga Vertov as Theorist’. Cinema Journal 18. 1 (1978), pp. 29-44. Petric, Vlada. ‘Esther Shub: Cinema Is My Life’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.4 (1978), pp. 429-448. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017). Suhr, Christian, and Rane Willerslev. ‘Introduction’, in Transcultural Montage, ed. by Christan Suhr and Rane Willerslev (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). Tsivian, Yuri. ‘The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of the 1920s’, Film History 8.3 (1996), pp. 327-343. Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Sergei Eisenstein and Philosophy’, Film and Philosophy, ed. by Bernd Herzogenrath, Minnesota University Press, 2017. Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx’, Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011, Web.

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van den Berg, Thomas and Miklós Kiss. Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (Scalar, 2016). Web. Willemen, Paul. ‘Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered’ (interview with Noel King), in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

About the Author Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include narrative theory, cinema and the mind, cinema and philosophy, and the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of Narrative Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013). Her publications have also appeared in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola, Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology, and a number of edited collections.

9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator Richard Misek

Abstract Who precisely is the ‘I’ referenced in so many essay films’ voice-overs? It is easy to assume that it refers to the film-maker, but, even if the voice that we hear is the film-maker’s own, an essay film’s narrative ‘voice’ is always ambiguous. Starting from Chris Marker’s contradictory claim in a letter about Sans Soleil (1983) that all he has to offer is himself, the chapter explores how the aspiration of open and direct address is complicated through the various mediations involved in film-making. With particular focus on my own film, Rohmer in Paris (2013), it raises the paradoxical possibility that essay f ilm-makers can only offer themselves, but are prevented by the form of the essay film from doing so. Keywords: essay film, reflexivity, documentary, narration, voice-over

‘Contrary to what people say, using the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: “All I have to offer is myself.”’ ‒ Chris Marker 1

Whenever we read a piece of non-fiction writing that begins with an ‘I’, it is fair to assume that the writer is referring to himself or herself. It is similarly fair to assume, whenever we hear the word ‘I’ in the voice-over of a non-fiction film, that, in the absence of contrary evidence, the voice 1 [http://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/]. Accessed 14 March 2018.

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch09

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is that of the f ilm-maker. Yet, even if we are in fact hearing the f ilmmaker speak, the identity of this ‘I’ is typically more ambiguous than it seems. In this chapter, I look briefly at the slippery brilliance of the voice-over in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and then reflect on the far less successful engagement with voice-over in my own film Rohmer in Paris (2013), focussing in particular on two questions: who is the ‘I’ referenced in an essay film’s voice-over, and how is the narrator’s identity affected by who is actually speaking the words? By recounting the trouble that these questions caused me, I hope to demonstrate how central both the constructed identity of the narrative ‘I’ and the actual identity of the person saying ‘I’ are to the underlying question of how to communicate thought processes in film. Inevitably, this chapter touches on a range of def initional issues around the essay f ilm, but I have made the choice, in this instance, not to engage directly with academic discourse on the subject. Instead, I just offer myself. Citing Robert Musil’s comment that the written essay is a form of ‘live thought’ and so must involve an ‘I’, Harun Farocki suggests that the same is true of essay films, ‘But this does not have to be the “I” of a man or a woman who made the film. It is rather the “I” of the film construction’.2 Though Farocki’s sui generis filmic ‘I’ seems well-suited to essay films, it sidesteps a pragmatic problem. Films themselves do not speak; voice-over narration is the utterance of a human. Even the synthesized speech of bots is, for the time being, still sampled from human voices. If a film is to have a voice-over, and often it simply must, the film-maker has to choose who will speak it. Documentary conventionally offers a set menu of alternatives: for example, the voice can be that of the film’s non-fictional ‘subject’, or the film-maker, or it can be a metaphoric ‘voice of God’ played by a voice artist. ‘I’ may play a role in the first two options, but, in each case, the referent is typically unambiguous: it is the film’s subject or its maker. Beyond the confines of conventional documentary, the choices are not so simple. Narration in an essay film can take various forms: for example, film-makers can speak their own words, get another (or others) to speak them, use on-screen text, or choose not to use their own words at all. When a first-person voice-over is used, its ‘I’ may point in different directions. For example, it may refer to the film-maker, the performer saying the words, a persona based on the film-maker, or a wholly fictional character; alternatively, its referent may be changeable or entirely ambiguous. 2 Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 303.

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Aldous Huxley famously suggested that essays exist within a ‘three-poled’ frame of reference: ‘There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal.’3 Huxley’s view is that the most ‘richly satisfying’ works encompass at least two, if not all three, poles: ‘Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles – from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.’4 How to find a single voice that can move between these poles? It seems an impossible aspiration, yet Sans Soleil pulls it off, thanks, in large part, to its narration. A female narrator reads extracts from a letter by a fictional cinematographer, Sandor Krasna. Because the text is presented as a letter written to a friend, it is personal; but, because its utterance has two degrees of separation from Marker himself – it is narrated by a woman, quoting a fictional man – there is also a universal element to it. In effect, the film has two simultaneous narrators – one identified, one not – whose parallel utterances allow it not only to move ‘hither and thither’ from pole to pole, but also to occupy more than one pole at the same time. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, by creating a narrative distance between the speaking voice and the subjects of the film, Marker is able to fill the film with his images, his experiences, his reflections, and even his own artworks, while the whole time also effacing himself.5 The self-exposure underlying Marker’s concealment (or perhaps, rather, the concealment underlying his self-exposure) is perfectly encapsulated by the quotation at the top of this article. At first glance, when Marker writes ‘“All I have to offer is myself”’ (a line spoken first in Level 5 and subsequently quoted by him in a letter about the voice-over in Sans Soleil), it seems refreshingly honest. But look again – he places the words inside quotation marks, as if quoting someone, perhaps himself, perhaps the narrator of another of his works, though it’s impossible to know, as he does not cite his source. By obscuring who is saying ‘All I have to offer is myself’, Marker slyly transforms a confession into a paradox. This paradox of course echoes the paradoxical narration of Sans Soleil itself, in which Marker goes to great lengths not to offer himself. A female voice artist, playing a nameless female narrator, reads fragments 3 Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958), pp. vi-vii. 4 Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958), pp. vi-vii. 5 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil’, [https://www. criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil] (2007). Accessed 9 March 2018.

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of letters by a male cinematographer called Sandor Krasna, who is also credited as the film’s cinematographer (but who is, in fact, Marker himself). The narrator discusses the film’s composer, Michel Krasna, and the digital artist, Hayao Yamaneko, within the film as well (although Marker is also, in reality, the composer and digital artist). By using alternative names within the film, Marker can state his intentions with a directness that would have been ludicrously egotistical had he done so in the first-person. For all the film’s other qualities, it perhaps, above all, the narration – and, in particular, the voice-over – that allows Sans Soleil to move between Huxley’s three poles: calm, mature, erudite, yet not patriarchal; with a subtle and non-threatening American accent, it feels urbane but also sincere, critical but empathetic. Its qualities are so well-suited to essay f ilm-making, that, in the three and a half decades since Marker’s f ilm was made, it has repeatedly reappeared in essayistic non-fiction films, as if there were an acting course somewhere that specialized in training students to speak with a ‘Sans Soleil voice’. Indeed, over recent years, the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ has become so prolific as to be a veritable signifier of the essayistic, encompassing works including Paul Bush’s experimental animation Babeldom (2012), Duncan Campbell’s single-screen video installation It for Others (2013), Kogonada’s video essay Auteur in Space (2015), and Theo Anthony’s documentary Rat Film (2016). Though each film-maker’s choice of voice artist was presumably made for reasons particular to the work, it is impossible not to hear in every use of the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ a 35-year-old echo of Marker’s film. It is no coincidence that all of the above works exist in the now expansive liminal space between documentary film-making and artist practice that Sans Soleil itself helped establish; like Sans Soleil itself, they all use voice-over to problematize meaning as well as to state it. It is also no coincidence that the above films were all made by men. The use of a female voice-over emphasizes that this is not the film-maker speaking; it creates a lacuna whose presence signals that the film is not a conventional documentary. Rejecting both an authoritative, male ‘voice of God’ and their own voice, the above film-makers each use the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ to evoke the kind of self-generated narrative ‘I’ hypothesized by Farocki. But what worked for Marker does not always work for those who have followed. By choosing to conceal themselves, by abnegating personal responsibility for their own words, the risk is that the film-makers simply replace the male ‘voice of God’ with a female one speaking a man’s words. It is no coincidence that many political documentaries, including Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corporation (2003) – films made to persuade – also use the ‘Sans Soleil voice’.

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The popularity of the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ among non-fiction film-makers demonstrates that the question of who speaks a film-maker’s text is just as important as the broader question of what metaphoric ‘voice’ – what tone – a film should have. In contrast to the literary essay, in which the written word is a natural and necessary means of expressing ideas, the options open to essay film-makers for verbalizing their ideas need to be carefully weighed. A voice artist may misinterpret a film-maker’s writing, put emphasis in the wrong place, bring in unwanted associations, or simply overact. A filmmaker, however, may be too close to the text to do it justice with their own voice; or perhaps their voice risks generating unwanted associations based on what it says about their nationality, age, and socio-economic background; or perhaps it may simply be too dull. On-screen text may truncate a filmmaker’s ideas, while no text avoids the danger of simplification but leaves open the possibility that – unanchored in language – the film-maker’s ‘thinking-through’ may be misunderstood. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many essayistic film-makers, including Marker, Farocki, and Godard, have, over the course of their careers, frequently moved between different ways of incorporating words into their films, as if unable to decide what the best option is, or acknowledging that there is none. Rohmer in Paris was (perhaps inevitably, given it was my first featurelength essay film) heavily influenced by Sans Soleil; it takes a lot of selfassurance as a film-maker in this field to escape Marker’s orbit, and I have yet to do it. Often, when I hit a wall, I would look to Sans Soleil for inspiration, and, of all its formal elements, it was the oblique narration that I most took inspiration from. However, in contrast to Marker’s assured, and clearly ambiguous, mélange of self-revelation and self-effacement, I eventually became trapped in my narrative persona. Rohmer in Paris (2013) evolved from a sixteen-minute video essay entitled Mapping Rohmer (2011), which focussed on Eric Rohmer’s cartographic approach to filming Paris. Mapping Rohmer was an output from a research project and was also my first video essay. I narrated it myself, without even realizing there were other choices, and aimed for the same ‘academic’ tone that I aim for whenever I give a conference presentation: authoritative but not imperious, objective but not dogmatic, and, above all, impersonal.6 Like most academics, in the 6 Of course, it is never quite so simple, as Ian Garwood’s video essay The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism (2016) demonstrates. Garwood’s seminal contribution to the discussion of voice-over in video essays demonstrates that academic video essayists are also not immune from having to consider the effects and implications of how they make use of language in their work.

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hope that the ideas would speak for themselves, I tactfully avoided the first-person. In the months after I posted the video, I continued to work on it. As it got ever-longer, eventually teetering on the brink of becoming ‘feature-length’, I made the decision to add a layer of fictional narrative, and to transform my own voice-over into that of a character. I started by providing this character with an imaginary backstory, notably that he had once walked in front of Rohmer’s camera during the filming of Rendez-vous in Paris (1995), and had become an accidental extra in the film. In tandem, I searched the film for a passer-by who could credibly pass as the narrator, a real extra to provide my character with a face. As soon as I found him, to my mind, at least, the identity of the film’s ‘I’ was settled: it was the man who walks in front of the camera exactly 38 minutes into Rendez-vous in Paris. Finding a face for my narrator was easy. Finding a voice for him was far more difficult. I cycled among all of the options mentioned above. Unable to dispense with words, but unable to settle on a satisfactory way to give them life, I eventually decided that my narrator needed the voice of a professional actor. After weeks of searching, I settled on an actor with a mild French accent, who had worked extensively on BBC Radio. He was articulate, sometimes ironic, sometimes impassioned, always responsive to my notes, incredibly generous with his time, and completely wrong for the film – though I only realized this after the entire voice track had been recorded and cut into the film’s timeline. Having run out of money and motivation to keep searching for the ideal voice, and not trusting myself to recognize it even if I heard it, I settled on the least-bad option available: I recorded the voice-over myself. Out of necessity, I myself played the narrator. It should be emphasized that my creation of a fictional narrator did not suddenly turn Rohmer in Paris into a fiction film. Later, reading Timothy Corrigan’s The Essay Film, I found a line that perfectly encapsulated what I had done: ‘Essayistic expression (as writing, as film, or as any other representational mode) […] demands both loss of self and the rethinking and remaking of the self.’7 Through the narrator, I both erased myself (as an academic who had been interested in Rohmer’s films since adolescence) and remade myself (into a character whose chance discovery of himself in a Rohmer film turns him into a film critic). If anything, this process of remaking myself embedded the film even more firmly within the essayistic mode. Naïvely, I assumed that my own clarity about the film’s essayistic nature would be shared by its audiences, and that they would understand 7 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 17.

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the narrator to be a persona. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the film’s viewers understood the opposite: almost all assumed that the ‘I’ referenced in the film was me. How could it be that the film’s viewers, all culturally aware film festivalgoers, could have made such a basic mistake? The answer, I realized, was that they hadn’t. The mistake had been mine: I had assumed people would understand that they were watching an essay film, and so hold back from making assumptions. Having myself assumed too much, I did not flag the fictional element in any way, I did not explicitly problematize the film’s ‘I’, set up identity as a theme, or, at any point, refer to Rohmer in Paris as an ‘essay film’ (either within the film or in surrounding publicity material). Without realizing it, I had made a film that was – at least initially – indistinguishable from an arts documentary. By the point in its running time when it began to follow a different path, it was too late: most viewers had already categorized it as one. And, historically, when documentarians have used the word ‘I’, they have meant themselves. Had the narration been delivered by a voice artist (a more suitable voice artist), viewers might have intuited that the words were being performed, and so question the narrator’s identity. As it was, the film’s voice-over, too unprofessionally delivered to be that of anyone but the film-maker himself, provided further evidence that the narrative ‘I’ was me. The film was labelled by programmers and reviewed by critics as a documentary, and so – from the outside at least – it became a documentary. This mistaken identity was reinforced by the fact that the film typically screened at documentary festivals. Documentary festivals, including Hot Docs, True/False, CPH:DOX, FID Marseille, and Thessaloniki, now use the term ‘documentary’ in a flexible and inclusive sense.8 In response, many essay film-makers whose work does not easily fit within extant industry forms have gladly accepted this institutional embrace. One might imagine that, when conventional documentaries and essay f ilms are screened together, a degree of contamination might take place. One might further imagine that, in this era of creative reflexivity, the essay film’s ambiguity might have permanently contaminated our understanding of what a documentary is. Perhaps this has indeed happened in certain contexts, but, with Rohmer in Paris, the opposite happened – the truth claims of documentary contaminated my essay film. It did not matter that my narrator’s backstory of urban flânerie and chance connections was suspiciously Rohmeresque. Nor did it matter that the extra whose identity I had adopted, and who 8 In 2013, Danis Tanovic’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker was nominated for the main festival award at CPH:DOX, though it is a fiction film.

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often appeared on-screen barely two minutes after I had introduced the film in person, looked nothing like me. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, almost everybody – audiences, festival programmers, even friends – assumed that I had indeed crossed paths with Rohmer in 1995. Too late, I tried to back pedal and emphasize that the film was not a documentary. After its f irst screenings at CPH:DOX and International Film Festival Rotterdam, I rewrote the press kit so that it referred to ‘the narrator’ as one would a character; I added a ‘written by’ credit at the end of the film; I even, for a time, searched for another voice artist. But nothing I did could undermine the film’s documentary credentials. So, accordingly, I myself began to play the role of documentarian: in Q&A sessions, I would skim over the question of narration and instead discuss Rohmer’s life and work. About half a year and a dozen screenings after the film’s première, an audience member (a real documentarian, I later discovered) came up to me after the film and hesitantly voiced her suspicion that it had not been me on-screen. ‘He was quite a large man…’ she observed, ‘…and you are not’. With overwhelming gratitude and relief, I immediately admitted that it was indeed not me. The following day, in the Q&A after the film’s repeat screening, for the first time, I confessed that I had never crossed paths with Rohmer. To my surprise, an immediate charge of excitement surged through the audience. People sat up in their seats, laughed, or turned and whispered to their companions. Some even gasped. It took a full 30 seconds for the audience to settle, and, even when they did, an atmosphere of pleasurable complicity continued to hang over the auditorium. From then on, I went out of my way to attend as many screenings as I could. The film developed a live coda, a final fifteen minutes of narration played out during the Q&A, which – though improvised – always culminated in the same revelation. Occasionally, I sensed individuals within the audience bristling at the discovery that they had been misled. But, most of the time, people expressed nothing but pleasure at having had their assumptions reflected back at them. As a result of these months spent in conversation with audiences, I have come to suspect that, for almost everyone except those who make them and write about them, essay films do not exist. Ironically, we who most celebrate essay films’ ambiguities are perhaps the only people who classify them as such. Everywhere else, essay films are typically perceived as a subset, or at least a variant, of documentary. And, personally, I have no problem with this. That’s not to say I don’t still feel a mild regret when I think of all the people who were led by various textual and extra-textual cues to watch Rohmer in Paris as a straight documentary, and never got to see it as anything else; I still

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wish there had been some way I could have reflected viewers’ assumptions about the narrative’s truthfulness back at them within the film, rather than after it. At the same time, had the film not been labelled a documentary in the first place, it would not have been able to reflect their assumptions back at them at all. For this reason, but this time not by accident, I currently feel quite happy to make ‘documentaries’ in the future. And again, and this time not as a last resort, I also feel quite happy to narrate them using my own voice. After all, ‘All I have to offer is myself’.

Bibliography Alter, Nora M. and Timothy Corrigan. Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Huxley, Aldous. Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958). Rosenbaum, Jonathan. ‘Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil’ (2007), Web.

About the Author Richard Misek is a film-maker and Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent, UK. His interests focus on montage and appropriation, cities and space, colour and light. He is the author of Chromatic Cinema (WileyBlackwell, 2010), and his articles have been published in journals including October, Screen, and the New Review of Film and Television. He is a regular video essayist and his essay film Rohmer in Paris (2013) has been exhibited in five continents and received widespread critical acclaim. He has been Primary Investigator on two Arts and Humanities Research council projects exploring audiovisual film and media studies (2016-2018), and is currently producing a series of virtual reality video essays in collaboration with Melbourne-based VR studio Vrtov and the British Film Institute.

10. The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking 1 Catherine Grant

Abstract This chapter carefully considers the practice of the audio-video essayist, reflecting on the topics of subjectivity, textuality, and technology. Grant is a film scholar who, in the last ten years, has begun to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digital-video essays on film and media studies subjects, essays that use footage from the films studied, as well as other moving image/sounds from existing media. Her chapter examines the critical and theoretical threads that surround the audiovisual essay as it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the broader realm of creative practice. She also thinks through some of the spectatorial implications of her online practice as research. Keywords: audiovisual essay, film and media studies, creative critical practice as research, material thinking

I. ‘In the face of the seemingly limitless possibilities, practice cannot know or preconceive its outcome. Rather, the new emerges through process as a shudder of an idea […].’2 1 This article was originally published as follows: Catherine Grant, ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 1.1 (2014), Web. 2 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Exegesis and the Shock of the New’, Text 3 (2004) Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch10

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‘In a sense, the cinephiliac moment may be understood as a kind of miseen-abyme wherein each spectator’s obsessive relationship with cinema is embodied in its most concentrated form. […] But if we see cinephiliac moments as the flashes of another history, how to develop that history?’3 ‘[I]t is in the joining of hand, eye and mind that material thinking occurs, but it is necessarily in relation to the materials and processes of practice, rather than through the “talk”, that we can understand the nature of material thinking. Words may allow us to articulate and communicate the realizations that happen through material thinking, but as a mode of thought, material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice.’4

Long after the advent of the digital era, while the overwhelming majority of university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical, theoretical, and historical research in conventional written formats, a small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture.5 Interestingly, at least in relation to its transfer to an academic context, some of the video essay’s emergent modes are especially indebted to the ‘provisional and subjective’ traditions of the essay film, much studied in written film scholarship.6 Indeed, the video essay format can inspire compelling work not only because, with its possibilities for direct audiovisual quotation, it can enhance the kinds of explanatory research that have always been carried out on films, but also precisely because of its potential for more ‘poetic’, creative, and performative critical approaches to moving image research.7 This new form also raises issues of medium-specif icity in a context of long-established academic assessment standards and practices: for example, 3 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’, Framework 42 (2000), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013. 4 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in Handling’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 27-34 (p. 30). 5 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’, in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176-191. 6 Christina Scherer, Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), p. 14. 7 Catherine Grant, ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies’, Mediascape (Winter, 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

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should we aim to ‘translate’ the (often unspoken) norms and traditions of written film studies into audiovisual versions, or should we embrace from the outset the idea that we are creating ontologically new scholarly forms?8 While these questions are important and pressing, what I elect to focus on in this written reflection is less the finished forms of the emerging range of videographic film studies, less on their status as research outcomes, ‘outputs’, or scholarly communications, as it were, and more on my experience of the ‘original and originary’ audiovisual research processes involved in their production.9 One of the most important informants of my discussion here is the artist, fine art theorist, and proponent of practice-based approaches to research in the arts Barbara Bolt. Bolt has persuasively argued that philosopher Martin Heidegger’s elaboration of handlability provides ‘a key to rethinking the conditions of possibility of creative practice’10 as a form of understanding with the hands and eyes, which ‘operates in a different register from the representational paradigm of man-as-subject in relation to objects’:11 ‘For Heidegger, handling is a relation of care and concernful dealings, not a relation where the world is set before us (knowing subjects) as an object.’12 In what follows, I will consider, above all from a personal perspective looking back at just two of the 60 or so videos that I have made, some of the possibilities that their processes of handling offer for the production of new knowledge in research into cinephile practices and experiences, research that is forged out of the conjunction of the film object(s) to be studied, digital technologies of reproduction and editing tools, and the facticity of the researcher(s). I will argue that digital video is usefully seen not only as a promising communicative tool with different affordances than those of written text, but also as an important emergent cultural and phenomenological field for the creative practice of our work as film scholars. 8 Catherine Grant, ‘How Long is a Piece of String? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, Presentation at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, 23-24 November 2013, Web. (Subsequently published as ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies (September 2014), Web. 9 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in Handling’, p. 27. 10 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’ (Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools Conference, 2004b), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013. 11 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’. 12 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’.

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II. ‘[T]here is always a personal edge to the mix of intellectual curiosity and fetishistic fascination.’13 Unsentimental Education (2009; see Figure 8) was my first, rather tentative attempt to make a film-critical video essay for free online distribution. As I look back at it now, I can see that this turn in my work was partly inspired by some of my earlier research on the emerging connoisseur culture of DVD ‘extras’.14 This had focussed on the relationship between voiceover commentary and audiovisual extracts from the film deployed in many of those formats, and had examined how this digitally-enabled contiguity might help to turn ‘the “original” (theatrical) experience of watching the film as fiction into one of watching it “re-directed” or literally “re-performed”, as a documentary, one in which the film’s existing visual track is employed as graphic illustration of a teleological story of its own production.’15 I was, of course, familiar with Laura Mulvey’s ground breaking written work, around ten years ago, on the new (and existing) material qualities of film in the age of video and digital technologies, and about ‘the space and time’ new digital affordances seem to offer ‘for associative thought, [for] reflection on resonance and connotation, [for] the identification of visual clues, the interpretation of cinematic form and style, and, ultimately, personal reverie’.16 I had also seen one of the digital video experiments Mulvey had directed.17 Like other scholars, I had begun to connect some of the developments she examines with the burgeoning examples of videographic film studies appearing online from 2005 onwards, which were clearly part of a much wider field of production in online cinephile remix and film critical culture18 and I had begun to explore these latter forms, in theory at least, on my research blog.19 I would never have predicted that I would go on to create such artefacts myself, however. I had always been a fairly conventional Film Studies academic: I 13 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 145. 14 Catherine Grant, ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Film and Television After DVD, ed. by James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101-115. 15 Catherine Grant, ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, p. 111. 16 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 146-147. 17 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 172. 18 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’. 19 Catherine Grant, ‘Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays of Note’, Film Studies For Free (28 November 2008), Web.

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Screenshot from Unsentimental Education (Catherine Grant, 2009) | © Paris Film/Panitalia.

saw writing about films and film culture as my ‘work’, and I was generally keen to maintain the usual separation between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. But, as Maria H. Loh notes, in an inspiring published conversation with Mulvey, ‘curiosity is the drive that can build a new kind of interactive spectatorship’ (my emphasis).20 As I was deeply curious about these new forms, and about what one might be able to explore with them, I very readily became an especially active kind of interactive and also, of course, at once ‘possessive’ and ‘pensive’ spectator.21 What surprised me, after I had embarked on the necessary processes of sourcing, converting, importing, exploring, playing with, and re-editing digitized film footage, was not only how straightforward it was to do all this, given the relatively user-friendly digital format-conversion and editing software that nowadays is available for free with many computers or online;22 but also how much more I went on to learn about the form of the Claude Chabrol film that I had chosen to examine in these ways, as well as about my personal response to it. Les Bonnes femmes (The Good Time Girls, 1960) is a movie I have taught many times. I thought that I knew it very well, which was one of the reasons I had chosen to work on it. What I realized afterwards was that I had also been motivated by a desire to engage even 20 Maria H. Loh, ‘Still Life: An Interview with Laura Mulvey’, The Art Book 14.1 (2007), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013. 21 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 144. 22 Jason Mittell, ‘How to Rip DVD Clips’, The Chronicle of Higher Education [Professor Hacker Column], 12 August 2010, Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

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more closely with this film’s strangeness – its beguiling yet disturbing affect – a quality to which I have always been (perhaps obsessively) drawn, and one that neither I nor my students had been able to account for effectively in words, to my satisfaction at least, in numerous individual sequence analyses in university seminars. Working closely on the digitized version of the film in my chosen iMovie video editing programme, in some ways, felt very much like studying it frame by frame on a flatbed editing table, as in the Film Studies classes of a mostly bygone era. It certainly introduced me to what Annette Michelson once described as the ‘heady delights […] the euphoria one feels at the editing table […] a sharpening cognitive focus and […] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence’.23 Using this non-linear editing software also created the sensation of ‘touching the film object’,24 at least virtually, as a digital, or digitized, artefact accessed through a graphical user interface. Of course, this sensation did indeed turn on an active handling of it, one that involved eye/ear-hand-touch pad-virtual object/screen coordination and interaction, similar to the DVD-handling conjunction of eye-hand-remote control-virtual object/ screen. But non-linear editing obviously offers the additional and constitutive affordances of extraction and re-formation of the component parts of the film object. The extra ability to manipulate audiovisual material from the f ilm in order to serve durational, motional, spatial, and locational experiments – including: randomly generating a whole suite of frozen moments from its entire duration in the form of thumbnail images, and then regenerating these at different frame rates; freezing and zooming in or out of full frames; playing with different forms of altered motion and superimpositions; detaching the soundtrack and moving it around; creating new image-sound, image-image, and sound-sound juxtapositions – helped me to arrive at a much more detailed, paradigmatic understanding of Les Bonnes femmes, of its constant moves from high to low, and its graphic matching, through these moves, of key shapes, like that of the statue at the beginning of the film. It also made the film’s brilliant thematic exploration of subjective experiences of spatio-temporality much more palpable, as I shall go on to describe. 23 Annette Michelson, ‘The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System’, October 52 (Spring 1990), pp. 16-39 (pp. 22-23), Cited by Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 193. 24 Catherine Grant, ‘Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins)’, Frames 1.1 (2012a), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

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When I produced this first essay, though, I didn’t have enough confidence in the process of making it to allow a completely intuitive, creative understanding of the film to emerge in the finished video. Unsentimental Education tries very hard (possibly too hard) to hit a lot of the bases I’d covered in my years of teaching the film – re-presenting knowledge about it that I already knew. It also feels quite long to me now, at thirteen and a half minutes. Even its fairly sparse voiceover commentary (which, rather than pre-scripted, was at least largely improvised to accompany the reediting – in other words, it was created as a kind of ‘antiphonal’ response to what I was handling) seems too wordy to me now. But, regardless of its shortcomings as a finished essay, it was the practical experience of having to work through, construct, and then convey or perform a meaningful analysis by re-editing the film for its making that completely convinced me of the merits of videographic approaches as analytical, pedagogical, and creative research processes. The more I allowed myself to respond freely to the material as I was experiencing it through the audiovisual, spatio-temporal affordances of my editing programme with ‘a gestural use of editing’25, the more new knowledge about the film I seemed to produce. How better to understand the intense affective charge of the moment in the final sequence of Chabrol’s film when a previously unseen character breaks the film’s ‘fourth wall’ (see Figure 9), I found, than to experiment with reframing it, attempting to retain the feeling of that charge in the new form of a transformative work? This sequence had never really come up much in my classes; it isn’t the most famous, or the most representative, example of direct address in Nouvelle Vague cinema by some distance.26 But it had obsessed me in my viewings of the film over the years, and this obsession returned, and even redoubled, at my iMovie-editing interface. Reworking this extracted scene, reacting to it materially, first by crafting a verbal accompaniment and then by performing it vocally, precisely, over the very instant of eye contact, was exactly where I relived an especially dramatic ‘cinephiliac moment’27 as the ‘shudder of an idea’.28 This (for me, uncanny) experience of repeatedly handling the sequence in and out of 25 Stefano Basilico, ‘The Editor’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, ed. by Stefano Basilico (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), pp. 29-45 (p. 30). 26 See, for instance, Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), for more prominent examples. 27 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’. 28 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Exegesis and the Shock of the New’, echoing Kierkegaard; see Carol Olson, ‘Re-Searching Unique Experience for Our Experience: Kierkegaard’s Question and Method’, Phenomenology and Pedagogy 3.2 (1984), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

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Screenshots from Unsentimental Education (C. Grant, 2009). | © Paris Film/Panitalia. The re-edited sequence from Les Bonnes femmes features Karen Blanguernon’s uncredited performance as ‘La fille du bal’.

its original context did indeed produce new affective knowledge about it regarding the film’s explorations of temporality and temporal experience throughout its duration, and particularly about the implacable logic of its film characters’ captivity in human (and cinema) time: On high, the glitterball doesn’t just glitter; it mirrors. It witnesses and fragments what lies beneath: the ‘special occasion’ that punctures the endless dull time, which imprisons us all. But we are held by the spectacle, waiting for something to happen. And then it does: the troubling moment when the character – as in so many other New Wave films – returns our gaze. What does she want to happen? And what do we want to happen? (Voiceover excerpt from Unsentimental Education, 2009)

Working towards the production of a video essay that, like the film itself, culminated in this moment of spatio-temporal, or spectatorial, ‘puncture’ materialized this knowledge, and made me perform it affectively, as videographical thinking-feeling ‘with rhythm and timing’29 – that is to say, poetically. Looking back now at this work, the creative digital context of the research allowed space for the establishment and working through of an unusually vivid relationship of aesthetic reciprocity with Les Bonnes femmes. Producing Unsentimental Education as an explanatory but also cinephiliac study helped me both to seek ‘the “film behind the film” […] the main aim of textual analysis’30, and, more unusually, to bring my version of that ‘hidden film’ into audiovisual existence. 29 Matthias Stork and Janet Bergstrom, ‘Film Studies with High Production Values: An Interview with Janet Bergstrom on Making and Teaching Audiovisual Essays’, Frames Cinema Journal (2012), Web. 30 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 146.

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III. ‘Part of what I love about Vine is its in-the-moment-ness, which harkens back to the ol’ days of shooting one-reel films, where you only have one shot to get what you want, and if you miss it, it’s gone.’31 ‘The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even […].’32

At some point in the first half of 2013 (around four years, and some 50 or so further video experiments under my belt after Unsentimental Education later), I heard about Vine, one of a number of emergent mobile device applications for creating very short looping videos to share with fellow app users, as well as online. Flora Magdalena Olszanowski and Will Lockett describe the app’s affordances, in their contribution to a collection of studies on Vine at In Media Res (2013), as follows: [T]he video recording begins as the user touches the screen of their mobile device, and the recording takes place only so long as they’re touching the screen. Given this touch-and-hold interface, there’s no [in-app] postproduction editing: edits can be made by letting go of the touch before the end of the six seconds, framing a new shot, and then touching again to capture the next image in the montage.33

Vine appeared in mobile application stores in January of that year, and had caught on particularly quickly with Twitter users, partly because of the app’s easy integration with its parent platform.34 By September, once again driven by the curiosity of Mulvey’s ‘pensive spectator’, I decided to play with it, particularly to see what kinds of film studies research, if any, 31 Jennifer Proctor, ‘That’s a really interesting [comment]’, In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (4 November 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013. 32 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel [1850]’, in The Poetical Works, 2 vols., ed. by William Michael Rossetti (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1913), pp. 1-7. 33 Flora Magdalena Olszanowski, with Will Lockett, ‘Rhythm Aesthetics: Vine & contemporary mobile moving image production practices’, In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (5 November 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013. 34 Jordan Crook, ‘Twitter’s 6-Second Video Sharing App, Vine, Goes Live In The App Store’, Tech Crunch (24 January 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.

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Screenshots from The Chosen Maiden (Catherine Grant, 2013) | © Paris Film/Panitalia.

could be carried out within the constraints of the app’s six seconds-long, square-framed video loops. Inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith’s academic and pedagogical experiments with ‘Uncreative Writing’ – forms of material textual exploration and re-performance through, inter alia, reflexive transcription techniques, including direct replication and ‘patchwriting’35 – I settled on the technique of re-filming film footage using my mobile phone video camera, difficult in itself with a hand-held device, but even trickier within Vine because the square shape of its viewfinder necessarily entails choices about what to select within any (usually rectangular) cinematic aspect ratio. Very quickly, I realized that the app would provide an interesting way of focussing in on, capturing, and then looping cinematic gestures, such as that of Jean-Paul Belmondo running his thumb over his lips in A Bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), the subject of my first Vine (Belmondo as Bogie in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Godard, 1960), 2013). For my second experiment, perhaps dissatisfied by the fact that, in the Belmondo sequence, I had chosen to re-film, the actor who addresses his own reflection, not the camera or the spectator. I returned to my ‘cinephiliac moment’ at the end of Les Bonnes femmes (see Figure 3). Or, rather, I went back to my remaking of that moment in my Unsentimental Education video, a copy of which was what I actually had at hand when I was messing around with Vine at that point. I played the video essay on my computer screen and tried to capture the moment of ‘contact’ of the character’s direct address. No conscious preconceptions about ‘(un-) creativity’ or even about ‘film studies’ got in the way. I just tried as best I could to capture the look of ‘La fille du bal’ in a way that satisfied me – a very close-up, rapidly moving shot of both her eyes was what I intuitively set out to achieve. It took only two takes – the six second duration of the necessarily moving, handheld shot 35 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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does ensure that somewhat involuntary, purely reactive techniques are in the ascendant. The second, successful, attempt was thrilling and, for me, insightful. As with my earlier voiceover discovery in Unsentimental Education, my inexpert yet lucky handling of the re-filming tools at once re-performed and recorded the precariousness of achieving the moment of ocular contact, thus making it much more palpable. The shudder of an idea produced by this, in every sense, ephemeral research process was a new material understanding of the personal charge of this particular instance of direct address. In this moment, the film not only opened up a surprising and compelling space for character-spectator intimacy (a quality frequently connected with examples of ‘breaking the cinematic fourth wall’, as Tom Brown argues in his magisterial study of this phenomenon),36 but also for a particularly captivating and uncanny coup de foudre-like encounter: the eyes of this anonymous female character will always meet and magically mirror mine (and yours, if you look, too) across our separate, crowded worlds. Just as, in the film’s diegesis, she waits to be singled out and chosen to dance by a dark-haired stranger in a troubling repetition of the film’s earlier plot (as we may notice while we try to work out why we haven’t seen these characters earlier in the film), we spectators are made to wait for meaning by the film, and are rewarded by being singled out and chosen (individually and en masse) to return her gaze. In its original duration, the scene powerfully stages, for me at least, an instance of, as well as an occasion for, what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called the ‘aesthetic moment’, when ’the subject is captured in an intense illusion of being selected by the environment for some deeply reverential experience’37, a concept I happened to have been exploring in relation to other cinephile experiences in recent research.38 My material thinking-through of this sequence did not end there, though. Unusually, for a Vine, I went on to re-edit my first recording on my mobile phone to add music that wasn’t taken from the original film sequence. Then I re-filmed the result, and finally shared the video as a loop. For the new soundtrack, I used the first six seconds of a piano recording of La Damoiselle élue (‘The Blessed Damozel’), Debussy’s 1888 work originally intended for two 36 Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema. 37 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987), p. 39. 38 Catherine Grant, ‘Uncanny Fusion? Remixing Childhood Cinephilia’, and, ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, September 2014, Web.

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soloists, a female choir, and an orchestra. I thought of this favourite piece of music for this purpose primarily because of its apt title (which I alluded to when I named the Vine The Chosen Maiden [2013]), but also because of the overall mood of La Damoiselle élue, with the contemplative spacing of its first notes, which also seemed to suit the re-filmed images. As I was preparing to write this reflection, I discovered that Debussy had based his cantata on Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1850 poem ‘The Blessed Damozel’, which he also later illustrated in an oil painting by the same title in 1875-1878. Curiously, and (consciously) unbeknown to me when I made the Vine, all these works turn out to stage an uncanny ocular encounter – and a direct address – across a normally unbreachable divide: a prematurely deceased Damozel looks down from heaven to observe her still earth-bound, still alive lover, and expresses her unfulfilled yearning for their reunion. As my discussion above reveals, as does the sheer number of audiovisual studies involving moments of direct address that I have been drawn to making, I believe that cinephiliac videographic explorations are particularly generative when it comes to the working through (or the acting out) of (my) unconscious spectatorial processes.39 Although I’m still not sure why I (and presumably others, judging by the relative ubiquity of these moments in the cinema, at least) may be so deeply and at times uncannily attached to ‘breaking the fourth wall’ moments, I will undoubtedly go on to produce much more exploratory ‘talk’ about this. But, in the meantime, it is clearer to me that The Chosen Maiden loop, the final sequence of Unsentimental Education before it, and many of my other videos have bought into being perhaps insubstantial yet always material traces of what Paul Sutton has called the dynamic, ‘reconstructive and creative’ aspects of ‘Nachträglichkeit spectatorship’, following Freud’s concept of afterwardsness: This process of spectatorship recreates the f ilms it ‘remembers’ and articulates a certain kind of love at first sight (always already at second sight) of the cinema, the expression of a kind of après-coup of the coup de foudre. 40 39 See Catherine Grant, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address and Metalepsis in the Cinema and other Media’, Film Studies For Free, for some examples; Catherine Grant ‘How long is a piece of string?’ 40 Paul Sutton, ‘Afterwardsness in film’, Journal for Cultural Research 8.3 (2004), pp. 385-405, (p. 386).

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My Vine experiment, my f irst video essay, and many others since, do seem to me effectively to record and re-perform the ‘flashes of another [more subjective] history’. 41 Viewed together, they are forging an ongoing cinephiliac archive for my creative explorations of spectatorial experiences in the (post-) digital age. For now, I know that, in placing my facticity as a researcher and cinephile in relation to the at once ‘possessive’ and ‘pensive’ handling affordances of digital editing technology, I, like others, have been able to reveal and materially think through knowledge (‘possession’ by a cinematic look?) that I would have once disavowed, or denied, as I searched for much more ‘acceptable’ scholarly objects.

Filmography A Bout de souffle [feature film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie/Productions Georges de Beauregard/Impéria, France, 1960. 87 mins. Belmondo as Bogie in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Godard, 1960) [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant. 16/09/2013, 6 secs [looping], [https://vine.co/v/ hnUUtKIiV96] Les Bonnes femmes [feature film] Dir. Claude Chabrol. Paris Film/Panitalia, France/ Italy, 1960. 100 mins. The Chosen Maiden [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant. 22/09/2013, 6secs [looping], [https://vine.co/v/hrZHqnQ9Wam] Cinematic Direct Address Part One: Mapping the Field [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant with Tom Brown. 25/3/2013, 17mins 28secs, [https://vimeo.com/62652453] Cinematic Direct Address Part Two: You Looking at Me? [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant with Tom Brown. 9/4/2013, 18mins 40secs, [https:// vimeo.com/63654511] Unsentimental Education [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant. 30/06/2009, 13mins 32secs, [https://vimeo.com/5392396] You Looking at Me? [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant. 24/2/2013, 2mins 42secs, [https://vimeo.com/60388474]

41 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’.

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Bibliography Basilico, Stefano. ‘The Editor’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, ed. by Stefano Basilico (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), pp. 29-45. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987). Bolt, Barbara. ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’, Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools Conference, 2004, Web. Bolt, Barbara. ‘The Magic is in Handling’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 27-34. Brown, Tom. Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Crook, Jordan. ‘Twitter’s 6-Second Video Sharing App, Vine, Goes Live In The App Store’. Tech Crunch (24 January 2013), Web. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Grant, Catherine, ‘Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays of Note’. Film Studies For Free (28 November 2008), Web. Grant, Catherine. ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Film and Television After DVD, ed. by James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101-115. Grant, Catherine. ‘Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins)’. Frames 1.1 (2012), Web. Grant, Catherine. ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies’. Mediascape (Winter 2013), Web. Grant, Catherine. ‘How Long is a Piece of String? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, Presentation at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, 23-24 November 2013, Web. Subsequently published as ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’. The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies (September 2014), Web. Grant, Catherine. ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies’. Cinea, 19 June 2014. Web. https://cinea.be/the-use-anillusion-childhood-cinephilia-object-relations-and-videographic-film-studies/ Keathley, Christian. ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’, in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176-191. Keathley, Christian. ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’. Framework 42 (2000), Web.

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Loh, Maria H. ‘Still Life: An Interview with Laura Mulvey’. The Art Book 14.1 (2007), Web. Michelson, Annette. ‘The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System’. October 52 (Spring 1990), pp. 16-39; cited by Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 193. Mittell, Jason. ‘How to Rip DVD Clips’. The Chronicle of Higher Education [Professor Hacker Column], 12 August 2010, Web. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Olszanowski, Flora Magdalena, with Will Lockett, ‘Rhythm Aesthetics: Vine & contemporary mobile moving image production practices’, In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (5 November 2013), Web. Proctor, Jennifer. ‘That’s a really interesting [comment]’. In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (4 November 2013), Web. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. ‘The Blessed Damozel [1850]’, in The Poetical Works, 2 vols., ed. by William Michael Rossetti (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1913), pp. 1-7. Scherer, Christina. Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001). Sutton, Paul. ‘Afterwardsness in film’. Journal for Cultural Research 8.3 (2004), pp. 385-405.

About the Author Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. A prolific video essayist, and writer about video essays (among other subjects), as well as a publisher and curator of such works (including at the annual ICA/Birkbeck Essay Film Festival, Film Studies For Free, and Audiovisualcy), she is founding co-editor of the first peer-reviewed publication for audiovisual essays on film and media studies topics, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, which was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction for 2015.

11. The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously Thomas Elsaesser †

Abstract The chapter outlines the posthumous constellations that led to the making of Thomas Elsaesser’s essay film The Sun Island, about his grandfather, Martin Elsaesser, chief city architect in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic. It reflects on the migration of non-theatrical film material into archives and art spaces, encouraging the emergence of found footage as essay film, but it also makes a case for The Sun Island as ‘home movies re-purposed’ in order to highlight the specifics of home movies as a historically and politically important practice. While acknowledging his father as ‘author’, whose images the film ‘appropriates’, The Sun Island also revisits topics associated with Thomas’s own film historical writings: family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; history, memory, and trauma. Keywords: home movies, ethics of appropriation, Weimar/Nazi Germany, architecture, Frankfurt, Berlin

The Past and the Posthumous In 2007, through circumstances not entirely of my own choosing, I found myself resurrecting a family ancestor, my grandfather, the architect, Martin Elsaesser.1 I was asked to write a biographical essay for a catalogue accompanying a retrospective of his work at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum 1 Martin Elsaesser (1884-1957), German architect, author, and university professor. See [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Elsaesser]; [http://www.architekten-portrait.de/ martin_elsaesser/].

Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch11

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Frankfurt. The exhibition honoured him as one of the chief city architects in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1932, during the peak years of what came to be called Das Neue Bauen.2 His key building from the period, the Frankfurt Central Market, had been acquired by the European Central Bank in 2004 as the site of the Bank’s new headquarters. Although a listed building and therefore protected as a national monument, the Grossmarkthalle was under threat: the plans envisaged by the Central Bank – along with the notoriously deconstructionist impulses of the star architect designing the ensemble – meant that the integrity of the building, and thus its value as a historical landmark had to be sacrificed.3 The general context of the retrospective was therefore as much an act of compensation or restitution as it was of celebration and recognition: the temporary nature of the exhibition and the online existence of the Foundation had to substitute for the physical survival of the architect’s most famous building. These, at times, painful encounters with an all-but-forgotten past and its retroactive reappearance, touched on several general issues. 4 For instance, I had to ask myself what does it mean to claim for someone the status of the posthumous? According to the dictionary, posthumous refers to something ‘arising, occurring, or continuing after one’s death’,5 such as an award being given to someone posthumously, or a reputation being shattered posthumously. In which case, it also connotes something more troubling than an afterlife, something to do with another kind of life after death: an unquiet, restless undead-ness, something unresolved or unredeemed that returns to haunt the living. Such a version of the posthumous is introduced by Jeremy Tambling, in his book Becoming Posthumous.6 Tambling makes a distinction between writers and works we consider classics: immediately accessible, recognized as relevant today as they were in their time (he mentions Shakespeare and Jane Austen). On the other hand, there are writers or works that were ‘already not quite alive in [their] own time’, and whose afterlife requires 2 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Building Blocks for a Biography’, in Martin Elsaesser and the New Frankfurt, ed. by Peter Cachola Schmal, Thomas Elsaesser, Christina Graewe, and Jörg Schilling (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2009), pp. 21-29. 3 Prominent voices of protest were the architecture critic Dieter Bartetzko, ‘Der EZB Neubau – Ein Euro-Krüppel’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 Febrary 2007, and the architect Christoph Mäckler [http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/grossmarkthalle-frankfurt-zerstoerungim-namen-der-avantgarde-1380634.html]. 4 [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fmarkthalle_(Frankfurt_am_Main)] 5 [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/posthumous] 6 Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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or must benefit from a special kind of constellation.7 This would be the condition of the posthumous in the case of the extraordinary fame of Franz Kafka in the 1950s and 1960s, or of Walter Benjamin’s reputation since the mid-1970s. The condition of the posthumous implies a special relation of past to present that no longer follows the direct linearity of cause and effect, but takes the form of a loop, in which the present rediscovers a certain past, to which it attributes the power to shape aspects of the future that are now our present. We are in the temporality of the posthumous, whenever we retroactively discover the past to have been prescient and prophetic, as seen from the point of view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here and now. In other words, we retroactively create a past and a predecessor, in order to assure ourselves not only of a pedigree, but to legitimate the present. The particular constellation, which made the condition of the posthumous a pressing concern for me, thus went beyond writing the catalogue entry. To assist the curators of the exhibition, I had gone through my father’s family albums and photo collection in search of visual material that could illustrate my grandfather’s life. That’s when I came across my father’s home movies from the 1940s, which we saw as children projected on a makeshift screen. Remembering that some of them featured my grandfather, I managed to edit together two seven-minute video loops. These home movies proved a major attraction for the visitors; even though the time was ten years after his Frankfurt period, and the place appeared to be his summer house on an island near Berlin. Tasked with establishing a Martin Elsaesser archive and with promoting the foundation, I decided the home movies might make a film that commemorates his life to complement the scholarly focus on his work in the catalogue and other publications.8 As a historian with a predilection for early cinema and some knowledge of German film history, I had already been publishing on non-theatrical films, such as industrial films and instructional films, including on documentaries about architecture and urbanism.9 7 Tambling, Becoming Posthumous, p. 4. 8 See also Hermann Hipp and Roland Jäger (eds.), Haus K. in O. 1930-32. Eine Villa von Martin Elsaesser für Philipp F. Reemtsma (Hamburg: Gebrüder Mann, 2005); Thomas Elsaesser, Jörg Schilling, and Wolfgang Sonne (eds.), Martin Elsaesser, Schriften (Zurich: Niggli Verlag, 2014); and Elisabeth Spitzbart Jörg Schilling, Martin Elsaesser Kirchenbauten, Pfarr- und Gemeindehäuser (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2014). 9 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Die Stadt von Morgen: Bauen und Wohnen im nicht-fiktionalen Film der 20er Jahre’, in Der Dokumentarfilm in Deutschland: 1919-1933, ed. by K. Kreimeier (Stuttgart, Leipzig: Reclam, 2005), pp. 381-409.

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We all dream of making our own Sans Soleil (Chris Marker’s seminal, moving, and poetic essay film) and I greatly admired Respite/Aufschub (2008), Harun Farocki’s found footage reconstruction of life in a Nazi deportation camp in the Netherlands in 1944.10 But I began to orientate myself more by the personal documentaries embedded in larger histories, for instance, those by Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March, 1985; Bright Leaves, 2003) and Alan Berliner (The Family Album, 1986; Nobody’s Business, 1996). I also studied Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990), Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003), and Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2003). These films by professional directors and visual artists quickly made me realize that there was no way I was going to turn myself into a film-maker: I just needed to make a film. The problem: I did not have a story. Or rather, I had two stories that had little to do with each other: one set in Frankfurt, in the present, and centred on the fate of my grandfather’s landmark building, on the lawsuit, the protests, the out-of-court settlement, the exhibition, and the setting up of the foundation. And that other story which may or may not be hidden in the two hours’ worth of uncut home-movies material, mostly shot between 1940 and 1944, and set in and around Berlin. This other story involved not just my grandfather, but also my grandmother, my father, his two sisters and younger brother, my future mother, her brother, and their mother. Overshadowing these members of my extended family was another person, also an architect, and my grandmother’s great love and long-time lover, Leberecht Migge. Anxiety over my family-centred self-indulgence was aggravated by the fear of indiscretion – of betraying the dead, rather than rescuing them: feelings which I tried to keep at bay by persuading myself that there were extenuating circumstances and mitigating factors that had forced my hand. First, both my grandfather (entirely thanks to the ECB’s controversial plans for their acquisition) and my grandmother’s lover (rediscovered as one of the fathers of the green movement in Germany because of his fervent advocacy of urban gardening, waste recycling, and ecological sustainability) had attained a certain topicality. Second, another protagonist, my grandmother, perhaps deserved a place in posterity and in the public domain, precisely because she is just one of the many women from the first half of the 20th century who were instrumental in bringing about changes in all kinds of fields, but who have remained in the shadow of their more famous, but often also more fallible men. For her, the posthumous 10 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Holocaust Memory as an Epistemology of Forgetting –Harun Farocki’s Respite’, in Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?, ed. by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig Books, 2009), pp. 57-68.

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comes as a way of making amends, or, in the words of Hannah Arendt: such posthumous fame is ‘the lot of the unclassifiable ones […] those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification’.11

The Essay Film Even if not conceived as an essay film in the manner of Marker or Farocki, I still wanted to sustain a personal point of view that relied less on the single voice – embodied in the obligatory off-screen commentary – but instead present a subjectivity that was manifest more in the tonality of the tentative exploration, in the cautious steps moving forward, across briefly glimpsed traces of past events, while interrogating the historical footage, yet letting the images speak about what they wanted to say (or carefully tried to hide). But I also intended to question the epistemological status of the home-movie scenes – whether caught on the fly or carefully staged: their truth status and evidentiary force. I wanted to involve the spectator in the process of discovery, as well as borrow the essay film’s constitutive reflexivity and self-reference. Reflexivity, in that I am not just showing these images because they evoke a bygone age, or present my family as if still alive: I am re-presenting this footage for a purpose, even if I did not yet quite know what this purpose was. And self-reference, because these images are the material residue of an act of f ilming, itself inflected by intention and purpose, and not pretending to deliver transparent access to the reality they depict, or open a window on a world as it once was, and that is now lost forever. The editing phase was productive (and painful) in that it made me focus on the differences between documentary, essay f ilm, and home movie, as well as between making a film for myself and making a film for television. And it obliged me to think more critically about the relation between today’s film culture and practical film-making, as the distinction between amateur and professional has become less a matter of craft and inspiration, and more a matter of capital and resources; less about access to tools and technology and more about access to institutions and insiders. In short: when – thanks to digital software and the Internet – everyone can be a film-maker and upload their work on Vimeo or YouTube, what is 11 Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 1-51 (p. 3).

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an author, what is art, and what is self-advertising? Acting on behalf of the Martin Elsaesser Foundation to promote its goals, my task was to access the institution, which is to say, television and, through television, try to reach the public sphere, and not to claim avant-garde status or to expect auteur treatment.

Lieux de Memoire between the Materiality of Memory and Historical Topographies If now – after many screenings of the film and after its television broadcast – I return once more to the external circumstances and posthumous constellation that made me make The Sun Island, it is to resume my role as film historian and theorist. I had begun to draw some further conclusions about the stakes involved, when utilizing found footage, incorporating amateur film, or when grappling with the ethics of appropriation.12 On the face of it, The Sun Island belongs to the by-now almost clichéd genre of the ‘family film’, in which sons or daughters make a film about their fathers, mothers, or parents, by sifting through home movies, letters, and family albums that have been passed down to them. Often, in such films, the memory of the dead becomes a mirror for the film-makers’ fragile egos: to study who they are, to ponder the roads not taken, or to reflect on what they have become. The genre, therefore, is part of the broader movement of identity politics: we are a culture mindful of our precariousness, fearful for our future, and are forever searching for ‘roots’. Yet, for this self-scrutiny or self-affirmation, we increasingly draw on audiovisual sources, as the lived embodiment and visible complement to the genes, the bloodlines, and DNA that biologically bind us to past generations. On the other hand, the quest for roots and personal identity is, in turn, embedded, especially in Europe, in the general memory discourse, which, in Germany, is inescapably shaped by and caught up in the various 12 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Die Geschichte, das Obsolete und der found footage Film’, in Ortsbestimmungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst, ed. by Eva Hohenberger, Katrin Mundt (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), pp. 135-155; and Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film Heritage and the Ethics of Appropriation/ Filmska bastina i etika prisvajanja’, in Muzej filma – Film u Muzeeju (Informatica Museological 47), ed. by in Lada Drazin Trbuljak (Zagreb: MDC, 2017), pp. 6-13. Also published as: ‘La ética de la apropiación: El metraje encontrado entre el archivo e internet’, in [http:// foundfootagemagazine.com], ed. by César Ustarroz and as ‘Zur Ethik der Aneignung: Found Footage’, (Berlin-DokuArts: Fachtagung ‘Recycled Cinema’, Zeughaus Kino, Berlin 11 September 2014) [http://doku-arts.de/2013-14/content/sidebar_fachtagung/Thomas-Elsaesser.pdf].

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The Sun Island (Thomas Elsaesser, Germany, 2017), screenshot.

‘mastering-the-past’ cultures of commemoration, beginning in the 1970s but taking off in earnest after reunification in 1990.13 And, while in my case, there was no ‘quest for personal identity’ that initiated the film, it would have been foolish of me not to own up to the memory and identity discourses that The Sun Island now finds itself part of. Indeed, one of the outcomes of the give-and-take between the producer and myself was that the film became ever more ‘personal’, even autobiographical: fully cognisant of the fact that it had to be the ‘family film’ genre which would serve as the matrix of recognition by which a German television audience could make affective and interpretative contact with The Sun Island. One of the strongest discourses of memory and remembrance since the 1990s has been Pierre Nora’s notion of the ‘lieu de mémoire’ (the site of memory).14 On a much smaller scale, both temporally and geographically, but partly inspired by Nora, I tried, in The Sun Island, to reconstruct, but, in the end, also to invent, the memory map of an ‘île de mémoire’ (an island 13 See for instance, Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge 2015). 14 Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992).

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of memory), based on this actual island located not far from Berlin, where, to quote Marina Warner, ‘ecology and stewardship’ were ‘interconnected with memory and stories’.15 This particular lieu de mémoire appears to the eye – and from the air – as a site of pristine nature, but turns out to be a site that bears its own scars of memory and traces of a once-lived history. In the course of plotting and recording these slow cycles of regenerative destruction, I discovered several other cycles of value creation and value destruction, binding together nature and culture. It turned out that the photographs, letters, administrative records, and home movies from which I had to piece together the story of The Sun Island, both metaphorically and literally, prolonged this transfer of decay and regeneration, insofar as, especially my father’s home movies and my grandmother’s letters, gave another twist to the human-history/natural-history interface, when I began to restore decaying film stock and had to decipher Gothic script. Digitizing both the images and the letters added another layer to the value exchange: the gain in legibility was a loss in authenticity, and yet, it is invariably the intervention of a new technology that confers added value to an object’s obsolescence.16 The Sun Island as a lieux de mémoire is intimately linked to another historical topography: Berlin. Berlin has engendered its own cultural memory, made up of images and music, buildings and ruins, clichés and discoveries, f iction and critical discourse. As almost everyone writing about the city notes, it is a very peculiar kind of chronotope. 17 In fact, ever since the nineteenth century, Berlin has been a city of multiple temporalities, and of diverse modalities: virtual and actual, divided and united, created and destroyed, repaired and rebuilt. Living in a perpetual mise en scène of its own history, a history it both needs and fears, reinvents and disowns, Berlin is a city of superimpositions and erasures, full of the ghosts and ‘special effects’ that are the legacy of Nazism and Stalinism, obliged to remember totalitarian crimes while still mourning socialist utopias.18 15 Marina Warner, ‘What are Memory Maps’, [http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/ memory-maps-about-the-project/]. 16 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence’, in At the Borders of Film History, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Gorizia Film Forum, 2014), pp. 103-116. 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84-258. 18 See Andrew J. Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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What Marina Warner presumably also means by ‘stewardship’ – and it applies with singular force to film, one of the most physically fragile and yet imaginatively powerful archives of evidentiary ‘presence’ – is stewardship as a form of trust, nowhere more so than in my particular instance, where most of the materials I depended on for The Sun Island film do not belong in the public domain, but are, in every sense, ‘private property’. Not only is the island private property (which I ‘trespassed’, when filming there), but the home movies and amateur photographs – which I complemented by drawing on personal correspondence, love letters, and poems – concern public persons at moments when they were at their most intensely private and vulnerable. Yet the realities they document also belong to a collective ‘history’, insofar as these letters and movies, these literary and photographic tokens of friendship and rivalry, of courtship and passion, of tragedy and trauma, are also the only extant evidence and testimony to an ‘experiment in living differently’: Migge’s project of urban self-sufficiency, refuse recycling, and of a maintenance-and-sustainability economy that was meant to be emulated, propagated, and made public. In inspiration, location, and implementation, the island experiment thus belongs to the history of Berlin and of German modernism, to the extent that one family’s filmic memories can mutate and metamorphose into a historical topography.

The Home Movie as Discourse and Practice It is partly this historicity and the peculiarly specif ic acts of symbolic transfer and material-immaterial exchange, which – in my contest with the producer over the f ilm’s formal structure and narrative arc – persuaded me that it was ultimately in the film’s best interest not to insist on making it the sort of essay f ilm I had once imagined and had even sketched out on paper. Instead, it is worth examining more closely the original discourse and practice into which my father’s f ilms inscribe themselves, before they became The Sun Island, namely, that of the home movie. Here, then, are some of the defining criteria, as well as the points of contention that arise when home movies are re-edited, repurposed, and re-presented.19 19 In what follows, I have chosen to engage in an extended dialogue with Roger Odin. Not only is he the writer who has thought more systematically and penetratingly about home movies than anyone I know, he is also a friend and colleague – with whom I once had a memorable

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How Do We Identify and Recognize a Home Movie? Roger Odin, probably the world’s foremost scholar of home movies puts it crisply and succinctly: Nothing resembles a home movie as much as another one. […] The same ritual ceremonies (marriage, birth, family meals, gift-giving), the same daily scenes (a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath), the same vacation sequences (playtime on the beach, walks in the forest) appear across most home movies.20

In this respect, the footage left to me by my father answers very precisely to this description: he recorded family meals, several birthdays, and different leisurely pursuits. Prominent in these home movies are the Boccia games so beloved by my grandfather, a volleyball game when my father’s work colleagues came for the weekend, and, as for playtime on the beach, there is the frolicking in the lake, caught in glorious Kodak colour by a camera at water level. Regarding ‘a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath’: these scenes, too, are duly present. It is as if Odin was describing my father’s films, but that is exactly the point he is making: he has seen them, because ‘once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all’.21 discussion regarding home movies. Odin’s major publications on the topic are: Roger Odin (ed.), Le film de famille usage privé, usage public (Paris: Meridien-Klincksieck, 1999); Roger Odin, ‘Ch 5: Espace de communication et migration: L’exemple du f ilm de famille’, in Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires des Grenoble), pp. 103-122; Roger Odin, ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach’, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, ed. by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 255-271; Roger Odin, ‘The Amateur in Cinema, in France, Since 1990: Definitions, Issues, and Trends’, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 590-610. 20 Roger Odin, in Mining the Home Movie, p. 261. 21 Scholarly interest in amateur film-making and home movies has grown substantially in the last decades. Besides Odin, Patricia Zimmerman has been a major pioneer: her Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) was followed by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (eds.), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Other important collections are Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (eds.), Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and two monographs in German: Alexandra Schneider, Die Stars sind wir: Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg: Schüren, 2004) and Martina Roepke, Privat-Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2006).

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Who Makes Home Movies? Odin also offers a definition of the home movie as a family film (in French, home movies are ‘films de famille’), namely ‘a film that is contrived to function within the space of familial communication: it is made by one member of a family for the other members of the family, about the history of the family’.22 This, too, applies to my father’s material: 70 per cent of what I have takes place and was shot on the island, about 10 per cent on skiing trips in the Alps, and the rest indoors or at other locations. Where my father’s home movies differ is that, traditionally, it is the father who films his own family and thereby affirms, consolidates, or enforces his own authority. In my case, it was the son who filmed the family, and, once he had his own family, he seems to have lost interest in filming. As it happens, the island was a matriarchal space, and my grandfather – the father figure who should have been behind the camera – had already given up or lost his paternal authority. But ‘who makes home movies’ also points to another factor. In the 1930s and 1940s, portable cine-cameras were still a rarity and a luxury item, making home movies of that period indicators of a well-to-do bourgeois family. This is evidently the case with my grandfather, a renowned if unemployed and unemployable architect during the time in question. Yet his son – a passionate photographer, owner of an expensive Rolleiflex since his fifteenth birthday – seems to have acquired the cine-camera quite late, only once he had settled in his first real job and was earning a salary. Since then, the class-index of home movies has all but vanished. The advent of video and the camcorder meant that anyone can and does make home movies, which may or may not affect their value as documents. The arrival of more affordable equipment and the exponential increase in the quantity of amateur film, has given their celluloid-based precursors, such as those standard 8 film strips of my father’s from the 1940s, an extra distinction of scarcity value, quite apart from the fact that they were silent witnesses or unwitting observers of one of the 20th century’s most momentous and catastrophic historical decades. After the camcorder came the mobile phone: this latest shift in technology – taking movies with your smartphone – not only makes of home movies a corpus so vast that no human and only machines can keep track of their proliferation. It also confers on home movies from these earlier technologies yet another value: that of obsolescence, which registers as a precious materiality, a guarantee of authenticity, and 22 Roger Odin, in Companion to French Cinema, p. 591.

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a promise of pristine veracity, all gained through hindsight, and subject to the posthumous.

Who Speaks in the Home Movie and to Whom is it Addressed? I’ve long puzzled over this question – whom do my father’s home movies address? Odin is quite clear and categorical: in home movies, the family speaks to itself about itself; they are entirely self-referential. But, inside this self-reference, there are nuances and enigmas, tensions and even contradictions. In my father’s case, it is possible and even likely that different events and circumstances occasioned the individual pieces of footage, because, with some notable exceptions, all of which I use in The Sun Island, the films are neither edited nor do they follow a discernible narrative arc. Odin offers a persuasive explanation: To function well, the family film needs to be compiled as a non-organized succession of shots that present mere snippets of family life so that each member is free to construe the family’s story in their own way, while sharing a reconstruction of the family’s story with the other members. In summary, the family film must not have an author if it is to allow the family to speak across itself: this is its ideological function ‒ to produce a consensus in order to perpetuate the family.23

I shall come back to the question of authorship, but, what cannot be emphasized enough is that, in my case, the son and not the father shot the films. For a long time, therefore, I thought he used the island and the family as a mere pretext, because what really fascinated him was the wind-up cine-camera, the machine itself, and what one could do with the apparatus: especially given that he was an engineer by profession, and a bricoleur by passion. In the film, I point out that this may have predicated him for making home movies, the bridge being ‘montage in its original meaning’.24 23 Roger Odin, in Companion to French Cinema, p. 592. 24 What also struck me is how, in the scene shot among the boats in the lake, my father must have stood in the water with his precious camera, even using expensive and rare colour stock, to film the mixed company ducking and diving in the waves of the lake, so close to the water level that one is almost afraid of the water ruining the camera. What must have been exhilarating is the extreme mobility of the handheld device, comparable to today’s camcorders or mobile phones. The Cine-Kodak had a clockwork wind-up mechanism: no need for a battery or any other electric source.

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However, this does not exhaust the possibilities of whom the home movies address. In The Sun Island, for instance, I tentatively make the case that my father used his camera to woo his future wife, who, at that time, was still nurturing the hurt of a broken engagement. As her letters attest, she was more attracted to the dashing writer who occasionally visited the island with his wife, and even to Sebastian (eleven years her junior) than she was to my father, whom she considered socially inept, chaotic, and nerdy. Three of the plainly ‘staged’ films are meant to win her over: one paints the idyll of a couple in love, the other shows them enjoying the domestic bliss of getting up on a sunny morning in their joint apartment, and the third has the two of them sharing Sunday brunch on the island. While making the film, yet another possible addressee imposed herself: the short instruction films I call ‘docu-manuals’, which show Leberecht Migge’s patented settler implements in action – tent hut, cold frames, compost silo, dry toilet – are clearly meant to honour my grandmother’s dead lover, and are therefore addressed to her, by way of document, homage, and monument. At once very personal gifts, the historical value of these sequences is nonetheless considerable, since they confirm that the Sun Island was indeed an experimental laboratory station, and not just a love nest (during the 1930s) and a refuge (in the 1940s).

What is the Documentary Status of Home Movies? Given the cliché situations and repetitions of events, the direct informational value of home movies would seem to be low. Home movies are a little like dreams: fascinating or troubling to the dreamer (the members of the family), tediously repetitive or inconsequential to anyone outside. Yet, the world at large (and not just film historians) seems to have recognized the documentary value of home movies in a variety of ways. To be noted is the remarkable migration of home movies and amateur film-making from the attics, shoeboxes, and flea markets to film archives, special collections, and institutions expressly set up to preserve such materials. One can easily list some two dozen archives in France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, the United States, but also in Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada that specialize in home movies or amateur films. The same archival impulse animates institutions dedicated to regional history: important centres of home-movie collections in the United Kingdom, for instance, are the East Anglia Film Archive, the North West Film Archive in Manchester, and the Scottish Film Council. Then, there is a special urgency to preserve

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amateur film in countries that have suffered historical disasters – civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing – which may explain the existence of the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), set up by the film-maker Rithy Panh, his country’s foremost director of films about cultural memory and national trauma.

Are Home Movies Counter Narratives? In the case of Cambodia, as in many other countries, an interest in the archiving of amateur films and home movies may well be guided by the need to possess non-canonical representations and thereby also to collect non-official sources of information. These often serve in the salvage or construction of a counter-memory, which, in turn, can be a powerful instrument in uncovering forgotten, repressed, or obliterated events in the lives of nations or individuals. More than oral testimony and less than evidence before a court of law, such documents have a potency of their own when enlisted in struggles for minority rights or restorative justice, after civil wars, or religious or ethnic conflict. One of the reasons why there has been such an interest in home movies is that epithets such as ‘alternative’, ‘resisting’, ‘anti’, and ‘counter’ lend themselves quite readily for this corpus, in line with a more general tendency to ‘activate the archive’.25

Home Movies are the Sunday Edition However, an equally productive approach to locating the ‘political’ significance might be to dwell on the discrepancy, so typical of home movies, between what is in the picture and what is kept off-frame. This can be extremely frustrating to historians, so much so that many professionals dismiss home movies as unreliable or even misleading evidence. Yet, the discrepancy can also offer unexpected benefits, since these gaps, once recognized as such, create openings in other directions. Quite generally, the intense public interest in home movies, family histories, found footage, vintage postcards, and photographs is not only due to a nostalgic appetite for a past we always imagine more authentic than the present, or to the hope 25 See the conference ‘Activating the Archive: Audio-Visual Collections and Civic Engagement, Political Dissent and Societal Change’ held at the EYE, Amsterdam, 26-29 May 2018 [https:// www.eyefilm.nl/themas/eye-international-conference-2018].

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of recovering there the voices of the silenced and oppressed. It also signals the broader cultural shift in favour of audiovisual, rather than written documents, as physical evidence for this past. We are now so used to having everything that matters recorded and stored in sound and images, that the written word, along with the material world, increasingly comes to be seen (and be used as) corroborating illustration of the audiovisual record. Gone is the time when images were regarded as merely the representation of a pre-existing reality, of which they were expected to be the faithful and truthful servants. Such an almost ontological switch depends quite clearly on a different set of default values. The visual record will be preferred for its special qualities: of self-evidence, of immediacy, of presence and authenticity. These qualities are, of course, not necessarily historical or epistemological – indeed, they are primarily aesthetic. Once we accept that home movies euphemize, select, and filter, we can look for their ‘truth’ somewhere other than in their ‘representational’ veracity. They force us to shift from a realist paradigm to a different hermeneutic strategy: we need to develop special skills to read and interpret the visual record, perhaps especially in the case of home movies and other non-canonical materials from the archives and the attics. As Roger Odin puts it: it is always possible that ‘a film of minor importance can suddenly become a fabulous document when the historical context of reading changes’.26 If we are, indeed, in the aesthetic regime, as Jacques Rancière would claim,27 new frames of reference come into view: first of all, any re-viewing of home movies made 70 years ago – even prior to any editing and compilation – constitutes a reframing. Secondly, such reframing requires a hermeneutics that not only reads what is there, in the light of hindsight and present preoccupations, but also interprets absences as having their own kind of presence. Correspondingly, the challenge for the curator-film-maker when reframing home movies in their own work, is to make silences become eloquent, but not to fill them with words (or more images). A reading against the grain, a reading that engages the home movie or amateur film in what it does not say outright, means listening to what it cannot say, but nonetheless gives away or conjures up through absence.28 26 Roger Odin, in Mining the Home Movie, p. 262. 27 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 9-46. 28 Here and elsewhere, I use home movies and amateur film as if they were interchangeable, ignoring that there is a body of writing that tries to draw clear distinctions. For Liz Czach, for instance, amateur films tend to be evaluated for their aesthetic qualities and technical ambitions, while the generally less technically accomplished home movies are appreciated for their cultural

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The Sun Island tries to be mindful of this challenge. For instance, the description of a horrific night of firebombing in Berlin, and an equally horrific incident of shot-down British pilots being left to rot in the sun on a Berlin square runs parallel with images of morning gymnastics on the island. More generally, the war, as, indeed, the entire Nazi regime, seems to be happening off-screen, and must be inferred from scant mention in the letters and a few words of commentary, such as the observation that we are in the third year of the war, and women now do men’s work, while we see three women in headscarves and aprons saw logs and chop firewood. This virtual absence of the signs of Nazi rule and the war’s invisible presence on the island is both faithful to the material – there is no extant footage among my father’s films of military parades or street scenes with jubilant crowds giving the Nazi salute – and a deliberate aesthetic choice, hard-fought-for in my confrontations with the producer. I have been criticized for this, also by audiences, notably in Germany and Britain, though not in New York or Tel Aviv. The main argument is that I am too soft on my family, who seems to have survived the war unscathed, and that I do not press them too hard or come clean about their political views. I merely mention that one son was part of the occupying forces in Paris, that the daughters were in the compulsory Reich Labour Service, that the family’s writer-friend was killed by a partisan sniper in Italy, that my father served a few weeks in a communication battalion on Czech-Polish border, and that my grandfather was drafted into the Volkssturm, the local militia, in the last months of the war and spent time as a Soviet prisoner. ‘Where is the “Kristallnacht”, where the Jews brutally pulled out of their Berlin homes, where is Auschwitz?’ They ask. ‘Not in my father’s films’, I am obliged to answer. Let each member of the audience draw their own conclusion, for it was my experience while making The Sun Island that home movies give away most, when one lets them speak in their own idiom. Much of this idiom, as Odin reminds us, is celebratory in tone and tenor. In The Sun Island, I call this ‘the Sunday edition of the family’. But given the polysemic nature of the f ilmic image, there is nonetheless enough evidence of realities outside – outside the frame and outside the island – to be found right inside the images themselves, if one cares to look. Historians or historical significance. ‘Home Movies and Amateur Film as National Cinema’, in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. by Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 27- 37. The hermeneutics I am proposing can apply to both but may seem to favour the home movie. See also Carlo Ginzberg, as well as symptomatic reading for structuring absences, and ‘the dogs that did not bark’ theory, which takes me to ‘media archaeology’.

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speak of documents as providing witting and unwitting testimony.29 What is of interest here is the unwitting evidence – not necessarily in the sense of a ‘gotcha!’ moment, not even primarily about the Nazi regime, but merely pointing to some silent witness present, or to a shift in attention brought about by the distance of the 70 years that separates us from these images. To give just one example of the silent witness, providing unwitting testimony: in one scene depicting my grandfather reading the papers, a radio can be glimpsed on the shelf, which is unmistakably a Volksempfänger, the people’s radio, introduced by the Nazi regime in much the same way it promoted the ‘Volkswagen’, the people’s car. Except that the Volksempfänger was a propaganda instrument, but also a surveillance apparatus for the State. Its portable version, operated by batteries, without connection to the electricity net – and clearly the version used on the island – carried a warning: ‘If used to tune in to enemy broadcasts, owner will be liable to severe penalties, including prison.’ Indices such as these resonate with the notion that home movies have a special ‘reality effect’ because of their peculiarly ‘accidental relationship with history’.30

The Traumas This accidental relationship must, in certain cases, be given a stronger reading: as the traces of a catastrophe that cannot but keep its origins and consequences buried. Another name for such disasters, which only manifest themselves in the form of accidents or parapraxes – slippages, non-sequiturs, chaotic or congested images – is ‘trauma’: a familiar trope in the discussion around the home movie. For instance, what in part occasioned (and animates) the collection Mining the Home Movie is the film Something Strong Within by Karen L. Ishizuka and Robert A. Nakamura, which deploys amateur film and home movies to document the traumatic impact of the WW II internment camps in California on Japanese families, of which the home movies’ apparent normalcy is the numb testimony. In a more theoretical essay, co-editor Patricia Zimmermann touches on trauma via the ‘repressed’, the ‘absent’, ‘failure’, and ‘unresolved phantasmatics’: 29 The term ‘unwitting testimony’ comes from Arthur Marwick: ‘from at least the time of Frederick Maitland (1850-1896), historians have been using unwitting testimony to establish the beliefs and customs of past societies’. [https://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/ marwick1.html]. 30 I take the phrase from Karen Shopsowitz, director of My Father’s Camera, quoted in Catherine Tunnacliffe, ‘Filmmaker re-appraises home movie’, Eye vol. 10 issue 30 (5 March 2001).

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Amateur films do not deploy any systematic cinematic language. They reverse the relationship between text and context. Facts reveal fantasies, and fantasies expose facts. They present psychic imaginaries of real things, and figure material objects as psychic imaginaries. As a result, it is necessary to cross-section the sedimentary layers of historical context to deconstruct what is repressed and absent. Amateur films are often viewed as cinematic failures infused by an innocent naivety and innocence, a primitive cinema without semiotic density. Amateur films appear to lack visual coherence because they occupy unresolved phantasmatics. These lacks and insufficiencies create collisions between the political and the psychic, between invisibility and visibility.31

In the context of German home movies from the period I am concerned with, trauma is inevitable, and it is invariably linked to the Holocaust, or, more particularly, the trauma of the eviction, deportation, and destruction of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families and individuals from Germany. By contrast, the disasters that befell the Germans themselves in the last years of the war and in the years immediately after – the deaths of their loved ones in a senseless and criminal war, the firebombs that destroyed their homes, the mass expulsions from the East, the punitive rape of German women – this could not be discussed and certainly not dignified with the word ‘trauma’. Against this background, The Sun Island could be seen as part of a kind of revisionist rewriting, where the Germans are finally allowed to have their traumas and also feel like victims. Having written an entire book on these issues, I am, of course, more than aware of such pitfalls, and have been quite careful to make sure that the traumas in my film are of a very personal and private nature, having to do with love and betrayal, with a death foretold and inconsolable mourning – before these domestic traumas reveal themselves to have connections with the historical traumas after all, through my mother and maternal grandmother. Framed by these different sets of references and reading contexts, several layers of hypothetical narratives emerged from the moments of life frozen in time and captured by my father in sometimes filtered, sometimes fortuitous images. The overall horizon referenced, is, of course, the Second World War, a concentration of an event of such enormous historical significance that their all-but-total absence from more than two hours of film is itself one of the most astounding fact about this footage. But, as pointed out above, 31 Patricia Zimmerman, ‘Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future’, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and Memory, pp. 276-277.

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there are ways of locating signs of presence, even in the absence of any visible evidence of how we picture Hitler’s Germany. An important reading context touches on the role these films played within my own family: my sister and I, as children, grew up with these films. They were shown on holidays, birthdays, when guests came, or as a special treat. We loved the anticipation of the performance in the living room, the white sheet that was hung up as the screen, the home-made stand for the rattling projector, the tiny little reels, how delicately they had to be threaded up, and how often the projection had to be stopped, because there was a break in the brittle celluloid. I can still smell the acetate used to glue them back together. I now know that we did not see all of the films, and, for us, as children, these moving images told the love story of our parents. It was especially thrilling to see our parents, before they were our parents, and to see them so happy and relaxed. By the 1950s, when we watched the films, this wasn’t always the case. Like most families, ours faced some very tough times, with my father out of work for several years, and us having to survive in very provisional accommodation on the outskirts of the industrial town of Mannheim. It took its toll on my mother and on the marriage. Surprisingly, my father never seemed to have bothered to edit the footage into some kind of coherent narrative; the reels were projected more or less as he had filmed them, and in random order, and without contextualizing commentary. From the late 1950s onwards, he lost interest in amateur movies, or found us as a family not that inspiring, and so, from the time I was in my early teens, the films faded from memory. Only decades later did another layer come to surface. It was in 1989, when I wanted to pay tribute to my mother for her 80th birthday, and had asked my father’s permission to transfer the films to video. I put together a life of my mother in photos, and then made a compilation of the scenes from the home movies, where I thought the budding love between my parents became most apparent. To my deep disappointment, my mother was not at all pleased with my offering. As a surprise gift, we showed the film to a large gathering of friends and family, but my mother felt it was an unauthorized invasion of her privacy, that we had inadvertently revealed much more of her personal life than she was willing to share. It was then that I realized that the island had been not just a location she happened to be during the war years, but a hideout, a place where she could recover, in the company of an older woman, from the pain of a broken engagement. As the daughter of a mixed marriage, she was not allowed to marry an Aryan, and her Catholic fiancé had broken off the engagement very

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suddenly, dropping her without word, making her wait and wait. With the help of her brother, a university friend of my future father, she found a new home on the island, shielded and protected from anti-Semitic persecution. In other words, inside the parental love story that we children thought we saw in the home movies, there was the personal tragedy and trauma of our mother. Something she obviously did not wish to relive or expose to the world. Now traumatized as well, I put the film material aside and did not touch it, until about fifteen years later, when embarking on the Sun Island film, I came to realize that, beneath my mother’s tragic love story, there was another love story, also tragic and traumatic: that of my grandmother. This story also emerged by accident, around 2005, after a lecture of mine on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?, 1932) at the Free University of Berlin. A young man from Philadelphia, David Haney, introduced himself to me afterwards, and asked if, by any chance, I was related to the architect Martin Elsaesser. I answered in the affirmative, and he then wanted to know if the name Leberecht Migge meant anything to me, since he was writing his PhD thesis on the garden architect Migge, and he had come across the name Elsaesser, as the city architect who had given Migge important commissions first in Frankfurt and then in Hamburg. I said I had heard about Migge, but not in connection with my grandfather, and more as the great passion and love of my grandmother. I vaguely remembered a hush-hush story that it was for Migge that my grandmother had left her husband and four children in the late 1920s or early 1930s. David was dumbfounded, because he had never heard about this liaison. All he knew was that Migge was a married man with seven children living in Worpswede near Bremen, where, supposedly, he had also died. The fact that he had actually died in a Flensburg clinic, with my grandmother by his side, remains hidden to this day, and is struck from the record. But, that his widow destroyed everything she could lay her hands on, in the hope not only of obliterating every trace or memory of the affair, but also of Migge’s life work, adds dimensions of anger and revenge, of despair and grief that certainly traumatized my grandmother until she slipped into dementia, but that must have traumatized the Migge family as well.

The Question of Authorship and Anonymity: Television and Art Spaces Even though The Sun Island was made for television and with television money – which brought its own sets of constraints, some that were creative,

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some that had to be resisted – I had few illusions about the chances of securing theatrical distribution for my film, and I was well aware that television tends to use home movies in historical documentaries mainly because they are cheap. But television also exploits home movies and amateur productions as a shortcut to truth and authenticity, creating a kind of collusion with the viewer. Odin sums it up: [Television shows] invite me to see these images as images shot by people ‘like me’ (vs. professionals). Since then, these images appeal to me differently: they possess an emotional force specific, a force that pushes me to accept them as they are, without questioning their enunciator in terms of truth (their origin is the pledge of their innocence). I call this the mode of authenticity, the mode which, while inviting me to construct or imagine a real enunciator, forbids me to question him in terms of truth.32

Questioning the enunciator is indeed a major problem when dealing with home movies. All too often, television instrumentalizes home movies to the point of ‘harvesting’ them for a whole range of authenticity effects. Yet, one wonders whether home movies fare much better when remediated and repurposed by film-makers or in installation pieces. There, too, the tendency is to anonymize them into found footage, to obfuscate their origins, the easier to manipulate the material and make it serve new objectives Yet, as Odin also reminds us: ‘the family film must not have an author if it is to allow the family to speak across itself: this is its ideological function (to produce a consensus in order to perpetuate the family)’.33 As indicated, this was true in the case of my father, who rarely edited the footage he shot, and it was true when screening the films among us family members: everyone talked, interjected, pointed out what was coming next, or started to tell an anecdote – except my father, who stayed silent: a mourner among the socializing family and guests. In the f ilms themselves, my father often put himself in the picture, as if to disperse the enunciative instance, but not unlike a director who 32 Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication, p. 108. Odin goes on to praise Peter Forgacs for using extensive post-production (sound, music, commentary) in order to turn this authenticity effect into a reflexivity mode: ‘In the Bartos family, the use of family films, far from blocking the question of truth, places it at the heart of the film, but it took a lot of cinematographic work to achieve this result. The task involved analyzing the family film as an ideological operator that reveals the behaviour of a class – here the European bourgeoisie’s indifference or obliviousness to fascism.’ Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication, p. 114. 33 Roger Odin, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, (p. 592).

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stars in his own movie, perhaps his authorship is thereby claimed more effectively. I show my father ‘direct’ even when he is in the frame, and I show him entering the frame when the camera is on a tripod and already running. But where do I stand? Am I using my father to appropriate the films, putting myself in his place, looking over his shoulder, retroactively guiding his hand by editing his ‘authorless’ films into a coherent narrative? Even if I didn’t make an essay f ilm, did I manage to make an authored film after all? It is a legitimate question, to which I only have an oblique answer: The Sun Island certainly connects with my more academic work in many clearly discernible ways, since several of my own theoretical preoccupations converge with the f ilm. First, The Sun Island relates to German cinema, notably Weimar Cinema and the transition to the Nazi period, where I suggest that, in matters concerning cinema, the rupture from politically progressive Weimar culture to repressive Nazi anti-culture is less clearly marked than one might imagine, notably in the genres of documentary, instruction, and propaganda.34 The Sun Island is also related to my research on family melodrama and trauma studies. Several people have responded to The Sun Island by calling it a family melodrama. Who are the heroes of this story? Each one a personal tragedy, each one has their reasons – much like the melodramas of Sirk or Minnelli that I wrote about in the early 1970s. Finally, my preoccupation with media archaeology plays a role in this film. In the film, I use the layer-upon-layer metaphor: I call it ‘unreeling and unpeeling’. It is also a sort of mise-en-abyme, by embedding the island story in the Frankfurt story: the ‘homecoming trope’ for me and the homelessness of Migge, but especially of Liesel – exiled from the island, and feeling like a widow next to her husband. Media archaeology is also present when material objects serve as internal indices and silent witnesses; for instance, the books briefly glimpsed as presents in the birthday scene. I managed to identify them, and this allowed me to ‘contextualize’ the scene. Other scenes I was able to synchronize with letters or postcards that had survived, permitting me to date and to locate certain film fragments, and, with them, other scenes that were preserved on the same reel. 34 See, for instance, ‘Lifestyle Propaganda: Modernity and Modernisation in Early Thirties Films’, in Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After (London: Routledge 2000), pp. 420-443, and Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Propagating Modernity: German Documentaries from the 1930s: Information, Instruction, and Indoctrination’, in The Oxford Handbook on Propaganda, ed. by Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 233-256.

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Conclusion: Return to the Posthumous Provisionally, I can summarize my findings about the posthumous as follows: one of the perceptual-experiential grounds on which the posthumous emerges is the growing prestige of images, and especially of moving images, in our general awareness of both past and present. The liveness, the evidentiary authenticity and presence, but also the uncanny undead-ness and untapped energies emanating from our photographic and cinematic archive have created powerful new forms of presence, where the agency of things and of images almost count as equivalent to that of people and individuals. This, too, emerges from the close reading of my father’s home movies, where presence and absence, on-screen and off-screen turn out to be potent vectors, reintroducing the nominally absent Leberecht Migge into the picture, and redefining the presence of both my mother and my grandmother, as crucial narrative agents, in a story that was supposedly about the architect of a Frankfurt building, itself made posthumous by an act of architectural vandalism, which, with hindsight, it is hard to know whether to be outraged by, or grateful for. The historical-political ground in this particular case, however, is the massively posthumous presence of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, under whose retroactive presence we still seem to live, or at least, under whose uncanny, traumatic, and often unexpected forms of posthumous agency, our current obsession with history and memory still plays itself out. Martin Elsaesser, though not a victim of the Holocaust and only ignored by the Nazi regime rather than actively persecuted, has belatedly benefitted from this pervasive posthumousness: the City of Frankfurt – just like the ECB on their website – is now proud to be associated with the growing retroactive reputation of the architect Martin Elsaesser. Furthermore, the last building that Elsaesser had a part in designing – the 1931 annex to the Palmengarten-Gesellschaftshaus and whose budget-overrun was used, at the time, as one of the excuses to get rid of him, has been carefully restored by the prestigious British architect David Chipperfield. This building entered the history books as the work of Ernst May, the architect generally associated with the New Frankfurt, and among the leading figures of International Modernism in architecture. I was therefore not a little surprised, when a newspaper article, ahead of the official reopening, captioned its picture with the words ‘Elsaesser-Anbau’ (‘Elsaesser-annex’), retroactively re-attributing ownership to my grandfather, and thus inadvertently undoing a past injustice, one depicted in a 1931

238 THOMAS ELSAESSER

cartoon, sarcastically expressing the city’s Schadenfreude of finally having managed to send him packing. In this sense, my father’s home movies and photographs captured a presence – life on the island – which may have nothing to do with Frankfurt or the ECB, but had hidden the differently tragic pasts of my mother and grandmother, and thus managed to preserve nonetheless the traces of things to come, in the sense that these images not only give added life to my grandfather’s claim to posthumous recognition, but their uncanny agency has projected me into several family histories, all now demanding to have a future in a media memory that only chance encounters, contingent conjunctures, and a posthumous constellation have even made thinkable.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 1-51. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84-258. Bartetzko, Dieter. ‘Der EZB Neubau – Ein Euro-Krüppel’. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 21 Febrary 2007, Web. Elsaesser, Thomas. German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (New York: Routledge 2015). Elsaesser, Thomas, Jörg Schilling, and Wolfgang Sonne (eds.). Martin Elsaesser, Schriften (Zurich: Niggli Verlag, 2014). Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Die Stadt von Morgen: Bauen und Wohnen im nicht-fiktionalen Film der 20er Jahre’, in Der Dokumentarfilm in Deutschland: 1919-1933, ed. by in K. Kreimeier (Stuttgart, Leipzig: Reclam, 2005), pp. 381-409. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Building Blocks for a Biography’, in Martin Elsaesser and the New Frankfurt, ed. by Peter Cachola Schmal, Thomas Elsaesser, Christina Graewe, and Jörg Schilling (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2009), pp. 21-29. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Die Geschichte, das Obsolete und der found footage Film’, in Ortsbestimmungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst, ed. by Eva Hohenberger and Katrin Mundt (Hsg.) (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), pp. 135-155. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Film Heritage and the Ethics of Appropriation/ Filmska bastina i etika prisvajanja’, in Muzej filma – Film u Muzeeju (Informatica Museological 47), ed. by Lada Drazin Trbuljak (Zagreb: MDC, 2017), pp. 6-13. Also published as:

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‘La ética de la apropiación: El metraje encontrado entre el archivo e internet’, in [http://foundfootagemagazine.com], ed. by César Ustarroz and as ‘Zur Ethik der Aneignung: Found Footage’ (Berlin-DokuArts: Fachtagung ‘Recycled Cinema’, Zeughaus Kino, Berlin 11 September 2014), Web. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Holocaust Memory as an Epistemology of Forgetting –Harun Farocki’s Respite’, in Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?, ed. by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig Books, 2009), pp. 57-68. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence’, in At the Borders of Film History, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Gorizia Film Forum, 2014), pp. 103-116. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Propagating Modernity: German Documentaries from the 1930s: Information, Instruction, and Indoctrination’, in The Oxford Handbook on Propaganda, ed. by Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 233-256. Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After (London: Routledge 2000). Hipp, Hermann, and Roland Jäger (eds.). Haus K. in O. 1930-32. Eine Villa von Martin Elsaesser für Philipp F. Reemtsma (Hamburg: Gebrüder Mann, 2005). Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (eds.). Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard 1984-1992). Odin, Roger (ed.). Le film de famille usage privé, usage public (Paris: MeridienKlincksieck, 1999). Odin, Roger. ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A SemioPragmatic Approach’, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, ed. by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 255-271. Odin, Roger. ‘The Amateur in Cinema, in France, Since 1990: Definitions, Issues, and Trends’, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 590-610. Odin, Roger. Les espaces de communication (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires des Grenoble, 2011). Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004). Roepke, Martina. Privat-Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2006). Schneider, Alexandra. Die Stars sind wir: Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg: Schüren, 2004). Spitzbart Jörg Schilling, Elisabeth. Martin Elsaesser Kirchenbauten, Pfarr- und Gemeindehäuser (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2014).

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Tambling, Jeremy. Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Tunnacliffe, Catherine. ‘Filmmaker re-appraises home movie’, Eye vol. 10 issue 30 (5 March 2001). Warner, Marina. ‘What are Memory Maps’, Web. N.d. Webber, Andrew J. Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Zimmerman, Patricia (ed.). Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Zimmerman, Patricia. ‘Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive of the Future’, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and Memory, pp. 276-277. Zimmerman, Patricia. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

About the Author Thomas Elsaesser (†) was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 2013, he was Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Among his recent books are The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012), German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (Routledge, 2013), Film Theory – An Introduction through the Senses (with Malte Hagener, 2nd revised edition, Routledge, 2015), Körper, Tod und Technik (with Michael Wedel, Konstanz University Press, 2016), and Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). His latest book is European Cinema and Continental Thought (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also the writer and director of The Sun Island (2017), a documentary essay film produced for ZDF/3Sat.

Index Notes are referenced by ‘n.’ and the relevant page and note numbers, for example ‘35 n.3’ indicates note 3 on page 35. accessibility of film: 24, 37–38, 50–51, 53 Adorno, Theodor: 13, 16, 18–19, 80 Agamben, Giorgio: 183 Agee, James: 112 agency distributive: 128–30, 135–37, 237 posthumous: 29, 237–38 Aitken, Doug Eraser: 26, 115 Akerman, Chantal From the East: 26, 115 Alter, Nora M.: 137 anarchive series: 41–42 Anderson, Laurie: 25 Heart of a Dog: 25, 95–109, 144 Anthropocene: 26–27, 142 appropriation, ethics of: 215–38 Arendt, Hannah: 219 Arsenjuk, Luka: 59–61, 67–69 art installations: 39–42, 44–47; see also multiscreen installations attainability see unattainable text audiovisual essays: 18, 24, 26–28, 33–47, 49–70, 165–85 essayist practice: 27–28, 199–211 modularity: 181, 182–84 and montage: 27, 57, 165–81 and new-media principles: 181–84 see also lyric essay film; multiscreen installations authorial voice: 12, 14, 28, 189–97 lyric ‘I’: 83–84, 87, 90–91 see also narration authorship: 27–28, 125, 177, 184–85, 234–36 Badiou, Alain: 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail: 13, 15, 184 Baptista, Tiago: 59–60 Bardo, the: 25, 102–08 Barthes, Roland: 24, 33, 51, 67, 174 Bateson, Gregory: 26, 118 Bazin, André: 22, 64, 79 Bellour, Raymond: 14, 21–24, 61–65, 67, 69–70, 169 reflections on his ’unattainable text’ essay: 24, 33–47, 49–58 Benjamin, Walter: 13, 80, 106, 217 Bennett, Jane: 128–29 Bergson, Henri: 160–61 Berlin, in The Sun Island: 218, 222–23, 230–32

Birkerts, Sven: 80 Blümlinger, Christa: 17, 125–26 Bolt, Barbara: 201 Bordwell, David: 153, 166–67 Braidotti, Rosi: 137, 143–44 Capital (Marx), Eisenstein film: 17, 27, 174–75 Celant, Germano: 102–03 Charon (Coleman): 45–46 Chile, portrayed in The Pearl Button: 27, 145–61 Cinéastes de notre temps: 35 n.3, 53–54 cinematic technologies and techniques: 18– 21; see also audiovisual essays; digital technology; DVD; videographic film studies cinema-viewing experience: 23, 27, 34–41, 53–54 cinephilia: 59–60, 67–68, 174, 200, 210–11 cinephiliac moments: 205–06, 208–10 climate change: 26–27, 142 Coleman, James: 44–46, 54, 70 compilation film: 27, 176–81; see also audiovisual essays complexity of affects and messages: 26, 115–18 semantic: 24, 51–52, 67 conscious mental field (CMF) theory: 116–18 Corrigan, Timothy: 12–14, 76, 126, 137, 142, 194 cosmopolitics: 154–55, 158, 160–61 Couret, Nilo: 157–58, 159 creative critical practice as research: 28, 199–211 Cubitt, Sean: 135–36, 183 Culler, Jonathan: 82–84, 91 culture see nature and culture, relationship of Deleuze, Gilles: 79, 129 Denkbild: 80 Deren, Maya: 78 Derrida, Jacques: 106–07 dialogical structure: 14–16, 23, 122, 124–27 digital technology: 18–23, 27, 50, 114–15, 167, 179, 181–84 digital video in creative practice of film scholars: 27– 28, 199–211 DVD: 24, 35, 37–42, 53, 55, 202 see also video essays dispositifs: 33–47 distributive agency: 128–30, 135–37

242 Index documentaries: 11, 77, 79, 82–83, 124, 143–47, 195, 202 environmental: 148, 153 interviews in: 152–53 narration: 189–97 personal essay films: 28–29, 215–38 polls (ratings): 11 see also essay film Duguet, Anne-Marie: 41–42 DVD: 35, 37–42, 53, 55, 202 ecological existentialism: 149–54, 156–57 ‘ecology of mind’ principles: 26, 118 Eisenstein, Sergei: 17, 27, 165, 171–76, 178–79 Capital: 17, 27, 174–75 October: 17, 172, 174–75 Elsaesser, Martin: 28, 215–18, 234, 237–38 essay film on: 28, 217–36 Elsaesser, Thomas: 29, 215, 218 Sun Island, The: 28, 215, 217–36 environmental documentaries: 148, 153 Epstein, Jean: 56–57 Epstein, Mikhail: 12, 182, 184–85 Eraser (Aitken): 26, 115 Escape from New York (Kleiner): 42–44 essay film: 11–23 definitions: 12, 14, 77 digital shift: 18–20 home movies as: 215–38 instrument of thought: 16–19 interest in: 12–13 intermediality: 19 lineage: 13–23 narration: 189–97 non-linearity: 17, 25–26, 100–01, 113–16 temporal unorthodoxy: 101–02 thematic foci: 16 see also audiovisual essays; lyric essay film; multiscreen installations; subjectivity; textuality essay forms: 22–23, 76, 191 ethical reflection: 15–16 ethics of appropriation: 215–38 existentialism: 149–53 experimental cinema: 100, 168–70 family film genre: 220–23, 225; see also home movies Farocki, Harun: 77, 149, 190, 192–93, 218 Fellini, Federico: 37 film criticism: 58–63, 69–70, 177 film form: 63–64 film theory: 49–70 filmic text see textuality; unattainable text film-maker as narrator: 28, 189–97 film-making see cinematic technologies and techniques Fisher, Mark: 107–08 form in cinema: 63–64 Foster, David: 80–81

Frankfurt: 216, 218, 237–38 From the East (Akerman): 26, 115 Fujiwara, Chris: 59–60 fusional doubling: 52, 58 Gallagher, Tag: 35–36, 54–55 Germany, Weimar/Nazi period, in The Sun Island: 215–38 ghost stories, network of: 25, 95–109 Gibson, Ross: 13–14, 25–26 Giles, Dennis: 65–69 Gleaners and I, The (Varda): 20 Godard, Jean-Luc: 37, 67, 101 n.16, 193 Histoire(s) du cinema (1998): 17, 60 Goldberg, Roselee: 96–98 Grant, Catherine: 50, 58–59, 61, 169–70, 174, 180–81 videographic film studies practice: 27–28, 199–211 Grosz, Elizabeth: 161 Guzmán, Patricio: 145 n.9 Nostalgia for the Light: 147, 156–59 Pearl Button, The: 26–27, 145–61 Hamilton, Annette: 20 Haney, David: 234 haptic theory: 58, 180 Haraway, Donna: 136, 143 Harvey, David Oscar: 133 hauntology: 25, 106–08 Heart of a Dog (Anderson): 25, 95–109 Heidegger, Martin: 201 Herzog, Werner: 144 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard): 17, 60 home movies: 215–38 authorship and anonymity: 234–36 characteristics: 224–25 counter narratives and historical evidence: 228–31 documentary status: 227–28 domestic traumas: 231–34 makers: 225–26 speakers and addressees: 226–27 Hughes, Helen: 153 human consciousness: 116–18 humanism: 137, 142–61 Huxley, Aldous: 191–92 hyperauthorship: 184–85 I (authorial voice): 14, 28, 189–97 lyric ‘I’: 83–84, 87, 90–91 Illinois Parables, The (Stratman): 26, 121–37 image and text, relationship of: 16–18; see also textuality Immemory (Marker): 21–22, 37 iMovie video editing programme: 204–05 installations art installations: 39–42, 44–47 multiscreen: 25–26, 42–44, 54, 111–18 intellectual montage: 17, 174–76

Index

intermediality: 19 ‘interval’ concept: 170–71 jardin qui n’existe pas …, Le (The Garden That Doesn’t Exist) (Kleiner): 42–44 Jetée, La (Marker): 22, 46, 52, 144 Keathley, Christian: 61, 175 Kleiner, Danielle Vallet: 42–44, 54 Kluge, Alexander: 19 Krauss, Rosalind: 44–45 Kuntzel, Thierry: 42, 44 n.14, 52, 54, 70 landscape and geographic modes of telling see The Illinois Parables; The Pearl Button language, oral and written: 36, 54–57, 184 meanings of ‘text’: 24, 51–52, 67 relationship between verbal and visual: 16–18, 56–57 Wittgenstein on: 101–02 see also textuality; writing Last Bolshevik, The (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre) (Marker): 80 Latour, Bruno: 154–55 Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie) (Marker): 20, 22, 79 Levinas, Emmanuel: 15–16 Libet, Benjamin: 26, 116–17 ‘lieu de mémoire’ (site of memory): 220–23 literary essay form: 13, 22–23, 76, 191; see also essay film Lolabelle (dog) see Heart of a Dog (Anderson) López, Cristina Álvarez: 170–71 on Grant: 169–70 on textuality: 24, 49–70 Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta) (Marcello): 82, 87–91 lyric essay film: 24–25, 75–91 argumentation and narration: 25, 76–81 Marcello case study: 81–91 Pearl Button, The: 145–61 MacKay, John: 167–68, 170 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov): 11, 27, 57, 167–71, 181 Manovich, Lev: 27, 175, 181–83 Mapping Rohmer (Misek): 174, 193 Marcello, Pietro: 25, 77, 81–91 Marker, Chris: 14, 20–22, 28, 37, 46, 52, 79–80, 189–90, 193 Immemory: 21–22, 37 Jetée, La: 22, 46, 52, 144 Letter from Siberia: 20, 79 Sans Soleil: 11, 20–22, 100, 190–93, 218 Tombeau d’Alexandre, Le (The Last Bolshevik): 80 Marks, Laura: 58, 180 Martin, Adrian: 170 on Grant: 169–70 on textuality: 24, 49–70

243 Martin-Jones, David: 159 Marx, Karl Capital: 17, 27, 174–75 Masson, Alain: 63–65 material thinking: 199–211 materiality: 130–31, 142–43, 156–57 of media: 134–36 new materialism: 128–37 vagabond: 129 Matta-Clark, Gordon: 25, 96, 98, 103, 105–06 Max, D.T.: 95–96 medianatures concept: 135–36 memory memory films: 145 n.9 in The Pearl Button: 145–61 site of memory: 220–23 metric montage: 171–72, 174 Michelson, Annette: 174–75, 204 Migge, Leberecht: 218, 223, 227, 234, 237 Min-Ha, Trinh T.: 152 Misek, Richard: 169 Mapping Rohmer: 174, 193 Rohmer in Paris: 28, 189–97 modularity: 181, 182–84 Monson, Ander: 81 montage: 17, 27, 57, 63, 100–01, 165–85 Eisenstein types: 171–76 ‘montage mode of thinking’: 179–80 Montaigne, Michel de: 13–14, 125, 141–42, 144, 158 Morton, Drew: 50, 60 Mouth of the Wolf, The (La bocca del lupo) (Marcello): 81, 82–87, 91 multimedial nature of cinema: 19 multiscreen installations: 25–26, 42–44, 54, 111–18; see also art installations Mulvey, Laura: 202–03 music and sound: 34–35 musicals: 65–69 narration: 15, 28, 76–78, 99–100, 143, 147 counter-narrative: 25, 77–81, 228 narrative ‘voice’: 28, 189–97 sound in The Illinois Parables: 124, 132–34 see also voice-overs nature and culture, relationship of: 16, 88, 135–36, 160, 222 natureculture concept: 136 nature documentaries: 148, 153 network theory and hauntology: 25, 95–109 new materialism: 128–37 new media: 21, 27, 181–84; see also audiovisual essays Nichols, Bill: 79, 99, 127 non-human themes: 26–27, 141–61 non-human voices: 90–91, 121–37 Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (Guzmán): 147, 156–59

244 Index October (Eisenstein): 17, 172, 174–75 Odin, Roger: 223 n.19 dialogue with: 224–35 Ophüls, Max: 35–36, 54–55 otherness: 15–16, 137 overtonal montage: 173–74 Panella, Claudio: 89 Parikka, Jussi: 131, 135–36 Pasolini, Pier Paolo: 78–79, 133 n.28 Patagonian indigenous people, in The Pearl Button: 145–61 Paul, Arthur: 16, 128 Pearl Button, The (El botón de nácar) (Guzman): 26–27, 145–61 Pertsov, Viktor: 177 Petric, Vlada: 178–79 photography: 44–46 Pinochet regime, Chile, portrayed in The Pearl Button: 145–61 poetic essay film see lyric essay film poetry: 76, 78–80, 82–83, 89, 149 polls (film ratings): 11 posthumanism: 137, 142–43 posthumous condition: 28–29, 216–17, 219, 237–38 post-structuralism: 24, 51–52, 58–61, 67, 128, 184 projection environment: 39–47; see also spectatorship proto concept: 12, 184–85 Rancière, Jacques: 17, 173, 229 Rascaroli, Laura on essay film: 14, 99–102, 105–06, 126, 137, 143, 171 on lyricism: 24–25, 75–91, 149 on sound in essay film: 133 n.28 Reed, Lou: 25, 96, 98, 106–08 re-editing digital: 24, 58, 203, 205 in Soviet film industry: 176–81 reflexivity: 12, 59–60, 175, 189–97, 219–20 self-reflexivity: 84, 96–97, 102, 167–69 rhythm: 168, 170 rhythmic montage: 172, 174 Richter, Gerhard: 80 Ricouer, Paul: 14–15 Rohmer in Paris (Misek): 28, 190, 193–97 Rokeby, David: 115 Rose, Deborah Bird: 149–50, 151–54 Routt, William D.: 61–64 Russian Ark (Sokurov): 20 Russian montage cinema: 17, 27, 57, 167–85 Sandler, Stephanie: 78 Sans Soleil (Marker): 11, 20–22, 100, 190–93, 218 ‘Sans Soleil voice’: 192–93

sashaying: 97–98, 100, 109 scholarly essays, audiovisual: 18, 24, 27–28; see also audiovisual essays self-reflexivity: 84, 96–97, 102, 167–69 Shaviro, Steven: 106–07 Shklovsky, Victor: 177 Shoenburn, Sarah: 158 show-making: 65–69 Shub, Esphir: 27, 176–81 site of memory (‘lieu de mémoire’): 220–23 Snow, Michael: 38–39, 42 Wavelength: 37, 42, 54 Sokurov, Alexander Russian Ark: 20 Spiritual Voices: 25–26, 111–17 sound environments in films: 133 n.28 spectatorship: 23, 27, 34–41, 53–54 projection environment: 39–47 Spiritual Voices (Sokurov): 25–26, 111–17 Sternberg, Josef von: 65 Stratman, Deborah Illinois Parables, The: 26, 121–37 subjectivity: 11–16, 19–28, 80–81, 141–45, 184 and Heart of a Dog: 95–109 and The Illinois Parables: 121–37 and The Pearl Button: 141–59 Sun Island, The (T. Elsaesser): 28, 219–36 Sutton, Paul: 210 technology see cinematic technologies and techniques; digital technology television: 37–38, 234–35 text (word) meanings: 24, 51–52, 67 textuality: 23–24, 33–47, 49–70, 100–01, 184–85 Thompson, Richard J.: 61–64 thought, instrument of: 16–19 time and duration in The Pearl Button: 158–61 temporal unorthodoxy of essay film: 101–02 ways of approaching a film: 35–36, 55, 62 Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (Marker): 80 tonal montage: 172, 174 truth: 18–19, 82, 179, 229, 235 Tsivian, Yuri: 176–77 unattainable text: 23–24, 33–47, 49–70, 169; see also textuality Varda, Agnès: 40–41, 54 Gleaners and I, The: 20 verbal and visual, relationship of: 16–18; see also textuality Vertov, Dziga: 172, 179 Man with a Movie Camera: 11, 27, 57, 167–71, 181

245

Index

video essays: 24, 27–28, 50, 54–55, 179 essayist practice: 27–28, 199–211 narrative ‘voice’: 189–97 see also audiovisual essays; digital video videographic film studies: 27–28, 50, 199–211 Vine app: 207–11 Viola, Bill: 39–40 voice authorial: 12, 14, 28, 83–84, 87, 90–91, 189–97 non-human: 90–91, 121–37 voice-overs: 28, 45–46, 54–55, 143 Laurie Anderson: 98–100, 103–04 in Marcello’s films: 83–87 ‘Sans Soleil voice’: 192–93 sound in The Illinois Parables: 121–37 see also narration

Wallace, David Foster: 25, 95–96 water theme in The Pearl Button: 145–61 Wavelength (Snow): 37, 42, 54 Winston, Brian: 11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 101–02 Wolfe, Cary: 142 World Wide Web: 21, 114 writing and filmic text: 36, 54–57, 69 and lineage of essay film: 13–14 see also language, oral and written; textuality Zimmermann, Patricia: 231–32