Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity 9780231544108

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Mythopoetic Cinema

Mythopoetic Cinema ON THE RUINS OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli C O LU M B I A UNIVERSITY PRESS N E W YO R K

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Excerpts by George Seferis from George Seferis: Collected Poems, trans. and ed. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard © 1981 Princeton University Press, republished with permission of Princeton University Press. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center Inc. Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-231-18218-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-18219-5 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-54410-8 (e-book) Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: © Theo Angelopoulos. Image provided courtesy of the Theo Angelopoulos Heirs Association.

Za moju majku (Helene), e per i miei Biagioli (Mario, Gabriel, and Luka)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION

1 1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark

25 2. O MEGALEXANDROS : Falling In and Out of Dreams

65 3. IN BALKAN: Marina Abramović and the Politics of the Suffering Body

125 4. NOTRE MUSIQUE : On the Ruins of the Divine

169 EPILOGUE: The Politics of Confrontation

221 Notes

237

Bibliography 277 Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book has been in the making for such a long time that I hope I can thank all of the many wonderful people whose conversations, comments, advice, generosity, and criticism have contributed to making it. I would like to begin by acknowledging the amazing artists and filmmakers who inspired this work: Aleksandr Sokurov, Theo Angelopoulos (who, tragically, passed away as I was completing my chapter on his work), Marina Abramović, and Jean-Luc Godard. Their work stands out for its intellectual rigor, perspicacity, and unique aesthetic acuity. The book would not exist without the encouragement and tireless effort of Mario Biagioli and Beatrice Dumin, who have read, edited, commented, and critiqued this project with both care and serious critical engagement. Throughout the many stages of this project, they have challenged me to become a better thinker and helped me become a better writer and researcher. I would like to acknowledge my most thought-provoking teacher, Sande Cohen, who has become one of my dearest philosophical friends. His guidance and insights are deeply embedded in this project. Raùl Ruiz’s courage to make a real cinema of poetry and to write such deep intellectual works of experimentation has been both a model and an inspiration. Wherever you are, I thank you, my friend. I also wish to express my deepest gratitude for the intellectual generosity and enduring friendship of Dušan Bjelić, Martine Beugnet, Gil Anidjar, Tom Conley, Randy Starn, Maria Koundoura, Stathis Gourgouris, Alberto Moreiras, Teresa Vilaros, Stefania Pandolfo, Sam Weber, James Leach, Randy Rutsky, Michael Herzfeld, Tarek Elhaik, Nikolaj Lubecker, John Orr, Olga Taxidou, Jane Sillars,

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Giuliana Bruno, David James, Chris Finsk, Toma Longinović, Tatiana Flessas, Alain Pottage, Jeff Geiger, Edward Campbell, Robert Dulgarian, Eric Smoodin, and Sunaina Maira—all of whom have read chapters of the book and provided me with extensive feedback, critical insight, and motivation. They have prompted me to reflect more carefully about what would constitute an ethical response to identity politics, and they have challenged me in unexpected and, I believe, extremely productive ways. Thank you. The many conversations, discussions, and debates with, and guidance from, Jelena Čolak, Zora Čolak, Ara Mgrdichian, Siniša Spajić, Dimitri Kotsaris, Carol Ravetto, Melinda Kapor, Marina Abramović, Maria Todorova, Larry Wolff, Dina Iordinova, Aniko Imre, Nick Nesbitt, Patricia Pisters, Laura Marks, Laura Mulvey, David Rodowick, Simon Biggs, Angela Dimitrakaki, Aleksandar Todorović, Dubravka Ugrešić, Svetlana Boym, Lucien Taylor, Vincent Lepany, Vojislav Stanovčić, Evangelos Makrygiannakis, Alexandra Smith, Dan Yacavone, Ana Rogers, Griselda Pollack, Tom Levin, Brigitte Doherty, Eduardo Cadava, Elena del Rio, Evi Lincoln, Teshome Gabriel, Peter Wollen, Marina Goldovskaya, Colin Milburn, Kris Fallon, Joe Dumit, Gerhard Richter, Blake Stimson, Jaimey Fisher, Caren Kaplen, Emelie Mahdavian, John Zibell, and Ksenia Federova have helped me recognize the urgency of this project and apprehend the complex network of perspectives, political sentiments, and historical understanding that are often contradictory, open ended, and incomplete. They have all persuaded me to think about the limitations of my own philosophical perspectives. I am forever grateful for their input. I am indebted to Joaquin Muñoz and Svjetlana Tepavcević at the International Monitor Institute, for making all the footage and film in the archives available to me for viewing and research, and Jelena Čolak, whose own work with B92 and various resistance groups helped me to understand the poltical landscape. I also wish to thank Dragan Milošević for his insight and detailed knowledge of events; Miroljub Vučković at the Yugoslav Film Institute for making all of the films in the archive I needed to see available to watch (I am grateful for his generosity and guidance but also indebted to him for sharing his breadth of knowledge); Radoslav Zelenović for his intellectual guidance; Slobodan Vukšić for his help locating and making available obscure and non-distributed films; and Theo Angelopoulos’s production company for making their archival material available to me.

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I would like to thank Philip Leventhal and my anonymous readers at Columbia University Press who helped me rethink what is at stake in the current political crisis of Europe, and to think more critically about how we represent such a crisis. I would also like to thank copyeditor Glenn Perkins. My sincere thanks to Luka and Gabriel who have had to endure traveling with me through the Balkans, Russia, and Eastern Europe, with many visits to museums, galleries, film and art festivals, airports, lectures and even off-the-grid locations. Thanks also to Melinda and Livio for driving me through Yugoslavia and ex-Yugoslavia. Your companionship has been invaluable. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the love and support of Mario Biagioli, Luka Biagioli, Gabriel Biagioli Salzer, Helene Ravetto, Melinda Kapor, Livio Diato, and the Marić family. Without their support this book would not have been possible.

Mythopoetic Cinema

INTRODUCTION

The ancient Greeks . . . more closely resemble a dream than the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens . . . then as a dream anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Truth and Lie

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ver time the maps of Europe have borne their own marks of anxiety— power shifts imprinted in expanding and contracting lines, metamorphoses in contour and border, sudden appearances and erasures of named space. Strangely, the vicissitudes of the map of Europe have not affected the figure of Europa: she persists, appearing alongside ideas much less tangible and out of reach than what the lines of ruined inscriptions represent. The figure morphs but endures, mixing new features with old time and time again, emerging out of the manifold stories of Greek mythology. In some narratives Europa is one of Zeus’s many lovers; in others, she is one of his many rape victims, abducted from Tyro and transported west across the Mediterranean to Crete. The history of the modern appellation is even murkier.1 It is unclear who named Europe after Europa, why or when that happened, or whether Europa originally referred to the Phoenician princess (daughter of King Agenor) or the river nymph (the daughter of Oceanus and the sister of Asia and Libya) (figure I.1).

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INTRODUCTION

FIGURE I.1

A detail of Europa riding across the sea on the back of the bull-shaped god Zeus, from a Calyx krater (ca 340 b.c., signed by Asteas, a fourth-century b.c. artist who lived in Paestum, near Naples).

Some of these ambiguities were already noticed by Herodotus, who asked why the ancient world came to be divided into three equal yet uncharted continents, each named after a mythological woman—Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa).2 The opaque genealogy and the uncertainties over the cultural boundaries of Europe were already bundled together with the equally uncertain political, social, and cultural reasons for naming these continents as separate entities. Europa, Herodotus continues, “evidently belongs to Asia and did not come to this land which is now called by the Hellenes, Europe.”3 While foregrounding the puzzling mythological and geographical association of Europa and Europe, Herodotus’s commentaries also connect these tensions to a long history of border disputes and animosities between regions and peoples. Tensions, borders, and marks of inscription accumulate, causing Europa and the map to fracture, flashing in and out of focus. This setting and resetting of oppositions between dreams and disenchantments, humans and nonhumans, maidens and beasts, the swarm of nature and the masquerade of the gods does not result in the

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casting of a definitive image of Europa. Rather these flashes reveal the many entanglements that are dragged into the assemblage of myth, figure, and map. It is in a flash, a moment of union, that this assemblage comes together— human and nonhuman, the divine and the mortal. With all their elevated and bestial natures, they contaminate and thereby undermine the same binary oppositions that attempt to set them apart. What remains is a mythopoetic assemblage that presents the possibility of different kinds of coming together and falling apart—violent and assaultive but also potentially dreamlike, rapturous, and fantastic (beyond the possibilities of the body or material conditions). How did Europa, an Asian (Oriental) woman who was enraptured—or rather, raped—by the Greek father of the gods, come not only to symbolize his exclusive homeland and civilization (construed in opposition to her own people and place of origin) but also to define the history, culture, and identity of all those post-1800 philhellene Europeans who claim to be the progeny of the ancient Hellenes? The very use of the myth of the origin of Europe to analogize historical continuities or animosities reveals the process of mythopoetics at work. As Anthony Pagden puts it: “What in myth had been a divine appropriation becomes in mythopoetic history a tale of the hatred between two continents, a hatred that would burn steadily down the centuries, as the Trojans were succeeded by the Phoenicians, the Phoenicians by the Ottoman Turks, and the Turks by Russians.”4 Mythopoetics, however, is not a practice where such analogies become forms of representation that provide Europe and European history with grounds for stable identities and judgments—that is, to write the history of Europe as a history of conflict with its neighbors or to present Europe as a model of civilization, morality, or rationality. To the contrary, mythopoetics calls attention to the disjuncture, doubling, and instability involved in the practice of analogy itself.5 This book examines a modern form of mythopoesis that mobilizes the moving image, rather than just texts, paintings, or prints, yet still engages and questions the same issues of history, identity, and representation brought up by Herodotus’s narrative of Europa. I look at a particular type of cinema that concentrates on the resurfacing of these problems in yet another, much more recent, crisis of so-called European identity following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the eastward expansion of the European Community, and the more recent rise of neonationalist parties, sovereign

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INTRODUCTION

debt, and immigration crises—processes that have brought up once more, with both urgency and violence, the contested meaning of “Europe” and the location of its geographical and cultural boundaries.6 My reading of mythopoetics goes against the grain of conventional scholarship on the term. Mythopoetics has most commonly been understood as the process of mythmaking—a creative practice that transforms ideas into themes, themes into narratives, and narratives into social meaning. A large portion of this scholarship (whether literary, theatrical, or cinematic) takes a formalist approach to poetics, situating poetics as a formal practice that can be analyzed and ranked according to prominent structural and stylistic features (as Aristotle does in his Poetics) or as a process of mapping out the temporal relations manifested in each narrative (Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette).7 More recently, however, this formalist approach has been reframed as “the practice of inquiry in scientific endeavor” based on “rational and empirical inquiry” (as David Bordwell argues in Poetics of Cinema).8 I am, instead, presenting and discussing a kind of filmic critical practice, not a filmic corpus or another attempt to disentangle enchanted from disenchanted thinking (dividing once again poetics from facts). And, in my view, the most appropriate way to do so is through the close readings of a few films that I take to be emblematic of such practice. The films, performances, and videos by Jean-Luc Godard, Aleksandr Sokurov, Marina Abramović, and Theo Angelopoulos share a strategy designed to implode archetypal myths of national, ethnic, religious, and political identities—a strategy also found in some of the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dušan Makavejev, and Emir Kusturica.9 Mythopoetics is not a film genre: Godard’s essay-films, Angelopoulos’s epic (modernist) cinema, Sokurov’s poetic lyrical style, and Abramović’s performance, moving-image, and installation art have little in common. What brings these disparate artists and filmmakers together is less a movement that creates a “new European cinema” than a critical engagement that takes up the question of what constitutes Europe in the age of neoliberalism. As these artists were well established before the end of the Cold War, they do not offer new aesthetic approaches, narrative styles, or historical perspectives about a post–Cold War Europe as much as they present a perspective that is informed by a sustained critical engagement with cinema and the many trajectories of Europa—Europa’s multiple deployments and imaginary incarnations, its monumentality, nostalgic dreams, and failed aspirations.

INTRODUCTION

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Although I analyze several “new” European films—in the sense that they were made after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of debates over a “new Europe”—in no way do I suggest that these films amount to a “new European cinema,” “post-Soviet cinema,” “Balkan cinema,” or a “new Slovenian art” form. On the contrary, I argue that while these mythopoetic films were produced by European directors working in Europe and Eastern Europe, they explicitly undermine the notion of a new European cinema, if by that term one means films that “reflect” or “represent” a new European identity (e.g., “post-Soviet,” “former-Yugoslav,” “German of Turkish descent,” “French Algerian”). I read mythopoetic cinema as a critical practice that can emerge virtually anywhere, being connected not to political identities but to a kind of critique that, while connected to specific European philosophical traditions, is certainly not aimed at stabilizing “Europeanness” of any kind. There have been several books that assume and support the possibility of the articulation of a new European identity—one that is less discriminatory and more inclusive. This kind of work acknowledges all of the political and social problems that Europe and its many kinds of immigrants and refugees are experiencing, but assumes that these problems are rooted in “bad” identity politics and that they could be solved by a new, more ethical or realistic, understanding of identity.10 The new European cinema these scholars advocate is meant to reflect and represent this new “progressive” European identity. Mythopoetic cinema instead questions this commitment to the discourse of identity (however inclusive, diverse, tolerant, etc.) by showing it to be both conceptually untenable and politically dangerous in the endless reproduction of identifications that inevitably bring more radical forms of exclusion—precisely the kind of exclusions that I would like to avoid by positing yet another image of European identity. Mythopoetic films dealing with these events and identity-formation dynamics expose the reality that all historical narratives aimed at buttressing identities (national or otherwise) are bound to introduce affiliations and separations that destabilize the very identities they are seeking to establish. They also show that the notion of hybrid identity is no solution to these problems as it, too, depends on the existence of distinct component identities that are then spliced and rearranged into a hybrid formation. The particular brand of mythopoetic cinema created by these artists cannot be characterized by its formal properties (as a genre) or the intentions of its

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INTRODUCTION

auteurs (as would be the case with a cinematic movement); rather it is characterized by what it does—that is, how it forces us to unthink the construction of Europe and European identity as powerful political tropes. Mythopoetics is a critical practice that questions the constant need to provide new identities, a new Europe, and with it a new European cinema. It is deeply political, but this is a politics of unthinking identity politics rather than providing us with new ones. Mythopoetic cinema does not set out to establish what is good and evil but mimics and parodies conventional stereotypes, proliferating many cultural resemblances as competing historical and mythic narratives. By juxtaposing myths, histories, stories, and various aesthetic forms, mythopoetic cinema unthinks these one-sided narratives that produce binary oppositions—like the myth of one unified group against an imaginary other. Such dichotomies fuel the vicious cycles of violence that we continue to witness along the boundaries of Europe, and with them the imperceptible power of a one-sided view “that puffs itself up into an all-sidedness which in turn is masked so as to look harmless and natural.”11 This type of poetics demonstrates that with representation comes an ongoing process of contamination. The history of Europe bears the traces of the many versions of the myth of Europa, and the myth of Europa may also lay bare the many traces of history that invoke it. Rather than reconcile modes of representation with events or existents, as Derrida argues, the trace marks a point of rupture within the discourses of history and metaphysics, exposing patterns of incongruities.12 By revealing these traces, mythopoetics demonstrates how myth contaminates history, and history contaminates myth. Herodotus, as François Hartog points out, has always had an ambivalent reputation: “Antiquity fabricated a two-headed Herodotus and turned the name ‘Herodotus’ . . . into a double name which designated both the father of history and also a liar—if not the father of all lies.”13 As Hartog indicates, Herodotus cannot be simply dismissed as a bad historian. The figure of Herodotus instantiates the paradox of producing history, of making truth claims about peoples and their actions while necessarily mobilizing fictions. History always deploys analogies—in Herodotus’s case between different peoples, the identities he attributes to them, and the different lands they occupy as “Greeks,” “Europeans,” “Trojans,” and so on. But analogies can never be identities. As “Europe” can never be identical to “Europeans,” the concept of Europe,

INTRODUCTION

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European, or European identity is bound to mobilize fictions to connect itself to nonfictional referents. This book returns to the ambiguity of these ancient narratives of political, geographical, and ethnic genealogies. It is not meant to demystify them, set the historical record straight, discern truth from lie, or point out how history alludes to mythic figures in the process of drawing analogies, creating allegories, or generating continuities. Rather, it picks them up at the other end, in the near present, showing how multiple, even contradictory, myths and figures of Europe have been redeployed in the construction of a new (post-Soviet) European cinema, in order to question the politics of both image and mythmaking. Mythopoetic cinema is a response to gestures such as creating new, coherent understandings of Europe or resorting to old formations when confronted with new crises, such as the massive influx of refugees and economic instability. I return to mythopoetics not as mythmaking that collapses myth and history through rhetorical tropes, narrative devices, allegories, or analogies but as a critical practice that makes us aware of these double articulations—that truth claims utilize myth. Mythopoetics helps us understand how truth claims are continuously modulated or contaminated, adding on to what Nietzsche called “supplemental rationality”—a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms . . . that have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory.”14 Truth does not simply become a lie, but rather an unstable construct that, in order to sustain itself, must always confront other truths, images, forms of rhetorical invention, and potential usages. Like myth, truth is contaminated by the very act of being attributed to specific events, concepts, or images. Since the modern period the figure of Europe has become more identified with the concept of civilization than with the territorial politics described by Herodotus. It also seems to have lost some of its ancient, constitutive tensions between Asian Europa and the Greek bull. While it is difficult to tell who is riding whom—whether Europa has domesticated the bull or it has domesticated her—by the late medieval period a veneer of stability was layered on top of an otherwise split identity. The two became united on the side of Europe against perceived identity threats from Islam, Europe’s colonial others, and internal minority populations. As Federico Chabod and

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INTRODUCTION

Denys Hay have argued, a unifying myth of Europe emerged precisely as the hopes of a universal Christendom had to be abandoned.15 This “modern” construction of European identity also marks an important shift from older territory-based notions, no longer resting exclusively on natural geographical markers and spatial differences but instead deploying what Reinhart Koselleck calls “counterconcepts” to establish absolute differences.16 A counterconcept is a notion designed to produce asymmetric forms of power by establishing two dueling identities predicated on binary oppositions. Such distinctions or counterconcepts between what is European and what is not recall the spirit (but not the letter) of Herodotus’s dilemma: how are conceptual borders drawn when the definition of the border requires a group self-recognition that excludes others on grounds of culture, intelligence, and language (Hellene as opposed to Barbarian), or morality (Christian as opposed to Heathen)? Still, unlike ancient definitions of Europe that cast the other as illiterate or not yet Christianized—an other that lacks certain features of the one but is not inherently unlike it—the counterconcept of modern Europe draws an essentially sharper distinction. It no longer calls on the other to negate itself as other and stand in for what is European (that is, to become part, or rather a lesser part, of the universal ideal of Europe, Christianity, or democracy) but construes the other as an enemy (the inhuman) that needs to be eradicated. The anthropomorphic image of Europa Regina commingles geography, religion, property, and sexuality, offering both a unifying map and a political and social commentary on Europe. Spain is the crown of Europe, Sicily its orb, and Bohemia the heart. Eastern Europe (up to Moscow), Greece, and Albania sit at the hem of her skirt (figure I.2).17 Europa Regina has been cleansed of any of the sexual connotation of the ancient figure of Europa. This desexualization has little to do with cartography itself, since there were earlier maps of Europe which likened it to a fallen woman. What the map shows is that the ancient Europa ravished by the bull has been Christianized, turned into a virgin queen, and is defending her purity and reign against those regions that lay beyond and below her—regions that, paradoxically, may also host those European populations that Christian Europe had recently expelled to defend her “purity.” Europa Regina is sharply distinguished from and yet co-exists with older pagan incarnations of Europa riding the bull. References to Greek mythology stand side by side with images of a unified Christendom and of Europe as an allegorical figure of

INTRODUCTION

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FIGURE I.2 “Europa Regina” (Queen of Europe) was first drawn by Johannes Bucius in 1537 and appeared in this simplified version in several editions of Münster’s Cosmography from 1580 onward. The west is shown at top, with Spain forming the crown and head, France the neck and bust, Italy the left arm, and Denmark the right arm holding a scepter with Britain as the flag. The remainder of the figure is a flowing robe with Greece and Russia at the feet.

advanced civilization that were to be globally exported through colonialism. Myths multiply.

BALKANIZING EUROPA The incarnation of a unified Christendom into the shape of Europe collapsed as religious wars broke out in response to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The figure of Europe, however, remained. As Hay points out, “in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries . . . Europe emerged as the unchallenged symbol of the largest human loyalty.” This also marked a shift away from its association with Christendom to a more

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INTRODUCTION

secular image as a political collectivity that required a “balance of power” and “peaceful negotiations” to ensure expanding commerce and religious tolerance.18 This quasi-secularized idea of Europe functioned as a Kantian “regulative ideal”—a prototype for the federation of all peoples. But while emphasizing the formal equality of all citizens under the law, it introduced distinctions and hierarchies within Europe itself. Even today, Kant’s idea of Europe applies more to France and Germany than it does to Italy, Spain, Greece, and post-Brexit Great Britain. Similarly, back in the early modern period, Kant’s regulative ideal of Europe set up internal relations of alterity among European countries while leaving the status of the margins ambiguous—neither part nor apart. According to Larry Wolff, “Eastern Europe [as the Balkans] appeared as a sea where shifting borders moved with the rising and ebbing tides. These were lands that ultimately evaded the competing claims of Europe and the Orient, lands that neither encyclopedist nor geographer could locate with fixed certainty.”19 Although the names and boundaries of the territories that comprise(d) the Balkans (which is a rather modern term) have fluctuated with wars and invasions starting with the Ottoman conquest and occupation of Bulgaria in 1352, the region came to represent the military front between Western and Eastern empires. The exclusion of Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic republics, and sometimes even the German states from Europe could not be determined on a territorial basis alone: “Eastern Europe” was invented by Western Europeans as an abstract concept—both as a negative image of the West and as the ideal image of Europe—in order to separate the barbarous East from the civilized West. The Enlightenment separated the West from the East on the basis of reason, democracy, civilization, and good manners—a division that, never stable or erased, was famously revised and reinforced during the Cold War between the “evil empire” (including its “captive nations”) and the Western “free world.” This book is about the sites and occasions where these layered dichotomies—ancient, early modern, and modern—fell apart, and perhaps could not but fall apart. An example is the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which participated in the founding and organization of the NonAligned Movement) and many of the Eastern European states that tried to develop an alternative (a third way) to both Western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Arguably, it is the uncertain status of these states in between conventional Cold War positions that makes them more disturbing because

INTRODUCTION

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they cannot be cast as an outright other to Europe. Alliances that constitute alternatives to global power cannot be described as “autonomous zones,” nor can they be reduced to the “swamp-begotten” borderland described by Joseph Roth in Radetzkymarsch. Roth’s characters have no notion of the world outside their local swamp, yet they seem to be the source of the global trade in human flesh, swamp fever, mixing, mobility, and the demise of empire.20 The end of the second world order of controlled economies and state socialism, “the revolutions of 1989–91,” and the subsequent eastward expansion of the European Union have dramatically reshaped the geography of Europe’s borders. Yet they have done little or nothing to change the multiple contradictory views about the cultural identity of Europe that have circulated since Herodotus. For instance, Eastern European politicians, journalists, and scholars, like their Western counterparts, have been quick to declare the “revolutions of 1989” as an ideological victory for “democracy” and an economic victory for capitalism, thus reassigning several countries from the East to the West without questioning the logic of the East/West demarcation. This “revolution” was not in fact read as the result of a pursuit for a new social order but as the return to a “good old” one. It did not achieve the “third way” or “Eurocommunism” (as articulated by dissident groups such as Solidarność and the Workers Defense Committee in Poland or Chapter 77 in Czechoslovakia); rather, it saw the resurgence of traditional nation-states and the reintegration of this “other Europe” into the democratic-capitalist world of private property, free elections, freedom of religion, and constitutional government. Although it affected European boundaries, this “revolution” became part of a globalizing narrative. Speculations on future economic prosperity, political pluralism, open borders, felled idols, walls, and iron curtains produced a flood of Western triumphal neo-utopian discourses of globalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism as the framework for all the world’s power relations. The triumph of the neoliberal “democratic” over socialist collective values amounted to the conflation of capitalistic values with those of politics and morality. Widespread historical revisionism ensued. Rather than seeing the end of the Cold War as an epistemological rupture, many revisionists presented images of democracy and nationalism lying dormant through the Cold War as evidence of historical continuity—a continuity rooted in collective forgetting. This helped to erase the frequent

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INTRODUCTION

accommodations and collaborations with the former Soviet regime but also revised national identities through the removal of monuments, names, and events from public space and official history—gestures that ironically mimicked previous erasures performed by the Soviet regime.21 Also, an explosion of nationalism and nostalgia has accompanied the age of the new nation-states, with many commentators pointing out the etymological connection of nostalgia with longing (algia in Latin) or pain (algos in Greek) and home (nostos in Greek).22 The longing to return to a homeland whose image resides in the distant past can, in turn, be effectively used as a means of legitimizing the “emerging” nation-state after an age of empire (Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian) and the Cold War order. However, such “returns” to the past of the nation-state are, as Svetlana Boym, Benedict Anderson, and Stathis Gourgouris argue, more a product of collective imagination (and sometimes a true movement against time) than a claim based on historical fact.23 For sure, there has been no reengagement with older figures of Europe that continue to frame the histories now being rediscovered or written. The resurfacing of terms like “Eastern Europe,” “Central Europe,”24 “Mitteleuropa,”25 and the “Balkans”26 to demarcate the economic, ideological, and physical borders of Europe attests to what Étienne Balibar calls “the hierarchal vision of European history.”27 The construal of the “New Europe,” Balibar argues, involves a double exclusion. On the one hand, the identification with a “phantom or illusory Europe” requires that new European states push the border of Europe farther east to include the likes of Ukraine, Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. On the other hand, it requires states seeking EU membership to recognize themselves as “emerging democracies,” thus implying a rejection of their recent history and a (re)turn to the historical form and political practice of the nation-state. By placing themselves within the hierarchy of European history, a few years after the revolutions of 1989, these states have in fact regressed politically by over a hundred years. This backward slide returns “Central and Eastern Europe” to its older position as the “other Europe”—countries whose European “membership” is predicated on their standing as and at the border—that is, both inside the borders and outside of what it means to be European. A good example is Turkey, a country whose European membership is being negotiated and advanced by its willingness to “house” immigrants from Syria who wish to depart for other European destinations. These new

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European states were initially called on to contain those lands and peoples to the East that are not only less European—more “tribal” or “barbaric”— but also “powder kegs” and “hotbeds” of nationalism, ethnocentrism, terrorism, and extreme sexism and machismo that threaten to spill over or seep through the borders—borders that are always presented from the perspective of the northern- and westernmost European states as inexorably porous and potentially explosive. But with the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, new European states like Poland and the Baltic countries have become the front lines for the growing tension between the NATO-aligned states and Russia. As a consequence of the growing anxieties among the populations of the easternmost European states over possible Russian expansion, NATO opened new bases in Romania and Poland in May 2016, and in June 2016, Britain sent troops to Estonia while Germany sent troops to Lithuania and the United States sent troops to eastern Poland. This concept of the “new” placement of these formerly “satellite states” that once provided a different perspective on historical identifications and geopolitical events is now collapsed into a series of returns—such as the Cold War animosity between the West and Russia, Christianity against Islam, native against immigrant populations, neoliberalism against socialism, and establishment politics against growing populist movements. The political tensions and conceptual problems surrounding the identity of the “New Europe” have only grown tragically more relevant in the last few years, making it even more urgent to question our thinking about political and cultural identity. This book was initiated and has been sustained by a deep concern for the political violence that since the 1990s has tracked the emergence of the “New Europe,” despite its apparent commitment to inclusiveness and hybridity. For example, the issues raised by the peoples who, following the collapse of the USSR, clamored to join the European Union. These former Eastern Bloc and Balkan countries quickly and forcefully erased their “non-European” and “undemocratic” socialist past, replacing it with historical narratives connecting them to Europe, the genealogy of that concept, the democratic values associated with it, and the historiographical myths that, over millennia, have sustained the idea of Europe by severing its many and amply documented ties to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. However, this recent mix of historical erasure and revisionism has not turned these people into “new Europeans” but rather has propelled a resurgence of neonationalist sentiments (quite antithetical

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to tolerant and inclusive visions of a “new” Europe) that have fueled and continue to fuel not only the erection of new political and cultural boundaries but also violent ethnic warfare (in the former Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine), as well as anti-immigrant policies and increasingly successful right-wing nationalist parties throughout Europe. Similarly, recent attacks in Belgium and France cannot be understood simply as a reaction to Western interventions in the Middle East but also as an effect of the “New European” identity’s inability to include large swaths of immigrant urban populations, or to make them feel even more excluded by treating practices like wearing the veil as “non-European.” These problems are not the result of these countries’ forging “bad” or “imaginary” histories as opposed to “accurate” ones. This sliding scale (or moving target) of what counts as the real Europe has only become more pronounced with the financial crises of 2007–2009 and the resulting bailouts in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and Italy. Sovereign debt crises have reduced the state to a “mechanism for domination and exploitation specific to modern-day capitalism,”28 as public money goes to cover the financial industry’s losses. But what is “Greek,” “Spanish,” “Portuguese,” “Cypriot,” or “Italian” about sovereign debt when the creditors tend to come from outside the nation? Have European global capitalists resurrected the nation-state on its southern margins only when they call for austerity and sacrifice? The borders that previously cast the eastern and southern margins as quasi-European in terms of culture, religion, and modernization are still in place, but they have now been redefined as divisions between those who can and cannot manage themselves financially. Unlike the “frugal Germans,” these new marginal states, which include what are now considered to be the core parts of Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece), are depicted in the popular press as out-of-control children blowing their weekly allowance as soon as they receive it. The figure of Europe seems to accrue rather than shed internal tensions and contradictions. It now refers to a set of contiguous nation-states that are considered more or less European, more or less in debt, more or less marginal, more or less civilized. These nation-states also resemble a federal structure based on the Kantian ideal of an inclusive representative republic, except that it is predicated on the notion of property and trade.29 There is no consensus on how to reconcile such contradictions, draw Europe’s borders once and for all, or assign it a figurative image of unity-in-difference beyond the Euro coins (of the same size but different imagery) minted by

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each EU member state. While Jürgen Habermas still sees the idea of Europe as a necessary “civilizing force” designed to reconcile democracy with capitalism,30 critics like Maurizio Lazzarato argue that the European financial crisis has “ushered in a new political phase in which capital [is] no longer able to count on the promise of future wealth,” and thus needs to manufacture debt to keep itself alive. Originally cast as the center of civilization, Europe may now signify both a new beginning and end of global capital, standing for a sense of abstract collective belonging and an intense set of exclusions, both within and outside its borders.

REASSEMBLING EUROPA In these pages, I analyze cinematic responses to speculation over and the spectrality of European identity in the post-Soviet era by showing how filmmakers—better than politicians and political commentators—have been able to engage and understand the recent reconceptualization of Europe’s borders, mythic figures, and identity paradoxes. More than a deconstruction of Europe’s appropriation of uncertain boundaries, mythopoetic cinema is about crossing borders (historical, ethnic, national, religious) to engage both the contamination of identities, cultures, and ideologies and the line between the real, the historical, and the imaginary. It mixes filmic styles (cinéma vérité, Nouvelle Vague, newsreel footage, fascist propaganda film, epic cinema, and big-budget Hollywood cinema) and genres (epic, essay-film, found footage, performance art, and art film), yet it goes beyond citational and transnational cinema or cinematic pastiche to present us with a series of returns. These are not returns to some epic myth of origin that gives rise to a cultural or national identity but only the citation, referencing, and parody of such nostalgic longings—repetitions that pay no reverence to the “original.” Mythopoetic cinema does not offer alternative histories but enacts revisions that do not presume to step outside of their own boundaries. Dušan Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon exemplifies such relentless parody and multifaceted referencing. It quotes a variety of films and styles—from Soviet realist cinema of the late 1930s and early 1950s to Leni

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Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (The Triumph of the Will, 1935), which it parodies in its opening. The establishing shot of Riefenstahl’s film depicts Hitler descending from the clouds to visit the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, while in Gorilla we find Viktor Lasukutin, a Soviet army officer, flying over Berlin—the city he has been asked to vacate following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany. The soundtrack is also related, but strikingly different. Instead of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Riefenstahl’s film, we hear Viktor commenting: “half a century ago a trivial man from the South, an unemployed artist came here, invaded other places where he was not wanted, and soon the whole world was here.” After a short, extreme close-up of Viktor eating an apple, the film cuts to the scene from Mikheil Chiaureli’s Padeniye Berlin (The Fall of Berlin, 1949), the epic film of the Soviets taking the Reichstag and flying their flag over the city to indicate their victory over the Nazis. At this point, Viktor installs himself into Chiaureli’s film by identifying two of the Reichstag conquerors as his parents, thus crossing over between “fiction” and “reality,” or moving horizontally between two propaganda fictions that both want to claim the status of reality. The juxtaposition of different genres of political filmmaking (Nazi propaganda, Soviet propaganda, the filming of Berlin after the unification of Germany) and three ideologies (fascist, socialist, capitalist) is unsettling, for both their differences and their similarities are made visible in new ways. The Fall of Berlin, for instance, can be seen as the direct ideological opposite of Triumph of the Will, but it actually copies some of the latter’s visual techniques—as much as Riefenstahl also copied Eisenstein’s method of typage. Chiaureli’s film enumerates the different ethnic groups who participated in the fall of Berlin (as Riefenstahl shows the different regions of Germany that contributed to Hitler’s work battalions), but it also frames Stalin as a mythical, godlike figure not unlike Riefenstahl’s Hitler. Both Hitler and Stalin are then compared to a statue of a gorilla in Makavejev’s film. Intercut with clips from both films is a scene in Gorilla where a German officer arrests Viktor for vagrancy. Upon his release he is given a one-way ticket to Moscow, which he unsuccessfully attempts to sell on the black market. Without offering any definitive way of reading this series of juxtapositions, Makavejev forces the audience to situate the unification of Berlin with respect to these two representations of “historical moments” and to

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find a place—a seemingly impossible one—for “a soldier whose army deserted him.” Viktor asks: “what is a man without a uniform?” He is a relic of a fallen superpower—a Siberian-born officer of an occupying army—but how are we to place him? Almost overnight, his uniform, his Soviet flag, and all that they stand for have become obsolete, or worse. Not only is he a man without a uniform; he is a uniform without a reference—a man without a sense of purpose, an affiliation, or a clear political, cultural, or ethnic location. Makavejev draws analogies between Viktor and the statue of Lenin that is slated for removal from East Berlin (capital city of the DDR). Like Lenin, Viktor is destined to return to Russia, yet Makavejev questions why Viktor and the statue must return when, in fact, they felt they had also become Berliners, a part of the city’s history. Both are now men without a country, since they belong(ed) to the Soviet Union, not to Russia, making the very notion of “return” unintelligible. In Viktor’s case, identity may not even be a form of nostalgia, being not a unified referent but a web of too many simultaneous differences and resemblances, not to mention too many contradictions. Viktor is played by a Yugoslav actor who speaks perfect English and Serbo-Croatian but does not utter a line in Russian—the language one would expect his character to speak. Instead of playing into the politics of representation (a practice of identification through resemblances and associations), these films practice unthinking (unlinking such resemblances and associations and questioning the grounds from which they are drawn). By revealing the unthought in thought, mythopoetic cinema challenges us to rethink the constructs of difference and opposition, but, as Gorilla shows us, we do not need to be left with only a primary lack (Lacan) or the figure of nothingness (Blanchot). The film closes with Viktor returning to Russia along with the statue of Lenin (an image of withdrawal into an absolute Soviet past and an uncertain present and future), but then the actor playing Victor, Svetozar Cvetković , suddenly switches to perfect German as he takes off his costume—an army uniform. The last image we see is one of the empty uniform seemingly floating near the Brandenburg Gate, with the alleged director asking in a voice-over: “How come he suddenly speaks German, you ask me? That is because he is an actor. So where is Viktor Borisivich, you ask? I am asking myself the same question, and I am getting no answer.”

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Even if we get no answer—only empty uniforms and the disappearance of Viktor Borisivich—these apparent absences do not constitute an essential lack, nor do they leave us with a figure of sheer nothingness. The film does not offer us a resolution but opens up as many questions as possibilities: it suggests that the film has been searching for a real man, Viktor Borisivich, while simultaneously using an actor from the former Yugoslavia (Cvetković) to perform a possible fictional story about Viktor Borisivich that cannot give us a satisfactory answer. It may also suggest that Viktor Borisivich may only be a fiction, yet his uniform (as his image) haunts the Brandenburg Gate like other real and fictional characters also haunt the same site. The monument recalls and calls on other images, images of Hitler, who plays himself in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad, and Stalin, who is played by Mikhail Gelovani in Padeniye Berlin. The monument itself was used to symbolize Hitler’s chancellorship in 1933; the Nazi blitzkrieg triumphs over Poland and France in 1939; and the fall of Berlin to the Soviets in 1945. After the war it became an infamous site of prostitution, the black market, and American solidarity with West Germany—the site where Kennedy is photographed with Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer before giving his famous speech “Ich bin ein Berliner” (also quoted in the film) as well as Reagan’s speech: “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!” Then, by introducing the director’s voice at the end, the film also comments on practices of image-making, destabilizing any one claim to reality, signification, symbolization, or authority. Gorilla does not offer stable images of thought—justice, nothingness, or the redemption of the image itself; instead, it provides us with a set of images that reflects on an ethics of existence in post-Soviet Europe. As mythopoetic cinema, it does not think but performs the unthought, revealing how opposition is just another form of representation disguising itself as thinking. It allows us to simultaneously produce a spectral sense of presence through a performance of the unthought, and to reflect on it critically. By juxtaposing myths, poetry, histories, and other narratives (visual, literary, etc.), mythopoetic cinema unthinks the logic of positionality that gives legitimacy to institutional and conventional truths.31 What emerges is a radical otherness not as negation but as an ambiguous form of affirmation. Conversely, mythopoetic cinema cannot affirm an identity because—as shown by Gorilla—it involves too many analogies (too many possible

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differences and resemblances at the same time), too many perspectives, and too many possible others, expressions, and experiences of otherness. Philosophy has pursued the unthought, but it has often done so in hopes that the unthought would possess the means of reconciling the human with its own essence. It is the promise of transcendental idealism and universalism, either as identitarian politics (speaking in the name of the oppressed, the workers of the world, or the postcolonial subjects) or as non-teleological politics (Alain Badiou’s “universal singularity” or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude”)—that which becomes the “preliminary ground upon which man must collect himself and recall himself in order to attain his truth.”32 These are not the paths followed by mythopoetic cinema, which refuses to offer us yet another national, personal, or political imaginary.

EUROPA IN FOUR ACTS While there are many alternative examples of mythopoetic cinema, I have decided to concentrate on four unique cinematic works of art that best analyze the specific geographical and contextual dilemmas facing contemporary Europe. Sokurov’s Russkij kovcheg (Russian Ark, 2002) focuses on the effects of the collapse of the Cold War world order on yet another reconfiguration of Europe that juxtaposes various forms of nostalgia (for a presocialist, tsarist past) and acts of erasure (the felling of monuments and icons, the collapse of states, the implosion of ideologies, and the expurgation of the Soviet past). O Megalexandros anticipates the shift in geopolitics from a Cold War world order to a new world order, but rather than presenting the failure of experimental socialism as a triumph for democracy, it presents it as the failure of democracy to overcome the tyrannical authority of global capitalism and its power over local politics. Angelopoulos made O Megalexandros in 1980, one year before Greece entered the European Union and the same year the socialist party (PASOK) took power. Ironically, this was also the time when the appeal and success of Soviet-styled socialism was globally eroding. Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic

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(2005) and Godard’s Notre Musique (2004) reveal that it is the investment in a singular history and identity of Europe and its nation-states that makes Europe unstable and vulnerable to further partitioning and outbursts of violence. The unhurried pacing and complexity of these films make it a daunting (if extraordinarily rewarding) task to engage closely with them. It does not make things easier that they are replete with theatrical, literary, filmic, historical, and philosophical references that often exceed the background of today’s film audiences. This is why I offer a close reading and detailed historical contextualization of these films. They deserve it. In chapter 1, “Floating on the Borders of Europe,” Sokurov’s Russian Ark takes tsarist dreams of Europe (turning St. Petersburg into a window on and bridge to Europe) and the erasure of the Soviet past as its points of departure. While treating the Soviet period as an ellipsis in Russian history, Sokurov also reminds us that recent practices of historical erasure only repeat well-established Soviet tactics of historical revisionism. More problematic is his resurrection of the tsars and their fetishistic relationship toward Europe as a means of returning to a pre-Soviet Russia. Russian Ark may take place entirely inside the Hermitage and Winter Palace in one single ninety-minute take, but it captures the objects, settings, and peoples from the period when the tsars were most influenced by Europe—from 1712 when Peter the Great moved the capital of Russia from Moscow to St. Petersburg to the end of the reign of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. At the same time, the film creates a sense of historical disjuncture, or perhaps even inversion, when it presents a series of ghostly images of contemporary Russia. It seems as if it is contemporary Russia that, itself a ghost, haunts its past, cut adrift from all senses of belonging, and from history itself. What counts as historical memory or historical culture in Russian Ark is only that which is contained in this ark—the collection of objects, the artwork, and the building commissioned by the tsar to construct and fill the Hermitage and Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The tsars’ ark appears to float over the “Russian” people who surround it or are drowned out by the flood of opulent images. Ironically, these images do not directly reflect the “Russian” people but reenact and reenvision the pre-Soviet Russian state. If the film is an ark, then it has selected only a few Russian figures to carry over the deluge of the Soviets—artists, poets, curators, and the tsars themselves. Sokurov asks us to think about how these images of the pre-Soviet state bear on the post-Soviet “Russian” people. Redeeming the image of the Russian

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state and its tsarist grandeur calls for the disappearance of the Russians themselves. Chapter 2, “O Megalexandros: Falling In and Out of Dreams,” considers the iconic figure of Alexander (who has taken many forms from the ancient to medieval and modern worlds) as a miasmic or impure figure. In different periods, he is made to stand for the imperial conquest of the East, Christianity against Islam, and independence from Ottoman rule, but he is also an ambiguous figure who both bridges and divides these oppositions. More than any other of Angelopoulos’s films, O Megalexandros struck a sensitive nerve in Greece, pointing to its complicated relationship to both the West and the East, as well as to how the left and the right have continually written and rewritten that story since the country’s “independence” in the nineteenth century. In fact, Angelopoulos shows how Europe’s dreams of restoring the glory of ancient Greece and the creation of a continuous narrative of European identity ends up both separating and linking Hellenic and modern civilization. Made as Greece was about to join the European Union, Megalexandros does not acquiesce to the political mood of the moment but foregrounds Greece’s status as a crypto-colony or client state at the same time that it recalls a complex history of resistance and the uncertain imagery of what always lies beyond “Greekness.” Chapter 3, “In Balkan: Marina Abramović and the Poetics of the Suffering Body,” examines how the repetition of past myths, events, and performances cause them to become untimely. Rather than reifying narrative identities, they are about unstable relationships, ideas, and identifications. While Marina Abramović is mainly known as a performance artist, her performances on the Balkans have integrated moving-image installation, and much of the work has been exclusively displayed as moving-image installation or distributed as a film. These cinematic works and video documentations of her performances—Balkan Baroque (1997) and Balkan Erotic Epic (2005)—explore the poetics of confrontation. Her performances and videos illustrate the ways the political interests inscribed in even the most wellmeaning distinctions (of victims and victimizers, just and unjust warfare, etc.) end up subscribing to untenable assumptions about morality. These moral judgments conceal their own hidden assumptions about subjectivity and the body—positing the former as an a priori center of reflection and the latter as a site of vulnerability, a place for inscription. I am interested, for instance, in how Balkan Erotic Epic presents the politics of bodies,

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subjectivity, and morality as a series of changing interactions rather than a set of fixed social or natural relations. While it makes the body vulnerable to the gaze of others, it also allows us to examine the performative aspects of both identity politics and moral judgments—the theater of ancient tribal hatreds, the spectacle of competing victims, the translation of bodies in pain into wounded spaces and wounded images. Yet the very introduction of the image into the discourse of suffering is a cause for suspicion because the image undermines the claim to the real—whether the experience of trauma, witnessing, or pain—as a form of singularity and uniqueness. Chapter 4, “Notre Musique: On the Ruins of the Divine,” presents another variation on the mythopoetics of confrontation. It asks us to think about how past relations of victims to victimizers and vanquishers (or the champions of the victim) have produced their own aesthetic and ethics. Godard’s Notre Musique drew sharp criticism for demonstrating how contemporary discourses of human rights, ethics, and the way we visualize the image of victims are deeply tied to the historical events of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as Jean-François Lyotard put it, has become a model, but it is not a model that can be applied universally. While drawing analogies to the events of the genocide of European Jews was politically effective in Bosnia, it has been disavowed in the case of Palestinians who seek to use it as an analogy to their predicament under Israeli occupation. This selective universal, as Achille Mbembe argues, is not designed to represent a universal in terms of human rights but “accomplishes its own work and validates itself through its own sovereignty, and thereby permits power to be exercised as a right to kill.”33 Like Mbembe, Godard suggests that the discourse of human rights is itself deeply political and can often be used to justify retribution— “the right to kill”—in the name of the victim. But is it possible to produce an ethical response to violence and violent images that does not reproduce the vicious cycle of violence itself ? Interweaving citations to poems, tragedies, histories, and iconographies, as well as to traditional oral narratives and customs, make these films extraordinarily complex, nuanced, and erudite. They do not simply offer us another image but question the status of the moving image as both visual evidence and an uncanny form of spectrality that unsettles what it signifies. They suggest that cinema presents us with a post-humanist possibility, which is constantly shifting, processual, and imagistic. These works make us aware of the limitations of human as well as mechanical perception; they

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stretch and condense time, revealing serial patterns of repetition and the unbearableness of duration. This is not simply a practice of camera consciousness or an awareness of the image’s technological determinacy; it is also a practice of thinking with and through cinema—a process that makes visible how meaning is both produced and questioned by cinema. In so doing, they make, I believe, a crucial contribution to both the ongoing disputes over European identity politics and to contemporary debates on the redemption of the image. The mythopoetic image of Europe does not seamlessly suture history and myth, nor does it call on us to recognize ourselves as ideological subjects in some universal discourse. The work of the image of Europe is unsettling. Its very repetition is poetic, making us think about its transfiguration, internal contradictions, and forces of contamination with other concepts and counterconcepts. While aesthetically these works have little in common, they have each engaged with a relentless critical practice that cannot simply be aligned with one political position or another, nor can it be summarily dismissed as relativist (the argument leveled against critical theory and deconstruction) or as critique for its own sake (an argument leveled against modernism). There is a deeper political message at work here, one that is not afraid to take sides—as long as the side being taken is tactical and temporary rather than ideological and essentialist. In my view, this is a highly political stance: to make a case for critique as a type of politics, without aligning oneself with a particular ideology. Mythopoetics supports a politics of confrontation, not a politics of ideological convictions. A politics of confrontation seeks to undermine essentialist arguments—for example, that the Balkans have always been plagued by ancient tribal hatreds or that Islam breeds fanaticism. The point is to question moral judgments that seek to propagate the logic of retribution, thus validating a “right to kill,” repress, punish, and exclude a whole people, culture, or religion for acts committed by the state or in the name of some ethnic or political identity. It is this unwillingness to make moral judgments—since various moral beliefs are often implicated in violent political action—that has generated so much controversy around the reception of these works. None of the works I discuss has been easy to categorize in terms of traditional politics. They all have consistently upset both the right and the left, and they have done so by questioning rather than putting forward easily digestible ideological statements. Often this makes them difficult, even frustrating, to view because they do not provide

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us with the answers we want to hear: they do not offer us new, revitalized images of ourselves or the ideas we choose to believe in, nor do they offer us a space from which we can judge events or other people. Through their very complexity they make us understand the ways other works of film so often do the work of thinking for us. As Raùl Ruiz puts it: “Cinema in its industrial form is a predator. It is a machine for copying the visible world, and a book for people who cannot read.”34 Films like Russian Ark, O Megalexandros, Balkan Erotic Epic, and Notre Musique do not present us with an image of the visible world that is already installed in a prepackaged narrative; rather, they help us see how politics are always already inscribed in such visible images and conventional narratives. These may not be the films we want to watch, but they are the films we need to see if we want to understand why this thing called Europe continues to collapse and reform along such politically divisive lines.

1 FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark

On the table, in the glow of the wax candle, stood the tiny bronze Europa riding a galloping bull. Baločanski took the tiny figurine in his hand, and began to examine it under the light holding it close to his eyes, so that he seemed to be sniffing at the little Europa like a dog. —Miroslav Krleža, The Return of Philip Latinowicz

M

iroslav Krleža’s vignette encapsulates the complex relationship of Europe to what Étienne Balibar has called its double borders— lands that are both within and outside of Europe.1 Like many films from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russkij kovcheg, 2002) examines identity and national politics that emerge from such desirous orientations toward Europe. Yet rather than represent this sniffing as a form of pure adulation of the figure of Europe by liminal or non-Europeans, Sokurov’s mythopoetic cinema reveals the instability of geographical, historical, and cultural points of reference. Europe’s view of the East does place Russia or Eastern Europe in the proverbial backwaters between Europe and Asia (or the Orient). By looking toward Europe he examines the placement (or self-placement) of the “East” in Europe’s master narratives (of progress, civilization, and development) wherein “Easterners” must struggle for national and ethnic identities that conform to notions of European statehood and culture. Central to Russian Ark is the spread of Enlightenment thought, the rise of the nation-state, and the explosion of discourses about nationalism and

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nostalgia that have accompanied it—first its emergence from under the tutelage of the Russian Empire and then its ferocious return after the fall of Soviet-styled socialism. Despite the many studies devoted to tracing its genealogy, the term “nostalgia” proves to be just as unstable as the myth or idea of “Europe.” Nostalgia’s meaning changes slightly depending on how the Greek algos and Latin algia affixes are interpreted. While the ancient and modern usage of the noun nostos (“homecoming” or “return home”) seems to have remained the same, algos and algia have been read as both “pain” and “longing.” Although the variance between being “homesick” and “longing to return home” may seem subtle, it presents radically different orientations toward historical time for one who suffers from nostalgia. “Longing to return home” opens up the possibility of a future return to a home that still exists as it was in the past, thus maintaining a utopian aspiration to restore or immerse oneself in that past. At the same time, “homesickness” offers no such consolation, or any hope of convalescence; it functions only as the constant presence of a sense of time’s irreversibility—the incessant experience of separation as lost time. The reviews of Russian Ark have been mixed, but they all seem to agree that the film exudes nostalgia and an anxiety about the irreversibility of time. Some have criticized the remarkably ambitious shooting of a ninetysix-minute digital film in a single take as a gimmick or a “ludicrous artistic venture”2 that “fashions itself after history in that there can be no montage, no cut and paste, no changes, additions, subtractions, [or] do-overs.”3 Others see this unblinking gaze that captures glimpses of three hundred years of history as “an exercise in czarist nostalgia.”4 In contrast to those who see Sokurov’s film as an expression of Russian nationalist sentiment, others read it as “an attempt to move away from the revolutionary lineage of Russian cinema and an attempt to reinforce its links with non-Russian artistic traditions.”5 Dragan Kujundžić disagrees with these critics. He does not take Sokurov as blindly promoting Russian nationalism, yearning for a nonRussian European identity, or simply relying on some cinematic magic that can capture the presence of the past. Instead, he argues that not all nostalgia is the same and that the nostalgia of Russian Ark is self-conscious, critical, and full of holes. Unlike Noah’s ark or the Ark of the Covenant, Sokurov’s is a leaking ship.

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Debates over the film’s pervasive spectrality recall Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgias. For Boym, restorative nostalgia stresses the notion of nostos (homecoming) and “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This image of homecoming is held as an absolute truth. Reflective nostalgia instead “thrives on algia (the longing itself ) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately,” thus “revealing that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.”6 Similarly, Russian Ark’s symptoms of nostalgia heighten a sense of mortality and an anachronistic yearning to dwell in the past but do not always categorically distinguish pain from longing, or the desire to return from the consciousness that the past is forever barred to us. The film mixes up longing with thinking and drives with doubt. As Kujundžić puts it: “Russian Ark is a ship that leaks and fills itself with the memory of its own loss, which is not least of all the loss of Russia’s supreme, hermetic, ‘iron curtain,’ national or Messianic sovereignty.”7 Yet by combining longing with critical thought, affect, and judgment, such nostalgic reflections disrupt how we order time and make history. Reflective nostalgia suggests an amalgamation of Nietzsche’s three categories of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history is a history of great men, great times, and great events. It offers models for us to emulate and improve on, but it often results in entire histories being forgotten, scorned, and washed away. In Russian Ark, this monumental past is selected from exclusive and limited canonical spaces and times within Russian history: the Hermitage Museum and the Winter Palace (the main residence of the tsars), and the epoch of Petrine reforms—from the time of Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672–1725) to that of Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918). By focusing on the tsars and aristocrats who haunt the palace and museum (together with the masterworks of Western European art) the film echoes post-Soviet Russia’s obsession with the pre-Soviet past. In so doing, however, it ironically overlooks the history and images of the thousands of serfs, slaves, and laborers who perished in the building of St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace, and the Hermitage, thereby seeming to repeat the gesture of contemporary historians who, in their attempt to relegitimize a prerevolutionary past, end up downplaying the role of the serfs and the proletariat in building imperial Russia. One iconic exception to this erasure of the Soviet

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past is the film’s depiction of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944). In this scene, we see a nameless man building his own coffin out of leftover picture frames from the museum. It is important that this historically referential character is nameless, thus making it impossible to identify him with Russian imperial power. Was he someone involved in protecting the “Russian ark” we see before us by removing the tsars’ treasures during the German siege of Leningrad? This single unnamed character is a stand-in for the one million Leningrad residents who were sacrificed or sacrificed themselves to defend the city (and the museum) from the relentless 900-day Nazi bombardment. But while he stands for the city’s sacrifice, he is not part of the city’s archive. Even in this “monumental” recalling of the heroic resistance of the people of Leningrad, what is venerated is not the heroic individual or even individuals but the city and the treasures of the past that those unnamed individuals managed to save and protect. It is, therefore, the ruins of Russia’s monumental past that haunt and overshadow not just the contemporary visitors who visit the Hermitage Museum but the ghosts of the entire Soviet period.8 While Russian Ark does not give the ghosts of the Russian people (narod )9 a collective cinematic image, it does give them a voice: the invisible speaker, who seems to double for the subjective position of the camera and for the position of the spectator wandering through the Hermitage Museum. This disembodied speaker simultaneously points to its own presence and absence, embodying the subjective point of view of the camera (which captures and directs the cinematic gaze) while doubling as the eye of the spectator. However, this gaze never establishes a unified vision through a shot-reverse-shot that would reveal the identity or location of the subject of the gaze. Instead, the disembodied voice remains “out-of-field,” which Deleuze describes as something that is unseen and not understood, but perfectly present: “[T]he out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; . . . [but] the out-of-field [also] testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’ a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time.”10 The positions of the subject and the spectator are always “out-of-field” from the spectacle of history—they are both around and yet radically absent from the mise-en-scène of the monumental narrative. The subject or spectator haunts the historical spectacle, pointing to the erasure of the subject from and by most historical accounts. Like those historians

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who create the effect of objectivity by withdrawing themselves from the historical narratives they tell, the subject of the gaze never reveals itself as an image. In Russian Ark, however, it is the subject of the gaze who also haunts the filmic narrative by providing it with an undefined voice and a perspective. This differs in an important way from what we generally find in historical writing, since historians typically do not acknowledge that their narrative structures originate from a specifically situated individual and are addressed to actual spectators or readers, the act of historical narration appears to be almost detached from both the author and her addressees. Russian Ark does not hide subjects or spectators but actively and critically reflects on their absence—on the absence or effacing of the image of a Russian or Soviet subject or spectator. It reminds us that the whole Soviet experiment has been reduced to an “accident” or a nightmare from which contemporary Russians are finally awakening. But this is a strange awakening, one without any of the features that could be used to establish an identity. It is not clear who is waking up from what, and to what. The modern, living visitors that the film depicts in the museum—“Russian awakened subjects”—are no more part of the archive than the nameless ghostly man who stands in for residents of Leningrad during the siege. These visitors are merely the museum’s patrons—people who, unlike the disembodied speaker, are not privy to the spectacle of history or the momentary immersions in the past. They are simply (paying) witnesses testifying to the monumental quality of the artistic collections. The film establishes a certain hierarchy and politics of ghosts. Much like the Hermitage itself, it conserves, curates, and venerates images, objects, customs, and traditions. And like antiquarian history, the film wanders from one event, object, or period of time to another, exploring different details in paintings, sculptures, decorations, dress, manners, and gestures. Objects, monuments, and historical actors from different periods converge, dissolve, and reappear next to each other: The historical figure of the Marquis Astolphe de Custine—a French diplomat to Russia (1790–1857) and author of the critical travelogue La Russie en 1839—first appears lurking just outside the private chambers of Peter the Great, together with eighteenth-century officers and partygoers, who subsequently disappear from the film only to reemerge almost two centuries later at Tsar Nicholas II’s last ball, held at the Winter Palace on February 23, 1913.

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For Nietzsche, the antiquarian venerates the past and disdains any attempt to relate it to anything but itself. In Russian Ark, the attitude of the antiquarian is epitomized by the character of the Marquis de Custine (figure 1.1) who is visibly dismayed by the manner in which Italian Baroque paintings such as Massimo Stanzione’s Death of Cleopatra (1630–1640), Ludovico Cigoli’s The Circumcision of Christ (1590), Carlo Dolci’s Santa Cecilia (1640s), and Francesco Maltese’s Still Life with an Oriental Carpet (1650s) are exhibited. He remarks on how unseemly it is to display them all on the same wall, since they represent a range of incompatible themes and historical periods.11 Clearly disinterested in the meanings these paintings might have for contemporary visitors to the museum, he is disturbed only by their improper thematic arrangement—what matters are the objects and their relationship to the past, not to the present and to present-day museumgoers (whom he almost seems to despise). The order Custine seeks to restore is not the proper chronological ordering of the past in relation to the present but the return to the past as such. In fact, toward the end of the film he refuses to move forward to inhabit post-tsarist Russia.12 Custine foregrounds the film’s own attention to the visual details of the surrounding materials—historical costumes, gestures, settings, and courtly manners. While this rehabilitation or resurrection of monumental effigies

FIGURE 1.1 The mysterious European figure that haunts the Hermitage Museum, the Marquis de Custine, marvels at the beauty of the room filled with paintings from the Italian masters.

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from the past produces a reality effect, it also reduces these signifiers of monumental history to an antiquarian appreciation of costume, anecdotes, and historical reenactments. It is this fidelity to the appearance of the past that confuses “the past” with its visual evidence. Within the film, the paintings, sculptures, architecture, costumes, and the performances of themselves are traces of past, but they are not objects. For Martin Heidegger, as an object it is present-at-hand—meaning that the object is tangible and stands in reserve waiting to be used. As a consequence of being affixed to its use, it withdraws from its ontological relations to humans and other things.13 Opposed to the object, the thing (das Ding) is ready-at-hand—meaning that it is constituted by its involvements with historical actors, contemporary figures, ideas, its context, as well as other things. The thing is an assemblage of relations that gathers together, and possibly creates, new relations (that is, it potentially invents). If we accept Heidegger’s distinction between objects and things, then we see that the past and our relation to those traces or ruins of the past cannot be turned into an object. Custine disapproves of the way the museum has hung the works of art, but there is an unintended irony in his quest for order. As Stephen Bann argues, in antiquarian history “there is more than a threat of chaos, of meaningless juxtaposition. But the rhetoric of the guidebook triumphantly asserts itself over this threat. . . . The master himself is on hand to complete the effect of illusion.”14 In this case, however, we have a conflict between different “masters” and their rhetorical orderings: between the Russian tsars’ construction of a “little Italian room” that juxtaposes paintings based on the “Italian” identity of artists; the guide (Custine) who criticizes such a display of disparate works; and the contemporary museum that rehabilitates the tsars’ “little Italian room” while at the same time changing the order of the paintings. The museum orders and juxtaposes the paintings according to chronology and the artists’ national origin, rather than exhibiting them thematically, as Custine prefers. Instead, the museum and the film seem to want to restore the imperial arrangements connected as they were to tsarist “dreams of Italy” rather than to any systematic organization. The restoration by museum curators of the tsars’ aesthetic master plans is also an antiquarian gesture that doubles or restores the tsars’ antiquarian sensibilities. Unlike monumental and antiquarian history, critical history does not engage a historicist illusion of time, which either creates a pantheon of

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great moments and iconic figures or an endless set of details and customs that need to be policed and protected. It constitutes only one moment, that of judgment. It points out disjuncture, illusions, falsifications, and all those things that have been covered over in order to make history continuous. Nietzsche considers this historical justice a “dreadful virtue” whose “judgment is annihilating” since “it brings to light so much that is false, crude, inhuman, absurd, violent, that the mood of pious illusion in which alone anything that wants to live can live, necessarily crumbles away.” Boym refers to nostalgia as a “historical emotion,” but Nietzsche reads this sentiment as an excess of history—a historical sickness that is without restraint, “uproot[ing] the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live.”15 Modern interpretations of nostalgia are not immune to this historical sickness: they favor reading the Greek algos as “pain” rather than “longing,” since it is the presence of psychological or psychosomatic pain that converts the meaning of nostalgia from an affective state into a clinical condition. Both Svetlana Boym and Andreas Huyssen point out that the modern understanding of nostalgia originated in Johannes Hofer’s 1688 medical dissertation on the homesickness suffered by Swiss mercenaries fighting in foreign wars, or by Swiss nationals working abroad. According to Boym, “contrary to our intuition, ‘nostalgia’ came from medicine, not from poetry or politics.” Still, it remained a strange diagnosis—not the name of a precise neurological disorder but a complex, large-scale epidemic—“a widespread European phenomenon.”16 Nostalgia gets even more complicated when identified as a “European sickness” or a “historical emotion” rather than an individual malaise. For Boym, nostalgia is a symptom of the modern age, a rebellion against a changing conception of time: “The nostalgic desires to turn history into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”17 While the afflicted might share a historical or collective longing (algia), their actual vision of return (nostos) can be highly contested if that vision becomes too personal and thus exclusive. For nostalgia to work as a “European phenomenon” or a “historical emotion,” the image of that desired home must have generalizable features—mythical features. Huyssen calls this yearning for a generic phantom nation or imaginary homeland a yearning for authenticity in the form of an already foreclosed image, the ruins of an impossible ideal.

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There is a nostalgic yearning in Russian Ark, but it is for an idealized European past rather than for imperial Russia. The image of the Romanovs as modernizers and patrons of the arts is contingent on their appropriation of two rather anachronistic moments within European culture—the industrial revolution and the history of the ancien régime. Catherine the Great (Catherine II, 1729–1796) and her successors violently repressed those intellectuals who advocated for a Russian revolution (often by sending them to their deaths or to Siberia). The appropriation of European modernization without foregoing absolute monarchy turned this image of Europe— the object of emulation—into a nostalgic ruin. This ruin is an allegorical sign of historical revisionism disguised as lost authenticity, much as the ark is the sign for the museum, which in turn holds the treasures or the covenant of the nation (or in the case of the Hermitage, the treasures of Europe). Huyssen argues that this kind of authenticity is analogous to Walter Benjamin’s aura, which is experienced when the original can no longer be distinguished from the copy: “Originality and uniqueness, which characterize the auratic work of art in Benjamin, were made into privileged categories in the romantic age that was already flooded by reproductions, translations, and copies of all kinds. Analogously, the ideological value of authenticity rose in proportion to print culture’s inherent tendency to reproduction and repetition.”18 The aura, by definition, is duplicitous. Huyssen likens it to nostalgia since it comprises both a feeling of loss (the loss of the presence of the sacred in modern life) and an act of historical revisionism (the consecration of that past). Yet joining the aura to the experience of nostalgia in the figure of the ruin somehow produces a critical consciousness that the current culture of reanimation and the “authentic” remake cannot. The present age—what Huyssen labels “the age of the remake”—is one he analogizes to the age of “corporate neoliberalism” and that of the “global shopping mall.” This is an age of “preservation, restoration, and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the idea of the authentic ruin that has itself become historical.”19 At the crux of his argument is the distinction between the authentic ruin and the commodification of its remake, which somehow undercuts the potential of reflective nostalgia to think critically and self-consciously about its own position. Because we can no longer tell the difference between nostalgia and feigned nostalgia, Huyssen seems to suggest that nostalgia itself becomes a historical disease. Like the authentic ruin, it has been relegated to history.

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Similarly, in his critique of Kujundžić’s reading of Russian Ark, Raoul Eshelman defines the present age as a “new epic,” one of performatism—a reactionary age that seeks to counter critiques of the subject and hegemony by returning to a transcendental, theistic world-view.20 Aside from the problem of distinguishing the new from the old, digital cinema from analog, good from bad history (or ruins of history), spiritualism from magic tricks, monumental from antiquarian or critical nostalgia, and authentic from inauthentic remakes, the recording and projecting of the moving image has always been simultaneously an animation of (the filmmaker’s, cinematographer’s, editor’s, and actor’s) vision and a reanimation (copying and doubling) of people, actors, mise-en-scènes, actual photographed places, performances, and events. Cinema is always a remake: it reanimates or brings the past back to life, confusing a sense of the past and the experience of presence. For André Bazin, photographic technology “embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”21 Our experience of time is subject to forgetting, but the recorded image of time preserves every detail, replacing our memory with the image caught in time. Like photography, cinema is indexical, but an index is also a double—both a trace and an imprint—implying a connection between subject and object but also making it difficult to distinguish one from the other. This instability gives rise to the cinematic uncanny, a sense of familiarity that is at the same time defamiliarizing. Maxim Gorki described this experience as being immersed in “the kingdom of shadows,” watching the grey ghost of one’s image as if it had its own life.22 Reanimation shares with the uncanny the compulsion to repeat—images, sounds, concepts, and movements. Like the uncanny, repetition comes in the form of difference. Reanimation, like presence itself, is spectral—it is neither being nor non-being, both there and not there. But if we understand the relation of the authentic ruin or reflective nostalgia to the “authentic” remake and restorative nostalgia as one in which the new simply reanimates the old, then we are essentially putting older forms of reanimation, nostalgia, and ruins in the position of representing critical thought, rather than thinking itself. The transformation of nostalgia into a form of critical history of critical thinking ends up advancing what Nietzsche calls “historical sense without restraint,” which “uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live.”23

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As Deleuze argues, “we produce something new only on condition that we repeat . . . [since] repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection.” Hence, the return in the form of reanimation produces only a “difference absolutely without concept, an indifferent difference.”24 This, of course, problematizes the relation of thought to criticism as a form of judgment that distinguishes animation from reanimation, people from actors, and events from performances. Such judgments often collapse repetition into representation, and they confuse experience with aesthetics. Thought uncannily emerges more out of an intellectual uncertainty—an unexpected reflection or a shock to thought—than out of a return of the repressed in the figure of the aura, the ruin, or reflective nostalgia. I would argue that Russian Ark produces this type of uncertainty, while at the same time referencing the ongoing historical revisionism of the Russian soul after the demise of the Soviet Union. The problem with the return of repressed nostalgia in the post-Soviet era is that historical politics are deeply indoctrinated in their own neoliberal performances. There is nothing new in the fact that history is the site of fierce political debates over what constitutes Russian national identity. Like many other nations, Russia has periodically reinvented its self-image, and along with its image, its history. Peter the Great’s gesture of moving the Russian capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg in an effort to mark Russia’s move toward modern Europe is one example of such reinvention. What distinguishes contemporary historiography of Russia and Eastern Europe is that historians seem to want to engage in conjecture and, with it, a particular type of erasure. Ekaterina Boltunova argues that some of the most popular contemporary attempts to reinterpret the Russian past “are those concerned with Russia’s unity—real and symbolic—and its disintegration, including consideration of what might have been done to prevent the events of 1917 or 1991. . . . Curiously enough, such fundamental causal factors as economics, foreign policy, and the activities of the Bolsheviks are often taken out of the equation.”25 Once historical evidence is selectively erased, a construction of a homeland, driven by longing, can be conveniently used as a means of legitimizing the nation-state that “reemerges” after both the Age of Empire and the Cold War world order. In the case of Russia, however, Anderson and Gourgouris argue that the “return” of the nation-state is more a product of imagination and dreams than a historical fact, since it involves forgetting eighty

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years of Soviet history, economics, and foreign policy in order to focus only on recollecting the history, economics, and policies of a distant imperial past. Energized by the collapse of the Soviet Union, this strain of historical revisionism reanimates the Romanovs and imperial Russian history and repudiates Marxism while questioning modernization and secularism.26 The “return” or turn toward the nation-state is therefore not necessarily an indicator of democratization or progress, as Western media initially made it out to be. “It is by now obvious,” Boym argues, “that a capitalist economy can peacefully coexist with the authoritarian state and its nostalgic nationalist ideology.”27 Russian Ark demonstrates how nostalgia for an imaginary past produces erasures, not only of the Bolsheviks but also the violence of empire. It constructs history not clinically but poetically, as something that has drifted in and out of Europe via metaphor, allusion, and myth. The film suffers from historical sickness but offers neither a vision of home nor a possibility of returning home. It walks us through the Hermitage Museum as a home to the ghosts of a violent and conflicted past. If we are to identify with anyone in this ark, it is most likely with the tourists who wander admiringly through these spaces but are not captured by their history.28

GHOSTLY ENTANGLEMENTS The author sees, instead of the person she is waiting for, ghosts from 1913. They wear masks. The white mirror room. Lyric digression: “The Guest of the Future.” Masked ball. The poet. The ghosts. —Anna Akhmatova, “Poem Without a Hero”

Russian Ark begins with the anxiety produced by a sense of disorientation. The establishing shot is one of complete darkness accompanied by a cacophony of sounds: the wind, a ship’s foghorn, the tuning of instruments, the sound of moving water, muffled laughter, and distorted musical accents that merge into one another and become indistinguishable. This haunting background sound reappears throughout the remaining ninety-six minutes of the film. A voice (Sokurov’s own) emerges out of the darkness and, almost

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as if in an internal monologue, seeks to orient itself: “I open my eyes and I see nothing, I remember only that there was some calamity . . . but I just can’t remember what happened to me.” Alluding to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno (and Pushkin’s allegorical images of the 1824 flood of St. Petersburg) this lost soul seems to have strayed from the course of time.29 There is neither a beginning nor an ending to this film, no foreboding entrance (as in the case of Dante’s Inferno), only an unexpected immersion in what appears to be the simultaneous presence of various layers of the past. The images that suddenly appear out of nowhere in front of this offscreen persona are fleeting and sporadic recollections of historical scenes, interactions, and performances that are anachronistically joined into one spectacular, continuous, unedited shot. Though time is certainly out of joint, this persona will remain estranged from the “action” of the film. As the voice (and the camera) follows a group of eighteenth-century officers and ladies who enter the Hermitage through the back entrance near the Winter Canal,30 he remarks, “can it be that I am invisible, or simply gone unnoticed?” The fact that there is no identifying shot leaves the identity behind the persona of the voice ambiguous: It could be the voice of the museum itself that witnesses history and the various Russian figures that float through its halls; the gaze of the camera that records and frames its own image of history, architecture, and artifacts; or the specter of an uncertain and indeterminate Russian present that haunts the halls of its monumental past. Later in the film, the “calamity” from which this solitary voice claims to awaken is clearly identified as the eighty years of Soviet rule. This entire period is presented as an ellipsis in Russian history that is left unnamed and unrepresented in the film, only to be alluded to in a few key moments. Yet the presence of a half-forgotten memory (neither truly there nor absent) haunts this Russian ark, especially since the Hermitage and Winter Palace played such iconic roles in the Bolshevik Revolution and its commemoration in Sergei Eisenstein’s October (Oktyabr, 1927) and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (Konets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927). As Kujundžić argues, Russian Ark’s composition as a single long-take “enacts the erasure of the dominant cinematic tradition . . . of Sergei Eisenstein’s intellectual montage.”31 In contrast to the triumphal ending of October, Russian Ark concludes with the languid flow of Russian nobles (from various periods) down the same Jordan staircase and out the palace toward both a certain

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(Soviet) and uncertain (post-Soviet) future. The film literally reverses the frenzied finale of October, which depicts the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace, climbing the famous Jordan staircase, and unseating Kerenski and the provisional government. Russian Ark shows the same room that was occupied by the provisional government, but now as the stage for an intimate domestic scene of Tsar Nicholas II having a meal with his family (figure 1.2). These images are overexposed (with a slightly reddish hue), giving the figures a ghostly, if not saintly, quality while also suggesting that they have been worn out by various competing histories and fantasies—like Disney’s Anastasia or the plethora of clichéd allusions to “twilight,” “sunset,” “cursed,” “doomed,” or “tragic tyrants” that refer to the last of the Romanovs.32 Yet the predominant reddish cast also reminds us that they have been bathed in blood. However, it is not clear if this rose-tinted scene whitewashes the image of Tsar Nicholas II and his family as “martyrs in a nostalgic and sentimentalized vision” or, instead, if it reminds us of the remote and out of touch “ ‘Bloody Nicholas’ whose troops fired upon unarmed demonstrators calling for an end to an unjust war [1914], economic exploitation, and bureaucratic arbitrariness.”33 The image of blood seems to refer to both the blood of the tsar’s family that was killed and those the tsar had killed.

FIGURE 1.2 Tsar Nicholas II has a meal with his family in same room that will later be occupied by the Bolshevik provisional government.

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If we are to read this image as a whitewashing of the tsar’s own responsibility in creating the conditions that led to extremist Russocentric doctrines, the incompetent handling of World War I, and the violent overthrow of the monarchy itself, then we must liken the Russian navy cadet who stands in the background guarding the royal family to the tradition of the tsars who dressed up as common sailors or soldiers (most notably Peter I, Elizaveta I, and Catherine II). The image of the sailor is probably one of the most politically charged images in the film. It seems unlikely that the figure represents the tsar alone, since it clearly refers back to both Grigory Vakulinchuk—the Ukrainian sailor in the Russian Imperial Navy who was killed in the 1905 uprising on the battleship Potemkin and made famous in Sergei Eisenstein’s film (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)—and the all but forgotten image (under the Soviets) of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921— where the same heroic sailors of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions rose up against the Bolsheviks to demand free elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assembly. This cadet, whose uniform bears no signs of rank, stands out in the scene. He seems out of place since he is not part of the tsar’s Imperial Guard, the Ministry of the Interior, the Cossack Guard, or the Okhrana (the tsar’s secret police). He is not part of any unit that would have been assigned to ensure the tsar and his family’s safety. Additionally, he alone is bathed in white light, isolating him from the royal family. Even if he does represent a tsar or tsarina masquerading as a sailor, he still appears comparably more “enlightened” than the last of the Romanovs. While the Romanovs dress in white, their images are tainted by the reddish hue that washes over them (a special effect added in postproduction). In addition, the sailor’s uniform clashes with the formal attire of the Romanov women, as well as Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarevitch Alexei, whose white outfits are decorated with silver and gold brocade. The sailor either represents the hypocrisy of the monarchy—its excessive pageantry and its pretense of humility—or opens up the scene to other possible readings. His presence could allude to Peter the Great’s ambition to establish the Russian Navy at Kronstadt, leading up to the Great Northern War with Sweden (1700–1721) and the conquest and founding of St. Petersburg in 1703; the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the mutiny on the Potemkin that helped trigger the revolution of 1905; or the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, which was brutally quelled by the Bolsheviks. If we are to read

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this image of the Kronstadt sailor as a staunch supporter of the revolutions in 1905 and again in 1917, then it is not the sailor who can be likened to the tsar; rather, it is the Bolsheviks who are compared to the regency since, like the tsar, they abuse power and act autocratically. Each of these allusions significantly changes the way we read this particular figure within the scene: whether as an enduring vision of Peter’s Russia as a modern maritime empire, an unsympathetic reminder that Tsar Nicholas’s wars and policies led to both disaster and revolt, or an acknowledgment that the same sailors who played a quintessential role in the Bolshevik Revolution ended up becoming its victims once the Bolsheviks wielded power. The juxtaposition and layering of ambiguous historical figures, clichéd iconography, and special effects, not to mention the collision of various historical periods, weakens the indexicality of the cinematic image, thereby casting doubt on any definitive reading of this and many other scenes (even if they were intended to have one particular meaning). Laura Mulvey succinctly defines the cinematic index as “an incontrovertible fact, a material trace that can be left without human intervention, [it] is a property of the camera machine and the chemical impact of light on film.”34 While Tillman Büttner (the film’s director of photography and Steadicam operator) cuts a “real” path through the Hermitage in the continuous ninety-sixminute shot captured on digital video, the tens of thousands of postproduction interventions (color corrections, removal of objects and digital artifacts, and added focus changes) blur the relation between the physical world and the imaginary. The digital image, as David Rodowick points out, is more painterly and imaginative than the photograph, and as a consequence its power of documentation (its reference to the physical world) is diminished. Digital cinema does not produce “images in the ordinary sense of the word”; they are “only optionally tied to the physical world.”35 This juxtaposition of untimely figures within the mise-en-scène, accompanied by extensive digital manipulation of the cinematic image in postproduction, indirectly engages classical film theory’s debates over what constitutes cinematic realism. It demonstrates how digital cinema problematizes the distinction between perceptional realism of the long-take and the aesthetics of intellectual montage. Russian Ark combines elements of both the long-take and montage but supports neither. Even though the film is shot in a single continuous long-take, it is not what Bazin had in mind when he argued that the long-take opened up a space for thought (as

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opposed to the montage theory of Eisenstein that he saw as deeply manipulative).36 Bazin’s long-take opens up space for contemplating the ambiguity of reality by avoiding editing and maintaining the unity of time and space that “disinvests its art of subjective mediation, makes provision for the world in-itself, sees the world withdrawing itself, and turns disinvestment into the subject of serious reflection.”37 This, however, is not what Russian Ark does; instead, its layering of historical allusions and digital effects or events does not provide the time and space of a unified reflection as much as the experience of multiple possible connections, readings, and ways of thinking. The documentary of the making of Russian Ark (offered as supplementary material on the DVD) explains how the raw footage was altered before being transferred to film. An example of such remastering is provided with the scene of the Marquis de Custine opening a door onto the Siege of Leningrad only to find a solitary man making his own coffin from empty picture frames left after the Soviets had removed the artworks to protect them from looting or destruction (figure 1.3). This documentary shows how the lighting of the scene, the focus, and depth of field were edited in postproduction. The digital rendering of the scene is much darker, cast in a purplishblue hue that is more ominous, and the image itself is elongated (stretched horizontally) to deprive the viewer of the sense of depth caught in the raw footage. As Rodowick points out, this digital manipulation is quite different from optical printing and chromakeying, which “combine elements recorded from physical spaces and join them through an effect of spatial montage.”38 With digital effects, discrete information is altered, dividing the image into modular elements and layers. That is, there are possibly many different alterations and effects embedded into the same image or frame. This leads Rodowick to argue that the film is not one uninterrupted sequence; rather, it exemplifies how digital media reconceptualizes the long-take and the single shot. Russian Ark is a “montage work, no less complex in this respect than Sergei Eisenstein’s film October.”39 For Eisenstein art is conflict, and this conflict is expressed in film through the juxtaposition of conflicting planes, graphic oppositions, counterpoints, and montage. It is montage that stimulates the spectator’s emotions, thereby opening him or her to an understanding of the significance of such contradictions.40 Eisenstein saw a clear hierarchy in the methods of filmic montage: The hierarchy begins with metric montage, which is determined by the

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FIGURE 1.3 The Marquis de Custine opens a door onto the Siege of Leningrad only to find a solitary man making his own coffin from empty picture frames left after the Soviets had removed the artworks to protect them from looting or destruction.

varying length of shots, followed by rhythmic montage, which combines the length of the shot with the movement in the frame. Next comes the tonal form (wherein emotional intensity is caused by the montage technique) and then the overtonal; the latter is a synthesis of the four and constitutes a subject or establishes identification. These four forms ultimately lead to intellectual montage, which grasps abstract and ethical concepts. Eisenstein’s montage and his use of typage (collective heroes rather than protagonists) presented a radical alternative to classical narrative cinema, but his films were designed to present political and moral views that were context-based rather than formal. As Peter Wollen observes: “Eisenstein wanted to translate the dialectical materialism of his world-view from an approach to subject-matter to an approach to form, through a theory of montage that was itself dialectical. The aesthetic was still content-based, it uses signifiers primarily as means of expression, but at the same time it demanded a radical transformation of those means.”41 Russian Ark, instead, offers countless sets of abstract juxtapositions—between what is European and Russian, tyrannical and opulent, iconic and iconoclastic, real-time and untimely—but it provides neither a method for producing a world-view

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nor any clear emotional intensity that could lead to an intellectual understanding of that totalizing picture. Its images are ghostly, opaque, and uncertain. They function as assemblages that generate many possible meanings rather than serving as montage cells that direct us to a unifying ideological point of view. As Rodowick eloquently notes: “the singular makes way for the multiple: the [digital film] does not make an image, but rather works the intervals passing ‘between images.’ ”42

AN ASSEMBLAGE OF DISCONTINUOUS FRAGMENTS Cinema is the art of inventing movements of things in space in response to the demands of science; it embodies the inventor’s dream—be he scholar, artist, engineer, or carpenter; it is the realization by kinoschestvo of that which cannot be realized in life. —Dziga Vertov, A Variant of a Manifesto

Lev Manovich believes that digital cinema may have more in common with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) than with any of Eisenstein’s films. For Manovich, Vertov is a database filmmaker; database film is not narrative but made of layers and assemblages. So unlike the dialectical films of Eisenstein, there is no clear political message in Man with a Movie Camera: Just as new media objects contain a hierarchy of levels (interface—content; operating system—application; Web page—HTML code; high-level programming language—assembly language—machine language), Vertov’s film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a progression of one day: waking up—work—leisure activities.43

The film’s ability to move between these three levels interrupts and subverts any definitive way of viewing or understanding it, but also makes it appear

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that the film can continue to be reassembled in many different ways. Russian Ark has little in common with Man with a Movie Camera’s aesthetics (the rapid montage, numerous special effects, and overt cinematic consciousness), but it does reveal its own type of typological layering. On the first level, Russian Ark unfolds before the camera (as the offscreen persona) in one long continuous fluid shot. But rather than calling attention to the different angles and perspectives set up in each shot (as Man with a Movie Camera does), the ever-present eye of the camera appears as a singular, limited, and embodied point of view. In this sense, the camera is less reflexive; in other words, it does not constantly render itself as an image to be contemplated next to the footage it has captured. Instead, it offers a seamless form of embodied perception immersed within the mise-en-scène. Eshelman argues that this singular vision of the camera creates a “human point of view, while simultaneously ennobling the limited point of view by having it record the transcendent.”44 However, Eshelman never clarifies how this embodied perspective of the camera becomes transcendent, nor does he explain how the unblinking single gaze of the camera is somehow more human than montage cinema, which requires an editor to assemble various fragments into a whole film (or, more abstractly, into a whole narrative). While Russian Ark might appear to simulate the “human” perspective of a first-person shooter in a video game, the synchronous movement of the camera and its operator are not computer-generated as they would be in such a game. The movement of the camera indexes “realtime” (the actual movement of the camera and its operator) and simultaneously subverts “real-time” by repeating it (via projection as a form of representation) and editing it (in postproduction, as an expression of the untimely, a time that is no longer anchored to any indexical time). The symbiotic relationship of the camera’s perspective and the fluid embodied (human) movement is not necessarily more realistic or more humanlike than the kino-eye, the cyborgian eye of the camera that is ever present in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Russian Ark does not superimpose the human eye onto the eye of the camera within a single shot (as Vertov does) but rather fuses the shooting of the whole film with the bodily movements of Büttner, Sokurov’s cinematographer. This unblinking presence of the camera accompanied by the haptic presence of the cameraman might just present us with another type of kino-pravda (cinema truth): the truth of the relationship of the cinematographer to the camera that, as

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Vertov argued, bridges the mechanical objectivity of the apparatus with artistic creation. More than simply operating a camera, the relationship of the filmic apparatus to the cinematographer, director, editor, and various members of the film crew, produces a medium-specific type of art. The second layer of camera consciousness, as well as the consciousness of the pro-filmic event, is arguably an unintended consequence of the conditions of shooting in thirty-five rooms of the Hermitage with seventy-seven pounds of camera equipment in a single take. On many occasions, the camera is visible (in reflections on the glass and shadows along the wall) and the visible effects of the presence of the camera are often felt, as actors frequently stare directly into the lens of the camera or move out of its path. These visible references to the camera comprise what José Alaniz calls Sokurov’s “flub catalogue.”45 Whether intended or not, the appearance and felt presence of the camera provides us with another type of camera consciousness. In Russian Ark, the specter of the camera is felt alongside the specters of history and the spectacle of the filmic event itself. The felt presence of camera and crew draws attention to the series of spectacles that unfold in front of the camera, presenting them as a series of events. But the positioning of the camera simultaneously renders camera and crew as spectators who passively watch and record the series of spectacles in front of them, and directors who orchestrate and capture these events. Because Sokurov may have failed to achieve the seamless invisibility of the camera and cinematic devices, the film demonstrates how the cinematic apparatus always haunts even the most naturalistic films. The third level of Russian Ark does not match Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which creates the illusion of the day in the life in a Soviet city by constructing a composite image of three cities (Moscow, Kiev, and Riga) and making an analogy between the city and the human experience of a daily routine. Rather, it displays the layering of digital effects on top of costumes, characterizations, historical allusions, actual spaces, and historic works of art. Time, not space, becomes the composite. But this composite is made of layered and yet incommensurable sheets of time. The film maps out a real-time passage into and through the museum, but this real-time filmic journey is augmented by embedding thirty thousand discrete interventions through thousands of hours of corrections and alterations. This augmented reality that captures and superimposes ghostly reenactments onto the real space of the museum points to disjuncture and erasure. This

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continuous movement of the camera is juxtaposed to the discontinuous flow of time, represented by historical and fictional characters standing in for different eras and events. The film’s overwhelming sense of disjuncture is produced by the fact that most of the historical figures that appear in the film also disappear around corners or fade into the winter light, like the aging Catherine the Great and her court escort (or possible paramour). The only constant figure is the Marquis de Custine, who makes his entrance seven minutes into the film and waves good-bye to the offscreen persona seven minutes before the end. His shadow (possibly a secret policeman or spy) follows him through the various interior spaces of the Hermitage, but like the marquis, he too is denied access to parts of museum. However, unlike the marquis, this secret policeman or spy appears only sporadically throughout the film: At the beginning, he is seen as he enters the restored quarters of Peter the Great and then reappears in a darkened hallway shadowing Custine. We later hear his squeaky shoes as he passes behind the marquis, and we watch (in a rare closeup) the spy as he scratches his gloved hands. He also seems to have Custine at the end of the film, but unlike the offscreen persona, he redoubles his tracks walking back up the stairs to locate the missing marquis. This Russian spy points to another form of disjuncture: Russia’s shadowing, distrusting, and yet constantly pursuing Europe, with squeaky shoes that make the pursuit all too obvious. The seemingly seamless movement of the marquis and the offscreen persona from one room to another functions much like Vertov’s notion of montage—as the assemblage of discontinuous fragments. With the passage to each new space there is an encounter with different age-specific characters, artworks, and new sociopolitical interests. The passage from one room to the next marks a threshold that many historical characters cannot transverse. Unlike the marquis, other historical figures are assigned to haunt only those spaces they are mainly associated with. With the exception of Catherine the Great, the other tsars in the film appear confined to their quarters, framed by windows and doorways (like Peter the Great and Nicholas II), or confined to the throne (like Nicholas I). Each room can be likened to a particular shot, scene, or vignette, while the movement out of the room often marks its end. Hence, the threshold also functions like a cut, but a cut that is not a film cut since the shot and the movement of the

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camera continues uninterrupted over and beyond the threshold. This movement across the threshold cuts off ghostly spectacles or angry ghosts, like the solitary man building his own coffin, who is shut out of the film’s progression by the closing of a door.

IN THE TRADITION OF REPEATED ERASURE Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. —Osip Mandelstam, “The Stalin Epigram”

The film begins in darkness, with a sense of disorientation and a voice telling us that he suffers from a rather selective form of amnesia, one that cannot remember the whole Soviet period. The deliberate omission of references to the Bolshevik Revolution replicates the long history of forced forgetting practiced by the Soviet state, but it also draws attention to a more recent erasure of names, such as Leningrad once again becoming St. Petersburg.46 The replacement of Soviet names with exclusively nationalist ones turns the memory of lived experience into the politics of memory: “The relationship between ‘Russian and Soviet’ is highly contested in the post-Soviet period. Extreme views of this relationship range from viewing the Soviet Union as ‘Russophobic’ . . . to viewing the Soviet period as a brief episode in the history of the Russian empire.”47 While there are references in the film to listening devices that the KGB has placed in the Hermitage and to “worms” that have eaten (destroyed or sold off ) the throne in the Memorial Hall of Peter the Great, there is only one fleeting glimpse of the Soviets. Red Army soldiers march across a darkened room for only a few seconds, but they are framed between two more permanent images: The Sacrifice of Isaac and The Return of the Prodigal Son, both by Rembrandt. Rather than commemorate the sacrifices that the Soviets endured and produced, the sound of Nazi airplanes immediately follows the soldiers, which foreshadows the subsequent scene of the man making his own coffin in a bombed-out room of the Hermitage.

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Symbolized by coffins and empty picture frames, the siege is referred to by the invisible persona as “a great sacrifice on the part of the people and the museum.” That this image of the Red Army travels between these two religious images—one of grace and sacrifice and the other of the belated return, spiritual awakening, and eventual obedience of the prodigal son—makes it seem more allegorical than historical. This shift between the allegorical (Old Testament) fatherland that is willing to sacrifice its son(s) and the wayward son who returns to a forgiving benevolent (New Testament) fatherland suggests both the end of an era of sacrifice and the return to a spiritualized fatherland, home, and national identity. However, placing the image of the Red Army, which seems to have no spiritual future, next to religious images that have been interpreted as prophetic (as the prefiguration of Christ’s atonement and second coming) is enigmatic: it questions the boundaries between anonymous (visionless) secular sacrifice (to the state or to the people) and (priceless) iconic spiritual prophecy. Although fleeting, this sudden appearance of Red Army soldiers recalls not only the “sacrifice” of one million inhabitants of Leningrad during the siege but also the “sacrifice” of hundreds of thousands of nameless men and women who built and rebuilt this monumental city. What is at stake here is not the political future of the nation-state (the invisible persona does not seem to know or remember what kind of state has preceded the disastrous Soviet state) but the Russian soul itself, as indicated in the title of the film.48 Although construed as a “national liberation,” Anatoly Khazanov argues that the break with the Soviet past has produced not one debate but many different ideological interpretations of history, many of which have been accompanied by the desire to associate with the Russian imperial past.49 The 1990s obsession with finding the remains of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, their interment in a proper site of resting, and the canonization of the murdered Romanovs by the Russian Orthodox Church50 (with the exception of the left-leaning Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich) represents the impossible dream of returning Russia to its past greatness under the tsars. This discourse also establishes the Romanovs as martyred victims of the Red Terror, cleansing them of their own terrible acts.51 As Gourgouris reminds us, nostalgia for the patria or the lost nation is always utopian and always impossible: “The Nation is both museum site

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and ground of oblivion . . . where repression and the return of the repressed take place simultaneously.”52 Russian Ark honors, if not privileges, this nostalgic image of the tsar cut adrift from any historical reality outside the walls of the Winter Palace. The choice of Mikhail Glinka’s mazurka “Life for the Tsar” (from the opera by the same name that premiered in 1836)—a composition in praise of the tsar and the Russian people that is played live by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in the film’s spectacular finale—references the last ball of Tsar Nicholas II (held in 1913 to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty) and also connects the tsar to the Russian soul and to Russia’s current national identity. In fact, Glinka’s “Patriotic Song” has become the “new” Russian national anthem. Upon entering the Memorial Hall of Peter the Great, the disembodied voice reflects on the ambiguity of such nostalgia: “monarchies are not eternal, but we are free to dream away.” The film recycles these self-constructed (and recollected) dream images of the tsars who fancied themselves as reformers, modernizers, and westernizers transforming Russia into one of the great European powers. While Russian Ark treats the past (the costumes, gestures, music, the historical reenactments, etc.) with meticulous detail, it mimics the historically revised image of imperial Russia, never once following those serfs (or servants) who paid a high price for the tsars’ “enlightened” lifestyle. Stanley Kauffman argues that “except for the few modern visitors everyone in the film is in the social range from gentry up to royalty.” If this is really a “Russian” ark, he asks, “Where is there even a hint of Russia’s entirety?”53 Maybe this is why the offscreen voice—who represents and defends Russia—is invisible. As Russian Ark participates in mass amnesia—treating the Bolshevik Revolution as both a rupture with and an interruption of imperial Russian history—it draws attention to the problems caused by such erasures and the desperate attempts to scour the national archives (or treasures) in order to salvage or reinvent some form of legitimacy. Yet just what type of continuity does this single uninterrupted gaze establish? If this continuity is just a dream, to whom does this dream belong? Although the ark itself is called “Russkij” (of the Russian people), Sokurov’s film demonstrates how the contents of the ark (both the priceless objects and the live pageantry) belong to another, that of the “Rossiikij” (the name of the great Russian

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Empire), which orients itself toward Europe. Kujundžić points out “that the dramatic tension of the film pertains to the question of identification (and the Russian national identity) that lies in the fact that the space of commemoration relies also on artifacts that have nothing to do with Russia, but are entirely imported from the West, and thus, structurally from outside of this site of memory.”54 Similar to the British, whose important art collections, housed in the British Museum, are of ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese art, the Hermitage memorializes the practice of acquisition and treats such procurements as the foundation for national culture. These spaces of commemoration memorialize the practice of acquisition, turning Russia into a site for the memory of appropriation. Russians appear only in live tableau, yet even these spectacular scenes allude to paintings of court life in imperial Russia and interior scenes of the Winter Palace, which were often painted by foreign artists such as Mihály Zichy, Adolphe Ladurner, Edward Hau, Christopher Unterberger, and Luigi Premazzi.55 The images that were made to commemorate “Russian” historical events are often created by outsiders looking in. Even if the artisans and architects of the city were imported from Europe (e.g., Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi) or Russians were influenced by the culture of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment (all featured in the film), or the implementation of such reforms were, as the companion of the invisible persona declares, “of the most primitive kind,” the voice tells us that “Petersburg is still a European city.” Contemporary thinkers (even Hermitage curators such as Arkadii Ippolitov) have argued that “St. Petersburg no longer exists as a city but as a museum.”56 The question then remains as to just what is preserved in this museum? Is it Russian imperial history, Soviet history, European history, or the many exchanges and battles between all of these historical agents? What Custine (the European companion) points out is the difference between the city and its artifacts (its ark and archive) and the Russian people who visit the museum, arguing that the Russians have no culture of their own; rather, they have only been master copiers of European art and culture, such as the Rafael Loggia in the Hermitage. As the nonfictional Custine put it: “I do not reproach the Russians for being what they are, what I blame in them is, their pretending to be what we are.”57 But the historical Custine was no original either. His own writing on Russia seems to copy previous works that contrast St. Petersburg to Europe.

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According to Larry Wolff, “One of the most influential travel accounts of the nineteenth century, Russia in 1839, by the Marquis de Custine, was itself deeply influenced by the formulas and prerogatives established in the previous century.”58 Custine was thus perpetuating the “phantasmagoric dream logic of continental differentiation.”59 Even before the specters of the Romanovs and the ghosts of Russian Ark, Custine’s divisive mythic thinking about Russia actually experienced a Cold War comeback thanks to political thinkers and strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote the blurb on the back cover of the reissue of Custine’s famous travelogue: “No Sovietologist has yet improved on de Custine’s insights into the Russian character and the Byzantine nature of the Russian political system.” Wolff rightly points out that “such comments, even as they ahistorically assert the unchanging character of Russia, establish even more emphatically the unchanging characterization of Russia by foreign observers in fixed formulas.”60 The artwork featured in the film is distinctly European and favors enduring European representations of religious figures (e.g., Saints Peter and Paul, St. John the Baptist, the Madonna) as well as mythological (e.g., Danäe and the Three Graces). The only depiction of a “lesser,” more “dated,” figure is Frans Jansz van Mieris I’s Lady in Her Boudoir (1659–1660). But this painting of a bourgeois lady, her handmaid, and her dog is accompanied by the disdainful comment (on the part of Custine, the European stranger who guides the camera to the painting): “rags, a dog, eternal people. Live and go on living, you’ll outlive them all.” Here, Custine lumps the bourgeoisie into the larger category of the Third Estate without distinguishing the bourgeoisie from the serfs. At the same time, Custine seems to extend his scorn to the disembodied speaker, growling at and giving him a contemptuous glance just prior to approaching the painting. The disembodied persona seems to belong not only to the Third Estate but also to these eternal people, whose presence can be seen in the modern (contemporary) scenes. Although not complete strangers, the “eternal people” are clearly visitors rather than inhabitants of the ark. There is nothing in this ark that speaks to contemporary life experiences, or even recent history. Just as the Soviets seem to be banned from the ark, so too is modernist art.61

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TSARIST DREAMS OF EUROPE The Russian state spent the eighteenth century copying contemporary European models, the nineteenth century representing the Europe of the anciens régimes, which the rest of Europe had abandoned, and the twentieth century representing a European socialist model which most of the rest of Europe never chose to implement. —Iver Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe

The film reminds us that St. Petersburg was itself built as a Russian dream of Europe. Peter the Great moved the capital of Russia from Moscow to St. Petersburg, built a European-style city on a swamp, and collected European artifacts, ideas, institutions, intellectuals, scientists, and artisans to aggressively westernize Russia. Many contemporary historians continue to identify Peter the Great as a monumental figure—the foundation of the Romanov dynasty and the quintessential Russian modernizer. “As a result, they do little more than perpetuate the commonly accepted myths about Peter the Great, the demiurge who supposedly dragged Muscovy kicking and screaming into the secular modern world.”62 Russian Ark, however, portrays Peter the Great as a distant figure. He is only seen from outside the window (figure 1.4) or at the threshold of the door of his recently restored private quarters, suggesting that perhaps he remains outside the image of Europe that he struggled so hard to impose on Russia. While all of the later Romanovs are indebted to his legacy and follow in his footsteps, he is the only tsar in the film to be depicted as a tyrant; he is violent with everyone he encounters. Although fascinated by the spectacle of power, the invisible speaker seems incapable not only of anchoring himself in this particular past but also of understanding it. It is not until he encounters a kindred spirit, who appears to be just as lost and disoriented, that he seems to establish a point of reference. But this anchoring comes in the form of a tenuous, if not antagonistic, dialogue between the invisible persona and the onscreen stranger, whom the persona initially calls “Europe.” Later, he is identified by the persona’s (present-day) friends as the “marquis,” but it is only in the last sequence of the film that the nineteenth-century spy (who shadows these visitors throughout the film) identifies him as the Marquis de

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FIGURE 1.4

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Peter the Great is framed in his quarters from behind a window.

Custine. “Europe” and the “marquis” bear certain resemblances to the historical Custine: he is both awestruck at the opulence and beauty of the tsars’ possessions and yet offers acerbic criticism of their rule. He is, in fact, more a composite (Russian) figure of Europe than an accurate depiction of Custine himself. William Johnson comments: “The most egregious difference is that [Russian Ark’s Custine] accepts the imperial political system without question at the end, after taking part in the grand ball, and decides to stay in Russia, while the actual marquis, who expected to admire a system without a representative government (his father and grandfather were guillotined in the Reign of Terror), was appalled by it, noting the fear even among the nobility of expressing any kind of political or social criticism.”63 Russian Ark, however, does not simply reverse the marquis’s attitude toward Russia, since he constantly reminds the offscreen persona of Russia’s inferiority complex in relation to European culture. It is in contrast to Europe (that is, to Custine) that the persona becomes identified as Russian. Rather than delineating any essential differences between Europe and Russia, this dialogue enacts the process of othering. While “Europe” calls the invisible speaker his “Russian cicerone,” it is “Europe” who will “guide” Russia through the theater or dream of the imperial past, constructing his own version of

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history. Wolff demonstrates how the categorical construction of “Eastern Europe” by representatives of “Western Enlightenment” (in this case a French monarchist) secured both Europe’s own myth of Europe as the paradigm of progress and humanity and the myth of the non-European as backward and boorish.64 For Custine, Russia is the other against which Europe will define itself. Not only are Russians reduced to “talented copyists, because they don’t have ideas of their own,” but Russia (like Greece and the Balkans) is excluded from the maps of Europe, located outside its borders.65 Custine responds to the Russian speaker’s awe at seeing Peter the Great by remarking: “In Asia tyrants are adored. The more terrible the tyrant the more cherished is his memory; Alexander the Great, Timur, and your Peter the Great.” Yet the marquis has no such response toward Catherine the Great, who not only forced her husband, Tsar Peter III, to abdicate the throne to her but also ensured that there would be no further claims to the throne by either Peter III (who was most likely assassinated by Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov, Catherine’s lover) or Tsar Ivan VI (whom she had killed while in captivity). Unlike Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and her husband Peter III represented an ethnic shift in the make-up of the royal family: after 1762, the Romanov dynasty is referred to as the Romanov-Holstein-Gottorp dynasty. Hence, from 1762 onward, even the tsars of Russia were imported from Western Europe. However, this was not unique to the Romanovs—many Spanish monarchs were Austrian, while the French were Spanish and the English were German. What was unique is that Peter the Great was Russian, and therefore singled out by Custine as a tyrant, even if his behavior did not differ greatly from those who followed. What is borrowed from Europe is primarily the gesture of consolidating political power (as exemplified by Louis XIV, le Roi-Soleil),66 and secondarily, the international and domestic image of Russia—that is to say, the appearance of Russia as European. Michael Gordin argues that the Petrine reforms were not designed to enlighten the Russians as much as to establish political absolutism by enforcing Western court etiquette and a new social (aristocratic) class at the expense of the boyars, the Orthodox Church, and, subsequently, the lower classes.67 While in its naissance St. Petersburg (and particularly the Hermitage) was already a museum of the “old European masters,” it was also (as Sokurov suggests) an imagined city. The tsars’ untimely dream of Italy or Europe was not as much designed to copy Europe

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as to extend the borders of the map of Europe from the Elbe and the Julian Alps to the Ural Mountains. As the offscreen Russian speaker tells us, “the Tsars were mostly Russophiles, but sometimes they dreamed of Italy.” Here the invisible speaker is not simply reacting to Custine’s anti-Russian diatribe but recalling the contradictions in Russia’s own past attitude toward, and debates about, Europeanization, which arose in the nineteenth century as Europe was itself undergoing revolutions (against the anciens régimes). Two main groups emerged from the debates: Slavophiles (slavyanoflily) and Westernizers (zapadniki). As Iver Neumann points out, the Slavophiles turned away from European models of culture and governance toward a romantic nationalist (narodnost) vision, drawing inspiration from the Russian people and returning to the narrative of Russian messianism (the belief that Moscow would become the third Rome or new center of Christianity).68 Ironically, the Westernizers argued that Russia was the protector of a “true Europe”—that is, the Europe of the anciens régimes. The invisible persona is put in a position of defending Russians and Russian culture, but he also repeats Custine’s statements almost like an echo resounding from the walls of these vast rooms. When Custine (“Europe”) introduces the topic of nationalism into the dialogue, only to disregard “Russia’s national poet,” Aleksandr Pushkin, as “nothing special,” he then adds, “I am sorry if I have offended your nationalist sympathies.” The invisible persona questioningly repeats: “What? . . . national . . . national sympathy?” but does not react further. Instead of simply confronting European criticisms of the “East,” the film shows how Russians’ sniffing at the various figures of Europe is read by Europe as a slavish act of deference. By allowing the European stranger to assume a superior position, the Russian speaker subtly undermines it, showing that Europe’s identity is also an imaginary construction contingent on its other. Ironically, it is the Hermitage that houses and preserves the various dreams, memories, and histories of Europe. This does not make the Russian ark the true covenant of Europe—only a vessel that contains a plethora of incompatible and anachronistic dreams about pasts and the future. Shifting from historic events to the details of European artworks, the film seems to relegate Russia to a series of live performances (history, theater, music, court rituals) while casting Europe as a collection of artifacts (paintings, sculptures, architecture, artistic styles). The dialogue between the figures of Europe (Custine) and Russia (the invisible speaker), and their

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journey through the times and spaces of the Hermitage question such clear divisions, making the European’s insistence on superiority look ridiculous (especially in contrast to the engaged post-Soviet visitors that the European encounters throughout the film). Sokurov pokes fun at Custine, who seems to see his reflection everywhere—“Empire style everywhere”—and whose keen sense of smell does not extend beyond the paint of the various European “Old Masters” he sniffs or the formaldehyde that his own body exudes. Custine mistakes or projects his own stench (and ideology) onto (living) others. The film, however, does not establish who is right or wrong. Is it the present that stinks of death as it merely preserves itself on past glory (as the historical figure of the past thinks), or is it the burden of history that reeks of death and oppresses the modern visitors with the stench of formaldehyde? Russian Ark parodies Europe’s proprietary and authorial attitude toward the artworks featured in the film, but the parody extends also to what those works represent. When he enters the “little Italian room,” Custine remarks that this collection does not possess the best Italian masters, and he scoffs at the many examples of objects in Empire style. The invisible speaker comments that Aleksandr I fought Napoleon, not the decorative style that would later be associated with him. However, when Custine is introduced to the Russian persona’s friends (Sokurov’s real-life friends, Lev Yeliseyev and Oleg Khmelnisky) he arrogantly asks them if they are interested in “beauty or just the imitation of it?” As they lead Custine to Tintoretto’s The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, it is clear that he is not interested in the painting’s beauty (as are these two modern patrons of the museum) but only in what it represents in terms of French history. He comments that Catherine the Great acquired the painting in 1772 at a Paris auction of the Crozat collection. Similarly, while overwhelmed by the beauty of Canova’s Three Graces, he notes that the sculpture was purchased in 1815 by Tsar Alexander I from Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife. In opposition to Custine, who seems able to relate to art only through its relation to Europe and particularly to France, the various Russian visitors to the museum (the famous ballerina Alla Osipenko, the blind sculptress Tamara Kurenkova, and the anonymous man who admires El Greco’s St. Peter and St. Paul ) develop their own relationship to the works of art independent of nationalist sentiments. The film, therefore, constantly reminds us that Custine’s performance

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is of many in one: he is Custine, a French diplomat, a European, and a stranger, but he is also a performance of biased European attitudes toward Russia. More importantly, he bridges this “live” performance of an untimely history to the haunting presence of those outside of time and geopolitical space. Custine is identified only by the friends of the invisible speaker, but the speaker, whom Custine identifies as Russian, in turn identifies Custine only as European. In this case, “Europe” (who is surprised to hear the invisible persona speaking Russian) is, in fact, a prominent Russian stage actor (Sergei Donstov) acting the part of “Europe.” But this time, the marquis (“Europe”) does not visit the palace with a diplomatic entourage as does the Persian delegation—sent to assuage Tsar Nicholas I and avoid war over the murder of Russian diplomats in Teheran (including the famous dramaturge Alexander Griboedov)69—nor does he appear as stiff and staid as the other diplomats (as surely a French diplomat of the time would appear). Instead, he is an obvious parody of Europe: flamboyantly delivering French lines with a Russian body. When we first encounter this strange European, he is hovering behind the masquerade actors who greet the party guests, the officers and ladies in the first visual shot of the film. The Russian speaker encounters “Europe” only after passing through two groups of actors. This confuses the speaker to the point that he cannot discern theatrical performance from historical reenactment and asks: “can it be that this has all been staged for me? Am I expected to play a role?” He even asks this stranger, whom he now finds lurking in the hallway: “is this all theater?” “Europe” further extends the metaphor of theater to Russia itself: “Russia is like theater, how pretentious these people are. What actors! And those costumes!” Russian Ark draws attention to multiple layers of theatricality: St. Petersburg and the Winter Palace provide the stage for Russians to act as if they were Europeans. On another level, the artificiality and pretentiousness seem to be imported to Russia from European court culture itself—the disguising of the violence of political and imperial power with etiquette and diplomacy. Additionally, history, remembrance, and even the present (e.g., the case of Osipenko, who acts [dances] out her relationship to Rembrandt’s restored Danaë ) are played out as cameo performances. Finally, the film’s focus on theater draws attention to film as an artistic performance.

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POURING OUT OF THE ARK In cemeteries, just as in museums, you understand acutely that there is no death. There is also no life . . . these depositories of culture add to a repository of illusions and metaphors. —Arkadii Ippolitov, “The City in a Porcelain Snuffbox”

Russian Ark emphasizes theatricality, but it does not spin it out of control into random, disjointed acts that repeat, intersect, and dissolve into oblivion. The film hinges all these disparate and fragmentary performances on the physical and historical map of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace. The trajectory of “Europe” and “Russia” does not seem to follow any order or chronology.70 As they move from room to room, they also move from the time of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, to the nineteenth century, contemporary Petrograd, to the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, and back to an older and more feeble late eighteenth-century Catherine. What is presented in coherent chronological order are the tsars themselves, from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, Nicholas I, and Nicholas II. Each played a significant role in the history of the museum: Peter the Great founded the city and built the first incarnation of the Winter Palace and the museum, which was then a Kunstkammer, library, and natural history museum for his Academy of Sciences. Catherine the Great was the founder of the Hermitage, and in 1764 she bought over 250 paintings to inaugurate the collection. Tsar Nicholas I opened the New Hermitage in 1852 and provided “public” access to the museum. The reign of Nicholas II marked the end of the Hermitage’s double role as museum and home to the tsars. It also marks the end of the epoch of Petrine reforms, and what the film presents as the splitting of Russia from Europe during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Sokurov’s film mimics this historical progression by moving from the dark quarters of Peter the Great to the brilliantly colorful climatic ball given for Nicholas II, only to descend once again into the dark waters of the Neva. This movement from the small provincial courtly rooms of Peter the Great to the opulent high-ceilinged ballrooms of Tsar Nicholas I’s and Tsar Nicholas II’s courts also marks the growth of the city and the empire’s geopolitical importance, especially with respect to Europe. This trajectory

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is also reflected in the film’s changing visual framing. As opposed to the fluid movement of the camera, which follows the rhythm of the dancers, musicians, and various guests at the last ball, the images of Peter the Great are more visually constrained. He is seen through windows and doorways with the ceiling often visible in the frame, which gives the images a claustrophobic effect. These images allude to Pushkin’s famous characterization of St. Petersburg as “opening a window onto Europe” in his poem “The Bronze Horseman” (“Mednyi Vsadnik,” 1833). Ironically, it is “Europe” and the Russian speaker who now apprehensively peek through the window onto Peter the Great, but a Peter stripped of the trappings of enlightened despotism. What we see through these windows is not an absolute ruler, à la Louis XIV, but a violent bully, physically abusing his wife (Catherine I) and humiliating one of his ministers by forcing him to the ground to crawl out of his presence. This scene visualizes the hypocrisy of the Petrine reforms, which used public humiliations to introduce Russians to the practices of “polite society.” The window also serves as a barrier to keep Peter at a safe distance. He is treated as an enigma.71 The man who according to popular culture taught the Russians to enjoy themselves—popular folklore tells that he threw wild drunken parties and demonstrated extraordinary sexual prowess—is also the man who, as Custine reminds the Russian speaker, ordered his own son’s execution. Boym writes: “For Russian thinkers, the ‘window to the West’ turned into a magic mirror in which they saw mostly their own reflections. Conversely, Russia was an exotic playground for Western travelers, ‘the land of the firebird’ or tyranny in the 19th century, and the land of possible communist utopia, or alternatively of the totalitarian gulag.”72 But the film is not uncritical of the Russian gaze through a European window onto itself. The city, like the foundations of the Hermitage and the history of the tsars of St. Petersburg, is built atop this boorish figure of Peter the Great. Catherine the Great, the great patron of the arts who launched this Russian ark, is presented less boorishly: She first appears watching a rather garish theatrical play (presumably her own production) that mixes classical Roman and Russian figures with masquerade and fantasy characters. She alone among the tsars has a second appearance, though in her reappearance she is a somewhat pathetic figure, hiding behind a column as the children of the court play blind man’s bluff. This time, she is almost unrecognizable to the disembodied visitor. Yet both times she is shown running off : first, as she claims,

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“to take a piss,” and later disappearing into the cold white and grey exterior of the palace. In her first appearance she is presented as anything but pathetic—her behavior indicates that she is not concerned with courtly manners, as evidenced by her rather impolite language, which is not out of line with that of the old princes and princesses, who liked to do as they pleased and say what they thought, being above such concerns. But in her second appearance, she is seen instructing her grandchildren on court behavior. As the film progresses and the art—as Custine claims, “gets better and better”—the tsars appear less active, almost peculiarly immobile. Nicholas I paces down two steps from his throne to acknowledge the Persian ambassador and then turns only his head toward his minister as if to indicate that the words the minister will read are his own (figure 1.5). It is almost as if the tsar has become a European clockwork figurine. It seems that as the tsars become more calcified in their princely role, the camera becomes more fluid, moving through the scenic tableau of a historical festival, giving this image a three-dimensional feel. The contrast between cinematic fluidity and figural stasis—the stiffness of his role and a prelude of the rigor mortis to come—is repeated in the scene of Nicholas II presiding at the head of an intimate family breakfast in full ceremonial dress. By the time we follow Tsarina Alexandra and her sister Elizabeth (the “white nun,” who was also killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918) down the hallway, there is a foreboding specter of doom looming beyond the walls of the Winter Palace.73 When Alexandra comes into focus, it is as if we hear her thoughts: “you are always there watching me.” Later she will ask Elizabeth if she hears the gunshots, and tells her that she feels the presence of someone watching. The allusion to gunshots does not necessarily foreshadow the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of the tsar and his family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The gunshots might also refer to the sound of gunfire that could be heard in Ekaterinburg coming from the Czech contingent of the White Army, which triggered the Bolsheviks to quickly dispatch the tsar and his entire family. Or it could be the sound of soldiers shooting numerous unarmed protestors in 1905, and again in 1914, just outside of the Winter Palace. Of course, there are also many other spectators who are watching in this scene: not only Europe (Custine), but possibly Rasputin (who is curiously absent), Russia (the invisible speaker), and the camera itself. As the camera pulls away from the family, these spectators all seem to bid it farewell. The

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FIGURE 1.5 A diplomatic entourage from Persia is sent to assuage Tsar Nicholas I and avoid war over the murder of Russian diplomats in Teheran.

invisible speaker will echo this gesture as he bids farewell to Custine at the top of the Jordan staircase, descending into the future: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist purges, World War II, the Cold War, and the anticlimactic finale of the film that echoes the anticlimactic endings of all of these events. At this point of closure—the last image of the tsars—the invisible speaker loses sight of Custine, his European accomplice, who has become increasingly embroiled in the spectacle of the past and less engaged in the antagonistic dialogue with the invisible Russian speaker. This disengagement produces a feeling of weightlessness. The camera and the speaker appear to be ever more disembodied—gliding through the ballroom, floating above the orchestra and around the dance floor (figure 1.6). Just as the camera and the speaker seem to be swept away by the music and the festivities, there is a loss of grounding that will leave the invisible speaker with a sense of melancholy and disorientation once the music stops. As he approaches “Europe” for the last time, he remarks: “I lost you . . . have I lost you?” as if to indicate that not only is he lost but so is this era of opulence, splendor, and power. When he suggests to “Europe”: “let’s go . . . forward,” his European companion, visibly saddened, responds by

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FIGURE 1.6 The final ball reenacted in the film is reminiscent of the painting Ball at the Assembly Hall of the Nobility in St. Petersburg on 23 February 1913 (Dmitry Nikolaevich Kardovsky, 1915).

asking: “What will we find there?” The future, to which the Russian speaker refers, is not the Russian Revolution but an unknown future beyond the Soviet period. Rather than remaining with “Europe” like an artifact fixed within a historical frame, the invisible speaker follows the moving spectacle of the partygoers down the Jordan staircase, but he flows between and beyond them, pouring out a window (to Europe) onto the desolate waters of the Neva. At the same time this ark floats above the waters of the Neva (making the Hermitage and the Winter Palace appear as if they prepared an ark of salvation), we are reminded that this ark may also be just another sinking ship. As Kujundžić points out: “the sound of sinking ships as well as the explicit mention of the ‘Kursk’ (thus hinting at the sinking of the submarine Kursk in the frozen depths of the Barents Sea during the early days of Vladimir Putin’s regime), permeates the Hermitage film.”74 Similar to Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” the film takes a sudden twist from the monumental heights of the tsar’s courtly ark to the surface of the Neva.75 It is here over the water that he reflects: “too bad you are not here with me, you would

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FIGURE 1.7 The closing image of the film frames the darkened winter sky of St. Petersburg over the frozen waters of the Neva breathing arctic fog.

understand everything, look the sea is all around and we are destined to sail forever . . . to live forever.” While the film closes with another nebulous image—the darkened winter sky of St. Petersburg over the frozen waters of the Neva breathing arctic fog (figure 1.7)—it recalls those anonymous “eternal people” who seem to sail undetected between the borders of Asia and Europe as they move within someone else’s dreams of an unforeseeable future and an impossible past, between the secularism of Enlightenment thought and the return to religion, lost somewhere in the exchange of ideology for international currency. Sokurov seems to be unwilling to identify these floating people as much as to anchor them on one bank or the other. What he does emphasize is the rift between the aesthetics of Russia’s monumental idols, its historical archive, the contentious politics of empire, and the murky, imageless (if not invisible) eternal people on which all these spectacular images drift.

2 O MEGALEXANDROS Falling In and Out of Dreams

D

uring a career that spanned more than forty years, Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos was feted with scores of awards, including the Palme d’Or for Mia aioniotitakai mia mera (Eternity and a Day, 1998), the Grand Jury Prize for To Vlemma tou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), the Golden Lion for O Megalexandros (Alexander the Great, 1980), the Silver Lion for Topio stin omichili (Landscapes in the Mist, 1988), and the International Critics Award for O Thiassos (The Travelling Players, 1975). But while critics have praised Angelopoulos as one of cinema’s most important auteurs, his films are largely unknown to contemporary filmgoers outside of niche audiences interested in European art-house cinema. Scholarly literature on his work is also limited; the sheer length, unhurried pacing, and complexity of the films make it a daunting (if not extraordinarily rewarding) task to engage closely with them. This engagement is made more challenging by the innumerable theatrical, literary, filmic, historical, and philosophical references, which often exceed the background of today’s film audiences. Furthermore, Angelopoulos’s work is as philosophically complex and politically critical as it is erudite. It questions, for instance, the way concepts such as democracy, justice, and truth have been used and misused in representations of Western history or in justifying modern geopolitical appropriations. But while driven by a strong critical ethos, Angelopoulos’s films refuse to endorse popular moral dichotomies between good and evil—a choice that has upset some of his critics both on the Greek political left and right.

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Angelopoulos’s films are not crafted to provide us with a few hours of escape from who we are but rather to make us confront our identifications (religious, moral, national, ethnic, and sexual). Yet even when dealing with issues like war, betrayal, corruption, and mortality, Angelopoulos produces stunningly poetic films. His unique use of the long-take explores each exquisite and carefully constructed frame, moving languidly across space and time all within a single shot. His films are about the poetry of ruins, and yet the aesthetization of the ruin does not produce a sense of lost grandeur; instead, it haunts us with the broken statues that we have used to populate our dreams. Unlike Sokurov’s Russian Ark, where the Russians orient themselves toward the stateliness of the European archive (housed in the Hermitage Museum), in O Megalexandros it is the non-Hellenic-born Europeans who orient themselves toward the splendor of ancient Greece (whose artifacts are mostly housed in Europe). But in both cases, this glorification of the distant past questions how contemporary inhabits resemble the iconic figures of that past (figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 The figure of Megalexandros is a mythical composite who shares elements of Byzantine heroes (St. George, Digenes Akrites, and the Akrites border guards) and messianic figures such as Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth.

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Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935, during the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas. His earliest memories were of political turmoil: the Italian and German invasions of Greece during World War II, followed by the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Subsequently, British and American forces were a key factor in the eventual defeat of the Greek political left, and the American government continued to support right-wing political parties and actors up through the military junta of 1967–1974. Such memories haunt Angelopoulos’s films and enable them to offer striking insights into the tumultuous history of twentieth-century Greece and the Balkans. Yet while he is generally considered to be the foremost filmmaker of the modern Greek experience, Angelopoulos’s work also speaks to audiences and issues well beyond the region. As he engages with the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of modern Greek identity, he also shows how the idea of Greece has shaped the Western imaginary down to the current debates over the definition of “Europe” and its cultural and geographical borders.

PERSISTENT DREAMS I dream’d that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians’ grave, I could not deem myself a slave. —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

I woke with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down. It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to disunite again. —George Seferis, “‫؞‬࿰۟Ԇۭࠗ‫ࢆٗݰڗ‬Ǔ Г”

More than any other Angelopoulos film, O Megalexandros (‫ࣹ͘؞ ܀‬Ǔड़͘৓Ǔဎ˗‫)ߥڗݰ‬ struck a sensitive nerve, pointing to Greece’s complicated relationship with both the West and the East but also to how both the Greek and the international left-right spectrum has continually written and rewritten the

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history of that relationship, beginning in the early nineteenth century but continuing all the way up to today, with the sovereign debt crisis that has plagued Greece since spring 2010. The film takes its name from Megalexandros, a mythical composite figure who shares elements of Byzantine heroes (St. George, Digenes Akrites, and the Akrites border guards) and messianic figures such as Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth. Since the film’s release in 1980, the figure of Megalexandros has also been artistically and politically appropriated for more modern heroes, such as those who fought in the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1830 (Odysseas Androutsos, Theodoros Kolokotronis, and Nikitas Stamatelopoulos), World War II resistance fighters, and the Greek Civil War guerrilla leader Aris Velouchiotis. As Marie-José Mondzain points out, although Greece is often considered the birthplace of philosophy and European culture, “its paternity in the domain of the image has hardly ever been recognized,” primarily because the appropriation of ancient Greece and its intellectual heritage has gone through so many permutations, so many historical revisions. For Mondzain, images like Megalexandros give birth to iconic thought by concealing the many appropriations and contaminations involved in their creation. For example, she points out that “because Byzantine Christianity was defined as orient, it was too quickly forgotten that the thought of the church fathers was nothing other than a long debate on the compatibility of Greek thought with the new dogmas of the faith.1 Rather than masking the many appropriations of Alexander the Great, Angelopoulos’s figure marks a site of interruption, where its various incarnations serve to undermine the ideas that are imputed to it. In contrast, historico-political couplings and resonances were often constructed (or carved in stone, as it were) to facilitate a particular image or narrative of the modern Greek state, yet they were also fraught with various antistatist contentions—in the tradition of the brigands, klefts (໵ड़ๆ‫ߥٗࠗݵ‬: guerilla-like rebels who defied Ottoman rule in the Balkans), Greek partisans, and Italian anarchists. Angelopoulos presents Greekness as a fictive identity based on retrospective resemblances to male figures such as Megalexandros. Such reveries have constituted virtual imagined communities and dream nations, haunting the people who inhabit the real and imaginary space of Greece with conflicting ideals. In the film, these poetic visions collide. Byronic dreams of Greek ancestry intersect with neohellenic dreams of a Greek nation that looks up to European democratic ideals, but clashes over

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revolutionary dreams of freedom (from the Ottoman Turks or European and American intervention). In turn, nationalist ideals are confronted by socialist ideologies of social inclusion for minorities and foreigners, and by Italian anarchist utopias of a borderless democracy in southern Europe. Notions relating to the restoration of ancient grandeur and the creation of a continuous narrative of neohellenic identity simultaneously separate and link Hellenic, Byzantine, and modern civilizations, coalescing into regulative ideas that have prefigured first the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule and then the cultural, political, and economic relationships of Greece to Europe, the Balkans, and the “Orient.” Such dreams become burdens for those who are forced to live in the space between statues (which signify the burden of history) and slaves (who point to the shame of failing to live up to glorified historic imaginaries). The film challenges the imposition of such dreams onto the people in or on the borders of Greece, particularly those dreams that divide logos (the historical experience or nomenclature) from mythos in order to map out ethnicities (Greeks from non-Greeks), and to install them within Western European cultural and political codes. Megalexandros exemplifies Pier Paolo Pasolini’s concept of unpopular cinema, making viewers uncomfortable by foregrounding the anxieties inherent in the notion of Greekness: its lack of coherence, its precarious placement at the crossroads between Western and Eastern history, and its casting as a no-man’s-land between Hellenic and Asian, Occidental and “Oriental,” Western European neoliberalism and Soviet-style socialism, and today between solvency and sovereign debt. Greekness is simultaneously treated as a decentralized site both of contamination (of cultural exchange, ethnic mingling, and mixed genesis) and of purity (as the spiritual cradle of Europe supporting its claims to cultural authenticity and global superiority). These two divergent images of Greekness (one ethnic and impure and the other logical and pure) constitute a double border that renders the status of the Greek nation-state simultaneously marginal and central to European identity. Neohellenic dreams of freedom may support modern European fancies of being the direct progeny of the ancient Hellenes, but the building of the Greek nation-state was anything but the unfolding of inevitable historical necessity. No stable Greek identity has emerged from these disjunctures, only rifts between reified Eurocentric histories of modern Greece and selfimages of the various “Greek” peoples.2 Megalexandros, however, does not

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play into the politics of idolizing the ancient, the Byzantine Christian, or the modern European, nor does it glamorize the impure, hybrid, or cosmopolitan “Greeks” that fall in between these iconic dreams and fabricated visions. Instead, it offers insight into the politics of dreams—dreams that give features and shapes to national subjects. Although central to Europe’s narrative of origin, Greece has been what Michael Herzfeld calls a “crypto-colony”: [A] buffer zone between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, [which] was compelled to acquire its political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. . . . Countries [like Greece] were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence.3

Unwilling to confront Greece’s Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, the European fashioning of classical Greece as the spiritual source of civilization and enlightenment only further marginalizes modern Greek peoples. Angelopoulos shows that Greece fits into neither Europe nor its borderlands. Instead, he asks us to think about how volatile figures could be made to represent the sanctity of the nation-state.4 This is a question that not only “bring[s] the border to the center” of European national identity (as Balibar argues) but also challenges the very logic that configures neohellenic (Greek), Eastern European, Balkan, and European identities. It is for this reason that the film stages events such as the Dilessi affair (1870) as myth and Megalexandros as an anthropomorphic figure of Greekness. In fact, Angelopoulos does not simply deconstruct the image of Megalexandros or the narratives in which this figure is embedded but juxtaposes competing appropriations so as to expose how they use iconic thinking to produce value and meaning. For example, the film’s narrative has elements of tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony. At the same time it engages with other modes of writing (e.g., poetry, philosophy, and political rhetoric). It also brings together Strauss’s “Viennese Waltz” with nineteenth-century Italian anarchist songs and Byzantine liturgical music played on ancient instruments. Megalexandros breaks cinematic conventions by presenting jarring juxtapositions of disparate audiovisual elements: religious and revolutionary

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iconography, Byzantine liturgy, ancient theater, avant-garde film, static photographic tableaux, popular myth, music, and folklore. Angelopoulos demonstrates how this mobile army of tropes has more to do with the will to control how reality is represented than with just a simple rendering of events—his own use of tropes putting any sense of reality into crisis. Instead, a new type of narration emerges from the film: a falsifying narration that, according to Deleuze, shatters the system of judgment because it “is constantly being completely modified, in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations, but as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologized moments.”5

RECYCLED ICONS AND THE VISION OF REVISION Trust not for freedom to the Franks— They have a king who buys and sells; In native swords and native ranks The only hope of courage dwells —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

Made on the eve of Greece’s entry into the European Union on January 1, 1981, Megalexandros did not acquiesce to the political mood of the moment but foregrounded Greece’s status as a crypto-colony or client state. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, the film reminds its viewers of the role that Great Britain, France, and Russia played in the Greek War of Independence, as well as in their continued gunboat diplomacy in relation to Greek national politics. While Greece’s political parties often emerged from alliances with one of the three protecting powers, it was Great Britain that came to be perceived as “a foreign colonizer, the exporter of capital from Greece.”6 Megalexandros is loosely based on the Dilessi affair, which involved the kidnapping and eventual murder of a group of British aristocrats and one Italian count by Greek bandits at Dilessi in Boeotia. Angelopoulos claimed that Megalexandros was one of the simplest films he made because it follows a linear narrative; however, the interweaving of numerous citations to poems, tragedies, histories, and iconographies, as

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well as references to traditional oral narratives and local customs, makes the film extremely complex and nuanced. The plot tracks the events of the Dilessi murders, or at least their outline: we are shown the conspiracy that led to the kidnapping of a group of English tourists, their capture, the subsequent release of the female hostages, the kidnappers’ negotiations with the Greek government and British diplomats, the breakdown of those negotiations, and the ultimate killing of the hostages, which led to the collapse of the (British-supported) Greek government. However, in Angelopoulos’s film these events are rewritten in terms of revolutionary politics (irredentism, anti-interventionism, anti-capitalism, and anarchocommunism), and the kidnappers are not just a group of bandits. Megalexandros, the film’s central character, is a left-wing political prisoner, a chieftain, and, as we shall see, an imaginary Greek hero. His escape from prison is aided by a shadowy figure with political ties to the opposition party, which hopes to create an international crisis thereby causing the government to fall. Apparently unaware of this fact, Megalexandros conspires with this covert go-between (who also plays the part of the guide or dragoman) to kidnap the British tourists for ransom. He then calls for the restitution of farmland to the peasants and general amnesty for his men and other rebels, who have all taken to the mountains. What Megalexandros does not know is that the Greek constitution of 1864 did not allow for such a quid pro quo: in order to be granted amnesty, Megalexandros and his men must first be tried.7 Under threat of an English blockade, the Greek government devises a plan to stage a mock trial; however, instead of bringing Megalexandros and his men to trial in Athens (a request the rebels refuse), they set up a makeshift court on the outskirts of the Macedonian village of Dostiko (the mountain hideout of various leftwing groups, guerrillas, and Megalexandros and his men). The government camp is symbolically divided from Dostiko by a river and the mountains in which the village itself is nestled. Nevertheless, the camp clandestinely grows, and Greek royalist forces encircle the village. The character Megalexandros comes from the real-life village of Dostiko (a small village in western Macedonia that borders the region of Epirus), but while he was in prison the village had declared itself an anarchist commune. Megalexandros happens to arrive in the village just as do a group of Italian anarchists fleeing persecution. While the anarchists are embraced by the communards, Megalexandros and his men are warned by the town’s

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schoolteacher that local laws have changed. Unhappy with these changes, Megalexandros and his men gradually seize power, placing the commune under martial law: the process starts with the symbolic killing of a flock of sheep (the sacrifice of the innocent) and is followed by the resetting of the town clock (symbolizing the return to an older order) (figure 2.2). At this juncture, the cult of personality slips into despotism, and a multilayered struggle ensues among anarchist revolutionaries, authoritarian revolutionaries, and the British-backed royalist forces. Megalexandros’s actions result in dividing the village between those who wish to return to private property and the older authoritarian form of revolutionary politics and those anarchists who wish to sustain their commune and try Megalexandros and his men for breaking its laws. At this point, Megalexandros has become a tyrant who abides by no law, and rather than play along with the mock trial, one of his men shoots the state prosecutor, triggering an attempted assassination of Megalexandros by three of the villagers. This act of defiance only encourages Megalexandros’s reactionary acts of violence: when the Italian anarchists attempt to escape

FIGURE 2.2

Megalexandros and his men gradually seize power, placing the commune under martial law: this is symbolized by their resetting the town clock.

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the village, they are murdered; the schoolteacher is imprisoned; all the villagers’ weapons and communal goods are confiscated; and when these brigands find out they have been tricked by the go-between, they respond by killing him together with the British aristocrats. They are subsequently overtaken by the Greek royalist and British forces that have surrounded Dostiko, and it is only after Megalexandros has been defeated that the villagers kill him. Although by 1980 the Dilessi murders were well outside of living memory, Greek film audiences were still able to understand the larger political issues implicit in the event. The botched handling of this incident by the British and the Greeks exemplifies the larger geopolitical picture of Western “diplomatic” intervention in Greek national politics, and the effects of foreign capital investment on land tenure throughout the Balkans. Ironically, at the same time that emerging democratic states in Western Europe and America were citing classical Hellenic democracy as their model, the protecting powers saddled the newly formed Greek state with a monarchy headed by a king of northern European stock. Deemed unruly, underdeveloped, and shaped by Ottoman or Byzantine-style clientelism, the Greeks were routinely excluded from negotiations with the Ottoman Empire over the territorial dimensions of their own “independent” state. They were considered fit, however, to be burdened with enormous debts amassed by loans provided by the protecting powers.8 Greek independence amounted to an exchange of masters: the despotic Ottoman sultan for the expensive King Otto, who ruled with a heavy hand from 1833 to 1862, bringing with him his own Bavarian army, bureaucracy, urban planners, and architects to secure his reign. As the fleeting romantic (radical antimonarchist) dream that Greece might be free of foreign domination (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, or European) gave way to the financial and geopolitical aspirations of Greece and its patron states, the Greeks themselves became one of what Rebecca West calls the “pet Balkan people in the bland pious fantasies of humanitarian and reformist English persons.”9 Greece’s dependency on foreign patron states continued with the British and American interventions against leftist anti-fascist forces during the Greek Civil War and with continued American influence in postwar Greek politics. But as geopolitics shifted from Europe to Asia and the Middle East, Greece ceased to be a “pet” and became “a flea.” As US president Lyndon Johnson bluntly stated:

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“Listen to me, Mr. Ambassador [Alexander Matsas], fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good.”10 Within the context of the present-day sovereign debt crisis and the austerity measures used to “rectify” Greek debt, Greece once again appears more as a flea than as Europe’s pet. It has remained a marginal power, rendered powerless by European Union threats (led by Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel), forced to default on its loans. While the 1980s marked the end of the American-backed dictatorship and the “return” of Greece to Europe, they also marked the rise of Greek socialism precisely (and ironically) as the Soviet socialist system was beginning to collapse. Because Angelopoulos’s internationally acclaimed The Travelling Players had been the first film to offer a leftist perspective on the history of the Greek Civil War, one can understand how within this new historical context Megalexandros came as a bit of a shock. Although it won the Golden Lion in Venice, the film was not well received in Greece. “The right attacked [Megalexandros] because of its radical political implications,” while the left reacted to the fact that “at the very moment when the Greek people had finally won the right to honor the Resistance fighters of WWII as heroes, Angelopoulos seemed to be resurrecting charges of leftist cruelty.”11 The dislike was mutual—the Greek left was critical of the film. In fact, the film proposes far more radical visions of sociopolitical freedom12 while also offering a relentless critique of the traditional revolutionary left for promoting authoritarian politics under the guise of hero worship, making it difficult to keep the living separate from dead idols and their ideals. Angelopoulos presented Megalexandros as “the bitter end result of my previous three films. . . . [It] addressed the concentration of power long before the changes in Eastern Europe took place, and in this respect it was a prophetic film on the failure of the socialist experiment in this part of the world.”13 The first film in Angelopoulos’s Trilogy of History, Meres Tou ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972) was shot under the nose of the Greek military junta (the Regime of the Colonels, 1967–1974). The film links the Regime of the Colonels to the dictatorship of General Metaxas, who took control of the government in 1936 after a political deadlock resulted in the Communist Party carrying the balance of power. The second film, The Travelling

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Players, was shot during the 1973 student uprisings against the junta and American intervention—with the occupation of Athens Polytechnic and the infamous killing, wounding, and incarcerating of scores of protesters on November 17. Only the last film of the trilogy, I Kynighi (The Hunters, 1977) was shot after the junta’s collapse and following the Turkish occupation of Cyprus. While The Hunters presents the “still warm” legacy of the Greek left,14 Megalexandros was shot in a considerably different political environment. By 1979, Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement Party (PASOK) had ceased to demand that Greece secede from NATO, denounce Europe as a “capitalist club,” and support an international socialist agenda. In 1981, PASOK was in power and began to accommodate European neoliberalism by privatizing state-controlled industries, integrating Greece into the European economy, and maintaining austerity measures set in place by the previous right-wing government. This move toward traditional “liberal” values created a new disjuncture between the political rhetoric and practices of the left. Upholding “pretentious political theories is useless,” Angelopoulos argued, because they only reduced the left to the status of a “dead language.” He continued: “For a very long time we used to dream that politics was not a profession, it was a creed, a faith, and an ideal. But in recent years, I have become convinced politics is nothing more than just another profession.”15 Megalexandros demonstrates how politicians across the spectrum share similar tactics in relation to the aesthetization of power. Common to propaganda on both the right and the left is the establishment of an enemy who can be demonized as non- or anti-Greek.16 This othering of the opposition is often coupled with the glorification of a male authority figure envisioned as embodying Greekness, either through an association with ancient Hellenic figures or with legendary heroes who defied foreign rule.17 The political right depicted the left as an external threat (under the sway of Slavo-communism and, later, Stalinism), while the left represented the right as collaborationist (selling out Greece and Greeks to European imperialism, Nazism, and American neoimperialism). But both the left and the right participated in the creation of personality cults. For instance, the iconography and narrative tropes used by Greek communists to depict the heroes of World War II resistance and the civil war revolutionary guerillas bear a definite resemblance to the “macho” tradition of the klefts and brigands.

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Angelopoulos presents Megalexandros as a political outsider and a social outcast who hides in the mountains, as did resistance fighters and communist civil war guerilla forces, and as a political prisoner who demands restitution for the peasants’ usurped land. But he also questions this cultic representation of male authority by presenting Megalexandros as a despot who, to maintain power, collaborates with political insiders who are themselves conspiring against the existing democratic government. This representational choice exemplifies how the gesture of othering those who do not fit into conventional visions of Greece produces competing imaginary communities at the expense of those that exist locally. Megalexandros embodies a conglomeration of visions, heroes, and icons, making it difficult to tell whether he is a figure of the political left or right. Instead, he is a guerilla freedom fighter who becomes a tyrant, and as a tyrant, he reminds us of numerous historical figures all along the left-right spectrum, in and outside of Greece. As a freedom fighter he becomes part of the dreams of a heroic past and future promoted by the left and right alike; as a despot, he becomes that evil other against whom wars and revolutions are fought. Angelopoulos insists that the figure of Megalexandros is not based on Megas Alexandros (Alexander the Great) but on The Book of Megalexandros— an oral narrative that begins in 1453, the year the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks. What makes this figure so interesting is that, although fashioned after many border figures who defended Greece against various invaders, his Greekness is openly questioned: he is part Greek, part warrior, part kleft, part brigand; he is a defender of local communities but also an outsider to any civil society. Historically, the figure of Megalexandros belongs to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition and its struggles against four hundred years of Ottoman rule. The composite figure of Megalexandros has represented and embodied conflicting political dreams, against the East with the West and against the West with the East. He begins as the heroic defender of borders but stands for the aspiration to conquer the borderlands, where Greek minority populations were still prevalent. As a composite figure, he does not reaffirm a collective identity but reveals the difference and disjuncture between the various heroes and events used to construct the image and narrative of Greekness. In the film, Megalexandros is intolerant of the multiethnic and agrarian commune that shelters him, and he does not protect the villagers from their European capitalist enemies. Instead, he stands for a defensive

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notion of Greekness, which reacts to Western European accusations that modern Greeks, far from being the true descendants of the ancient Hellenes, were “muddied” with Slavic, Albanian, and Turkic blood.18 Because figures like Megalexandros emerge from popular folklore, they cannot be contained within one simple tradition. The film shows how over hundreds of years of telling and retelling, the figure of Megalexandros has intersected with that of Alexander the Great, Digenes Akrites (a legendary figure who fought Arab invaders),19 the klefts, the partisans (who fought the Italians and Nazis in World War II and the British and Americans during the civil war), Andreas Papandreou (the charismatic leader of the PASOK Party),20 and even, perhaps, Angelopoulos himself. This charismatic figure of Greekness asks us to think about how the image has and can be resurrected every time Greece comes to a political impasse—such as the current rise of the extreme right in Greek national politics and the victory of the leftist SYRIZA Party in the 2014 European Parliamentary election in Greece. The interconnections and conflations of diverse heroic traditions from ancient (pagan), Byzantine (Orthodox Christian), and modern (philhellenic, neohellenic, and demotic) were fashioned on a selection of mythic figures that could provide nineteenth- and twentieth-century neohellenists with the appearance of continuity at a time when Greece was aggressively pursuing irredentist politics. These figures contributed to a “national epic,” casting Hellenic national consciousness as a continuous resistance to the imposition of various forms of non-Hellenic culture—Christian, Saracen, Byzantine, Slavic, and Ottoman. Yet, as Herzfeld argues, Greek folklore was created after national independence.21 Angelopoulos is interested in folklore and iconic national images only as afterthoughts. In fact, by displacing the Dilessi affair from 1870 to the turn of the twentieth century, he wants us to think of the film not as the representation of a specific event but as the repetition of certain patterns and figures that constitute a dream nation—the virtual whole of Greek identity. Angelopoulos shows how the repetition of such poetic images and narrative rhythms defaces the ideals they allegedly represent. Megalexandros embodies the traces of multiple acts of effacement and, therefore, functions as both a dynamic form of difference and a static icon of failed ideals, dreams, and aspirations. For a film that is so meticulous about historical detail—in dress, of specifics in the Dilessi affair, and of nationalist politics—Megalexandros treats

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historical narratives with irreverence. Angelopoulos does not venerate the past but rather treats it with “a sense of ambiguity and disintegration.”22 He criticizes, in particular, the trope of anthropomorphism, which allows for the synthesizing of all figures associated with Megalexandros into an icon of Greekness. The fixing of competing and transitory signs of Greekness into the figure of Megalexandros locks all possible social relations into the cult of hero worship and the cult personality. This relation is anything but stable as it reflects only the whims or aspirations of its charismatic leader. Angelopoulos does not attempt to find a place for, or to replace, actual “Greeks” in relation to all of these monumental “Greek” figures. Instead, he raises the question: how do we rid ourselves of the burden of the past when the past has become embedded in everyday social interaction? This resonates with Stathis Gourgouris’s claim: “Society has lost the sense of its perishable nature; it has forgotten the nature of its own mortality and therefore lives the eternal death of an idol, a textualized ideal, with an eternalized history accrued and duplicated over time.”23 Megalexandros reminds us that time in relation to the nation or ethnos is always out of joint—untimely, imaginary, a hodgepodge of images that clash with the ideal with which they are imputed. The figure of Megalexandros represents the struggle of the people against the state while simultaneously authenticating the state’s own official history and territorial claims. As an emblem of the Greek people, he contradicts both his own historical role and his iconic role as a unifying figure. Standing against the people in favor of some historical notion of Greekness, Megalexandros reveals the aporia between his own image of Greekness and his evolving relationship to the (ever-changing) concept. This aporia exposes the problematic relationship of signs, events, and social relations to their representations.

MODERNIZING MYTHOLOGIES For what is left the poet here? For Greeks a blush—for Greece a tear. —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

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The opening sequence of Megalexandros foregrounds the act of narration by staging an oral narrative that calls the truthfulness of the past into question. Rather than establishing Megalexandros as the film’s protagonist, the film opens with a shot of an anonymous modern Greek speaker in a seemingly unidentifiable location who turns to look at, walk toward, and directly address the camera. By framing the film’s narrative with this unconventional direct address to the camera, Angelopoulos begins by interrupting the viewers’ expectations and their willing suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, by framing a film about a historical event and a legendary figure within an oral narrative, Angelopoulos reminds us that the memory of Megalexandros was both kept alive and transformed by oral culture. Like all oral narratives, this performance by the Greek speaker recites (as a form of repetition) and re-cites (as a form of difference) the myth of Megalexandros in terms of the narrator’s own personal style and his ever-changing relationship to the addressee. By giving the narrator a face, albeit an anonymous one, Angelopoulos recalls the intricate relationship of “storyteller,” “inquirer,” and “historian,” all of which are implicit in the term “‫ ڗ‬Ԇۭࠗ‫ݰڗ‬Ԇ໵ཬߥ” (istorikos). This nameless narrator (a shepherd) clearly stands both inside the film and outside of the narrative. He is identifiable only by his dress and his accent as a Macedonian, but he is placed in Parnassus—one of the most celebrated sites of the ancient Mediterranean world and one of the most infamous modern sites of brigandage.24 It is also in the shadow of Parnassus that Oedipus killed Laius and his servant, at the spot where three roads meet.25 The intersection of the sacred ground of epic narrative with oral narrative performed on a rural dirt road questions the monumentality and stability of the narrative while simultaneously bringing “mythology down from the heights and directly to the people.”26 The shepherd’s oral narrative frames the film—marking its beginning and its end—delimiting narrative-time rather than containing it. The framing of the film within an epic mode of narration as told by a contemporary speaker of demotic (not classical) Greek further confounds the boundaries between myth and history. Although it mimics the form of oral narrative that often begins before recorded time, this one seems to start after the story’s climax (“at sunset, one evening in the years of old”), and on indefinable middle ground (between “our lands,” “the heart of Asia,” and the “setting out along a nameless river”). The narrator (o Ԇۭࠗ‫ݰڗ‬Ԇ໵ཬߥ) begins: “In the years of old when they came to conquer our lands, Alexandros, who came from ‘Ellous,’ a race of warriors who governed

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the mountains, assembled his Macedonians and chased the foreigners out. Afterward he moved to the heart of Asia vanquishing and liberating nations and languages. One evening as he watched the sun setting on the great river, sadness overtook him. That night he left his companions and set out, alone, searching for the end of the world.” The reference to “the times of old”27 seems to place the narrative in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “absolute past” of epic time. But sunset is the time of endings, not beginnings—particularly so in reference to the Alexandrian empire, whose emblem was the rising sun. These words stand in contrast to the establishing shot, which enframes the sun rising in the East. This initial image of triumph or beginning is accompanied by an open-ended narrative of decline, casting doubt on whether Alexandros will ever reach his destination. More importantly, the narrative arc questions the very meaning of the destination (“the end of the world”): it could be an apocalyptic search for the end of the world, an attempt to conquer the entire world, or Alexandros’s individual journey (as both man and myth) toward death. He embodies other contradictions as well: “Alexandros” literally means the defender of men (particularly of warriors), yet he is also presented as a conqueror of men (an emperor), a liberator (a revolutionary), and a wanderer like Odysseus and Oedipus. Still, he is one who searches not for truth, home, or glory but for the “end of the world.” This oral narrative seems to refer to Alexander the Great, who goes to the heart of Asia, but it does not engage in the ongoing debates (ancient, medieval, and modern) that install him in a monumental narrative as either a great liberator and Hellenizer or a tyrant “orientalized” by the various people he conquers. In this passage, “Alexandros” refers to the many historical configurations he has come to represent but also to numerous other heroes who have been likened to him. He is, therefore, not situated in some epic or absolute past but in multiple pasts (ancient, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman, and even modern). Contrary to Bakhtin’s argument that there is an “impenetrable boundary” separating epic from subsequent time, Megalexandros (who appears in anonymous popular legends and fables) demonstrates not only how the past participates in the present but also how figures of the past obstruct notions of progress and national history.28 The cinematic narrator orients the film within a familiar trope—a conquest by a foreign power that leads to heroic resistance and ultimately to the defeat of the conqueror—but it does not identify who these heroic ancestors are. They could be ancient Hellenes,

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Byzantines, Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire, or diasporic Greek populations; however, they can also be marginal figures inside the confines of what is considered to be Greece—for Megalexandros is a border figure, a figure of mixed genesis. Similarly, the narration does not specify to which conquest it refers: It could be the conquest of the Hellenes by the Persians or the Romans; the medieval Eastern (Roman) Empire by the Serbian tzars or Bulgarian kings; the conquering of the people of the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor by the Byzantine Empire or by the Ottoman Turks; the imposition of foreign kings (Bavarian and Danish) on the Greek throne, newly invented by the Great Powers; the invasion of Greece by Italian fascists and German Nazis; the “liberation” of Greece by the Allies; or the continued American “presence” designed to “contain communism” under the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. It might also be the Hellenization of the borderlands—those marginal figures who are made to appear as if they were ethnically pure.29 Megalexandros, instead, opens a series of questions about whom the narrator includes when he says “we,” and whom he excludes when he says “foreigners.” The only clear identification in the oral narrative is that of “the Macedonians,” a term that remains contested to this day.30 It is not clear whether the narrator uses it to include or exclude the classical Hellenic peoples, modern Greeks, Slavs, Vlachs, and Albanians. The film does not reinforce the Greekness of Macedonia but points to the controversies surrounding the Macedonian Question. Although o Ԇۭࠗ‫ݰڗ‬Ԇ໵ཬߥ distinguishes between Macedonians and non-Macedonians, he does not identify Macedonians with Greeks or any other ethnic group. Instead, he shows that, like the Europeans, the Greeks engaged in a form of nation-building that separated the logos or mythos of Greekness from the ethnos. Like the narrator, who is tied to the rural oral tradition, Megalexandros signifies the paradox of neohellenic Greek culture: it excludes actual figures like the brigands, klefts, and border-dwellers, while predicating authentic Greekness on oral narratives told in rural villages.31 Even though Megalexandros is a demotic Greek speaker, his ethnic origins are unknown—as a youth he is found wandering down from the mountains of Macedonia after his parents are killed. Megalexandros embodies all the ambiguities of a border figure: He resembles Oedipus (who is both a foreigner and a native son), Alexander the Great (son of Philip of Macedon and the Epirote Illyrian princess Olympias), and Digenes Akrites (who, as his name suggests, was himself of double genos, the son of a

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“compromised” Greek woman and an Arab emir).32 He also travels with a band of Macedonians—whose very identity was highly controversial and disputed at the turn of the century.33 The opening scene provides neither the ground for a stable narrative nor a clearly identifiable character in Alexandros; rather, it offers multiple entrances into the film—into performance, oral narrative, identity, and international and sexual politics. In fact, the film ends with another entrance: it ends with the line as told by the narrator, “and that is how Alexandros entered the cities.” Alexandros is presented as a mythopoetic figure who brings with him to the capital of modern Greece all the contradictions of the past.

BORROWED DREAMS AND BROKEN ICONS My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

The abrupt cut from the Greek speaker at Parnassus to the exterior shot of the Old Royal Palace building in Athens (today’s parliament building) visualizes Balibar’s “bringing the border to the center”—the bringing of Athens (reduced to a village under the Byzantines and Ottomans) to the center of Hellas by making it the capital of Greece.34 But this gesture of “returning” Athens to its “lost glory” also reflects the bringing of “Europe” to the center of Greece. “A design for Athens is a European affair,” claimed German architect Leo von Klenze, who was brought to Greece in 1834 to aid in the design of modern Athens.35 The parliament building is a monument of (and to) the strange relationship that Greece has to Europe. Neoclassical in style, it was commissioned by King Ludwig I of Bavaria as the royal palace for his son, Otto, installed on the recently established “Greek” throne by the three “protecting powers.”36 The building (remodeled in the early 1930s) embodies European dreams of classical Hellas through its neoclassical aesthetics as well as the importation of those dreams back to Athens, revealing the contradictions between colonizing modern Greece and (re)importing dreams of democracy and civilization to Greece—dreams it could not live up to.

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FIGURE 2.3 AND

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The Old Royal Palace in Syntagma Square on New Year’s Eve (1900),

the lights off.

For neohellenic Greeks (many of whom were European-educated or diasporic Greeks), the objective was Europeanization, which meant connecting to the ancient heritage while effacing the immediate Ottoman past. The objective of the Europeans was less clear. While the regency attempted to introduce the machinery of a Western state,37 many other Europeans came to Greece as tourists. Ironically, what attracted European tourists was not neoclassical architecture (designed to attract European investors to Athens) but the romantic images of ruins, picturesque “orientalized” peasants, and the heroic gesture of Byron, whose death became a myth of sacrifice offered so “that Greece might still be free.” The film lingers long enough on this external shot of the parliament building for us to hear twelve full strokes of the bell that rings in the New Year (1900). All of a sudden the building, which was previously lit by only two external street lamps, explodes with light from within, the sound of gunshots, a Viennese waltz, and a voice that cries out: “Long live the twentieth century!” (figures 2.3–2.4). As we watch male silhouettes shooting off their guns and others dancing inside the palace, the shadowy figure of a

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FIGURE 2.4 The lights of the Old Royal Palace in Syntagma Square are lit on New Year’s Eve, symbolizing the dawn of a new century (1900).

man emerges from the building. He is the same person who will liberate Megalexandros and his men from prison and then serve as a go-between— between these men and the European-backed government. The camera that frames the man from the front takes a sudden turn onto Syntagma Square as if moving with him through the adjoining neighborhood, suggesting that we are seeing from his subjective point of view. A change of music from waltz to march (played by a European-style brass band) accompanies the cut. This traveling shot functions as a tour of Athens’s neoclassical architecture, turn-of-the-century Athenian culture, and modernization. Because the street is full of revelers (all dressed in continental European attire) moving in all directions (on foot, on horse back, or in carriages), the camera follows aimlessly from one military marching brass band to another. This traveling shot captures the omnipresence of electricity, the music of empire (waltzes and marches), and soldiers (in different uniforms) who transverse the frame in all directions, recalling the creation of (central) Athens as a modern European city. But this focus on the presence of

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various “armies” in Syntagma Square also recalls as much as it foreshadows the fact that this location was (and would be) the site of many uprisings: from the demand for a constitution in 1844 and the Megáli Idéa to the World War II communist insurgency and postwar period, the student uprisings in 1973, and contemporary protests against migrants, refugees, immigrants, and European austerity measures that began in 2010. Most of these uprisings were followed by military repression, showing that attempts to “rehellenize” Athens involved force masked as culture and modernization. In fact, the rise of ultranationalist and anti-immigrant parties like Golden Dawn—whose slogans include “Greece for the Greeks” and “Blood and Honor”—are also calls to “rehellenize” and return to a model of aggressive patriarchal politics. Current protests (of both the nationalist right and the left) are met with the continued possibility of a future Grexit that would either be self-imposed or ordered by the European Union if Greece’s elected officials do not meet EU demands. Greece’s tenuous relationship to Europe remains at the core of these struggles, and elected officials (such as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras) have had to take up once again the role of the go-between—between intransigent European policies and an increasingly disenfranchised and disillusioned public. In Megalexandros, we are surprised when this long traveling shot returns to the figure of the go-between, who is not shot from the front this time but from behind, as he descends a darkened set of stairs, suggesting that we have not moved with him but around him, only to end up following him. Although the camera comes full circle, it does not affirm the character’s subjective point of view, employing what Pasolini calls the “free indirect subjective point of view shot.”38 This rupture (rather than suture) in the visual narrative reveals that we are not seeing through the eyes of a character but through the disembodied gaze of the camera, which is immersed within the mise-en-scène. We are watching a film wherein the subjective point of view is clearly detached from its actors and from any conceivable subjective position within the narrative, but the subjective point of view does not hold a position of power either. We are being led astray by the gobetween, left to wander the streets of Athens only to discover that he is not really with us (i.e., this is not a character we can identify with). We are never given the privilege of seeing through his eyes—feeling what he feels or knowing what he knows. Yet he is a key figure that will lead us from one location to the next.

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In the next sequence, the camera follows the go-between at a distance. And the scene after that begins by following a boat that moves toward the prison island, where Megalexandros is being held. This initiates a series of parallel scenes that are connected by visual and aural metaphors. For instance, the transition between the scene shot in central Athens and the one of the go-between secretly arranging for Megalexandros’s escape from prison, repeats the image of the go-between’s back as a visual metaphor of stealth. The transition between the scene of the prison break and the arming of Megalexandros and his men, however, uses a sound bridge—the sound of running feet—as a link. Yet these visual and aural metaphors do not establish any sense of continuity (even poetically); rather, they perform a selfinterruption (a parabasis) that disrupts narrative and cinematic illusions. While the visual metaphor of following behind the character links the two scenes by framing the back of the go-between (from the stairs in the first scene to the boat in the next), the abrupt sound cut (from a bombastic march to the sound of water) that accompanies this metonymic shift undermines its smooth transition. In the second scene, the camera does not follow the go-between from his rowboat into the prison where he frees Megalexandros and his men from their cells. Instead, the camera waits stationary outside (seemingly offshore), recording only the sound of footsteps mixed with the waves crashing on the rocks. When the camera finally enters the prison, it seems to come upon the go-between as an intruder, reflecting the perspective of the guard who discovers him. Springing brigands from prison was not uncommon at the time. The Greek government often used brigands to stir up trouble in local elections, or for paramilitary actions in Ottoman lands. Angelopoulos makes it clear that in this case it is a member of an opposition party who releases Megalexandros so that he will stir up trouble for the party in power.39 The gobetween will miraculously disappear over the water as he leaves the prison, only to reappear on the streets of Athens to guide the group of British nobles to the Temple of Poseidon where they are kidnapped by Megalexandros.40 The prison sequence ends in darkness, with the sound of the waves and the footsteps of the fleeing men. The waves and footsteps serve as a sound bridge for the next scene, which also begins in darkness, panning from darkness to light (from left to right), mimicking the motion (and direction) of the escaping men only to freeze on a spotlit circle with a white horse at its

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FIGURE 2.5

Megalexandros enters the film in a scene that is set up to look like the stage of an ancient theater. He is wearing an Alexandrian helmet and a fustanella (the traditional dress of the klefts). After donning a sword, he kneels, takes a rifle, and mounts a white horse.

center. It is in this “circular stage of ancient theater,”41 as Angelopoulos calls it, that Megalexandros makes his first appearance in the film. He kneels, takes a rifle, and mounts a white horse. Because Megalexandros enters the film (and stage) wearing an Alexandrian helmet, a fustanella (the traditional dress of the klefts), is donning a sword, mounting a white horse (like St. George), and carries a rifle as would a brigand or a partisan, he alludes to various contending histories (figure 2.5).42 This scene stands out as it marks the first occasion in which Angelopoulos uses extradiegetic sound. It is also the first time we hear non-Western music: Byzantine liturgical music seems to come from an ethereal source, casting Megalexandros and the ancient theater site on holy ground while also connecting the ancient theater to medieval imagery of Alexander the Great, Byzantine icons of St. George, and romantic imagery of darkly lit

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landscapes in the mist. As the surge of human voices accompanied by ancient instruments fades out, we are left again with the sound of running feet and the image of men fleeing into darkness. Unlike the previous scene, however, they disappear at the center of the frame, setting up the entrance for a French singer who appears at this same spot in the following shot. The visual metaphor of the stage returns us full circle to the royal palace, yet this time the building is shot from the inside. Moving from the circle of the ancient theater (lit from overhead) to an abrupt opening of a red curtain (frontally spotlit) inside the palace, Angelopoulos draws attention to two distinct images of theater. These two scenes divide the theater inside the palace—which is political, courtly, and distinctly European (full of sexual innuendo and racial and class prejudices)—from the theater outside the palace, which is ethnically and religiously coded. Inside the palace, a French woman (presumably the lover of the Greek prime minister, and fashioned after Yvette Guilbert) emerges from behind the red curtain to sing about a woman who cannot stop talking and has a crowd of lovers.43 The contrast between the two scenes is stark. Accompanied by flute, the soprano is made to sound almost like a bird—singing about, flitting between, and flirting with various men—as opposed to the low, monotone chant that seems to emerge from the ground in the previous scene. Her coquettish performance is interrupted by, but also seems to merge with, the laughter of the British entourage who enter the stage through the same red curtain from which she came. The camera follows from the French singer to the jocular British aristocrats moving through the palace, back out to the streets of central Athens. The sequence inside the palace functions as a metaphor for the internal politics of the nation-state and the negotiations over foreign capital investment. We see representatives of the Europeanized Greek government and the “protectorate powers” singing French and British ditties44 and dancing to Strauss’s “Viennese Waltz.” Yet the first exchange between Greek officials and British nobles attests to the awkward relationship between philhellenic “Europe” and neohellenic “Greece.” As a greeting to the Greek officials, Lord Lancaster (soon to be kidnapped by Megalexandros) recites the opening lines of Plato’s Crito in ancient Greek: “ࠗԆ ࠗԆဎٗ໵Ǔ˗͘ ǓྦԆ৓ǓԆ, ‫ ڗ‬໸‫ݰ‬Ԇࠗङဎ.” Confronted by the puzzled look on the Greek officials’ faces, the people in the entourage laugh as Lancaster comments, “They don’t understand a word I said!” By juxtaposing the New Year’s Eve ball, where European

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businessmen negotiate their investments in the Balkans, with Megalexandros’s escape from a political prison, Angelopoulos points to a double misunderstanding. The Greeks do not understand the language and culture they claim to represent, but the British do not understand the implications of the dialogue in which they have chosen to engage. The British will become actual prisoners of Megalexandros and his men, but they are already metaphysically imprisoned in the dream of ancient Greece—a dream in which Megalexandros is one of their heroes. Steeped in the classical tradition, the British noble’s dream is of reexperiencing not only ancient Greece but also Byron’s romanticized dreams of ancient Hellas that are projected onto the modern state—he declares that it is his wish “to see the sunrise between the pillars of Poseidon’s temple at Cape Sounion.” At the same time, the Greek government that imported neohellenism back to Greece appears inauthentic and collaborationist, limiting the role of modern Greeks to little more than tour guides of “their” ancient culture’s ruins. Megalexandros presents European philhellenism and Greek neohellenism as equally inauthentic, second-handed attempts to recapture and reexperience ancient glories. However, the closest they can come to their own philhellenic dreams is to recite the lines of ancient and romantic texts and tour the sites of ancient battles and places of worship. Lord Lancaster’s recital of the Crito is a gesture of schoolboy reverence for the Hellenes, but it is also an expression of self-empowerment. By implicitly assuming the role of Socrates, Lancaster pompously takes a position of authority and installs himself in a dialogue where he is destined to expose the falseness of his interlocutor’s preconceived ideas about freedom.45 The invocation of the Crito—itself a dialogue about misunderstanding freedom’s true nature—draws attention to the trivialization of the discourse of freedom, which is used and misunderstood by philhellenes and neohellenists alike. It also appears that Lancaster is oblivious to the fact that he is reciting a line from a man condemned to death. In the Crito, Socrates is imprisoned and awaiting execution upon the arrival of the ship from Delos, and Crito has come to tell Socrates that the ship has already been sighted at Cape Sounion. Similarly, Lancaster’s allusion to Byron’s poem “The Isles of Greece,” foreshadows his own and his entourage’s fate. The poem ends with a reference to the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion: “Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, . . . There, swan-like, let me sing and die.” Unaware of this irony, the British proclaim their desire to “live out Byron’s dream,” or at least to go to the Temple of Poseidon, where Bryon graffitied his name in

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1810. The go-between will ensure that their schoolboy fantasies about Greece come true. As the group leaves the palace dancing and singing “The Eton Boating Song,” they are encircled by a train of carriages and trapped in the middle. Suddenly the go-between appears, introducing himself as their guide.

PROUD INVADERS OF A MYTH Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swan-like, let me sing and die —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

It is at Cape Sounion that Megalexandros literally emerges from the ragged cliffs below the Temple of Poseidon, once again accompanied (and preceded) by a monophonic Byzantine liturgical chant. He arrives on cue: entering on a white horse just as Lord Lancaster, true to his philhellenic character, recites the first stasimon of the chorus to Sophocles’s Antigone: “Beam of light. . . . Speeding upon their headlong homeward course / Far quicker the Argive force came in full armor; / Putting to flight. . . .”46 Lancaster is cut off by Megalexandros, who suddenly appears before him, and he cannot deliver the last lines: “The argent shields, the host with scutcheons white / Against our land the proud invader came / To vindicate fell Polyneices’ claim.” Megalexandros seems to come out of this “beam of light” from the rising sun “in full armor” (›ǓဎۭǓࣹԆǓ). But following the trail of sunlight over the water, he arrives from East to West, thereby positioning himself both as an “invader” (like the men from Argos) and as Emperor Alexander (symbolized by the rising sun).47 Our inability to discern whether Megalexandros is invading or returning questions not only his national and ethnic identity but also his allegiances. Seeming to take the place of the sun, he also eclipses its light, blurring the lines between identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance. Lancaster’s reference to Antigone allows Angelopoulos to open up themes that run through many of his films: the effects of the struggle

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between rural and Europeanized urban authority that glorifies and erases traditional allegiances; the strife between what Hegel calls the “ethical order” and the laws of kinship that results in the killing of one brother by another; and the betrayal of Greeks by Greeks. Although it is Megalexandros who appears to be on a “homeward course” (heading back from prison to the mountains where he is from), “putting to flight” the European robber barons and defending Greek lands against “the proud invaders,” he also appears to be an invader who takes hostage not only the British nobles but his own people. The figure of Megalexandros functions as a speculative image that “reflects on the convergence of narrative structures with political authority becoming itself a cultural and political fusion.”48 As he stands like the pillars of the temple that (as the go-between tells the British entourage) have endured invasions, battles, and civil wars, he is likened to a timeimage that can only be experienced as past, making it difficult to locate him among the living. It is precisely as an icon of resistance and ruin that he becomes one of “national” endurance and nostalgia that cuts across competing ideologies. The long-take that frames the British entourage as it shrinks backward out of the frame at the sight of Megalexandros, pans slowly to the left, now framing the various islands below the jagged cliffs, only to return to the broken columns of the temple and, this time, to the stunned faces of the British as they continue to inch backward onto the temple itself. This image links the statuesque figure of Megalexandros to the islands behind him, but also to the ruined pillars of the temple. He is at once a symbol (of isolation, exile, endurance, ruin, and nostalgia), an index (the embodiment of the past in the present, the East in the West, and the Orthodox Christian tradition in the leftist political iconography), and an affect image (an image that simultaneously evokes awe, terror, authenticity, and the sacred).

A PLAY OF MASKS AMONG THE RUINS I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak —George Seferis, “‫؞‬࿰۟Ԇۭࠗ‫ࢆٗݰڗ‬Ǔ Г”

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Influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s concept of epic theater, Angelopoulos attempts to produce an “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt), which denaturalizes the aesthetics of cinematic real time, the connection of actors with their roles, the presumption that an action leads to meaningful narrative progress, and the manipulation of emotions designed to produce identification and catharsis. By directing attention to its own cinematic devices (the long-take, dead space and time, distant and alienated action) Megalexandros uncovers the theatricality involved in the process of representation. Uncovering the conditions of production interrupts the dramatization involved in the staging of events.49 But, as Walter Benjamin writes, “interruption does not act as a stimulant; . . . It brings the action to a standstill in mid-course and thereby compels the spectator to take up a position towards action, and the actor to take up a position towards his part.”50 For Brecht, the process of defamiliarization required the self-conscious distancing of actors from action, action from narrative, and actual consciousness from the medium itself. Defamiliarization comes in Angelopoulos’s films in the form of a refusal to adhere to cinematic conventions such as sound matches, point-of-view shots, continuity editing, action sequences, characterization, and narrative time. He makes the “artificial aspects of film direction” visible so as to “prevent any type of identification” with events, subjects, and characters.51 Instead, he uses long sequence shots that move from one figure to another, from one aesthetic to another, and one sound image to another in one sweeping camera movement. Although these extensive long-takes “reveal many facets of the central situation,” they “prevent the viewer from identifying with any of these facets, since he is jolted from one surprise to another.”52 The effect of distance is enhanced by Angelopoulos’s obsessive use of both the long-take and the long shot, which install characters in situations and environments rather than isolate them as individuals. The slow panning and tracking shots immobilize characters, space, and time and deny them a subjective point of view. This marked absence of a central subjective gaze communicates Pasolini’s concept of the “free indirect point of view shot” in the movement of the camera itself. Without a subjective point of view, the character is reduced to an icon— as Jean-Luc Godard describes the icon in Notre Musique (2004), “l’icône [ pause] pas de mouvement, pas de profondeur, au aucune illusion, le sacré” (the icon [ pause] without movement, without depth or artifice, the

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sacred)—or, as Angelopoulos proposes, a classical theatrical mask. Andrew Horton has suggested that the main character in Megalexandros was chosen as the mask of a “Mediterranean face,” one without identifiable national features. But Omero Antonutti, the Italian actor who plays Megalexandros, is more a statue than a mask since he hardly speaks. Unlike a mask that bears an exaggerated expression, the face of Antonutti appears indifferent. His face does not reveal or conceal hidden messages or meanings or “produce the actual appearance of the soul,” as Béla Balász put it.53 Instead, his face appears distant, immovable, and iconic (if not sacred); it is his facial quality rather than expressive power that recalls a history of heroic figures so revered as to become sacred. And it is this face, overladen with the marks of history and religiosity, that seems to turn the mise-en-scène into a monument to himself. “The image is always sacred,” but Jean-Luc Nancy qualifies this statement when he argues that the “sacred, for its part, signifies the separate, what is set aside, removed, cut off.”54 In this sense, the image of Megalexandros is both present and withdrawn; it cannot be touched, but it affects the other characters and the way we understand the film. The “essence of the image is not visibility” but its economy—its ability to establish, shape, and organize relations.55 The presence of Megalexandros functions much like gazing at the medusa—it freezes the beholder in some unspeakable obligatory relation. But this overwhelming silence and the silencing of those who resist Megalexandros “is partly a reflection of the main character’s inability to communicate and his increasingly internalized vision; it is also simultaneously an intensification of, and a critical commentary on the power of the image.”56 As an emblem of sacred transhistorical heroism, incommunicability, and silence, Megalexandros appears in the first part of the film almost as a statue. When he does speak, his voice is actually detached from his body. The first time we hear Megalexandros speak is in a voice-over that accompanies the image of him stoically marching his men and their British hostages northward, toward Greek Macedonia. The voice itself is also monumental, self-identifying, and declarative: “I, Alexandros, captain of the rebels.” While he continues by enumerating the demands that the king of Greece, the Greek government, and the British diplomatic corps must meet to secure the release of the captives, the camera pulls out and we see the unidentified liberator of Megalexandros and his men and subsequent tour guide for the British tourists (having presumably

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set them up to be kidnapped). Later in the film, we see him deliver Megalexandros’s messages and negotiate with the Greek government, the Greek army, and British diplomats. As he steps out of the shadows from behind a hedge and waves goodbye, we hear Megalexandros’s voice trail off, saying, “in order not to spill blood unjustly . . .” But this line only foreshadows the numerous times that blood will be spilled, implicating both Megalexandros and this shadowy figure (referred to as the ˳‫ݰ‬Ǔࣹ‫ࢆڗ‬Ǔဎ‫ߥڗ‬, the Dragoman) in such acts of injustice. The juxtaposition of Megalexandros and this political conspirator questions the veracity of these monumental words. Whose words are we hearing? Are they those of Megalexandros? Or are they put in his mouth by some politician, historian, or filmmaker? The words are recited (by a disembodied voice) and function as a citation (carrying the gesture of a great figure of resistance and deliverance). Yet the gesture made with these words does not match the actions of either Megalexandros or his go-between. In fact, in the next scene, the go-between relays what are presumably Megalexandros’s demands to another conspirator, who laughs as he reads the words, understanding how they will place the Greek government at odds with the British diplomatic corps. From this point on, we hear only Megalexandros’s private voice—instead of speaking in public, he talks to himself in the confined space of his room. It is in this room that he speaks to the bloody wedding dress of his slain wife (figure 2.6), finally reflecting on his own tyrannical role in the community’s demise by reciting the line from Seferis’s “‫؞‬࿰۟Ԇۭࠗ‫ࢆٗݰڗ‬Ǔ Г”: “I woke with this marble head in my hands.”57 Yet rather than holding a marble head in his hands, he holds his own balding head and curls into a fetal ball as if to indicate his awareness that he has gone from being a head figure to a figurehead—a broken statue that cannot speak to contemporary issues but burdens the living with dead values and ideals. Because Seferis’s poem already reflects on the problematic remembrance of the monumental past in the neohellenic present, Megalexandros’s recitation serves to double this reflection. Angelopoulos does not present the fragmentation and dissolution of collective memory (as Seferis does) but embodies the poetic voice (the words of Seferis, Greece’s “national bard”) in the mute and visionless marble head itself. Angelopoulos disavows any nostalgic or sentimental reading of Megalexandros. The metaphor of the broken statue amid the ruins of ancient

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FIGURE 2.6

After he returns to his home from prison, Megalexandros speaks to the bloody wedding dress of his slain wife that remains hanging next to his bed.

Hellas is parodied in the scene where Megalexandros poses on horseback in front of a painting of a dragon alongside ancient ruins. He is asked to stand still, “like a statue,” by the photographer who captures his image as he poses with his men in front of the communards and some English-speaking tourists (figure 2.7). It is not clear who he is performing: St. George as he slays the dragon (since the pose mimics Orthodox Christian and medieval Byzantine iconography); Alexander the Great (who is likened to St. George in medieval iconography); or himself (the leader of the rebels who defeats the landowners in the name of the peasants). Similar to the ruins of classical Hellas, to the birthplace of Alexander the Great, and to Orthodox Christian icons, Megalexandros has become a tourist attraction; his image is a souvenir to be captured and reproduced. Ironically, it is his go-between who once again performs the role of tour guide. This time he does not entrap tourists for Megalexandros to kidnap but rather takes them to the village retreat where Megalexandros and his men hold the British nobles captive. It is also from

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FIGURE 2.7

Megalexandros poses as the statuesque heroic figure St. George (patron saint of Greece) for the camera and the tourists who come to visit Dostiko.

this “tour guide” that we learn of Megalexandros’s uncertain ancestry and of his Oedipal relationship with the woman who raised him. She first becomes his adopted mother and then his wife, only to be murdered at their wedding. We also hear about Megalexandros’s relationship with his “sister”—the woman who, when he marries her mother, becomes his daughter, and later his lover. Yet this self-conscious theatricality—Megalexandros posing as a statuesque heroic figure for the camera and the go-between-turned-tour-guide recounting his biography—questions the authenticity of such figures and their narrative histories, as well as their referential status within the film. These self-conscious representations point to the differences between acts (events), action (movement-images), actuality (making present), and acting (performance). It is Angelopoulos’s framing of representation (in film, history, politics, and subjectivity) as performance that likens it to acting and, therefore, to the “powers of the false,” since “acting lacks the kind

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of reality usually associated with the present.” As Samuel Weber argues, acting “is never simply ‘present’ as much as it is repetitive.”58 Acting is a double movement: both a repetition pointing toward the past and a rehearsal directed toward the future. The problem with this double movement that cites what is past as it gestures toward the future, is that it vacates the stage of the here and now—or what Martin Heidegger calls Dasein (Being-There). By drawing attention to the medium (the actual sound and image in the film), to the act of acting, and to the act of presenting in representation, Angelopoulos destabilizes the ground on which such reflections are predicated. In so doing, he suspends the movement between perception and affect, interrupting the “tyranny of meaning.”59 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains that the notion of a ground is only in the repetition of the speculative image of ground itself. It is a reflection, an echo, or a double, but never a ground. Like origins, grounds “are assigned only in a world which challenges the original as much as the copy, and an origin assigns a ground only in a world already precipitated into universal ungrounding.”60 Caught in the act of repetition (or an attempted authentication of the original) is something unrepeatable, a certain type of remainder, a difference or radical singularity that ungrounds, or as Weber would say, “never arrives at its destination.”61 Rather than ground Megalexandros in the narrative time and space of Greek history, Angelopoulos “avoids at any cost a realist effect, [in order] to reach some kind of pure geography.”62 He achieves this pure geography by suspending the production of time in a series of long-take shots that focus on gestures of difference and repetition, what Raymond Durgnat calls the “local unity of a traveling stage.”63 Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Miklós Janscó, Angelopoulos is a master of the long-take that joins various time periods, myths, and events within single, seamless shots. Unlike The Travelling Players—a film that moves back and forth between 1939, 1922, 1944, and 1952, sometimes within a single shot—Megalexandros follows a linear narrative. Yet similar to his previous films, the pacing of Megalexandros is slow, circular, and distanced, forcing the audience to contemplate a series of long-take shots. “By refusing to cut in the middle,” Angelopoulos invites “the spectator to better analyze the image, and focus on the elements he finds most significant in it.”64 These lingering long shots and long-takes present (in the sense of making present) the moment between words and action, between

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spaces, gestures, and off-camera realities.65 Rather than produce another reality effect to augment the film’s narrative, Angelopoulos’s insistence on the long-take suspends narrative progress and presents it as supplementary to the visual image. Ironically, as Mary Ann Doane observes: “dead time— a time in which nothing happens, which is in some sense ‘wasted,’ expended without product—is the condition of a conceptualization of the event.”66 Pasolini likens dead time produced by the long-take to life itself, since it remains incomplete. It is only through montage that in some sense the present becomes past. The cut translates the unstable (actual) present in potentia into the narrative finitude of what Pasolini calls “presente storico” (historical present)—an order of time.67 By opposing the actual image of the longtake to the presence of historical images (such as Megalexandros himself ), the film examines the presence of the past through the expansion of the present. Megalexandros may be one of Angelopoulos’s simplest films, but that does not make it more realistic: “On the contrary [Megalexandros] is more surrealistic. It doesn’t describe real events but their sense and meaning, and concentrates on their political and sexual consequences.”68 The foregrounding of literary and aesthetic citations only serves to heighten the surreal sense of history and myth that suspends time, thereby interrupting fictional continuities of chronological succession and linear narrative. The citations of Byron, Seferis, Plato, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the various myths of Megalexandros, and the history of the Dilessi affair suggest that time itself is just another fiction. The time of Megalexandros is constantly being reordered by different conceptual regimes: Christianity, romanticism, iconoclasm, iconophilia, classicism, neoclassicism, enlightenment, modernism, nationalism, militarism, regionalism, liberalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, radicalism, and so forth. Each citation functions as a gesture to varying orders of time. Yet by following the continuous forking paths of these time-images, the film suggests their potential coexistence and thus undermines the status of truth in the various narrative regimes. As Deleuze argues: A new status of narration follows from this: narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying. This is not a case of “each has its own truth,” a variability of content. It is a power of the false, which replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the

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simultaneity of incompossible [impossible at the same time] presents or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.69

CAPTURED IN AND BY THE DREAM I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin. I don’t have any more strength. —George Seferis, “‫؞‬࿰۟Ԇۭࠗ‫ࢆٗݰڗ‬Ǔ Г”

The scene at the Temple of Poseidon ends as the chanting voices are drowned out by the sound of waves and marching feet. We are left with the image of the go-between standing in the background alone above the huddling British captives. In the following scene, in which Megalexandros marches the captives along the beach, the go-between reappears in the foreground, though still isolated from the group. This parting of ways signals two parallel paths that the film will follow: one of the go-between and the other of Megalexandros. The first path leads the camera once again behind the gobetween, who disappears into the woods, eventually arriving at the Greek government building where he delivers the news of the kidnapping. Soldiers are immediately deployed. Angelopoulos creates a sense of confrontation by juxtaposing two shots: soldiers rushing out of the entrance hall seem to clash with Megalexandros, who appears in the next shot at the top of the screen, seemingly moving toward them. The preceding scenes, where we follow the path of Megalexandros as he returns to his home, do not create this sense of conflict. Instead, they seem to frame Megalexandros in a series of biblical images; for example, the people who come to greet Megalexandros as he enters their village kneel before him. But Megalexandros’s image shifts from one religious icon to another, revealing how fusions of biblical, mythical, historical, and military figures have produced problematic images of authority. Angelopoulos does not present these conflations as allegorical or seamless metonymic shifts that reify political power; rather, he marks their points of disjuncture. For instance, in the scene where Megalexandros baptizes what appear to be four young men (or possibly two men and two women) who have been

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stripped naked and brought to the river (figure 2.8), Angelopoulos invokes the Orthodox iconography of St. John the Baptist. But while Megalexandros seems to take the position of St. John the Baptist by baptizing his “disciples” (or, possibly, captives) to become part of his following, it is Megalexandros himself who is christened, as one of the brigands calls out, “and they shall call him Alexandros,” while the rest of the brigands respond by raising their rifles in salute. In this brief scene the act of naming empowers Megalexandros, who both names and is named, baptizes and is baptized. Megalexandros turns the baptism into an act of selfempowerment, in which he assumes the role of naming others in his name. The hostages or “flock”—those who are named in his name—are territorialized and stripped of their own names and identities. The baptism also resembles a wedding. By installing himself in the role of priest, he is entitled to lord over the act of “coupling” his subjects, not just a man to a name, but man to woman in what looks like a forced heterosexual

FIGURE 2.8 Megalexandros seems to take the position of St. John the Baptist by baptizing his “disciples” (young boys who are to become future rebels like Alexandros).

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union. In contrast to the heavy-handed Christianization of the image of Megalexandros, this sequence ends with the rape of a female hostage by one of the brigands. This scene—which fuses baptism, marriage, and the public shaming of the vanquished—is juxtaposed with the following, in which Megalexandros goes from playing St. John the Baptist to assuming the role of Christ, appearing at the center of his disciples in a tableau of the last supper. Megalexandros transforms his role from that of naming and baptizing his “flock” to that of a savior who returns to deliver his people from the bonds of empire. Yet it is unclear who “his people” are. Does his community extend only to his disciples, a brotherhood of brigands? Or does it include those he has taken by force and baptized in, or branded with, his name, or even those nameless others who await his return? Nor is it clear in whose name Megalexandros performs such acts. The last supper scene is frontally shot and lit to illuminate the faces of Megalexandros and his men as they break bread and drink wine. It resembles both Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and a Byzantine icon. Megalexandros appears to go through the motions of performing the benediction as he passes the sanctified cup from brigand to brigand. But as the camera begins to slowly pull out it reveals that this tableau is being watched, the way an audience would gaze at icons in a church or at a reenactment of the last supper. This oscillation between religious iconography and theater subverts “the consecrated and institutionalized boundaries that structure political space: those that separate the sacred from the profane, the ‘altar’ from the public.”70 The heterogeneity of perspectives is further enhanced by the choir that accompanies the scene. As the camera pulls out, an offscreen male voice begins to sing in Byzantine liturgical style: “Holy is the bread, holy is the wine, holy is the hay for the horse.” This voice seems to cement the analogy between Megalexandros, Alexander the Great, the klefts, the Akrites border guard, and Christ—analogies that mimic the popular Balkan myth about the second coming of Alexander the Great to liberate his people from the Ottoman yoke. Yet this male voice is complemented and contrasted by a female singer (who is also out of frame). Since women do not sing in the Orthodox Christian Church, her singing is meant to tie Megalexandros to pagan tradition. She sings: “O Megalexandros you are the wind . . . you are the sun, you are

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St. George the dragon slayer.” Like Megas Alexandros, St. George functions as a transitional figure between Christian and pagan traditions: both a savior and Christian soldier (crusader), who links the West to the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa, where various versions of Megalexandros and the Alexander Romance have circulated and where St. George is treated as a patron saint. Although the two voices and their metaphors harmonize and are ultimately overpowered and absorbed into the same monotone chant, they also mark a gender divide, a gender divide that draws attention to the homosociality of the Christian, kleftic, Akritic, and pagan mythic traditions. The juxtaposition of choirs (the male voice, the female voice, the sea of voices) subverts any official reading of this ceremony. This scene does not, however, end in holy silence (as the male voice suggests) but rather with a loud clap of thunder, which in the next scene proves to be the sound of a crackling fire. The scene depicts the brigands, like ancient Greek athletes, wrestling in the nude by firelight. In recalling the aesthetics of ancient Greek vase painting, the scene highlights the erotically charged homosociality of such images. In the Western imagination, “the Klefts, as the Byronic heroes, were not men with homes and families, but rather a group of men without women, joined in a special bond, depicted as homosocial if not homosexual.”71 That these scenes of baptism, marriage, the last supper, and eroticized male athletic competition are juxtaposed to the rape scene of one of the captives suggests an underlying current of misogyny within these homosocial cultures. The absence of women from historical and religious iconography enforces a strict gender division, which is repeated throughout the film. In the scenes shot in Dostiko, the stronghold of the brigands, it is Megalexandros and his men who clearly stand out in opposition to the people of the village. While he was in jail, the villagers have come together and turned the village into a revolutionary commune—forbidding private property, advocating communal labor and equal rights for women. This radical society embraces a group of Italian anarchists seeking asylum. When the communards welcome Megalexandros and his men back home, they also warn him that the social structure has changed from a traditional patriarchal society to an egalitarian one. Megalexandros’s men lament the fact that they have to “beg for their women, their food, and their land.” They demand the return to individual property rights and to their “rightful”

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superiority over women, children, and foreigners. In contrast to the villagers, who celebrate both the homecoming of Megalexandros and the coming of the Italian anarchists, Megalexandros’s men enter the celebration dressed in black robes, carrying rifles. While the Italians are embraced by the commune’s elected officials and encircled by the communards, who dance around them, the brigands keep to themselves, constantly forming closed circles that set them apart from the others. The joyous melodic music and dance of the Italian anarchists bring together men and women, Greeks and Italians, but they are juxtaposed with and interrupted by the sullen (almost dirge-like) music and warrior dance of Megalexandros’s men—who only dance with each other to the monotone rhythm of stomping feet accompanied by the insolent raising of their rifles. These alleged, male defenders of borders seem to be less concerned with defending the laws of the commune than with imposing draconian laws of honor and manliness that are politically, sexually, and ethnically exclusive. As Oedipus (to whom Megalexandros is likened), these “native” sons return home as strangers. Although they allegedly champion the villagers’ cause against the wealthy landowners, they bring with them the plague of self-righteous violence and machismo (Ǔဎ˗‫ݰ‬Ԇۭࢆ‫ڗ‬s) that ultimately leads to their demise, as well as that of the commune. As border figures, Megalexandros and his men stand both in the name of Greek society and social relations and outside of them. It is only by standing on the border that these figures can represent the sanctity of the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox faith, the nation-state, the Greek ethnos, or the history of resistance against Ottoman rule.72 The village of Dostiko is itself something of a border figure: it was a border-turned-ghost town. In World War II, mountain villages like Dostiko became centers of resistance against fascism, but when Stalin and Churchill assigned Greece to the Western sphere of influence in 1944, mountain villages were brought to the borders of the Cold War, and subsequently to the center of the Greek Civil War—a war of British- and American-backed royalist forces against Greek Communists. Revolutionary guerrillas used these mountain villages as their headquarters, but by 1949 they were overrun by the royalists. Dostiko was abandoned, and its inhabitants fled to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the USSR. It is also worth noting that Dostiko had been at the heart of the Macedonian Question—the

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turn-of-the-century border disputes between Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, as well as the Macedonian ethnic irredentist movement—which was only partially resolved in the tripartite partitioning of Macedonia at the end of the Second Balkan War (1913).73 The issue regarding Slavic-speaking ethnic minorities in Macedonia would return with the Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s. It was Metaxas who associated the Communist Party with ethnic minorities and the Soviet-controlled Third International. Ironically, as Victor Roudometof points out, “in the early years of the Kingdom of Greece (1832–44), the boundaries of modern Greece were conceived as identical to those of ancient Greece; the ancient Macedonians were viewed as conquerors of ancient Greece and not as part of it.”74 It was during the late nineteenth century that historical and nationalist claims became intertwined.75 But even before the Macedonian Question became a problem for emerging nation-states, these villages were uncontrollable, even by those who allegedly ruled over them. Because the villages were mainly inhabited by shepherds and brigands, it was hard for Greeks (and Ottomans before them) to enforce the law there. Angelopoulos does not directly address the ethnically charged disputes over Macedonia’s borders, but by choosing the abandoned village of Dostiko he foregrounds the history of lawlessness, resistance, and defiance followed by severe repression that characterized this region. Through the absence of its inhabitants, Dostiko recalls the ghostly presence of such disputes and erasures.76 Horton points out that Angelopoulos’s art director, Mikis Karapiperis, “virtually [had] to rebuild the village as it would have looked at the turn of the century.”77 Megalexandros represents the aporias between the values and lifestyle of a homosocial warrior culture and traditional patriarchal social values. Like a brigand, he also openly transgresses the laws of the family: He marries a widow, but she is the woman he had adopted as his mother; his stepsister becomes his stepdaughter, only later to become his lover. His lover also has a son (Alexandros), whose origin (like that of Megalexandros) and relation to his “mother” remains unclear.78 Alexandros could be the “shameful” progeny of their incestuous relationship, or he could be a foundling like Megalexandros (and Oedipus). Although Megalexandros is presented as a savior, his wife/mother is murdered in his stead by the landowners at their wedding. Megalexandros appears to be more like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s

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schizophrenic Oedipus than Freud’s symbolic Father or “hero” of the family romance: The father, the mother, and the self are at grips with, and directly coupled to, the elements of the political and historical situation—the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss’s wife— who constantly break all triangulations, and who prevent the entire situation from falling back on the familial complex and becoming internalized in it. In a word, the family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even when inscribed in a larger circle that it is said to mediate and express.79

Megalexandros’s “family” is not a unit. It is an eccentric rhythm of pseudoincestuous relations (between mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, fathers and daughters, and between brothers and father figures), fragmented (with absent fathers and mothers) and decentered (oscillating between ethnic, political, and ideological alliances). It is not plagued by Freud’s and Lacan’s shadow of the fantastic phallus that is deeply embedded within the unconscious, but it is haunted by the specter of violence (of nation-building, empire, civil wars, revenge killings, and political assassinations). Like Oedipus, Megalexandros is a victim of a double impasse: at once the victim of a murderous identification between brothers who rebel against authority, only to then himself become an authority figure and demand the restoration of authoritarian patriarchy. He does not represent stable national, ethnic, or widely accepted sexual mores (law of castration). He is a miasma infecting notions of belonging, as he implicates the state, the community, and the family in acts of brigandage, machismo, sexual ambiguity, and murder. He contaminates the sacred with the profane, the law with its transgression. Megalexandros, like Alexander the Great, suffers from epilepsy, “the sacred disease.” The ancient Greeks took epileptic seizures as a sign that the afflicted individual was either possessed by evil spirits or touched by the gods. Epilepsy was considered to border on ecstasy, divination, and self-abandonment. But in the case of Megalexandros, this “sacred disease” serves as a metaphor that bridges the sacred (familial, national, or patriarchal authority) and the failure of signs and symbols to reinforce social bonds. Megalexandros is unable to overcome himself and can only make a spectacle of the

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self-image to which he so desperately clings. While his men forbid any spectator from witnessing one of his seizures, the camera lingers on the image of his body as it violently convulses, revealing—untouched by gods or demons—how it overwhelms and overcomes his attempts to project a selfcontained image of authority. Each time he returns to consciousness he becomes more reclusive, but no less autocratic or authoritarian. Megalexandros’s stepsister, stepdaughter, and lover, who is referred to in the credits as “the young woman in black,” is also a miasmatic figure. Her relationships with Megalexandros and the young Alexandros (who is either her foster child or adopted charge) are both ambiguous and sexualized. Megalexandros’s immediate reaction to seeing her in her nightgown is to passionately embrace her, but his knee-jerk reaction to his own passion is shame and disgust. His relationship with this woman is oedipalized only post facto, when Megalexandros rejects her in the middle of an embrace, forcefully pushing her away and then shutting the door on her. It is at this point that she addresses him as “father,” banging on the door and shouting: “Father, let me in!” It is his act of negation that allows her to identify him as an authority figure (the father). Through the process of equating authority to patriarchy, the notion of kinship oedipalizes all paternal relations. The young Alexandros’s relationship to “the young woman in black” is equally unclear. She looks after him when he is sick and invites him into her bed to keep him warm. This invitation is sexually charged, as her bed is small and she is wearing the same white nightgown she donned when embracing Megalexandros earlier in the film. At the same time, her covering Alexandros with her blanket (and presumably her body) does not appear as an act of passion when compared to the previous scene. In this case, she seems to protect and care for the boy. As a woman, however, she appears more as a figure of shame (a social pariah) than an expression of the sacred (miasma of a tragedy). Unlike the other women of Dostiko, she does not simply disappear from public space but dances alone before the community. Her audacious dancing draws attention to the double standard of sexual taboos and transgressions: while Megalexandros remains a revered social leader, she is a social outcast. As a figure in black (in mourning, misery, or shame) she stands in chromatic opposition to her mother’s bloodstained white wedding dress. Yet it is through this miasma or stain (the blood of the mother, the soiled dress, the unconsummated marriage, the broken vow) that she is bound to Megalexandros.

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The bloodstained dress marks a web of relations that produces no coherent kinship, since Megalexandros’s and his sister’s relations to the wedding dress are not the same. Megalexandros, who speaks to the dress as if it represented the presence of his absent (dead) mother and wife, treats it as an eternal wound (Slavoj Žižek’s “tear in the fabric” or Jacques Lacan’s “lack”). Similar to Pasolini’s Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), in which Iocasta’s dead body hangs in the bridal chamber, the bloodstained wedding dress hangs over Megalexandros’s bed, commemorating not only his loss (of a mother and wife) but also his guilt for the fact that she died in his place—and the guilt that he will be forced to order the death of “the young woman in black.” He is at one and the same time a victim who demands revenge against the landowners who killed his wife and mother; the guilty culprit who laments the fact that she died in his place; and a patriarchal figure who sacrifices women to assure his own survival. It is this privately worshipped wedding dress that his sister will make public by wearing on the day of her own execution, walking through the village to a wooden post standing at the center of a circle (much like the circle of ancient drama in which Megalexandros first appeared) (figure 2.9). This gesture of wearing her mother’s wedding dress (the one in which she died) also forms a symbolic circle, redoubling tragedy as a performance. The military brass band from the royalist camp (below right) also forms a circle as they watch the punitive spectacle above, providing musical accompaniment to the execution. The two circles of men compliment and contrast each other. They both demonstrate a closing of ranks, but while the royalists face outward, Megalexandros’s men face inward. It is only Megalexandros’s unwillingness to watch (turning his back on the scene) and the direct gaze of his sister at her executioners that interrupts these two circles. She stands out as a chromatic opposite to all the male figures, but even her white wedding dress cannot be seen as a symbol of purity because it is already stained with blood. Although she is not suspected of involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Megalexandros, she turns herself in, aligning herself with the two accused men.80 Like these two men, she does not confess to a conspiracy, only to being “with them.” The donning of the wedding dress at her execution can be seen as multiple acts in one. It is an act of repetition—the daughter wearing the same vestment as the mother on her day of death— yet it is also one of difference because the wedding is now likened to an

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FIGURE 2.9

Megalexandros’s stepsister/stepdaughter wears her mother’s bloodstained wedding dress on the day of her execution, walking through the village to a wooden post standing at the center of a circle (much like the circle of ancient drama in which Megalexandros first appeared).

execution. It is also an act of closure that points to a series of deaths: of the mother, the sister, the community, the captives, and the innocent sheep that Megalexandros secretly kills. Additionally, it is an act of accusation, putting Megalexandros to shame for not protecting his mother and the community for sheltering him. Finally, it is an act of resistance, a refusal to submit to the vigilante laws of the brigands. By choosing to die in such a public manner—witnessed by the brigands and the communards who watch from above, but also by the Greek government and army officials encamped below—the young woman draws attention to the fact that patriarchal laws and the laws of the state (both supported and enforced by warrior cultures) protect neither the sanctity of the family nor the prosperity of the community, nor even the interests of the nation-state. With this act, she questions the justification of legal authority.81 While the acts of justice in the name of

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Megalexandros or the state serve only to buttress their own self-interests, power, and sense of honor (philotimo). At the same time, Angelopoulos neither demonizes Megalexandros nor idealizes the communards. He presents both groups as responsible for the failure of their dreams. Megalexandros divides the people of the commune; orders the execution of its leaders, who then try to assassinate him; and even makes a secret alliance with the royalists. In turn, the royalists are politically invested in upholding the Greek government, even if it means certain death for the British nobles. But it is the people of the commune who are responsible for submitting themselves to Megalexandros’s authority. They turn on him only when they realize they have been tricked and that they will lose their freedom to the royalist forces and their land to capitalist investors.

RETREATING ONTO A RUINED PATH Remember the baths where you were murdered —Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

Angelopoulos likens Megalexandros to both Oedipus (through his incestuous relations) and Orestes (by way of the Seferis poem “Mythistorema,” which he recites).82 He also shows that these figures are more than miasmatic. As David Porter writes, Oedipus and Orestes are “polluted and tormented wanderers” who question whether purgation has been or can be achieved in either of their tragic cycles.83 Megalexandros offers no purgation or catharsis, only the contemplation of crimes, incestuous relations, and contaminated border identities that end up being absorbed into mythic narratives of Greekness. Instead of being exiled from his homeland (or even returning to it as a stranger), Megalexandros embodies the contradictions and contaminations embedded in the process of creating a national homeland. And like Oedipus, Megalexandros ends up as a metaphor for (and a curse on) his homeland. While Oedipus’s body becomes a sacred object in Oedipus at Colonus, he literally curses his sons. Similarly, as their leader, Megalexandros not only disarms the rebels of Dostiko who challenge his

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authority but also brings the wrath of the Greek state and the international community down on their rural experimental society. Yet like Orestes, Megalexandros points to the aporia between demands for blood vengeance and the civic ideal of resolving disputes through legal means. Angelopoulos examines this aporia by juxtaposing three different legal systems: that of Megalexandros and the brigands, that of the communards, and that of the Greek state. Each of these bodies demands retribution, but each subscribes to a different civic ideal. The brigands’ notion of justice is tyrannical, based on loyalty to Megalexandros, who needs to mete out “justice” with haste. He punishes rape in the same way as political conspiracy and personal betrayals—with corporeal punishment. When one of his men rapes a British woman captive, he has him hanged in the public square and brings the female captives out to witness that “justice” has been served.84 He also has the political conspirators (including his stepsister and lover) publicly shot. He shoots the Italian anarchists as they attempt to leave Dostiko and stabs the British nobles with his sword and dagger. He shoots the go-between once he understands that he has been used as a pawn in someone else’s political maneuvering. Finally, he has Dostiko’s schoolteacher shot in the back as he waves a white flag of surrender to government troops before they enter the village. The only difference in all these “punitive” acts is the manner of execution and the degree to which Megalexandros turns them into public spectacle. The clandestine execution of the go-between points to Megalexandros’s refusal to display his own fallibility—his lack of power or ability to discern what was really at stake in the kidnapping and killing of the British nobles. While the hanging of the rapist and the shooting of the political conspirators are public spectacles, the killing of the British nobles (as well as the killing of the sheep and the Italian anarchists) are not; they occur offstage, as they would in an ancient tragedy. Perhaps they are conducted in secret because the condemned are sometimes innocent scapegoats. The shooting of the schoolteacher stands out as an anomaly: The camera captures his death as he crosses the narrow bridge that connects the village to the camp of government forces. He stands alone, halfway across the bridge, holding a white flag, but the shooter is not revealed in the frame. We only know that the schoolteacher is shot in the back (from Dostiko) because his body arches backward and falls forward with the force of the shot, landing with his head toward the Greek and British forces. Unlike the other inhabitants

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of Dostiko, the teacher makes his dissent public by waving a white flag and leaving the village. Even before this last act of dissent, it is he who confronts Megalexandros and his men for having violated and then changed communal laws. It is also the teacher who articulates the community’s charges against Megalexandros and his men for killing the communal sheep. Like the Italian anarchists before him, he understands what had escaped Megalexandros himself—that “there was something invisible behind all of these political actions” and that Megalexandros had been used as a pawn. More importantly, it is the schoolteacher who instructs the villagers about their history—about the sociopolitical role of figures like Megalexandros. By killing the teacher and the anarchists, Megalexandros prevents his historical demystification. As a myth and a monument he will outlive the historical contexts in which he was inscribed. While each militarized group adheres to a model of justice that falls somewhere between what Michel Foucault describes as “the spectacle of the scaffold” and a disciplinary or militarized society,85 the communards’ legal system seems closer to a democratic ideal of civic justice. The community first accuses Megalexandros of destruction of public property and then votes to put him on trial for killing their sheep. Although just who slaughtered the sheep and placed them in the public square remains a mystery, the camera movement literally places the responsibility at the brigands’ feet.86 However, rather than respond with violence, as some of the older communards demand, the village as whole decides to put the brigands on trial. Megalexandros and his men are formally charged by elected judges and asked to defend themselves. Aside from the conflict of interest, Angelopoulos suggests that the community can manage its own conflicts without having to rely on a “neutral” third party such as the state’s judicial system. Shot in the classroom (that also serves as the community meeting hall), this scene stages an idealized vision of the polis, but one that is rendered powerless. The scene begins as a long-take shot from the back of the schoolroom looking forward as the communards enter and the elected officials take their seats facing the community and camera. Starting the shot with an empty room, before the town meeting begins, which will be filled only to be emptied again, suggests that the brigands are either out of frame or not present, since they are neither seen nor heard. Once the elected officials have formally charged the brigands, the communards clear the room for

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the court proceedings. The camera, however, never reveals the presence of the accused and we are left to wonder whether they have bothered to show up to their own trial. The scene abruptly ends after a long silence following the judges’ request that the brigands respond to the charges. It is this long silence, the refusal to comply with communal law, that marks the demise of this experimental society. Ironically, while the brigands rebuff and transgress communal laws, they embrace the theatricality of the state’s legal system. Since it is illegal under the Greek constitution to pardon Megalexandros and his men without a trial, the Greek government, in an attempt to save its credibility, asks the rebels to participate in a mock trial, after which they will be granted amnesty. Unable to bring Megalexandros to court in Athens, the government brings the entire court to the outskirts of Dostiko (even though it is outside their territorial jurisdiction).87 The Greek government and landowners even consent to absolving the communards’ debts and to returning their land as a means of saving face for the nation-state. In return, they ask only that the brigands comply in order to keep up the appearance that justice has been served. Effectively, the Greek state officials turn their own justice system into a circus in order to salvage the appearance of the rule by law. Angelopoulos points out that for the Greek state, the British diplomatic corps, and even for the brigands, the notion of justice is irrelevant; the trial and military operations are both conducted outside their jurisdiction—in a territory that had not yet become a part of Greece. What matters is maintaining the public image of those in power through the theater of justice. Various systems of justice are juxtaposed in the long scene that starts with the hanging of a brigand, followed by the parading of the women captives in front of his now lifeless, hanging body. Just as the women are handed over to the go-between, who waits with a carriage to whisk them away to safety, the square begins to fill with British and Greek officials. Keeping their distance from the body of the rapist-brigand, the messengers of the Greek government communicate to Megalexandros and his men that it is impossible under the constitution to award general amnesty. And to further demonstrate the weakness of the state’s position, these same messengers translate the announcement of a British military official, the contents of which undermine the statement made by the Greek government. Anticipating US president Johnson’s “fuck you,” the British express total disregard for the democratic system they themselves helped to establish:

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“The sole concern of Her Majesty and her government is that not one of her subjects have their life endangered. . . . Her Majesty’s government maintains no interest in the upholding of the Greek constitution and forewarns the Greek government if it should mismanage this affair.” Their announcement, however, appears to be addressed to the Greek officials rather than to the brigands. Understanding that the British have power over the Greek state, Megalexandros and his men respond by defiantly marching all the remaining male captives right in front of the Greek and British officials. By leaving the body of the brigand hanging in the foreground throughout this long-take, Angelopoulos suggests that the kind of vigilante justice practiced by the brigands was also practiced under Greek constitutional law, by the military, and even by the British diplomatic corps. What matters is the display of power—there is little to no consideration for the body of the condemned man, as there will be no consideration for any of the victims of this incident. It is only as the brigands exit the town square and the filmic scene that one of them cuts down their ex-comrade, leaving his body to lie on the ground. In order to secure the safety of the British nobles, the Greek state will be forced to use military action against its own people. But the use of the military against the brigands will ensure the death of the captives. Furthermore, by sending Greek troops to rescue the captives, the Greek government dishonors its own promise to meet Megalexandros’s demands, provoking Megalexandros to shoot the state prosecutor in the mock trial. Rather than simple farce, this makeshift trial is composed of three disparate types of theater. The first theatrical display is that of Megalexandros’s own prowess. He has caught, stripped, and released the unit of royalist soldiers who attempted to infiltrate Dostiko and liberate the captives. This means that rather than liberate the British nobles, it is the soldiers who will be liberated by Megalexandros at his own trial. At the beginning of the trial, the soldiers suddenly reappear, nude, carrying their uniforms, running across the narrow bridge that leads out of the village, only to end up right in front of the tribunal. They are offered as bodies of evidence to the misconduct of the state. The second theatrical performance is that of the British captives themselves. Rather than testify to their kidnapping, Lord Lancaster repeats the same obscure lines from Antigone that he recited at the Temple of Poseidon

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immediately preceding his seizure by Megalexandros. It is unclear whether this is an attempt to reenact the events that transpired or to point to the ridiculousness of a trial that occurs while the criminal act is still in progress. Nonetheless, his repetition of these lines triggers another repetition: the council for the defense responds to this recitation from ancient Greek by saying, “I don’t understand a single word he said.” This recalls the line Lancaster uttered at the New Year’s Eve ball weeks before, in response to the Greek official’s inability to understand his oration of the Crito. This time, however, one word from his quotation, “›ǓဎۭǓࣹԆǓ” (in full armor), is presented as a double entendre—marking Megalexandros’s strength while making fun of the fact that the Greek soldiers were literarily caught “without armor”—that is, with their pants down. Ironically, it is only the defense lawyer (an obvious parody of a Western European diasporic Greek) who doesn’t understand that the joke is on him. He alone fails to accept that the trial is itself theater. The last bit of theatricality—the shooting of the state prosecutor—is more serious because it literally blows away any façade of credibility the trial might have had. The prosecutor is shot and dies before he has a chance to present his case. Rather than run to his aid, the members of the tribunal scatter at the sound of gunshots, leaving the prosecutor to die alone. As the camera pulls back, the prosecutor slowly collapses into the center of another circle—the same type of ancient theatrical circle that has been appearing throughout the film. As soldiers transverse the frame from random directions, the prosecutor seems to be invisible to everyone except the camera, which holds fast to his image for more than a minute. While his body remains untouched, his death triggers a series of tragic events that accelerate the pace of the film: from the siege of Dostiko by British and Greek forces to the poisoning of the water (which kills the communal sheep), the imprisoning of the schoolteacher, the attempted assassination of Megalexandros, the execution of the alleged assassins, the killing of the British nobles, the defeat of the revolutionary brigands and anarchist rebels of Dostiko, and the death of Megalexandros at the hands of his own people. These political tensions and power plays are constantly reinforced by the camera work of cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis. He shoots the brigands, the people of Dostiko, the Italian anarchists, the British and Greek armies, and the Greek officials as divided by uniforms and clothing style but most importantly by the river that runs between Dostiko and the

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military encampment and makeshift court on the other side—that is, these groups are only precariously connected by narrow bridges. Members of opposing groups either meet each other halfway across the bridge that connects Dostiko to the valley below (as when the returning Megalexandros is greeted by the town’s schoolteacher) or are left standing alone (as when this same teacher is killed). Attempts to make bridges or to overcome such political divisions are rare. More often we see attempts to overtake, invade, or steal across to the other side. All these movements are presented as aggressive acts—plays and displays of power—that simply reinforce the legitimacy of such divisions. Even when the Greek officials offer to pay a ransom, absolve debts, restore property rights, and acquit the brigands, this apparent victory only serves to divide the townspeople. The communards briefly celebrate their victory, but soon they begin to quarrel over whether the property should be returned to the community as a whole or to its original owners. The animosity between those who demand private property and those who want to maintain communal ownership culminates in the townspeople’s raid on their own storehouse. Stealing food supplies, guns, and ammunition, and burning the rest, they are ultimately placed under martial law by the brigands, who step in to reimpose order. Yet this every-man-for-himself attitude is a direct byproduct of the brigands’ brutal and senseless killing of the state prosecutor. It is at this point that the communards understand they will not have their land returned to them or be able to maintain their community. They are left with only two choices: to stand and die or to take what they can to survive. The choice to stand up for the community becomes more complicated after the community has been divided, as this also means standing up against the brigands, the Greek government, and the British and Greek armies. Unlike Orestes in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers—who avenges his father’s murder by killing his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, and then awaits trial at the beginning of the Eumenides—Megalexandros kills and kidnaps in the name of some ghostly notion of patriarchy, which he himself embodies. He does not resolve a dilemma between conflicting laws (the necessity to avenge slain fathers and to punish matricides) through a trial by jury. Rather, he exposes the discrepancies between communal laws and the political theatrics of the Greek state, monarchy, and their international allies. Angelopoulos points out that the community of Dostiko is structured similar to a polis but is unable to preserve its own

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FIGURE 2.10

After his men lose the battle against the British and Greek soldiers who storm Dostiko, Megalexandros collapses in a pool of blood. But his hand and sword dripping in blood point to the fact that it is he who has the blood of the village on his hands— he is responsible for the surrender of the village.

sovereignty and succumbs to the economic and political forces that impose their will on it. The epigraph in “Mythistorema,” “Remember the baths where you were murdered,” as recited by Megalexandros in the film, recalls the line Orestes delivers to the ghost of his father, Agamemnon. In this cinematic context, however, the poem no longer invokes dead fathers to help avenge the crimes they themselves have inspired; rather, it calls attention to how the memory of the father (as the figure of the nation) cannibalizes its own promised dream of justice, sovereignty, and identity, producing nothing more than empty promises of property and power (figure 2.10). What makes the collapse of this experimental society seem so bitter is that those who remain faithful to the dream of communal sovereignty (the Italian anarchists, the schoolteacher, and Alexandros) are literally left standing alone. Once the bankers concede to absolving the communards’ debts,

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the community turns a deaf ear to the Italians, who in an attempt to remind them of their political commitment to communal law sing Luigi Molinari’s “Inno della rivolta” (Hymn of revolt) in the town square, as one by one the villagers abandon them. And as the square empties of people, their singing begins to echo off the stones. Similarly, the community abandons the schoolteacher in the classroom, with the exception of young Alexandros, who appears by his side. As mentioned earlier, the schoolteacher is imprisoned by Megalexandros for standing up for the same ideals that brought the community together in the first place. Once his teacher is arrested, Alexandros remains alone in the classroom. In order to continue his lessons he must visits the teacher, who is in prison. It is from behind the metal bars that the teacher delivers his last lesson: “property is . . . ,” “power is . . .” While Alexandros repeats these lines, neither term is modified, leaving its definition open to those who can claim power and property. The young Alexandros is the only figure to escape and survive this political catastrophe. Yet his escape seems to be another form of repetition: “little Alexandros becomes Megalexandros and goes toward . . . modern day Athens. When he enters the city [at sunset] he brings with him all the experience of the century.”88 There is, however, no empirical correspondence between the past and the present, between Megalexandros and rural nineteenth-century Greece and young Alexandros and urban twentieth-century Athens. The present and the past are depicted as two different images, repeating each other by analogy and similitude. The young Alexandros repeats the older Megalexandros, who repeats the multiple historical figures with whom he is likened. Both of these figures are framed in the image of the sunset, the story of defeat. Deleuze argues that “repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced . . . what is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing but repetition.” While the past and the present are both diverse forms of repetition, this third repetition (of the absolutely new) is a form of repetition “by excess, the repetition of the future as eternal return. . . . It has no more than a problematic and indeterminate value, with no function beyond that of posing the problem of eternal return.” This Nietzschean return, however, can only be described as what Deleuze calls a “centrifugal force” that leaves

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nothing intact: “It allows only the plebeian to return, the man without a name.”89 In the case of Megalexandros, that nameless man is the woman who continues to save, shelter, and raise the many incarnations of Alexandros. According to Dan Georgakas: “Angelopoulos had given himself the unpopular task of warning Greece that its beloved Alexanders carry a cultural heritage that is capable of crushing the most noble of dreams. While Angelopoulos continued to celebrate the nobility of certain communal dreams, he was not afraid to explore the contradictions in the souls of the dreamers.”90 The repeated dream of Alexandros leaves nothing intact: it is not clear if this is the dream of the revolutionary or the ultra-nationalist. Who, indeed, has this Alexandros become? This icon of long-lost glory is not just a centrifugal force but also one of entropy, taking with it the souls of dreamers.

VISIONLESS MONUMENTS OF THE PAST My hands disappear and come toward me mutilated. —George Seferis, “‫؞‬࿰۟Ԇۭࠗ‫ࢆٗݰڗ‬Ǔ Г”

The ending scenes of the film visualize Seferis’s “Mythistorema”: “I woke to find this marble head in my hands . . . it was falling into the dream as I was falling out of the dream.” Megalexandros’s character recites these lines after it becomes clear that the Greek royalists have deceived him and he must keep his word and order the death of the captives and the commune’s political leaders to save face. While he has become one with the dream, he is also burdened by the dream, which brings with it all the mute and visionless monuments of the past, of its greatness, and its traditional laws. Yet this mutilated dream that Megalexandros embodies falls into the hands of the villagers. The last scene of the film recalls the circle from which Megalexandros entered. This time, however, it enacts his negation. Rather than appearing alone in a circle of white light, Megalexandros is surrounded by villagers dressed in black closing in on him, presumably to smother him to

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FIGURE 2.11

Megalexandros is surrounded by villagers dressed in black. They encircle and close in on him, presumably to smother him to death or to absorb him.

death (figure 2.11). This closing-in is slow and rhythmic, not frenzied and chaotic. It appears as though the crowd is kneading him, reshaping him, or absorbing him into itself. His body mysteriously disappears and a marble head in a pool of blood appears in its place (figure 2.12). In this act of communal violence, Megalexandros disappears underneath the villagers— merging matter and imagination. Falling into their dream-nightmares, he has become one with them. As the people who live in the space of what is today called Greece, the villagers are left in the ruins of the dream. Life does not emerge from the ruins (as a restoration of the whole, as the neohellenists hoped); rather, life is turned into ruins, and we are left with only the bloody head of the statue. But what relationship do modern Greeks have to such fragments or ruins that allows them to re-member, identify, and implicitly complete the figure of Alexander the Great or Megalexandros as the tragic history or the ravaged body of Greece itself ? This supposes that Megalexandros, Greek

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FIGURE 2.12 A marble head of Megalexandros appears in the very spot where his body and blood have disappeared, but it is not the villagers who discover this statue. It is the British and Greek soldiers who overtake the city.

nationalism, or Byronic romanticism are, as Paul de Man points out, “themselves entities which, like a statue, can be broken into pieces, mutilated, or allegorized after having been stiffened, frozen, erected, or whatever one wants to call the particular rigidity of statues.”91 Angelopoulos demonstrates how such quests for origin, direction, and identity can paradoxically be fastened only to fragments, ruins of the past that do not complete the present or move toward the future. They end up not just crushing the dreams “that Greece may still be free” but also sacrificing the present to the demands of an imaginary past. However, it is not the people of Dostiko who discover the marble head of Megalexandros but the British and Greek soldiers who overtake the village. Historical representation belongs in the hands of the protecting powers and the diasporic Greeks who were educated, if not born, in Western Europe. Ironically, this mutilated dream is handed down to them as evidence of their own glorious continuity and

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imaginary community with the ancient Greeks and the Macedonian emperor, Alexandros. The film does not close with the image of the bleeding bust of Alexander the Great or Megalexandros but follows the young Alexandros, who is himself bleeding from a head wound. Like Megalexandros before him, Alexandros has been saved by a nameless woman. It is she who places him on a donkey and leads him to Athens. Rather than make a new entrance into the Europeanized capital of Greece, this image of Alexandros crouching toward Athens at sunset marks the closure of the dream. And the film ends with the line, delivered in voiceover by the anonymous narrator from the establishing shot: “and that is how Alexandros entered the cities.” Angelopoulos explains that Alexandros is the “heir to a revolutionary tradition, who has to rid himself of the tragedies of the past in order to face the present.”92 However, this is a present that has exhausted its hope of a political solution to the problem of unequal distribution of wealth and power—the two unfinished lessons that the young Alexandros is given by the jailed schoolteacher. Already in 1980, a year before Greece’s entrance in the European Union and nine years before the fall of the socialist experiment, Megalexandros anticipates the shift in geopolitics from a Cold War world order to a new world order. But rather than presenting the failure of experimental socialism in Eastern Europe as a triumph for democracy, Angelopoulos presents it as the failure of democracy to overcome the tyrannical authority of power and wealth. Instead of true democracy, it gives the people ruined statues that are passed off as beautiful, enlightened ideals. It is this triumph of the image of democracy (rather than democracy) that has come back to haunt contemporary Greece, which remains at the crossroads of Europe (bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis from North Africa and the Middle East), left to enforce Europe’s anti-immigrant policies and at the same time constitute Europe’s borderlands (it is clearly part of Europe’s margins). Megalexandros shows that the “return to Europe”—the move toward the modern city of Athens—marks a series of contradictions. Europe, which sometimes stands for Enlightenment ideals that divorce logos from ethnos, also stands as a site of exchange of people, commerce, armies, empires, cultures, and ideas. It carries with it both the marks of division—natural borders, frontiers, and chasms—and the marks of ambivalence—a history of mixed genesis, of fluid boundaries between East and West, male violence

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that is eroticized, and female sexuality that is repressed, rejected, and violated. By exposing the complexity of Megalexandros and his relationship to Europe, Angelopoulos’s film counter-narrates hegemonic-imperial narratives as well as patriarchal, national-ethnocentric histories.

UNCANNY HOMECOMING And men in nations;—all were his! He counted them at break of day— And when the sun set, where were they? —Lord Byron, “The Isles of Greece”

Megalexandros marked a shift in the reception of Angelopoulos’s films and of himself as the filmmaker of the political left. Unlike his triptych—Days of ’36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters—which drew attention to the historical erasure of the Greek partisans and leftists who fought in the Greek Civil War—Megalexandros does not point to the erasure of this past. Instead, it distances itself critically from his previous films, examining how the iconic images and narratives of religion, great men in history, and philosophy (including the brigands and leftist partisans), give rise to the discourse of right and moral righteousness. What seems to trouble Angelopoulos is that both the left and the right rely on a logic of the image that abstracts historical figures by making them appear to be transhistorical or even sacred archetypes. One of the most profound images of the film is the cheap facsimile of a stone head of Megalexandros lying in a pool of blood, in place of the actual figure. Not only does the sheer whiteness of this freshly minted bust stand out in a film that so diligently captures rustic earth tones and the dark ochre color of northern Greece, but it also points to how such iconic images serve to cover up more complex political situations and return marginal figures to their proper place within the official national narrative. This image reflects the crisis in the symbolic foundation of authority, undermining the recycled images of “Greekness” that elide Greece’s own geopolitical marginality, its complex gender politics, and the cultural identifications of those who do not neatly fit into such an image. This recycling of the

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narrative and image of Alexandros makes us reconsider just what his reentry into the city of Athens means—or Greece’s continued return to Europe. Is this really a new beginning or simply the repetition of bad politics that leaves us with only cheap slogans about democracy under the guise of “revolutionary” Greek politics? What Angelopoulos uncovers, however, is not a continuous line of transcendence but an endless convolution of circuits. For example, Megalexandros assumes a multiplicity of symbolic roles: the imprisoned brigand, leftist rebel, St. John the Baptist, Christ, a border figure of mixed genesis, an Oedipal son who becomes an Oedipal father, the autocratic leader who squashes democratic values in favor of his own traditional rule of law, and a pawn in geopolitical finaglings who ends up causing the subjugation of the people he sought to liberate. As a figure, he reveals the myriad inscriptions these images bear: markings of intersection and conflict, traces of iconic transformation, transvaluations, lines that cancel each other out, and lines of disappearance. This explosion of intertextual references leads Angelopoulos in multiple directions, beyond the seduction of mythic language, beyond the good and evil of dialectic thinking, to questions of value and will—challenging all cultural idealisms regarding the value of a valuable life. Thus, he constructs an image not of a homeland but of a kinship of what Heidegger would call the Unheimlichkeit, the “unhomely.” However, as unhomely, this kinship presents a problem to the existing world order because the existing order is dependent on ethnic, cultural, and religious divisions while this unhomely kinship can only be upheld on a personal, intimate level, one that cannot accumulate power or solidify relationships but constantly disappears.

3 IN BALKAN Marina Abramović and the Politics of the Suffering Body

A specter is haunting Western culture—the specter of the Balkans. All the powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: politicians and journalists, conservative academics and radical intellectuals, moralists of all kind, gender and fashion. Where is the adversarial group that has not been decried as “Balkan” and “balkanizing” by its opponents? —Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans

F

ollowing the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, Marina Abramović began a series of performance pieces and video installations (collectively known as Balkan Epic) confronting the fierce identity politics used to produce and justify so many acts of brutality throughout the region. Her performances illustrate how the political interests inscribed in even the most well-meaning identifications (victims and victimizers, just and unjust warfare, etc.) end up subscribing to untenable claims about morality. Such claims conceal assumptions about subjectivity and the body, positing the first as an a priori center of reflection and agency and constructing the second as a site of vulnerability and inscription. In this chapter, I examine how through performances and video installations Abramović’s Balkan Epic presents the politics of bodies, subjectivity, and morality as a series of changing interactions rather than a set of fixed social or natural relations.1 In so doing, they force us to question the grounding of subjectivity, ethics, affect, and identity politics.

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Abramović began her career as a performance artist in Belgrade but left the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1976, returning to perform there only in 1997, after the collapse of Tito’s regime and the fragmentation of the country. This long absence from Belgrade and her work’s new focus on the former Yugoslavia has proven quite controversial. Many critics have lauded Balkan Baroque (1997), Count on Us (2003), and Balkan Erotic Epic (2005)—with Balkan Baroque (figure 3.1) winning the gran premio (the Golden Lion for Best Artist) at the 47th Venice Biennale (“Future Past Present”), hailed as a “gesture of mourning and healing for the civil wars in the Balkans.”2 But other critics (particularly those from southeastern Europe) have criticized Abramović for exoticizing “the Balkans,” capitalizing on Western media’s anti-Serbian and anti-Balkan stance, and conflating Yugoslavia with the Balkans. Curiously, the nastiest criticism has come from some of Abramović’s own artistic and personal collaborators; it is deeply personal and shaped more as an ad hominem attack on Abramović than as a critique of her artistic performance. Such critics tend to confuse the performance art of Marina Abramović—especially her performances as herself—with the real-life

FIGURE 3.1

Marina Abramović washing cow bones in her 1997 performance of Balkan Baroque, which won the gran premio (the Golden Lion for Best Artist) at the 47th Venice Biennale (“Future Past Present”) and was hailed as a “gesture of mourning and healing for the civil wars in the Balkans.”

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person. Performed live in Frankfurt in 1994, Delusional ’s use of diary entries (mostly “memories” from Abramović’s childhood) exemplifies this genre. Although Charles Atlas was Abramović’s close collaborator and the director of Delusional, he accused her of “paying lip service” to Western sentiments relating to the role of Serbia in the Yugoslavian civil wars by staging her “shame” over the “brutality of the Balkans.”3 Similarly, her biographer James Westcott (who was once her personal assistant) calls Delusional “over-wrought abjection,” concluding that “the piece didn’t try to purge or transcend this shame so much as exacerbate it, wallow and thrash around in it.”4 Atlas claims to have titled the piece Delusional because it captured what he saw as Abramović’s delusional identity politics, and he maintains that she did not even understand what the term meant, thus apparently confirming his diagnosis.5 In this piece, Abramović reclines on a divan made of ice blocks surrounded by plastic rats, with more live rats (four hundred of them) caged in a transparent Plexiglas container underneath the stage (which she crawls through in the finale as the audience watches on). Three projection screens complete the set, exhibiting what one might interpret as Abramović’s “biography” in the form of an Oedipal triangle. However, while these “autobiographical” vignettes from her mother, her father, and her own performance as the “rat doctor” exemplify the visual genre of the triptych, they do not amount to a cohesive Oedipal narrative. In fact, Delusional was set as a theater piece: a five-act play performed in a theater that presents a fictionalized account rather than a “true story.” While the five acts—titled “The Mother,” “The Rat Queen,” “The Father,” “The Rat Disco,” and “The Conclusion”—recount events from Abramović’s childhood in Yugoslavia, they do not cast those events as actual memories. A similar misreading affected another element of Delusional: the video footage that was taken from interviews with her parents, which had been shot in Belgrade during the wars that broke up Yugoslavia. Atlas (her collaborator-turned-critic) claims to have brought Abramović to Belgrade in 1994 to interview her parents because “I wanted to get at the why of the way she is. . . . The film wasn’t a performance. It was a portrait of her; a selfportrait with me involved.”6 Atlas, however, seems oblivious to the glaring tensions in his own words. He stresses the “documentary” nature of the footage (“the film was not a performance”) while acknowledging that it was staged, that it was a “self-portrait” but one “with me involved.” Presenting

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himself as somehow able to “expose” the “real” Abramović (or her “shame”) as mere performance, while apparently forgetting his own role in framing, staging, directing, and shaming Abramović’s life for stage, seems doubly delusional, entailing a delusional perception of his own motivations for calling her delusional. More candidly, James Westcott, in discussing his biography of the artist, admits: “[T]he book was always meant to be both intimate and critical, and it was not written at her behest, or subject to her approval. However, it did rely on her total co-operation. I came to think that the process of writing the book was like her 1974 performance Rhythm 0, in which she stood totally passive for six hours while members of the public were allowed to do whatever they wanted to her.”7 Westcott points out that his biography, like his criticism, participates in a conversation with Abramović but that it is also a performance involving translation, ventriloquism, interpretation, possibly projection (an act of acting out), and transformation of the subject (Abramović) into a figure (or possibly disfiguring her or it). There is also an implied potential for violence, which makes assessments about the personal and political motivations of Abramović’s work even more curious. The performance of “Abramović” does not simply display the artist’s obsessional intra-subjectivity but rather a hysterical intersubjectivity (with her public as much as with her biographers or a collaborator-turned-critic like Atlas) that discloses theatricality as a key feature. Theatricality, as Tim Murray describes it, is “an unbalanced, not representative force that undermines the coherence of the subject through its compelling machineries.”8 Abramović was vocal in her antinationalist and anti-Milošević stance, but her critics have, in fact, read her position as apolitical or, worse still, as tinged by nationalism. For instance, Stefany Anne Golberg writes: “Putting aside the fact that [Abramović’s] rhetoric somewhat mirrors that of Serbian apologists who condemn ‘nationalism in general’ and claim that ‘we’re all to blame,’ Abramović’s ‘tremendous feeling of shame’ (for what it is unclear) underlines again her interest in the personal over the political.”9 Nesting in such criticisms is another generalization. As Milica Bakić-Hayden argues, this type of criticism simply repeats the “homogenizing of one people against another.”10 By demanding compliance with a politically motivated form of side-taking—distinguishing good from bad nationalism— this kind of criticism leaves no space for a critique of nationalism itself as an essentializing or generalizing practice.

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What is distinctly disturbing about both the positive and negative reviews is that much of the controversy over Balkan Epic’s engagement with identity politics ignores the more astute political aspects of Abramović’s work. Critics persist in reading it in terms of identity politics but then become confused when they try to identify her politically and ethnically. Their insistence on identifying Abramović with one particular ethnic group and one particular political position results in the reification of ethnonationalist identity politics—only this time in the form of a political correctness that takes the negativity of suffering and turns it into an affirmation as the “pure identity” of the victim. As Slavoj Žižek puts it: “ultimate authenticity is based on the idea that only the person who is immediately affected by circumstances can tell the true story about his or her suffering.”11 Practices that render the experience of suffering and the ethnonationalist claims attached to that suffering as axiomatic, and thus unquestionable, end up foreclosing the emergence of any critical voice. But how can we hold on to such assumptions when we know that both “suffering” and “identity” are part of a performance? Dubravka Ugrešić argues that the triumph of nationalist discourse in all Yugoslav territories and throughout the West has subjected collective memory to various projects of amemory. Collective memory of Yugoslavia has been coined Jugonostalgija and, as Ugrešić points out, “is used as a political and moral disqualification: the Yugonostalgic is a suspicious person, a ‘public enemy,’ a ‘traitor,’ a person who regrets the collapse of Yugoslavia . . . [the Yugonostalgic] is the enemy of democracy.”12 Like Ugrešić, Abramović prefers to refer to herself as Yugoslav; however, to identify oneself as a Yugoslav in the post-Yugoslav era does not mean that one is (or was) a staunch supporter of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In fact, both of these women have been outspoken critics of Tito’s regime. Using the label “Yugoslav” in the post-Tito era signals one’s discomfort with being constituted as an ethnonationalist subject in one of the so-called democratic states that have since emerged. As I discuss in more detail later, “Yugoslav” now functions as what Antonin Artaud called a subjectile—a conscious gesture that recognizes a common experience that is now under erasure.13 In her biographical and autobiographical performances, Abramović strategically uses the term “Balkan” instead of “Yugoslav” or any other ethnic identity. She does so as a provocation to both the Western imaginary vis-à-vis the Balkans and to the southeastern European repudiation of that

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term. As Stavros Stavrianos, Mihailo Stojanović, and Maria Todorova have shown, the term “Balkan” was originally Turkish, though it was later reinvented by Western travelers and cartographers to describe an indeterminate, geographical space.14 The severing of the term from its Turkish origin and its modern redefinition continued in European and Western media coverage of the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 and again in the civil wars of the 1990s, when it eventually came to mean brutality, ethnic hatred, and fragmentation. From an undetermined space between Europe and its others, it eventually became a wild place, the dark side of the collective Europe, the place of Europe’s forbidden desire, of vampires, unruly feminine sexuality, and tribalism.15 Abramović engages all these connotations and their layerings. By installing herself in the wounded or wild space of the Balkans, Abramović responds to the national and international demands to take sides. She does so by foregrounding the glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in all ethnonationalist generalizations, which try to cover up the many exchanges, interchanges, assimilations, and transmutations each group shares with its current “enemies.” That is, she embraces the contradictions and histories of this loaded term, and in so doing she makes it difficult to pin down the political implications of “the Balkan” in her performances.

UNGROUNDING THE RELATION OF THE SELF TO THE SUBJECT Both the artwork and the viewer are not mere things that one struggles to encounter or enliven; they are, instead, properly understood as dynamic and essentially relational wholes that are in a constant process of re-formation, always maintaining identity in motion. The normative image of the artwork is tied closely to the normative image of the self, and both are premised on a norm of organic life: the proper self is a well-formed whole in which there is not an imposed or centred form so much as a dynamic interaction of constantly re-engaged parts, all contributing to the ongoing coherence of a well-bounded unity. —Clare Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life

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Abramović’s long-standing collaboration with Michael Laub resulted in The Biography. First performed at Documenta in Kassel (1992)—and several more times up until 1997—this piece has Laub directing Abramović in her performance of the biography Laub wrote of her. It was then re-performed several times, remixed and directed by Charles Atlas who, like Laub, had engaged with Abramović’s biography; this latter version resulted in a short, four-minute program for Spanish television. Finally, in 2005, Michael Laub once again directed The Biography, wherein Abramović’s students play her part, thereby highlighting the distinction between Abramović as a person and as a character. Both The Biography and Delusional present us with a dilemma: to whom does the subject (and the subject’s identity) belong? Does it belong to the author (Laub-Atlas-Abramović)? The artist (Abramović and her students)? The referent (Abramović)? Or, the performance itself ? By doubling and redoubling various representations, points of view, and relations among subjects and acts of subjectification, Abramović is effectively distanced from the intensity (the immediacy) of her life experiences.16 Her performance of “Abramović” questions the veracity of the subject “Abramović” (the famous artist), in the manner as described by Deleuze, wherein “each composing representation must be distorted, diverted and torn from its centre. Each point of view must itself be the object, or the object must belong to the point of view. The object must therefore be in no way identical, but torn asunder in a difference in which the identity of the object as seen by a seeing subject vanishes.”17 What remains is the work of art that takes apart the workings of identity politics by pointing to an interplay of theatrical acts between the image (“the portrait” of Abramović), the framing of the image, and the performance of that image. This interplay foregrounds theatrical acts—posturing, posing, editing, acting out—but also modes of embodiment, gestures, and inflections. Abramović’s work is made up of carefully contrived and embodied acts, but its performances question that “nationalism is written on the body,” as Balkan scholar Julie Mertus likes to argue.18 How is it that techniques of the body become readable as a particular narrative form of nationalism when those same forms of nationalism are under erasure, or recast in a new form? Abramović’s embodied acts gesture to the remains of socialism and their reenactment in ritual acts of the body, but they also refer to the remains of socialist avant-garde art and to her own anticonsumerist performance art. Such acts are neither clearly personal nor completely

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public. The Biography begins with “Abramović” narrating her life but drastically limits that narration to one line per year. Similarly, Delusional continues to explore the relationships of autobiography to autofiction, biography, theatricality, history, remembrance, identity politics, and anti-memory. Also, both Delusional and The Biography reveal a reworking of images, acts, and props from earlier work—elements that will again be featured in her and Pierre Coulibeuf ’s 1997 film, Balkan Baroque. In order to challenge such networks of accumulation that territorialize (Balkanize) the Balkans, Abramović adapts a rhizomatic strategy, connecting any point to any other point, bringing into play different regimes of signs—even nonsign states. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari define it, a shortterm memory, or an amemory—not a return or a recollection of the past but a process of becoming that by its very nature ungrounds a sense of time. It operates by variation and expansion, becoming a map that is connectable, reversible, and modifiable. As a process of modulation, the map of the rhizome is a performance, not a calculation. Calculation attempts to limit possible outcomes (it regulates), but performance proliferates possibilities, dwelling in the in-between and focusing on the process rather than the final act.19 In rhizomatic fashion, Abramović’s performances collapse memory, history, ritual, narrative, and cultural geography into anti-memory—an amemory that corrupts and invades memory with uncertainty and an awareness of falseness. By virtue of repeating previous acts and performances, Abramović’s performances become self-referential, yet they point to the difficulty of reading embodied acts of repetition as acts commemorating the past. Her repetitions function as phantom embodiments—the muscle memory of an act that no longer has any ritual meaning. They simultaneously make visible actions that have become gestural or performative habits, as well as the various erasures and differences in how we understand such movements and gestures over time. By producing new maps, new stratifications, and new primitives (new iterations of backwardness and innate savageness), they create variations, expansions, and contradictions that unground the historical, ethnographic, and political narratives that seek to attach essences or identities the Balkans never had. Hers is not a simple use of the term “Balkan” so as to appropriate or cleanse it as if for good usage—a gesture that has been attempted in so many art exhibitions since the break-up of Yugoslavia.20 Instead, what she performs is an ambiguous set of responses that

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are simultaneously ironic and ethical, ethnographic and imaginary, ritualistic and repetitive, biographical and theatrical. She does not set up contradictions as much as corruptions, contaminations, and blurrings. Not a simple revision of the past via the present, her restagings are a political gesture that contemplate the act of reassembling the past as an act of short-term memory or amemory. For example, the re-performance of her 1975 piece Thomas Lips took on a different meaning in 1993 when performed as part of The Biography, and again in 2005 when performed as one of the Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim. In each of these “original” performances she eats honey, drinks red wine and breaks the glass with her hand, or uses a razor to cut a five-pointed star onto her stomach (figure 3.2). The 1993 and 2005 performances of this piece added new elements: she stands up and listens to Slavic folksongs (“Slavic Souls”) donning a partisan cap, military style boots, a white flag, and a wooden staff. She then returns to the routine of the original performance, violently whipping herself and then lying down on a cross made of ice blocks, with a heater suspended above, causing the star cut on her stomach to bleed more profusely. In 1975,

FIGURE 3.2 Marina Abramović reperforming Thomas Lips at the Guggenheim in New York in 2005 (as a part of the Seven Easy Pieces performances).

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however, the conflation of Christian symbols (the cross made of ice) and rituals of repentance (self-flagellation) with socialist icons (the five-pointed star cut into her own stomach) and traditional Slavic folk culture (the honey and wine consumed as a means of cleansing her body) presented a radical gesture of conflating contending symbols of authority.21 As Tzvetan Todorov recounts, the communist state was already engaged in such conflations: “[I]nside the Communist state itself the ideology assumed an increasingly decorative and ritual function. . . . In this sense, that state was not really a secular theocracy . . . [and] power had no other goal than itself. . . . In Eastern European societies, adherence to Communist ideology increasingly played the role of simple ritual: everyone extolled it, and no one—or almost no one—believed it.”22 Yet when placed next to the empty rituals of communism, Christian rituals also begin to look like a pure will to power. In Thomas Lips, Abramović reminds the spectator of the forced forgetting of religion and other ethno-cultural practices mandated by the socialist state, but she also demonstrates how some of these practices were appropriated by the state itself; for example, socialist pageantry simply exchanged parading the icons of saints with those of Tito, Marx, and Lenin, thereby producing its own oppressive, fetishized images of communist martyrdom. The iconic reenactment in Thomas Lips changes the critical function of rituals like socialist parades, especially when performed in the post-Yugoslav context. In 1993, the iconography of socialist Yugoslavia was already under erasure and on its way to being replaced by religious and folkloric symbols that quickly assumed nationalist meanings—an amemory that “cleansed” fifty years of socialist history and culture. Abramović’s use of socialist icons in 1993 and again in 2005 made Thomas Lips appear nostalgic rather than oppressive, yet this nostalgia was not entirely respectful. She seems to pay homage to both her partisan parents and her grandfather, who served as a patriarch of the Orthodox Church until he was allegedly assassinated by the Yugoslav king. However, these gestures are more ritualistic than reverent. The star she cuts on her skin viscerally inscribes and thus re-members socialism, but what the star signifies has greatly changed, as has the memory of the partisans’ sacrifice during the National Liberation War (1941–1945) against Nazi and Italian fascist occupation. Those same partisans the socialist state once extolled as heroes of World War II were subsequently identified with communism and therefore as enemies of democracy; during the civil wars in Yugoslavia, they were mostly associated with Serbians, even though the

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partisans and the Communist Party were a remarkably multiethnic group. But most egregious is the widespread antisocialist conflation of the partisans with the Nazis, forgetting the fact that the partisans fought against fascist ethnonationalism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Abramović’s repetition of socialist or Christian icons is not meant to set the record straight, nor does it contribute to the politics of forgetting—a reification of world histories that erases any problematic political content only to serve the interests of what Foucault calls Western media’s “truth regime.”23 In fact, her re-performance of past events (including her performance of “herself ”) counters the politics of forgetting by reclaiming the histories and memories purged from the prevailing truth regime. She reenacts such memories not to reclaim historical truths but to expose a history of erasures. Blurring the past with the present, her re-performances contaminate the current truth regime with the past “truths” it has toppled. In so doing, she offers her viewers neither relief from collective guilt nor cathartic truth, nor even a sense of jouissance for enduring pain. Unlike the rest of Abramović’s oeuvre, the works that make up Balkan Epic are not committed to what Peggy Phelan has described as the purity and radical singularity of performance art: the need to be completed by a live audience, to happen only once, to be site-specific, deeply embedded in the time and space of the present, and undocumentable. Nor do they perform what Diana Taylor calls “the sacralization of the remains.”24 The performance of the remains or ghosts (of socialist, Christian, or folk iconography and ritual) conjured in and after a performance are themselves uncanny doublings rather than reverential repetitions. These repetitive acts confuse the order of time (before–after–during), and with it the notion of ground or a point of departure. Balkan Epic’s mix of live performance with video installation forces a variety of confrontations between the cultural and political heritage of Abramović’s own upbringing in Titoist Yugoslavia, her family’s central role in the Orthodox Church, the numerous transformations of sexuality and ethnic identity in the post-Yugoslav era, and the apparent desire to return to a pre-Yugoslav ethnonationalist narrative of origin. This confrontation of the past with the current political climate of postYugoslav southeastern Europe challenges attempts to blame ancient tribal hatreds (which are constantly being reinvented), socialism, pornography, or the rural community’s turn toward folklore for all the atrocities that transpired in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

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THE FIVE-POINTED STAR: REPETITION The attributes of liminality or of a liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremony. —Victor Turner, The Ritual Process

Difference inhabits repetition . . . difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another: from instantaneous repetition which unravels itself to the actively represented repetition through the intermediary of passive synthesis. On the other hand  .  .  . difference allows us to pass from one  .  .  . generality to another within the passive syntheses themselves. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

There is a ritualistic aspect to Abramović’s Balkan Epic, but unlike the ritual process described by Victor Turner, it does not lead to reaggregation or reincorporation into a community.25 The community referenced in Abramović’s performances is liminal and comprises threshold people, mixed messages, invented memories, and symbols from conflicting ideologies. All these symbols are brought into a living present, but through a juxtaposition that renders them liminal or as threshold objects that are neither endowed with nor devoid of conventional ceremonial significance. Balkan Epic reworks and remixes motifs, images, and actions from Abramović’s previous performances and video installations—repetitions that allow us to think about the relationship of motif and representation to the living present. Through their repetition, the practice of identification or naming ends up contemplating its other; that is, the process by which figures, patterns, subjects, themes, ideas, or concepts emerge and transform. Identification is shown to be not an epistemic gesture but a motif that undergoes constant modulation and modification. Contrary to prima facie appearances, Abramović’s performances and video installations do not favor the physical (including the human body) or the inscription on the body (the practice of embodiment) over the immaterial, the iconic image, or pattern, nor do they privilege

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these elements over the audience engagement required by purist definitions of the performance genre. She reminds us that the key function of the motif in the performance or video installation is to set up relations between symbolic meaning, iconic images, and the performative patterns of repetition, thus challenging how we order and understand such patterns and motifs. The five-pointed star has been a recurring motif for Abramović since her 1974 performance of Rhythm 5, which featured a large, wooden five-pointed star with wood chips soaked in gasoline placed along its points and edges. The star was large enough for Abramović to lie down inside of it. She began the performance by setting fire to the star, cutting her hair and nails, and placing them at each point. She then lay down in the center with her arms and legs stretched out to each of the five points (with her head at the top). Abramović claims this was the only performance she never finished, because the fire depleted the available oxygen in and around the star and she lost consciousness—the audience had to intervene and lift her out. In 1975, the five-pointed star returned in Thomas Lips, where she inscribed it on her stomach by cutting herself with a razor blade and then donning her mother’s partisan cap, which also featured the Soviet-style red star. The image of the star cut into her skin recurs in The Biography and Delusional and returns as a central motif in Balkan Epic, particularly in Count on Us (2003). However, rather than constructing a wooden star and setting it on fire, Count on Us produces this shape by arranging children—some lying prostrate, some sitting—in the same pattern (figure 3.3). Unlike the burning star of Rhythm 5 or the red star of Thomas Lips, the children are dressed in black, as is Abramović. Yet in Count on Us, she returns to the center of the star, but this time with two skeletons fastened one in front of and one behind her body. As an image and historical symbol, the star lends itself to both veneration and desecration, but iconophilia and iconoclasm are simultaneous in Abramović’s work. Analogizing it to the burning of the Yugoslav flag and other official emblems and documents stamped with the red star, critics have read the burning star in Rhythm 5 as a radical critique of Titoist Yugoslavia. However, her performance can also be read as a purification ritual— cutting and burning as acts of purification—perhaps venerating the image of the star as a figure of purification. All these different readings are enabled by the fact that the star is a generic symbol. It refers to the red star at the center of the (local) Yugoslav flag but also to the (international) leftist

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Still from Marina Abramović’s Count on Us (Belgrade, 2003).

politics it symbolized and the Soviets whom Tito opposed in 1948 (and again in 1961) with his Non-Aligned Movement. The red star was also used by the radical left in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s as an emblem of the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara’s National Liberation Army, Italy’s Red Brigades, and the Red Army Faction in Germany. Depending on where one sits on the political spectrum, the star may be associated with either heroes or criminals, but it also harks back to mathematico-spiritual symbolism, such as Renaissance alchemy’s use of the pentagram to represent the golden ratio, the five senses, and the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and spirit). Pythagoreans saw the pentagram as a symbol of perfection, and Leonardo da Vinci used it in his drawing “Vitruvian Man” (1490) to symbolize the proportions of the human body—an image obviously mirrored in Rhythm 5 and Count on Us. The cutting of the star into the flesh evokes a violent branding not inconsistent with rites of passage. It also recalls the ritual scarifications and

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tattooing that were common practice among Christian and Muslim women in the Balkans from antiquity to the early twentieth century.26 But while Abramović’s self-inflicted branding can be read as an act of submission to authority and social norms, it can also be seen as a gesture of penance to the socialist state—a recognition of the heroism of Abramović’s parents, who fought with Tito’s partisans in World War II. It is the gesture of carving the star onto her torso that is confused or collapsed into religious practices. However, it is unclear whether Abramović’s use of the star is an act of reverence and, if so, what the object of her admiration might be: it could be a recognition of her parents and the partisans who fought against fascism; an act of submission to authority (carrying the burden of the past); an act of self-punishment (for not living up to the past); an act of remembrance (repeating the bodily sacrifice and suffering); or a way of ridding oneself of the burden of the past. Her self-cutting is in fact not unlike the self-flagellation she also performed in Thomas Lips. But the repetition of these motifs and the juxtaposition of these acts change their relations to the present, the past, and the future. If we take the star only to symbolize the red star within the Yugoslavian context, the burning of the star can be read as a critique on contemporary politics. In this case, Rhythm 5 (1974) and Thomas Lips (1975) can be read as critical reflections on Titoist Yugoslavia. However, the re-performance of Thomas Lips in 1993 connects it to a very different context: the break-up of Yugoslavia. Later re-performances of Thomas Lips in 2005 again shift the context, in this case to the post-Yugoslavian era, no matter how close the repetition of those performances may have been to previous versions. And as these performances, motifs, and images reflect on present social conditions, they can also be seen as either “burning” (desecrating) the past or purifying (venerating) it. As such, it is unclear whether Rhythm 5 is burning or purifying and what the subject of this burning or purifying might be. Is it the present or the past? Similarly, what particular presence or past does the star signify: the memory of the partisans who died for the socialist cause, the official stamp of Tito and the socialist state, or one of its many other incarnations? Thomas Lips etches a now ambiguous past onto the body: the presence of socialism, the presence of a past socialism, the traces of a past socialism that cannot be easily erased even if it no longer has a stable meaning. In turn, Count on Us seems to reference the future of that past, asking a

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generation that was not born under socialism to (physically) embody the star. This means that if we want to read the use of the star in Count on Us as referring to the “Yugoslav” context, we must bracket the term in some way, since that country no longer exists. It can only be recalled as a specter, or as something that died but may be said to continue its existence only through its children. And yet Count on Us does not make clear what this now black star forebodes. Is it a symbol of death—as might be inferred from the skeletons Abramović wears? Is it the impossible dream of the past “Yugoslavia” (a united country) that is now under erasure? Or perhaps the presence of the remainder of the failure of those past aims, which are now recombined with the ambiguous present-day aims of international geopolitics and aid organizations, that trouble the living? Is it the specter of an impossible future—one without vision, hope, or possibility? Each instantiation of the star enacts many of the forms of repetition described by Deleuze: a drawing together in the present of a series of actions, symbols, and images that become recognizable as a repeated form and gesture; a form of repetition that is recognizable and passes into a generalized form of repetition; and the representation of repetition in the act of performance itself, highlighting its own theatricality (which is directed outward, toward some virtual future). The first form constructs the sense of timeliness in repetition, a return of the same act or image (the star as a ritualistic figure). However, this recognition must also come with the awareness of difference, of the fact that what returns must pass through memory and thus return as different (the star as a symbol of an age or as a degraded copy). The third type of repetition points to the attempt to inscribe the star onto the future—that is, the black star as a signifier for the coexistence of the failures of the past projected onto an impossible future. The second form of repetition constructs a model through analogy, a relation of different acts and symbols. But Deleuze points out that repetition has the potential to challenge both the singular copy (what comes to us via memory, which is not a form of repetition as much as a reflected and reproduced singularity) and the model: “The model collapses into difference, while copies disperse into the dissimilitude of the series which they interiorise, such that one can never say that one is a copy and the other a model.”27 Because repetition cannot be repetition of the same, the star embodies and inscribes many possible reflections (too many possible or impossible memories), and thus too many possible or impossible meanings (or potential futures). The star,

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therefore, becomes a specter (a phantasm) that haunts both our understanding of the past (the memory of the historical Red Star) and our possible speculations on the future (the revision of a red star). The black star becomes an uncanny double, collapsing a possible repetition of a failed past into a possible past under erasure, and an impossible present that holds no image of the future. It is this type of repetition that possesses the formidable power to render such repetitive acts indeterminate—a repetition that ungrounds models of identification, acts of judgment, and sites of perception.

THE POETICS OF THE SUFFERING BODY The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all of these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. —Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”

Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word . . . one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without a subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body. This is the body animated solely by mortal desire: the desire of dying—desire that dies and does not thereby subside. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster

Balkan Epic makes the body vulnerable to the gaze of others but also allows us to examine the performative aspects of both identity politics and moral judgments. This collection of performances challenges how the theater of ancient tribal hatreds is translated into the spectacle of competing victims, as well as how bodies in pain are transformed into wounded spaces. Since Rhythm 0 (1974), Abramović’s work suggests that the body cannot function as a subject or an image: the body of the performer is expansive in its

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ongoing gestures and interactions rather than bound as an image. The documentation of the performer’s body may be rendered discrete, but the moving performative body cannot be made to hold any indexical value. Thus, the performative body questions the language we use to understand images, indices, movement, and embodiment that in turn produce clear moral judgments. The predicament of moralizations that distinguish good from evil— what Hannah Arendt called “the problem of evil”28—is that they assume morality is at once universally applicable and, as Arendt formulates it, “a solitary business.” Arendt associates moral judgment with critical thinking, but she construes the latter as the ability to imagine the plight of others from an experiential standpoint.29 Critical thought, the practice of thinking and making a judgment, is a “solitary business,” yet not one that is cut off from others; it is the imagination that allows a critical thinker to empathize with others. Furthermore, Arendt posits that both morality and thinking involve forms of creativity. First, the act of imagining requires a disavowal of one’s own self-interest or subjectivity, creating a general standpoint. Second, the ability to imagine allows us to put ourselves into someone else’s individual (subjective) experience that is actualized as our own via empathy and imagination. In order to make such associations, Arendt assumes that there are legal, causal, and logical connections between the real and the imaginary, and that there is a continuity or a shared understanding that allows us to translate a particular—a particular interpretation of experience—into a general concept. By aligning moral thinking with the imaginary, Arendt opens it up to what Deleuze calls “the powers of the false”—the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking a field of forces, oppositions, and the conflicts between these forces with a system of judgment that is predicated on readymade formulas, set procedures, and generic applications.30 It is the processing of actual experience into ready-made categories (like morality and the common good) and set procedures (like the law and reason) that should make us stop and question how “creativity” is being deployed in critical thought itself. If creativity, like critical thinking, can be applied to all forms of reflection, we must question, as Jacques Rancière does, the very ground for making distinctions between the moral, the political, and the aesthetic—between self and other, truth and lie. For Deleuze, all forms of creativity “shatter the

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system of judgment because the power of the false (not error or doubt) affects the investigator and the witness as much as the person presumed guilty.”31 As a result of creativity being involved in the process of judgment, even the “I” that judges becomes another. Arendt is keenly aware of the problem that creativity poses when the critical imagination slips over into the powers of the false, into performance, or into the theater of the actual judicial system. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that “the failure of the Jerusalem court consisted in its not coming to grips with three fundamental issues . . . : the problem of impaired justice in the court of the victors; a valid definition of the ‘crime against humanity’; and a clear recognition of the new criminal who commits these crimes.”32 Tatiana Flessas points to two problems that Arendt identifies with the trial: it should take place in the house of justice not the stage, and it must be done to the individual on trial.33 When justice is tainted by politics and drama, the result is failure. The theatricality of the courtroom— the performance of testimony, the theater of juridical geopolitics in relation to crimes against humanity, and the dramatization of the suffering of the victims—corrupts the single purpose of justice (a disengaged passing judgment on an individual’s singular actions) and with it the “solitary business” of morality (that must also have a public dimension, displaying that individuals are made responsible for their transgressions). “Quite possibly,” Flessas continues, “Arendt demands impossible standards for the space of justice—her analysis may ignore the reality that all trials are from the beginning spaces of politics and drama.”34 But this begs the larger question concerning the relationship of justice as a concept to its enactment in a legal procedure. Flessas concludes that Arendt’s notion of justice—conceived of as reconciling an individual judgment with a universal moral standard through the various performances involved in a trial—can only appear in a ghostly or spectral (virtual) form. Justice haunts the courtroom rather than being actualized through the process of a trial: “The ghost in Arendt’s telling of this tale is justice itself. Indeed, justice may always be the ghost in the house of law.”35 In other words, even though for Arendt, Eichmann got what he deserved (justice was done), the theatrics of the trial rendered justice incapable of judging. In contradistinction to Arendt, who saw justice as a specter haunting the court of justice, Shoshana Felman has argued that the Eichmann trial

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produced “for the first time a radically original new event,” which “translated thousands of private, secret traumas into one collective, public, and communally acknowledged . . . monumental or sacred narrative.”36 According to Felman, the Eichmann trial (as performance) gave victims of the Holocaust legal, moral, and historical authority. The transmission of trauma in the form of testimony works as a form of transcendence, allowing the oppressed victim who has had no voice to become the person who reclaims legal subjecthood by bearing witness.37 For Felman, what returns is not justice or even morality but the sacred in the form of the witness as subject. This collective subject, however, is just as untenable and ghostly as Arendt’s concept of justice. Annette Wieviorka argues that the act of testifying to injury or survival has itself become a media spectacle, and therefore indistinguishable from the theatricality that troubled Arendt.38 Furthermore, Carolyn Dean points out that the process of transforming the immediate, imageless trauma of such experiences requires the detachment of the witness from his or her suffering: “the only credible narrative of suffering is that in which the victim has already mastered or controlled the traumatic or other symptoms of his or her experience.”39 Witnessing ascribes to a certain aesthetic sensibility, that of minimalist realism—“a sophisticated style characterized by aesthetic and emotive restraint.”40 Abramović’s work shows that this creativity (whether in the form of “moral thinking” about, witnessing the media presentation, or eyewitnessing the actual events in the Balkans) is often grounded in the powers of the false—a creative power that “replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.”41 An investigator is affected not only by his or her individual imagination but also by a series of creative mediations— photographs of victims, television interviews or broadcasts, eyewitness accounts, documentary and fiction films, and political rhetoric—that become an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives and forms. The other that one imagines (embodies) has already been reproduced in the form of a recognizable image or narrative, but so has the self (the subject) that one imagines oneself to be. Abramović asks us to think about why moral consciousness is treated as epiphenomenal (Arendt) while creativity is contingent on aesthetics, politics, sociocultural understandings, empathetic bodily responses, and rational and irrational feelings, when in fact both are constantly being modified and transformed. The inclusion of creativity into the “solitary

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business” of moral thinking renders the practice of making moral judgments subject to the instability of images, emotions, and performances. The point is not to relativize moral judgments but to challenge, as Judith Butler has argued, existing modes of accountability that normalize violence in the name of retribution—modes of accountability that read violence as the foundation of the subject, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle of violence. In order to challenge normative structures that produce such potentially violent forms of ethno-politics, we need to rethink the relationship of the subject to consciousness and the individual to experience that only imagines one possible truth (cause, moral, or legal obligation). Abramović’s performances move in that direction. They do not return the discourse of the subject to a “wounded space” but instantiate what Bruno Latour and Michel Callon call “actor-network theory” (ANT)—an approach that seeks to trace the “hidden geography of the political” in all concepts that we take as self-evident or naturally occurring phenomena: “the social,” “the public,” “the public dimension,” the “body,” etc.42 Measuring, interpreting, and positing abstract concepts (like “the social”) do not produce knowledge but instantiate various processes of social engagement. Defining social dynamics shapes and regulates social relations, including bodily gestures. Politics is, therefore, disguised as knowledge when in fact politics functions like the creative act of drawing things together by establishing relationships between things and people, actants and actors. This “hidden ground of politics” has much in common with the powers of the false since both operate on the principle that “truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence, what Melville called ‘shape’ in contrast to ‘form.’ ”43 This is not to say that Abramović’s performances are purely emergent or critical. Rather, they expose what is considered to be normative—giving an account of human agency, particularly metaphysical and empirical claims about agency such as rituals and beliefs. By exposing and repeating gestures, Abramović points to their simultaneous vulnerability and violence—the fact that norms favor the interests of some people, often (though not necessarily) at the expense of others. Her performances make us aware that the body’s public dimension is always relational both in its performativity (its gestures, expressions, social conditioning, actions, and reactions) and in its vulnerability (its susceptibility to the demands and scrutiny of others). By presenting performance as a gesture that makes her vulnerable to “becoming

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the agency and instrument” of contact, mediation, and violence, she shows us that vulnerability is not the only condition under which all social relations are formed—it is only one among a variety of possibilities. The vulnerability of Abramović’s body exposed to public scrutiny and intervention does not by itself ground the performance or provide it with a stable subject. Staging a set of relations between artist, audience, space, context, and their mutual interactions, the performance produces “subjectivity without a subject”—what Deleuze calls “subjectification”—that is, a temporary collective combination of associations. Subjectivity, as Latour argues, “is not the property of human souls but of the gathering itself—provided it lasts of course.”44 Abramović’s art cannot be reduced to simple repeating acts of self-exposure, nor can it be lauded as some unique event that illustrates the radical singularity of presence. Instead, each performance makes visible both the hidden ground of politics and the emergent relations between the artist, the performance, and the audience’s participation and reaction—foregrounding the risk or potential of creating a social rather than a preconceived social vulnerability. Making visible this hidden ground of politics does not mean that Abramović discovers or uncovers hidden truths about the Balkans. Rather, her work challenges processes of normalization—history, doctrine, and dogma—by bringing together different times, concepts, gestures, and symbols that slip from all constancy.

PERFORMING AS AN ACT OF SUBJECTIFICATION If Levinas is right, and the face-to-face encounter is the most crucial arena in which the ethical bond we share becomes manifest, then live theatre and performance might speak to philosophy with renewed vigor. So far the language of this conversation has been largely nonverbal. Becoming fluent will require practice, patience, humility, and the recognition that the social body, like our own all-too-human body, is both stronger than we guessed and unbearably tender. The connection between the social body and the mortal body is defiantly metaphorical. —Peggy Phelan, “Marina Abramović : Witnessing Shadows”

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Abramović is famous for using her body as a medium for experimentation that tests the limits of physical and mental endurance, particularly the threshold between pain and determination.45 By performing self-mutilation, flagellation, and deprivation, she provokes a series of confrontations between the body’s public dimension and the public’s often polarized responses to the vulnerable and exposed body of the performance artist. The hostility that emerges at some of her performances may result in part from her forcing the audience into a variety of uncomfortable roles: voyeur of, witness to, accomplice in (if not perpetrator of ) her suffering. It is the blurring of roles between passive witness and provocateur and the inability to separate actual pain from pain that is self-inflicted for the purpose of performance that gives raise to the “obscene conflation of private and public,” analyzed by Elaine Scarry.46 In her 1974 Rhythm 0, for instance, Abramović offered herself at the Galleria Studio Morra in Naples as an object to be manipulated by the public, or as a mirror for their projections (figure 3.4).47 She also provided them with seventy-two different objects to use on her, including needles, grapes, roses, lipstick, razors, and a loaded gun. Rhythm 0 turned into a deeply disturbing event. In the first few hours people moved gingerly around Abramović, but as the performance entered its third hour, the audience— particularly the men—became more aggressive, stripping her clothes off, cutting her, groping, and threatening her with grave bodily harm. When a member of the audience picked up the loaded gun, placed the gun in her hand, and pointed it at her temple, a small group of spectators banded together to protect her from the rest of the audience. This was precisely the moment when the event was taken over and transformed into another event—one where the audience was forced to take sides. In the end, Rhythm 0 became a symbolic rape. Abramović later recounted: “The experience I learned was that . . . if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed. . . . I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”48 What disappears here is not just the audience’s willingness to own up to its actions but also the location of the subject of the performance itself. Roles turn ambiguous: the performer becomes

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FIGURE 3.4

Marina Abramović performs Rhythm 0, a six-hour performance at Galleria Studio Morra in Naples in 1974. Abramović allowed herself to be manipulated by the public in any way they chose, using a range of objects she laid on a table, such as grooming tools, food, and weapons. The artist submits her body to a “dialogue of energy” with the audience, who are implicated in the collective generation of meaning.

both a theatrical embodiment of vulnerability as well as the body in pain; at the same time, the spectators become both witnesses and performers— perpetrators and defenders of the artist’s suffering or defenders of the artist and perpetrators of her suffering. Abramović’s work dissembles the conventional distance between audience and artist, while the public space of the gallery merges with the private space of the actual suffering body. Her performances do more than reveal “the connection between the social body and the mortal body.”49 And although they are not simple reenactments of the social, there may be elements of that as well. Rhythm 0 was a performance of the public on the body of the artist shaped by objects and weapons chosen by the artist herself. The framework for these interactions is performance art, not the construction of a social context. By foregrounding “actor-network relations,” Abramović casts each performance as a mode of inquiry.50 Within these performative relations, she makes herself vulnerable

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to a range of responses “that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other,” as Judith Butler puts it.51 This risk of radical exposure and vulnerability forces us to rethink the relations between vulnerability as a common condition, the “radical subjectivity” of pain, and the aesthetics of suffering. Pain, as Scarry argues, has neither voice nor form of representation, yet it constitutes the body’s most singular experience. Abramović’s conflation of public and private may transgress the social dimensions of the body (its image, expression, gesture, sounds, and its aggressive, empathetic, or visceral responses), but it cannot convey the experience of pain. Yet Scarry collapses the exceptional condition of torture with the inception of the subject, arguing that the subject is only produced through the pain of extreme deprivation. She thereby implies that the subject must be tethered to a body yet at the same time is produced from the outside: the subject seems to emerge simultaneously from inside of pain and outside of pain and the body. By turning the negation that is physical pain (“it is alien to me, against me, even if it is in me”) into an affirmation of the subject, Scarry dissolves the boundary between inside and outside, implicating the subject in the “obscene conflation of private and public.”52 How is it then that this radical singularity (the subject constituted somewhere between the body and the pain that is external to it) can become the sign of commonality, the common vulnerability or self-exposure? Butler, by contrast, argues that this condition of vulnerability (exposure to suffering) is not radically singular but constitutes the condition on which the body’s social dimension is constructed. Vulnerability is the grounding relation of the body (in its public dimension) to others, and it is our ethical responsibility to become accountable to the vulnerability of others. However, as Catherine Mills points out: [W]ithin Butler’s account of the normative constitution of the subject—or what she later calls “the human”—norms themselves are inherently violent, and it is that violence itself that generates the need for what she calls a “nonviolent ethics” or “ethics of nonviolence.” But if the appearance of the ethical subject is itself productively constrained by social norms and is thus dependent on violence, then it is unclear in what sense an ethics could be nonviolent. Or in other words, when the subject of responsibility—keeping in mind the different valences of that phrase—only appears through the violent

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operations of normative regulation, violence is not easily expunged from ethics.53

Butler’s call for a “nonviolent ethics” thus stands in contradiction to her theorization of the normative violence of subjectivity. For it is pain or the possibility of exposure to pain that serves as the foundation for the subject, and this subject is (according to both Scarry and Butler) an ethical one— one that is accountable to others. Even if we agree with Emmanuel Levinas that the suffering body is the ultimate source of ethical value—that the response to bodily suffering is the ultimate test of our ethical responsibility—the suffering of the other is always mediated. Mediation occurs when the face of the other is read as an ethical demand—“thou shalt not kill”—or when that same image of the face is put in political perspective by aligning it with friends or enemies (see chapter 4). The face mediates between a plea for immediate response to the individual other who suffers and a more general concern for ethical justice. But in the process of recognizing the political, juridical, or cultural orders demanded in the act of facing the other, the actual face is effaced by these alleged demands. The face functions as an interface—a complex process that, as Godard puts it, is misunderstood as simply an image. According to Bernhard Waldenfels, “the face announces the corporeal absence of the other,” which means that the response to the ethical, political, and juridical demands of the incorporeal other requires some creativity on the part of the one who must interpret its demands.54 Such mediations between ethics and politics often confuse recognition and acknowledgment of what is not part of one’s own immediate experience, like the witnessing of someone else’s pain with the sensibility of one who feels for somebody else’s suffering body or face. The face (in Levinas), the image of suffering (as Susan Sontag argues), or the body in pain (Scarry) become vanishing mediators entangling ethics with politics.55 Abramović’s performances demonstrate our inability to identify with someone else’s experience of pain or to appropriate it, thus confronting us with the disjuncture between making public the body in pain and politicizing the suffering body. By staging the relations between the suffering body and the perception of that suffering by others, Abramović questions how suffering comes to constitute a political subject. That is to say, how is negation as physical pain—“being swallowed alive by the body”—transformed

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into an affirmation—“I suffer, but the ‘I’ that suffers is not suffering itself, it is that to which the suffering is directed”?56 And how can this subject that is constituted by a primary trauma—in the act of “withdrawal from and into oneself ”57—become responsible for both the other who suffers and the other who causes me to suffer? Such politically charged theories project subjectivity in the absence of a subject. But in so doing, they privilege the “I” that withdraws over the embodied relation of subjectivity to tactile forms of experience and expression. The “I” that emerges from this process of separating the subject from sentient experience bears the marks of desubjectification—the dislodging of subjectivity from both the body in pain and from the wounded space that produces such pain—only to relocate the subject as the subject of something that is completely outside the body: the inscription of the body in political and historical scenarios, human rights offenses, or questions of ethics. Abramović’s performances do not project the subject onto identity politics but return subjectivity to the gesture of projecting an “I” into a space of relations. In such a space, each bodily action becomes both a form of release (of personal ghosts) and a provocation to the audience. It also turns into a way of contemplating relations between humans, between the sexes, between pornography and eroticism, and between humans and the conditions under which violence and war occur. These performances of subjectivity and suffering function as Artaud’s subjectile—an untranslateable word that signifies a self-conscious gesture that performs a subject that is neither subject nor object but the affect of subjectivity.58 In other words, while the subjectile is an act of subjectification, “subjectification doesn’t have anything to do with a ‘person’: it is a specific or collective individuation relating to an event. It is a mode of intensity, not a personal subject.”59 Abramović does not separate herself from bodily pain, nor does she foreclose the subject in primary trauma. Rather, she embraces pain, politics, subjectivity, and ethics as a part of actor-network relations. As Latour states: [A]ction is possible only in a territory that has been opened up, flattened down, and cut down to size in a place where formats, structures, globalization, and totalities circulate in tiny conduits, and where for each of their applications they need to rely on masses of hidden potentialities. If this is not possible then there is no politics. No battle has ever been won without resorting to new

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combinations and surprising events. One’s own actions “make a difference” only in a world made of differences.60

Abramović’s work continues to question the politics of subjectivity by revealing the differences between the suffering body, the perception of that suffering by others, and the abstraction of that suffering—one might consider the many articulations of these forms as trafficking in suffering.61 Her more recent multimedia performances challenge how suffering, violence, and the appropriation of images and documents of suffering and violence are made to reinforce existing political formations by making them represent political scenarios already imbued with moralism.62 A focus on differences creates problems for those who wish to speak about ethical encounters or to use art for political purposes. Images of the suffering or of dead bodies, as Scarry has shown, belong neither to the side for which they suffered or died nor the side that caused their suffering or death: “The fact that [the body] belongs to both or neither makes manifest the nonreferential character of the dead [or suffering] body . . . a nonreferentiality that rather than eliminating all referential activity instead gives it a frightening freedom of referential activity, one whose direction is no longer limited and controlled by the original contexts of personhood and motive.”63 Similarly, attempts to move from the body in pain to the ethics of a proper political response (including Scarry’s own) wind up transforming the radical singularity of the body in pain into the perception of pain—what Blanchot calls “subjectivity without a subject . . . [a] wounded space . . . which no one could ever own.”64 Nowhere has Abramović addressed the politics of “wounded space” and “subjectivity without a subject” more clearly than in her Balkan Epic. Her persistent use of the term “Balkan” in her work from 1994 to the present can be seen as part of a process designed to confront those political and cultural effects that Latour has tried to account for through “networks of accumulation.” What makes a difference is not the initial quality of the knowledge or the inherent power of those networks but the ability to simultaneously mobilize and locate knowledge—in other words, the ability to gather together different forms of information in one “center of calculation,” process that information, and make it deployable elsewhere as part of other, different actions. Knowledge acquired from such networks of accumulation— networks that connect scholarly interests with media and military industrial

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complexes, capital investments, humanitarian efforts, and geopolitics— engage in new forms of social management. Questions concerning the ethics of such actions or the quality of the knowledge that enables them proceed from these networks of accumulation but cannot precede them. Through these networks, ethics are turned into political spin.

TOWARD A BALKAN BAROQUE But the patient was also familiar with the fact that rats are carriers of dangerous infectious diseases; he could therefore employ them as symbols of his dread ( justifiable enough in the army) of syphilitic infection.  .  .  . The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth with which it gnaws and bites. But rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had observed with horror. He had often pitied the poor creatures. But he himself had been just such a nasty, dirty little wretch, who was apt to bite people when he was in a rage, and had been fearfully punished for doing so. He could truly be said to find “a living likeness of himself ” in the rat. —Sigmund Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis”

Balkan Baroque was first performed at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and then became the subject of the 1999 Pierre Coulibeuf film by the same name. At the Biennale, Abramović donned a white butcher’s coat and sat on a pile of over 1,500 cow bones. For six hours a day over four consecutive days, she ardently scrubbed and washed away any remaining flesh from the bones, while singing soulful Russian and Yugoslavian songs. Each day she sang the same song over and over, and each day she chose a different song from one of the six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.65 Accompanying her performance were three sets of video portraits arranged like a triptych—one of Abramović herself and the other two of her parents, both of whom were members of the Communist Party and partisans during the National Liberation War. According to Abramović, her parents placed her in the middle of their volatile relationship, which resulted in

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producing an atmosphere of domestic violence and acts of abuse. Each parent is shot separately, but their portraits are arranged to face each other. They simultaneously mirror each other as high-ranking Communist Party officials (whose romance began when they saved each other’s lives during World War II) and confront each other as a passionate and volatile couple whose ideas about love and marriage were so diverse as to fuel domestic warfare. Through these moving-image portraits, they seem to gesture to each other as if emotionally responding to one another. Yet the significance of the gestures is not clearly readable: while indicating some form of communication, they also set the couple apart—at one point, her father even brandishes a gun, while her mother crosses herself with her hands and covers her eyes, furthering the suggestion of their incompatibility. Abramović appears on the screen in the middle, dressed in a doctor’s white topcoat. She plays the role of a scientist who tells a rather convoluted story about the creation of “wolf-rats” in the Balkans, animals that when placed under unbearable duress begin to destroy their own kin: To catch the rats you have to fill all their holes with water, leaving only one open. [ pause] You have to make sure that you choose only the males. You put them in a cage and give them only water to drink. [ pause] Normally, they would not kill members of their own tribe; since they risk suffocation they are forced to kill the weak one. [ pause] They go on until only the strongest and most superior rat of them all is left. [ pause] When the rat catcher sees that there is only half an hour left before the rat will suffocate, he opens the cage, takes a knife, removes the rat’s eyes, and lets it go. Now the rat is nervous, outraged and in a panic. He faces his own death and runs into the rat hole and kills every rat that comes his way, until he comes across the rat who is stronger and superior to him. This rat kills him. This is how we make the wolf-rat in the Balkans.

This parable obviously calls to mind two of Freud’s most famous cases (the Wolf-Man and the Rat Man), collapsing them into one myth that confronts two of Freud’s most famous truisms: the Oedipal complex and “the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction,” which amounts to “exterminating one another to the last man.”66 The wolf-rat, however, does not blind itself (like Oedipus) but is blinded by the rat catcher. Abramović’s thick Slavic accent also reminds us that Freud’s Wolf-Man (Sergei Konstantinovitch

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Pankeiev) was a White Russian from Odessa, who dreamt of wolves watching him as he slept. But as Carlo Ginzburg points out, Freud misread the case largely because he did not bother to consider the role of werewolves in Slavic folklore and how those narratives may have informed Pankeiev’s dreams.67 In southern Slavic folklore, the primordial wolf and she-wolf are ambiguous figures that either need to be chased away or called upon in magical charms to protect children who suffer from illness and disease. Even if, as Alexandr Gura argues, the dream of the wolf “bears the erotic meaning of coitus,” the dream does not possess a hidden meaning in Slavic cultures, where the relation of the wolf to coitus is commonly featured in popular culture and folk songs.68 Freud, however, reduces a complex dream to the simple trauma of witnessing the primal scene (catching one’s parents in the sexual act): several elements of the dream—the wolf, the pores in the skin on the Wolf-Man’s nose, the butterfly cut, and the finger—all become signs of castration. Deleuze and Guattari argue that, like Freud, Ruth Mack Brunswick fails to interpret the wolves that return to the Wolf-Man’s nightmares as Bolsheviks: the revolutionary mass that had emptied the dresser and confiscated the WolfMan’s fortune. The wolves . . . have gone over to a large-scale social machine. But psychoanalysis has nothing to say about all of these points—except what Freud already said: it all leads back to daddy. . . . Talk as [the Wolf-Man] might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even listen; he glances at his dog and answers, “It’s daddy.”69

Similarly, Freud reads the nightmare of the Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army) as a homosexual fantasy when, in fact, it describes an imaginary “Eastern” torture recounted to Lanzer by a Czech captain where rats are applied to the buttocks of a victim and bore their way into the victim’s anus.70 Freud folded sexuality, fear of infection, greed, money, debt, and cruelty into Oedipal guilt, but Gil Anidjar reads Lanzer’s nightmare as a case of hatred—hatred of the father, selfhatred, and anti-Semitism: “[I]t is unclear whether the association, made famous and infamous by the Nazis, had already been established, which irrevocably linked Jews with rats in the anti-Semitic imaginary. Still, Freud’s text has everything to do with Jews (fathers, rats and money, all of which were or became deeply entangled within a web of Jewish and anti-Semitic

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significance).”71 The hatred, self-hatred, and ethnocentric violence that expresses itself through torture is certainly present in Abramović’s tale about the extermination of the rats (or getting the rats to exterminate their own). However, what becomes apparent both in her performance and in Anidjar’s reading is the relationship of the doctor or scientist to the subject, as well as the inclusion of the doctor or scientist in the symbolic meaning of “rat.” In the Rat Man case, Freud demonstrates that “rat” is loaded with symbolic imagery and language-play by connecting the German word Ratte (rat; pl. Ratten) to Lanzer’s recollection of his father as a Spielratte (literally a playing rat: a child who enjoys playing games, a gambler), Raten (installments, the payment of a debt), and in relation to Lanzer’s girlfriend, the word heiraten (to marry). The language-play continues with the Rat Man’s own expression of exasperation—“so many rats”—possibly resonating with the payment of prostitutes, and possibly Freud himself. But Freud seems to forget (or deem less relevant) that the German verb raten means “to guess, advise, or counsel,” which would point to the analyst’s role in treating a patient. More importantly, he does not elucidate on the meaning of verraten: “to reveal,” “to betray” (something or someone)—colloquially speaking, “to rat out”—which alludes to the double role that Freud may himself be playing by both curing his patient and at the same time writing about the Rat Man case; the latter being an action in pursuit of his own interests, not necessarily those of the patient. And again, he ignores the geopolitical implications of his patient’s dream-imagery—the barbaric torture that comes from the East, military debts, the borderlands where the military is stationed that foster corruption, debt, and sexually perverse fantasies. In Abramović’s case, we might think about the fact that rat means “war” in Serbo-Croatian, and that the “ratline” was an infamous postwar route organized by the Vatican granting safe passage to World War II Nazis and fascists escaping Europe for South America. The stated aim of psychoanalysis is to fortify the subject’s identity by restoring to him or her those interior objects lost through trauma (lost objects of desire) and to reinstall him or her into a healthy Oedipal narrative. As Eric Santner explains, the psychoanalytic “cure” of working through Oedipal trauma is not a process of turning that trauma into a narrative but of establishing “a self that feels entitled to play with its boundaries (rather than denying them or reifying them).”72 This focus on the restoration of a

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healthy self capable of playing with one’s own boundaries was also attractive to former Yugoslav nationalist psychiatrist-politicians (e.g., Jovan Rašković and Radovan Karadžić), who blamed the civil wars in Yugoslavia on a failing Balkan Oedipus.73 Such is an example of what can happen when psychoanalytic terms are translated into historical ones—a process that Abramović challenges in her short video performance.74 Forcing new networks of accumulation to confront older ones, she does not establish continuities between the two but rather demonstrates the political interests of both East and West in reinscribing the Balkans into a failed Oedipal narrative. In a parody of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that grounds all truth on the primacy of conflicting drives—pleasure and destruction—Abramović suddenly takes off her white topcoat and glasses, abruptly transforming the image of the good doctor into a “typical” Balkan tavern singer, dancing to a Hungarian czárdás, a typical folk melody. However, the transformation is willfully incomplete because under the white topcoat she is not wearing a folk costume but a black negligee. (She is also waving a red scarf ). By multiplying messages—wolves, rats, Slavs, doctors, and interpretive frameworks—Abramović draws attention to the complex politics underlying such associations. Her repetition of the stereotypes of Balkan peoples’ neuroses, psychoses, backwardness, dirtiness, and ancient tribal hatreds does not reaffirm Freud’s theory of primordial instincts; instead, it becomes just another clichéd gesture among so many others. As Deleuze puts it: “Repetition thus appears as a difference, but a difference absolutely without concept.”75 There is no ground (Oedipal), principle (pleasure), or drive (death) that draws all of these associations together. Without such grounding there can be no cleansing, catharsis, or cure—only repetition. Although read by Western art critics as a purification ritual that explicitly alluded to the carnage of the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia, Balkan Baroque does not simply condemn humanity’s inhumanity76 but points to images, stereotypes, and analogies circulated by both Western and Eastern media. The very term “butcher” recalls the moniker used by the international press for Slobodan Milošević, “the Butcher of the Balkans,” and before him for Ante Pavelić (the head of the Ustaše and the World War II Nazi puppet state in Croatia).77 But in this performance, we have Marina Abramović (a woman, and one who had not resided in Belgrade since 1976) washing the flesh from the bones of dead animals. As a woman (performer)

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she recalls two traditional female roles: the allegorical mother of the nation and a “traditional” woman mourner—the narikača, who is hired to sing at funerals in the name of the bereaved family.78 Yet by placing these figures within the context of war, she reminds us of women’s traditional status as victims whom the media often reduce to the stereotypic icon of the ravished people or nation. During the Balkan Civil Wars and the subsequent conflicts in Kosovo, women were forced back into sexual ideals of domesticity and nation, collapsing the body of the victim (mother) into the generic experience and identity of the ethnos or nation. As Vesna Kesić and Lene Hansen point out, the rise of nationalist politicians throughout Yugoslavia during the 1990s meant that “women’s bodies became everybody’s business. They were the objects of demands, projections, and restrictions. After the elections, women almost disappeared from national parliaments, where before they had made up between 16 and 30 percent of deputies; many women’s rights, including the right to legal and safe abortion, were threatened.”79 The paradox of such victimization is that women are returned to the presocialist patriarchal roles of mothers and ethnically pure virgins. They are represented as uncorrupted by and uninvolved in politics, but they can also simultaneously become the alleged reason for political interventions, “just” wars, preemptive strikes, and acts of retaliation. Suffering women became icons in civil war media representations, but their status as victims ultimately stripped them of any other possible identification, thus reducing them to the wounded space of the Balkans—a subjectivity without a subject. Abramović neither speaks in the name of the victims nor simply represents Serbian guilt. Instead, she brings all these paradoxes together by embodying a plethora of contradictory roles: the butcher; the obsessive-compulsive who keeps singing the same song while endlessly washing the bones of the dead; the professional mourner; the rat catcher who pits one rat against the other; and the singer of traditional songs that recount the tales of war and suffering. This begs the question: if Abramović’s performance is to be read as a purification ritual,80 whom does she represent, and just what is being purified—women, the Yugoslav past, Serbian identity, the dead, or the living? Balkan Baroque makes this paradox graspable. In an interview, Abramović argued that “killing is a shame, and by washing the bones it was an exodus from this condition. Once you have killed, it’s done, you can’t wash.”81 Rather than purification (which she sees as

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impossible, thus casting her own performance as a failed catharsis), her cleansing ritual refers to the more loaded term “ethnic cleansing.” With this reference, she poignantly invokes the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in places like Srebrenica but also other widespread forms of ethnic cleansing that involve the bones of the dead.82 Her performance recalls that there has been a massive historical erasure of the immediate socialist past (which took the form of desecrating partisan graves and monuments throughout Yugoslavia) but also that this ritual cleansing is hard to distinguish from the obsessive-compulsive disorders that Freud attributed to both the WolfMan and the Rat Man. What we have is an obsessive-compulsive recycling of one dead “hero” or victim with his or her nemesis—the statue of a partisan is replaced by the ethnonationalist, just as the partisan once replaced the statue of the ethnonationalist. Just prior to the civil wars of the 1990s large media campaigns were designed by those parties who wished to gain independence to remake an ethnically cleansed history of the separate Yugoslav republics. For example, the remains of the medieval Serbian prince Lazar were paraded across Yugoslavia upon their return (after six hundred years) to Kosovo, following a geographical route crafted to support Serbian territorial claims.83 But there were other mediated images as well, such as the topos of the “multiethnic state,” which was deployed by the Ruder Finn public relations company, hired by the Bosnian government to facilitate the independence of Bosnia. Having become a predominantly Muslim region by the end of the war, the Bosnian state wished to secure Western support for its independence by appealing to its alleged commitment to the protection of multiculturalism. As a result of this campaign, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian state and Alija Izetbegović’s predominantly Bosnian Muslim party (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA) were unfettered by any association to ethnic or religious nationalism. These acts of historical cleansing politicized and eventually broke down the intricate social relations, shared traditions, and pervasive cultural exchanges between the various ethnic groups.84 Abramović’s compulsive repetitions are neither restorative (they cannot bring back the dead) nor anesthetizing (they do not provide the audience with a way of overcoming or forgetting), but they serve to recall and link these multiple acts of cleansing. While the media’s cleansing of violent acts cannot be equated to the genocidal acts themselves, their relinking in Abramović’s performance

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forces us to confront the need to think about the relationship between these acts and the media representations of victims and victimizers. Abramović’s performances ask us not just to face the others who suffer but to think about the motivations and manner in which we represent them.

IN BALKAN While colonized peoples could perceive Europe precisely as invader and colonial master (and therefore identify it with the enemy, which gave them an opportunity for resistance), the communities circumvented by colonial occupation had another vantage point and a different perception. . . . That is why the cultural perception of this uncivilized, unworthy of the effort semiwild periphery appeared so fuzzy and unfocused, suffering from farsightedness (Karl May’s metaphor in den Schluchten des Balkans is probably a good example). The structure of the Scene-Narrative denied them the same distinctive otherness as was reserved for the real colonies, and therefore relegated them to the ambivalent, shameful, and comic internal other who was best forgotten or shoved into the realm of the comically embarrassing. —Alexander Kiossev, “The Self-Colonizing Metaphor”

Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) marks a shift away from the image or the act of suffering embodied in works such as Balkan Baroque and Count on Us to a series of carnal and carnivalesque images of “Balkan” sexuality (figure 3.5). Balkan Erotic Epic was originally commissioned by Neville Wakefield for Destricted—a compilation of short pornographic films by renowned artists. Abramović is one of the few female artists included in the compilation and the only one to question the borders between pornography, eroticism, and the carnivalesque. In a Flash Art interview, she explains why she accepted Wakefield’s invitation: “I wanted to present things that were both truly ritual and erotic. It seems like we have made ugly everything that is erotic. We have lost sense of our sexual awareness for things from social history, practices that were used in totally different ways but we are not used to reading them—such rituals are de-eroticized to us because they are unfamiliar.”85 Balkan Erotic Epic responds to current popular

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cultural depictions of Balkan sexuality as typified by rape culture, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, and male dominance, expressed through pure sadism, genocide, rape warfare, hardcore turbo folk, and torture porn. Simultaneously, the same popular media has reduced women to statistical victims or to stereotypic icons representing a ravished people or nation, thus rendering female sexuality as the site of shame and victimhood. Against this backdrop, Balkan Erotic Epic returns the term “Balkan” to a place of “comic embarrassment,” uncertainty, and erotic but humorous energy that does not transform into violence or religious or nationalistic repression. It also does not present sexuality as the violation of one gender by the other, thus confronting scholars like Alexandra Stiglmayer and Catherine A. MacKinnon who have linked the origins of the wars in Yugoslavia to a regional prewar culture of pornography.86 Abramović’s contribution to Destricted opens with her playing the part of a Balkan ethnographer. She appears in a medium close-up shot, dressed in black, but her outfit is maybe a little too dressy for a normal academic lecture. Her hair is pulled tightly back into a bun, her hands are folded behind her back, and at first she begins speaking in offscreen narration. When she finally appears on screen, she directly addresses the camera as if to speak to an audience unfamiliar with Balkan customs. Here she plays the role of the curator affected by the anthropological turn,87 who introduces the colorful cultural material in a rather feigned, deadpan academic manner. Her accent and diction mark her as a native speaker, establishing her as a typical Westernized intellectual from the Balkans speaking to a Western audience— what Kiossev calls “the self-colonized.” There is, however, a humorous discrepancy between the seriousness of her tone and the subject matter she addresses. She begins: “In Balkan culture, since ancient times, the male and female organs, like phalluses, vagina, and breasts, been used [sic] as a tool against sickness, evil forces of nature, etc., etc.” This narration does not, however, match the next two sequences, which are alleged visualizations of such folk incorporations of genitalia into daily practices and beliefs. We cut from Abramović the ethnographer to Abramović as the native other, performing the local custom she was allegedly referring to: she is wearing traditional Balkan dress, with a black headscarf, massaging her own breasts and looking up toward the sky. This double role—as ethnographer and native participant—confuses the conventional division between the expert subject

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Marina Abramović performs one of the vignettes in Balkan Erotic Epic

(2005).

(the ethnographer) and the subject of expert discourse (the native informant or participant), thus undermining the objectivity and authority of the former. Louisa Agvita argues that this constellation of conflicting roles functions like an anthropological study which depoliticizes embodied acts of native agents in favor of a cultural interpretation: “Abramović’s own body instantiates History, she becomes History, and by universalising her historic body through the rituals of performance art she obstructs the possibility of politicising the past. Her body is not a means for protest or political

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struggle but a naturalised field of compromise and consent.”88 I agree with Agvita that Abramović draws on what Hal Foster calls “the artist as ethnographer,” linked to conventional nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnography that mapped the primitive—a primitive that was “first projected by the Western white subject as a primal stage in cultural history and then reabsorbed as a primal state in individual history.”89 Abramović points out that the Balkans were included in Western European nineteenthand twentieth-century anthropological studies, identified as an exotic place on the borders of Europe, full of primitivist fantasies. However, these “ethnographic” images are not part of some widely accepted historical canon of the wild Balkan past, and it is not only artists but also politicians and other popular cultural figures who, at different times, have taken on the role of the ethnographer in (re)creating, (re)interpreting, and manipulating these images. Images of folk and “national” dress, song, and custom have been recently recycled—widely and wildly—mostly for historical revisionist and ethnonationalist purposes. By playing the role of scholar, native informant, and native other, Abramović renders these images untimely (at least difficult to locate historically) while also making recording, interpreting, and speaking for the other a deeply political performance. Contrary to many ethnonationalist reappropriations of folk customs, dress, songs, and images, Abramović does not attach them to any one “national” historical culture where they can represent authenticity, origin, or priority. Balkan Erotic Epic, therefore, does not quite fit Foster’s image of the artist as ethnographer. There is no return of the real, only a repetition of conventional roles, outdated scholarship, and a series of visualizations that blur “reenactment” with the imaginary scholarship about rats and wolves. Some of the rituals described by Abramović do not come from “ancient times” as she first announces but from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic studies. However, these studies are not reified as authoritative sources in relation to the native other but clearly made part of the performance; thus, they are transformed in a way that forces us to think about the relation of knowledge production to performance, interpretation, perspective, and ideological investments. The film is divided into nine sections, which Abramović introduces with some comic differences: she wears the same dress in each segment but alternates between wearing and not wearing glasses while, depending on the sequence, dust particles float down from above and insects fly across the

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screen. These small differences and intrusions purposefully denigrate the image of the ethnographer as a professional who stands outside the miseen-scène of her field of study. Performing “the ethnographer,” Abramović deliberately accentuates both the stereotypic Eastern European accent and its manner of speech by supplying the definite article at precisely the wrong times. Even if this performance was in earnest (it may not be a simple parody), the fact that it is a performance politicizes the body of the performers, since each gesture marks a carefully studied form of mimicry: of the ethnographer, the native other, the past, and the collective folk of the Balkans. Ironically, following Avgita, critics seem to miss the parody and read the artist as ethnographer, with David Carrier going so far as to state that: “Seen at an ethnographic museum, Balkan Erotic Epic could be an effective educational display.”90 Similarly, in the performance catalogue, Adelina von Fürstenberg writes: “The nudity in Balkan Erotic Epic may seem offensive to our modern, Western sensibilities, but these images are amply compensated by the innocence and spontaneity characteristic of a primitive and pagan civilization that no longer exists.”91 Not only do these critics help to dehistorize and naturalize Balkan customs, but they do so in a manner that echoes the discursive power play of the colonialists who saw themselves as forces of modernization. Both the sequence that immediately follows Abramović’s first descriptive monologue (when she massages her breasts) and the second sequence (of a man masturbating in the rain) are imaginative interpretations of the way Balkan people understood the power of sexuality. They are then followed by an even more outrageous sequence based on a description by early twentieth-century ethnographers—a sequence that is not visualized in liveaction but with a hand-drawn animation accompanied by Abramović’s voice-over explaining: If the woman wanted her husband or lover to love her, in Balkan she would take the small fish and insert in her vagina and leave it there over the night. The fish die [sic], in the morning. She would take the fish out, and she would make a powder of it, then mix it with the coffee and give to her husband or her lover, in the morning. If he drink [sic] the coffee, it was believed that he would never leave her.

While we only hear Abramović in voice-over as we watch a hand-drawn animation (in black and white) illustrate the narration in graphic detail,

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the animation does not fill the screen but appears instead to be crudely attached to a white wall with masking tape. This adds another layer of meaning, turning the apparent illustration into an installation of some sort—an animation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnography of the Balkans that challenges the veracity of such observations by pointing to the handiwork in the line drawing, the animation of the moving image (bringing to life the images), and the reanimation of the narrative (that recounts the story or describes what we see on screen). All animated images are illustrations from actual ethnographic texts, but all live-action images came from Abramović’s imaginary. These imaginary images are, however, not without a certain reality effect. The grand finale that features a chorus line of men with erections is pure fantasy, but one that uses culturally specific details. The men are dressed in a traditional (authentic) Balkan outfit, with waist belt, black vest, black linen pants, white linen shirt, the opanka (leather shoes with up-turned toe), and the šajkača (the traditional Serbian cap, worn by soldiers defending the AustroHungarian Empire against the Ottomans). Also, this scene is accompanied by Olivera Katarina—the famous Yugoslav film star and sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s—who sings a version of the Byzantine Orthodox Christian song “O Lord Save Thy People.” This song is based on the famous Troparion of the Holy Cross (a short hymn with three stanzas and repeated lines), but it incorporates in its lyrics a lament about the Slavic soul’s proclivity to war, “war is our eternal cross.”92 Such combinations of church liturgy, folk humor, and iconic figures and themes from Yugoslavia’s past popular culture do not yield a cohesive image like those invoked by the supporters of ethnonationalism, Christianity, or “scientific” ethnography. Coupled with images of a line of men with erect penises, the song about the elevation of the cross could either be plainly blasphemous or meant as a defense of religion in the form of a critique of mixing Christian prayer with a very secular appeal for military victory over one’s adversaries. Placing the imaginary (that which never existed) next to a recorded custom or ritual (“the primitive” that the curator speaks about), Balkan Erotic Epic questions what counts as real and imaginary, even within folk customs themselves. To further complicate matters, Abramović does not attribute the practices she describes to a specific ethnic group from a particular Balkan locality— something that her ethnographic sources do93—but simply repeats generic designations like “in Balkan,” “Balkan woman,” or “Balkan man.” There is,

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of course, no such language as “Balkan,” and most Balkan scholars argue that the term is in fact derogatory, indicating a certain kind of exoticism, marginality, and exclusion from Western Europe. As Kiossev suggests, these scholars attempt to show that the Balkans are not the other of Europe but do so while also distancing themselves from the “wild places”—the backwater villages of the Balkans where such “embarrassingly comic” rituals are performed. Ironically, it is these same backwaters that are accused of generating ethnonationalism. The backwaters are treated as both the source of violent ethnonationalism and the site of a spontaneous return of repressed sexual energies that cannot be understood without the mediation of the new “ethnographers.” Similar to Adela Peeva’s documentary film Whose Is This Song? (2003), Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic reminds us of things that do not fit into the nicely reconstructed ethnonationalist narratives currently circulating in the Balkans. Peeva’s film traces how the same song has been appropriated throughout the Balkan Peninsula (Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey) and how each cultural group sees it as part of their national culture. Unsurprisingly, the question of who owns this particular song incites “deep seated” and “long-standing” animosity among the various ethnic groups who see the song as part of their own “authentic” heritage. Clearly, both films place the artist as ethnographer, but Balkan Erotic Epic goes a step further and parodies the role of the ethnographer itself. “Ethnography” or pseudo-ethnography played a key role in Balkanization. Refusing to identify customs with specific places and ethnic groups— Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, etc.— Balkan Erotic Epic has avoided much of the negative ethnonationalist reaction that met Whose Is This Song? However, Abramović’s film triggered a more surprising form of criticism: it was seen as self-balkanizing, meaning that it either provoked a positive or negative response not from specific Balkan countries and peoples but from the Balkans as a whole. Part of this reflects the fact that the film offers no stable ethnic position from which to judge. It is simply not clear where the film positions the subject or the object of its study. Is it directed to a Western or an Eastern audience? A cosmopolitan or local one? Are the Balkans a Western fetish or a self-fetishizing metaphor that the people from the Balkans now use to promote ethnonationalism or distance themselves from their neighbors? And what role does Abramović play: the expert, the native informant, or the ethnic other?

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Balkan Erotic Epic does not leave us with many certainties, not even in its classification. Is it a pornographic, erotic, or ethnographic film? Do its performances represent some social reality, or do they simply undermine ethnonationalist claims to the real that use folklore as their “evidence”? Rather than certainties, Abramović’s film leaves us with laughter, but not with a clear sense of what we are laughing at. Are we laughing at obscene folk humor, laughing at the backwardness of Balkan folklore, or laughing at the Balkan imaginary as either a Western or Eastern fantasy? This laughter is a form of disruption that does not allow value judgments to form. What emerges, instead, is both a critical reflection on subjective positions and identity politics and the opening of new possible relations.

THE POLITICS OF CONFRONTATION This is much, much wider than art, and it comes with great responsibilities. The public has to trust me. An artist has to be generous, unconditionally giving, open and humble. —Marina Abramović, in an interview with Rachel Cooke

Similar to Godard’s Notre Musique, Abramović’s work asks us to rethink what we see in the face or the body of the other who suffers. But rather than forcing us to confront only the politics of images, she offers us her own suffering—not, however, as a way of redeeming or legitimizing anything, or of speaking for victims. Her acts of suffering are themselves a provocation, a confrontation—a confrontation that is not staged as a simple clash of cultures, peoples, ideologies, styles, and philosophies in order to demarcate boundaries and define one’s self as opposed to another. Operating outside the regime of dialectics, her work engages multiple images of opposition in order to examine how such images (of victors and vanquished, victims and victimizers) and ideas (humanist and moral absolutist, interventionist and pacifist), associated as they are with such conflicting forces, end up producing a single image, quality, or concept by projecting differences onto previously established forms of representation (identities, values, or morals). That is to say, how do we produce simple interpretations from such diverse and stratified situations?

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Abramović’s Balkan oeuvre does not denounce all representation as distortion, nor does it embrace any one representation over another. Forcing conflicting images, representations, and ideas to confront one another, it engages in Deleuzian politics—the powers of the false—in an attempt to show that there is no one image, quality, perception, or concept (of suffering, war, good, evil, national identity, justice, right, or bodies in pain) but only a relation of images, qualities, perceptions, and concepts among themselves. It is a politics of confrontation that does not posit political, ethical, aesthetic, or philosophical claims but rather presents the performance of suffering as a form of politics.

4 NOTRE MUSIQUE On the Ruins of the Divine

And to a certain extent . . . I am responsible for the other even when he bothers me, even when he persecutes me. . . . But I am responsible for the persecution of my neighbors [prochains]. If I belong to a people, that people and my relatives [proches] are also my neighbors. They have a right to defense, just as do those who are not my relatives. —Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other

The victim must concede the right of his killer to kill him, and those buried under the rubble have to declare the legitimacy of their slaughter.  .  .  . The Other, present with all his murderous gadgets, is demanding our presence for a while, to announce his right to push us into the final absence. —Mahmoud Darwish, Memory of Forgetfulness

J

ean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique (2004) is a film about the poetics of confrontation. But here (like the other films I have discussed) confrontation is not presented as a simple clash of cultures, peoples, ideologies, and aesthetic styles that serve to demarcate boundaries so as to further define one’s self (as opposed to an other). Confrontation works as a way of thinking about difference and opposition (of victors and vanquished, victims and victimizers) but also as a way of thinking about correspondences, or how we associate images with ethics, politics, and ideology (humanist, moral absolutist, interventionist, pacifist, Marxist, or neoliberal).

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By focusing on confrontation, Godard asks us if it is possible for the image to become an idea without the idea also partly becoming an image. For Deleuze, the translation of the image of thought into previously established forms of representation (identities, values, and morals) ends up distorting thought. The image distorts thinking by turning it into something visible: a figure of recognition, opposition, analogy, or identity. Notre Musique, by contrast, asks us to think about how the image is also distorted or supplanted by discursive dogma. As Victor Burgin notes, the image is “invaded by language at the very moment that it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange for one another.”1 Yet this invasion is not simply one-sided; rather, the image invades, intermingles, and confronts ideas, performing momentary acts of correspondence between the image and discourse but also opening itself to forms of disagreement. What cannot be accounted for in such maneuvers is the mobility of the image and “phrase-images” (the collapse of distance between words and images)2 and their ability to establish relations with other images, ideas, and forms of representation. These relations modify both the moving image (with all of its permutations and unfoldings) and those forms of representation they are said to make visible. For instance, Notre Musique begins with a segment entitled “L’Enfer,” which consists of a rapid montage of war scenes from film and television, transferred to video. This barrage of gruesome images suggests simultaneously that “war is hell” (war is senseless, chaotic carnage) and that war is the struggle of good and evil, just and unjust (war has its own logic and ethics). The sheer repetition of images, however, reveals aesthetic similarities in the framing and editing of these depictions of opposing forces, the various mechanisms of destruction, sites of ruin, and bodies laid to waste, which in turn dissolve the ethical and political differences that make each war unique. Difference (or opposition) returns as repetition and similarity. As Deleuze points out: “It is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference, and far from resolving difference by tracing it back to a foundation, opposition betrays and distorts it.”3 Opposing, therefore, becomes an image of opposition, a form of representation. Representation is itself a form of distortion that works in cinema by transforming images into identities or concepts into visual analogies, thereby creating either the illusion of opposition or the perception of resemblance—but each form of identification is deeply political.4

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By calling attention to the fastening of images to ideas, Notre Musique demonstrates that images cannot be reduced to functions—of difference, resemblance, or analogy—nor can they stand in for ideas, ideals, or general knowledge. The confrontation of images and ideas, of ethics and politics, asks us to think about the practice of linking or grounding the figurative in discourse. The linking and unlinking of images and ideas demonstrates how ethical and political claims are made, but the foregrounding of this practice cannot support one claim over another. Instead, Deleuze argues, “In Godard, the ideal of knowledge . . . collapses: the ‘good’ discourse, of the militant, the revolutionary, the feminist, the philosopher, the filmmaker, etc., gets no better treatment than the bad.”5 This does not mean that Godard can simply be dismissed as escaping into a nonethical type of symbolism (high modernism) or as attempting to resurrect the image as a form of the sacred, as Jacques Rancière has suggested.6 Notre Musique demonstrates that by placing images (of Nazism, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, or war in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East) and texts (the Bible, philosophy, poetry, and music) next to each other, we do not simply reproduce visual clichés (as opposing forces, analogies, or resemblances). Rather, these juxtapositions point to the spaces in between shot and counter shot, between sound and image, between images of thought, ideas, and their antitheses that do not amount to a synthesis but the unmaking of such forms of representation. This is not an operation of association but of disassociation of images, concepts, and value judgments. As Deleuze puts it, “it is a radical calling into question of the image, and the image of thought.”7 Notre Musique functions as what Pasolini calls a cinematic theorem that does not operate as a system of exchange (one representation for another) but constitutes an assemblage of images, texts, and sounds that constantly transform the parts by adding one of these layers to another. Yet this form of confrontation does not amount to what Rancière calls “the great parataxis,” since there is nothing random or indifferent about these assemblages.8 These assemblages simultaneously invoke ethics while questioning the a posteriori application of ethics to images. The film is divided into three unequal parts—“L’Enfer,” “Le Purgatoire,” and “Le Paradis” (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise)—borrowed from Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia, and it begins with found footage depicting multiple images of hell: war, acts of violence, genocide, and destruction. However, it is not a film about violent conflicts as much as how we cope

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with the aftermath of such violent acts, and how we confront the potential return of new forms of violence. Rather than ask why certain regions have been so violent, Notre Musique asks if reconciliation is possible in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, the West Bank, or between various populations within Europe itself. The second and longest section of the film, “Le Purgatoire,” follows two young Israeli women who travel to Sarajevo, searching for answers on how to cope with ethical and political impasses created by war and other acts of violent conflict. These two women are doubles (played by different actresses) whose paths cross even though they never meet or are shot in the same frame. The first to appear in the film is Judith Lerner (played by Sarah Adler), a journalist who comes to Sarajevo because she is interested in seeing a “place where reconciliation is possible.” Ironically, she is not interested in talking to the local Bosnian-Herzegovinian population, which still remains ethnically divided (Bosniak or Bosnian Muslim, Croatian, Serbian, Jewish, and Roma). Instead, she sets up a series of interviews: first with a fictional French ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina, who saved her grandparents from Nazi persecution in Vichy France; second, the famous exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who comes to Sarajevo for a literary convention; and third, the French architect Gilles Péqueux, who has been commissioned to reconstruct the Old Bridge of Mostar (the Stari Most). The other young Israeli is Olga Brodsky (played by Nade Dieu), who unlike Judith contemplates extreme political action; as the film progresses, we realize that she is planning to become a martyr for peace. While the film loosely follows these characters, it is not constructed as a linear narrative but an assemblage of fragments from diverse texts, films, documentaries, images, and musical selections. Notre Musique turns apparently arbitrary movements into a rhythm of sounds, images, and texts—a fugue that uses the carnage of war as a point of departure or exposition (“L’Enfer”), with a hopeful image of harmony as its counterpoint (“Le Paradis”), and the contemplation of the devastating aftermath of war as its inversion or double counterpoint (“Le Purgatoire”). Similar to the structure of a fugue, Notre Musique is divided into key episodes that modulate the structure of the film; however, these conflicting voices or countersubjects do not provide bridges to the consecutive episodes but rather draw attention to the interval as a figure of nothingness (“the unthought”), the dark space between images or one event and another. Godard stresses the unstressed beat or pulse that relates (connects or juxtaposes)

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sounds to shots, images, texts, and contexts. As Godard tells us, the film is organized around music. It uses the stark dissonant piano music of Jean Sibelius, Hans Otte, and Ketil Bjørnstad to accompany the images of war; the various sounds and rhythms of everyday life to accompany a series of philosophical reflections on ethics, politics, and history; and the metaphysical music of David Darling or minimalist music of Arvo Pärt to accompany natural sounds like water flowing and birds singing in a cinematic vision of paradise. Godard argues that the rhythm of life—our music (notre musique)— corresponds to our understanding of time. Grounding the present on the music of the past but orienting ourselves toward the music of the future leaves us without a unified vision or music of the present, only random sounds, incomplete ideas, fragmented dialogues, and half-erased memories. It leaves us between a point and a counterpoint, the past and the future, or one image and another. Godard calls this moment of refraining from or reflecting on the grounding and orienting of one’s self to history and identity “the real image.” But it is an indeterminate moment, full of disjuncture and aporia. While Notre Musique borrows its structure from Dante’s La Divina Commedia, it reduces “L’Enfer” and “Le Paradis” to two quasi-symmetrical short sequences that frame “Le Purgatoire” (which corresponds to the historical present), presented through a long series of existential reflections on identity, ethnicity, history, and the coexistence of historical enemies. Rather than replicate Dante’s hierarchal model, Godard juxtaposes the three as separate kingdoms (royaumes) that form more of a triptych than a teleology or epic trilogy. Each kingdom is aestheticized in a different manner. “L’Enfer” is composed of a montage of short, overexposed, color-saturated, and often grainy stock footage and found images of war, weaponry, and the victims of war. “Le Paradis” is comprised of a few long-take shots of vivid (lush green) natural landscape surrounding Lake Geneva. “Le Purgatoire” is shot in the grey-blue hue of winter in the war-torn city of Sarajevo. For Godard, the present cannot be narrativized or contained in a unified image; it can only be episodic—a series of poetic and philosophical exchanges between real and fictional personae. These exchanges, however, are often commentaries on miscommunication or incommensurability. For example, the exiled Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo reads poetry in the

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bombed-out shell of the Vijećnica National Library in Sarajevo (destroyed by Serbian artillery in 1992); the fictional Israeli journalist Judith (who carries around Emmanuel Levinas’s Entre Nous)9 interviews Mahmoud Darwish (speaking Hebrew as he responds in Arabic); while Godard plays himself giving a lecture on film (on the relation of image to text and the use of shot-reverse-shot as a misrecognition of otherness). We also see Native Americans who visit the library (reciting lines from Darwish’s poem “Speech of the Red Indian”) and the Old Bridge in Mostar. Gilles Péqueux also appears in the film, stating that the need to rebuild the bridge was not simply to reopen it to tourism but to “restore the past so as to make the future possible.” While “Le Purgatoire” is open to the possibility of multiple exchanges and the hopes for reconstruction, it is also (like Sarajevo itself ) a place of uncertainty, caught between competing discourses on ethics, ethnicity, history, and homelands, standing somewhere between the borders of Europe and its perpetual margins.

RECYCLING HELL ch’io non averei creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta. —Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Matar a un hombre para defender una idea no es defender una idea: es matar a un hombre. —Sebastian Castellio, Contra libellum Calvini

History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasize. Only death is certain. —Danilo Kiš, Enciklopedija mrtvih

As Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) and Éloge de l’amour (2001) before it, Notre Musique is formally experimental, closer to conceptual art than narrative cinema, weaving together a series of (filmic, photographic, musical, and textual) citations with found footage, advertisement, and various

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iconic references to art, history, religion, and philosophy. In Notre Musique, Godard continues to explore a combination of interests: the effects of war on individuals, the role of the image in creating cultural memory and identity politics, and the responsibility of art to challenge the co-opting of the cinematic image for simple political purposes in the age of global terror. Despite the stunning onslaught of images that appear as a stream of disconnected juxtapositions of war, violence, and destruction, the “L’Enfer” segment conforms to a set and formal structure. Godard makes us realize that even what appears to be a heterogeneous combination of elements is not a spontaneous form of art. Rather, “L’Enfer” is an organized clash of images that demonstrates how the representation of a historical or narrative continuum (such as the history of the representation of warfare) and the representation of historical ruptures are as aesthetically orchestrated as the wars they represent. “L’Enfer” is structured by means of seeming dichotomies: between good and evil, vanquished and victors, victims and victimizers, cowboys and Indians. Documentary footage (from the Holocaust, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Palestine) is juxtaposed to and intermixed with clips from fiction films (e.g., Zulu, Fort Apache, Ran, Alexander Nevsky, Kiss Me Deadly, Braveheart, Battleship Potemkin, War and Peace, and Apocalypse Now). Just to emphasize the point that war is “notre musique,” the real sounds of war are replaced with stark piano music that only plays on low notes that resonate and counter higher ones, blurring the lines between fact and fantasy, or war and its aesthetization. “L’Enfer” is organized into four distinct movements, each with its own set of images, music, and textual commentary (in voice-over): first comes war, then the mechanisms of war, followed by the victims of war, and lastly remembering Sarajevo. Each movement begins in silence with an image that lingers a bit longer than the others; it is then followed by the sound of a woman’s voice reading or reciting an iconic text, which in turn cues another musical selection and a different set of images and finally fades to black. The effect of such ordering and reordering of the image’s relationship to silence, to voice-over citation, and to music is one that reveals conventional associations through the use of montage and analogies via a sequence of appearance as both overdetermined and indeterminate. The film’s establishing shot is a photographic image recycled from Godard’s For Ever Mozart (1996). It does not move, but is moved; the frame is

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violently agitated. The overexposed photograph of a fallen (bloodied) woman literally shakes, and seemingly bleeds, making it difficult to discern the details of the photograph itself (figure 4.1). We cannot tell who this woman is, where the photograph was taken, or whether she is severely wounded or dead. It is the artificial movement of the image that animates it, seemingly waking it from the dead. This unnaturally red image is replaced by its chromatic opposite: a muted, green-tinted traveling shot from a moving tank. In this image it is only the background (of cars moving in the opposite direction) that is blurred by the real movement of the tank, while the tank’s gun (in the foreground) remains in focus (figure 4.2). The traveling shot from the perspective of a gun mounted on a tank is just as quickly replaced by a third image: a black screen with the text “VISA NO 103 039” (figure 4.3). These briefly displayed images offer us another take on the famous dictum “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” which Godard borrows from D. W. Griffith. However, rather than simply comment on the practices of commercial cinema, we are left to wonder if this equation

FIGURES 4.1 The first of three opening images from Notre Musique: a shaking image of a bleeding woman.

FIGURE 4.2

The second of the three opening images from Notre Musique: a traveling shot from the perspective of a gun.

FIGURE 4.3 The third of the three opening images from Notre Musique: a title card with a visa number.

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(girl + gun) also applies to documentary and experimental film as well as news reportage. This is more than a question of selling a film or the news; it is a question regarding why we need to attach a narrative structure to images. This opening sequence also offers us four distinct versions of the moving image: a single shot that is physically moved, a traveling shot from the perspective of the gun, the seemingly static title card that fades up from and back to black, and the ordering and succession of images that is montage. Even though all three images appear in silence and in rapid succession, they do not constitute what Eisenstein called a montage of opposition— chromatic, graphic, thematic, or even intellectual montage. With Notre Musique, there is no real opposition—black comes before and after each sequence of images, just as blackness often fills in between images, reminding us that cinema has never really produced montage.10 Narration is, instead, developed according to spatial and chronological relations that unify moments and identify characters.11 In this prelude to the film we have girl + gun + visa, but we also have three isolated images.12 Just as the addition of the visa to the gun and the girl constitutes a relation in time and space (girl in foreground bleeding + gun as perspective moving + visa number in black and white graphics), the fact that these images appear disconnected makes them also appear de-chronologized (girl, gun, visa; still image, traveling shot, title card), which questions their apparent relations. More than simply constructing or deconstructing this set of correspondences, “L’Enfer” multiplies images of war (victims, devastation, carnage, exploding bombs, armies, and devices of warfare), exposing certain patterns in one image that pass into another—one army into another, one gesture of patriotism into another, one sign of suffering or death into another. The effect of this multiplication of images is complex. While it works as a form of addition (one image + another image + another image), which sets up relations between the US cavalry, Roman soldiers, and the British army (the historic and filmic victors) as well as Native Americans, ancient Carthaginians, and Zulu warriors (those who have been enslaved or annihilated), the quick cutting between images coupled with the (il)logic of shot and reverse-shot makes it appear as if the US cavalry were rushing to confront Zulu warriors or as if Apache warriors were clashing with medieval Japanese knights in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985). For example, the shot of Roman soldiers on horseback pursuing Carthaginians retreating across the water

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(moving from the foreground to the background) is immediately followed by a shot of Zulu warriors coming from the background to attack British soldiers in the foreground. Not only does this appear to link the Carthaginians with the Zulus and the Romans with the British, but it also makes it appear as if one event responds to the other, when in reality a thousand years separated the two conflicts. The constant addition of moving images does not allow for such perceptions to last for long: in other sequences, Zulus warriors seem to charge toward the US cavalry while at other times they appear to be breaking down the door of the Nazis. With each linkage—Roman to British to American to Nazi—the assemblage of images becomes more ambiguous. This barrage of war images constitutes a series of rhythms of conquest, of charging, retreating, annihilating, and grieving that flows back and forth from the right to the left, the left to the right, the foreground to the background, severing the moving image from its narrative or historical context and blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction—between Roman gladiators, medieval Russian knights, Zulus, and Native American warriors. “L’Enfer” uses scenes from fictional films similarly, so that, for instance, the Confederate army (depicted in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation) seems to be attacking the African warriors in Cy Endfield’s Zulu (1964). By always adding another image, another sound, another quotation, these confused point-counterpoint relations seem to have endless possibilities. This multiplication of correspondences sets the tone for how we look at the following documentary footage and fictionalized historical reenactments. Here we are faced with the drama of war and death, which is artificially slowed down and set to music but then edited in the rapid sequence of images. Rather than Eisenstein’s intellectual montage (sleeping lion + waking lion + lion rising up = revolution), which is designed to produce a shock to thought, the rhythmic montage of “L’Enfer” follows more in the tradition of Artavazd Peleshian’s “distance montage.”13 The segment does not appear to move forward toward some enlightened idea but is beset with a series of impressions that are adding up, and transforming it in the process. The piano solos create an ominous mood and set the pace at which images appear in each of the movements, putting emphasis on certain gestures and symbols that are accompanied by accented notes—a burning house, the Teutonic knights massacring people and pointing forward, a severed head, etc.

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These emphatic gestures are counterpoised to images that appear in the spoken-word voice-over from lines in Montesquieu, Lewis Carroll, the Bible, Blanchot, Derrida, and Heidegger: respectively, a pirate ship on fire, the atomic bomb blast at the end of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), a  woman pleading with a partisan, and images from the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This type of montage works on modulation: the image re-presents or repeats the unrepresentable (death) or the unrepeatable (the event). By adding one image of war to multiple others, war becomes both singular (as the isolated image) and repeatable (in the aesthetic representation of war). Yet each additional image, set to the repetitive sound of the piano and rhythmic exposure of images that flash across the screen, transforms the entire structure and meaning of “L’Enfer.” This results in the simultaneous appearance of incommensurable ways of treating the image and the event— each war is presented as a radically singular event; each war resembles images of other wars and is, therefore, generalizable; each war has a relationship (both aesthetically and ideologically) to other wars; and each image has infinite future potential relations to other images. The weapons, costumes, uniforms, and combatants change, while the carnage remains the same—unidentified and unidentifiable bodies are dragged or piled on the ground and bulldozed into a pit. It is not the particular event of war that repeats (it cannot), only the representation of war that reproduces similar scenes, narratives, gestures, and images. As Godard puts it: “The twentieth century didn’t invent horror, it just churned out thousands of copies.”14 The fact that all the found footage from American, British, Soviet, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German fictional and documentary cinema presents war as having four movements—battle, weapons, carnage, and war’s aftermath—suggests that there is a general narrative structure (law or protocol) to the representation of war. But as Deleuze points out, repetition is also a transgression: “It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality.”15 The making sense (ordering and narrativizing) of war takes place in language and thought, not in the image or in the event. Hence, this general law adds a moral—a story—to the image and the event. But the repetition of the same story (the same aesthetics and narrative) as well as the same ethics by enemy combatants undermines pleas for moral superiority and historical authenticity.

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It is the relation of ethics to war (the moral of the story) that “L’Enfer” challenges. Like sound-byte moralism, contemporary thinking about ethics is forced to confront competing discourses and, therefore, its own theoretical limitations. The discourse of ethics begins to unravel when we realize that it is predicated on universal claims about right, justice, and historical allusions to innocence and culpability rather than a complex set of circumstances and situations. The effect of juxtaposing documentary and imaginary images of war and death with quotations from various authors (Montesquieu, Carroll, the Bible, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Derrida) is less disorienting than it is a disturbing set of concurrences. Rather than depict war as hell or complete chaos, the film begins with a quote from Montesquieu: “Thus, in fabulous times, after the inundations and the deluge, there arose out of the earth armed men, who exterminated one another.”16 In the context of images of war, these words seem to mark the onset of an apocalypse. But the line appears in book 23 of the Spirit of the Laws (1748), entitled “Of Laws in the Relation They Bear to the Number of Inhabitants,” wherein Montesquieu describes how the Roman Empire gained superiority over its provinces by controlling populations: on the one hand, by sending eligible men from the conquered provinces to fight wars or exposing children born to families who could not support them to the elements (and sure death) and, on the other, by encouraging the propagation of their own citizenry so as to outnumber the vanquished. According to Montesquieu, the competing strategies of expanding and maintaining power by increasing the number of citizens while achieving glory by means of military superiority over peoples and territories triggered the decline of the Roman Empire: But soon the wisest laws could not re-establish what a dying republic, what a general anarchy, what a military government, what a rigid empire, what a proud despotic power, what a feeble monarchy, what a stupid, weak, and superstitious court had successively pulled down. It might, indeed, be said that they conquered the world only to weaken it, and to deliver it up defenseless to barbarians. The Gothic nations, the Getes, the Saracens and Tartars by turns harassed them; and soon the barbarians had none to destroy but barbarians.17

Unlike the film’s two other kingdoms, “L’Enfer” seems to use images to illustrate textual citations. In fact, the images that precede the voice-over of

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the Montesquieu passage are grainy, black-and-white images of bombs exploding, as if the war and warriors were erupting from the earth. As the voice begins, we see a pirate ship on fire, a lone penguin standing before an enormous wave, monkeys crossing a river, and then a shot from Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) of US soldiers in Vietnam crossing a river with their rifles lifted in the air. This sequence of images links the soldiers to the monkeys since they are both moving in the same direction and cast in a military green hue, whereas the penguin is chromatically associated with the burning ship. The sequence is followed by a series of armies or groups of warriors, one after the next, that in turn rush forward to confront unseen other groups. These cinematic fragments are intercut with images of dead bodies lying on the ground, in ditches, and being rolled into mass graves. Here the exposure of lone figures (even dead ones) to the elements is met with clashing armies and armies of the dead. War clearly possesses its own logic, repeated over and over, and from such logic comes the machinery of destruction, which will be the focus of the second movement of “L’Enfer.” The second movement begins with the image of a severed head and then the same woman’s voice announcing: “They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is, that there’s anyone left alive!”18 This line, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is delivered over the original end sequence from Kiss Me Deadly, where Mike Hammer and Velda try to escape an atomic bomb blast by running into the Pacific Ocean. After the bomb blast, we see a string of images of tanks, fighter jets, rifles, cannons, helicopters, horses, intercut with images of dropping bombs, blasts, napalm explosions, and images of battle scenes that are juxtaposed and likened to the image of ruined cities. The montage is poignantly punctuated by a steady tempo of keystrokes on the piano. Unlike the first movement, the second does not focus on flags and symbols but on the machinery of destruction, concluding with the grainy footage of young boys playing war games with sticks. In turn, the third movement references images of the victims of war, using the voice-over of a women asking for forgiveness. It begins with the image of a woman pleading with a partisan, a fade to black, and the iconic close-up in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) of the mother’s face as she suffers from a fatal gunshot at the top of the Odessa staircase. These images are coupled with a slightly altered Lord’s Prayer (or Pater Noster) that

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begins with the traditional, “Pardonne-nous nos offenses, comme nous pardonnons à ceux qui nous ont offensés” (Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us), but then the speaker adds, “oui comme nous pardonnons, pas autrement” (yes, just as we pardon others, without any difference). This particular line is altered and later repeated in the segment over the images of hanged World War II partisans, the burning of the false Maria at the stake in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and men and women making the Roman (fascist) salute as seen in stock footage from the 1930s and 1940s—perhaps emphasizing the uncertainty in regard to whom we make our appeals for forgiveness and the impossibility of measuring out one’s own debts, trespasses, and sins in equal amounts. The last and shortest movement takes up the issue of possibility and impossibility through Blanchot’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of death as the “the possibility of the absolute impossibility.” The voice-over is heard saying, “We can consider death in two ways: the impossible of the possible, or the possible of the impossible. Now ‘I’ am an other,” which corresponds to Derrida’s questioning of Heidegger’s hinging the project of life on the knowledge of one’s own finitude. For Heidegger, death serves as a limit that is cast temporally as the not-yet (the immanence and anticipation of death) and spatially as the impassible. It is this impassible and inaccessible limit that grounds life and makes the project of existence possible (being is constituted as a “being-towards-death”).19 Both Blanchot and Derrida reject Heidegger’s interpretation of “the possibility of the absolute impossibility” when they suggest that it might have two meanings: first, that the impossible becomes possible or death becomes possible when it becomes our destiny, our being sent or dispatched into the world; and second, that the possible manifests itself as impossible. That is, it is impossible to realize death in our existence; death is otherness, or as the character of Olga will put it, “death does not exist.”20 But paradoxically, as Derrida states, neither death nor being in the world can provide us with any form of measurement or direction. Death is, therefore, an aporia. In both instances, the becoming possible of death cannot be attributed to one’s own death but rather the death of the “other” in oneself. This death of the other seems to affirm the primacy of Levinas’s ethical relations to others—it establishes a relation to the other through mourning, witnessing, and haunting. But as Derrida observes, the grounding of all existence on ethical relations to others creates another danger, another aporia—the

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production of the dead, the victim, the witness, or the ghost as a totalizing figure that demands justice from both the living and any possible others to come. How is it that death or the obligation to the other can become dogma? The other referred to in the voice-over passage does not seem to refer to one’s relation to one’s fellow man or one’s neighbor that would affirm an ethical relation. Instead, the passage recites verbatim Arthur Rimbaud’s “je est un autre” (I is someone else / I is another) suggesting that it is the subject (the “I”) that is in the process of becoming other or experiencing alterity (but not death). Furthermore, in the context of war, the status of this other (as one’s neighbor or fellow man) disappears. As Gil Anidjar aptly writes: “In war there are no others, only enemies.”21 The last two movements of “L’Enfer” (with all their references to the Bosnian War of the 1990s) are framed by two questions: first, how do we distinguish the other from the enemy when war is always a possibility; and second, are ethical relations to the dead possible without reproducing enemies? Images from the Bosnian War appear for the first time in the third movement and include the 1994 bombing of the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo, hundreds of refugees walking along the highway, and scores of wounded bodies throughout the former Yugoslavia—but the images from the civil wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina are intercut with images from Rwanda, Europe, and Japan. Images of Sarajevo before the war introduce the fourth movement, which focuses on the siege of Sarajevo. First, we see people sledding and skiing as we hear the line “the impossible of the possible.” It seems as if the anticipation of death is not yet imaginable. But when we hear the following line, “the possible of the impossible,” we see a man’s bloodied face and the grainy image of four men and one woman hanging. Here, death has become imaginable, or at least it has been given an image. But “L’Enfer” does not close with the image of death. Instead, it pans the faces of three women, who are neither identified nor placed within any historical context other than the prompt, “Do you remember Sarajevo?” It is this uncertain image that leads up to the next kingdom, “Le Purgatoire,” indicating a movement away from a totalizing commentary on humankind’s relation to violence and a movement toward specific instances of violence and violent conflict. The final movement of the previous kingdom that concludes by asking, “Do you remember Sarajevo?” is not just addressed to Bosnian women, since it is written both in Bosnian and English. This question is preceded by iconic images of the 1992 bombing of the Vijećnica

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library and the firebombing of the Momo and Uzeir twin towers in downtown Sarajevo that same year. After posing the question, the camera pans over the faces of the three women. Even though these women are clearly together, each woman appears in a separate frame and each looks off in a different direction. Presumably, they are from Sarajevo, and perhaps they represent the three main ethnic groups: Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb, and Bosnian Croat. Yet the fact that these three women sit together suggests that they are no longer divided as enemies but that they are now treated as “others.” However, this image of the three solitary women also returns us to Montesquieu’s logic of population control, where war depopulates areas of resistance, leaving women widowed and childless. Thus the question becomes, who are these other peoples who will repopulate Sarajevo? Even though the next section of the film is set in Sarajevo, we will see few Bosnians; instead, the city will serve as a metaphor for Europe’s past and its future. As a metaphor for Europe, the images of Sarajevo are easily confused with other images (of other ruined cities) and the unique features of the city disappear into this barrage of found footage: from documentary footage of bodies being bulldozed into a ditch at Nazi concentration camps, images of Soviet soldiers in the trenches outside Stalingrad, German officers on the Russian Front, and American soldiers in Vietnam to Hollywood movies like Zulu that depict the struggle of the colonized against the colonizer and John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) where cowboys fight Indians, Japanese films like Ran where brother fights brother, and Soviet films like Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), where medieval Russians battle German knights, among many others. Fable and fiction contaminate the document, as the document contaminates the fiction. Here in “L’Enfer” fact and fantasy become indistinguishable, beautiful, and banal. We are reminded that only ten years after the end of the siege of Sarajevo, it is already difficult to distinguish which images were taken there as opposed to in Mostar or other places in the former Yugoslavia—or, for that matter, in other wars altogether. This point is made clear when, during his lecture on image and text, Godard holds up a picture of Richmond, Virginia, at the end of the American Civil War (1865) and asks: “Where do you think this photo was taken?” Members of the audience call out: “Stalingrad, Warsaw, Beirut, Sarajevo, Hiroshima.” The audience’s inability to locate the photograph is a comment about the return of the same—that on a general level war

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produces similar types of destruction. However, it is also an observation on what type of images enter the visual archive. That is, it speaks to the way that we aestheticize war. The war photograph and footage already assume certain structures of interpretation and, therefore, fall into categories similar to the movements that Godard outlines in “L’Enfer.”22 The filmic, musical, and textual fragments that make up “L’Enfer” comprise what Deleuze calls “geological layers” of already archived representations that return us to the “deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms.” Deleuze maintains that cinema properly deployed is unique technical equipment for sifting through “geological layers” by developing “a whole aesthetic power which reveals the layers of history and political struggle on which it is built.” Cinema, then, can do politically liberating archival work, “combining elements from different strata in order to resist the order that would be imposed by working on one stratum alone.”23

WAITING IN THE AFTERNESS Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Eternally here, we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be. Beyond that aim we differ in all. —Mahmoud Darwish, “State of Siege”

I’m still alive. In Sarajevo. For now that means: living in the past. To talk of the future means: to dream. —Goran Simić, “A Message of Thanks”

“Le Purgatoire” opens with a shot of two streetcars passing on the tracks, the one in the foreground has the Bayer brand “One-A-Day” slogan written on its side, “science for a better life,” and “one day” written on the back of the same tram (figure 4.4). The advertisement indicates that Sarajevo lies between the backward-looking figure of speech “one day” (as in “once upon a time”), a future-oriented “one day,” and the mantra of getting through “one day at a time,” which is focused on just surviving another day. But in the context of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is unclear which outlook would

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The image of a tram in Sarajevo that opens “Le Purgatoire” section of the film.

bring a “better life”: a return to the multicultural socialist past of Yugoslavia, the current ethnically partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina, or some projected future state to come. There is also something rather cynical about an advert that offers the science of a better life, one pill at a time, to a population that survived a three-year siege and over six thousand civilian casualties.24 While the promise of global advertisement seems to be everywhere in contemporary Sarajevo, the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina as an emerging market is less than certain. Perhaps the most jarring images that point to this uncertainty are the billboards placed next to bombed out buildings, and the fact that many of the ad slogans on trams, buses, and billboards are written in English or Japanese. We see the ruins of iconic buildings (Sarajevo’s Vijećnica National Library and the Old Bridge of Mostar) and numerous advertisements for American, European, and Japanese commodities, but we rarely see the people of Sarajevo, nor do we hear much Bosnian being spoken. What little Bosnian we do hear is not translated, and the Bosnians who appear take

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on only roles of servitude to Europeans: they are guides, taxi drivers, waiters, and secretaries, but not characters. Godard reminds us that once the war was over, the people of Sarajevo were all but forgotten; only what is newsworthy receives attention. In a scene inside the French embassy, where the congress of the Rencontres européennes du livre (European Literary Encounters) gathers, the camera pans over the major American, European, Israeli, and Arabic newspapers, scanning the headlines.25 Rather than Sarajevo, now Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States are the key figures in the current media drama. The images of combat, of victims, and the war machines that occupy the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers (in 2004) remind us both of the visual classifications of war in “L’Enfer” and the fact that, just ten years before, similar images from Sarajevo were plastered across these same newspapers. The headlines and photographs call attention to specific instances of suffering, demanding an emotional response to ethical questions that are framed by global politics.26 But this rather complex demand for compassion, which leads to military intervention on moral grounds, elides the fact that “intervention can only be implemented if someone has the political/ military power to do so.”27 The discourse of intervention requires a fundamental moral judgment that identifies whose suffering represents the human condition and whose acts of violence are deemed inhuman (barbaric or tribal). Moral criticisms launched at “rogue states,” “inhuman dictators,” or ethnic groups in the headlines of the world’s leading news organizations do not address the political and material interests of those who intervene, since such interests would distract from the target message. Universal appeals to human rights and humanitarian intervention under the claim that “we are all citizens of Sarajevo” or “Sarajevo is the center of Europe” often confuse political ideology with universal moral values.28 We are asked to think about why certain images of suffering and death constitute a demand for intervention while others do not (e.g., Rwanda, Palestine, Sierra Leone, and the Sudan). Critics like Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and Jean Baudrillard have all argued that the identification of the victim is also a political act. As Baudrillard observes, “victim-culture” is grounded on a form of “commiseration” that requires identification with the victim. In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the war was framed as one in which the victim was fighting for “democratic values” and “basic human rights”: “The status of victimhood,

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paired with human rights is the sole funeral ideology. Those who do not directly exploit it do it by proxy—there is no dearth of mediators who take some surplus value of financial or symbolic nature along the way.”29 The logic of intervention and with it the appeal to identify with the victim ends up, as Jean-Paul Curnier will say toward the end of “Le Purgatoire,” in a “splitting of the world, between those who line up to voice their misery, and those for whom this public display provides a daily dose of moral comfort to their domination.” Notre Musique makes a point of challenging the gesture of universal humanitarian concern on the part of Europeans who visit Sarajevo. The film does not make a moral statement (after the fact); instead, it explores the possibilities of dealing with the aftermath of war. As Godard points out: “It wasn’t just a film we made about a war zone—like Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo [1997], for instance, where it seemed he saw nothing in Sarajevo, or that everything he saw he knew already. And then he created a theatrical mise en scène.”30 Like Balibar, Godard suggests that Sarajevo is a metaphor for Europe since it embodies this double border, this predicament of being in-between, neither here nor there. But unlike Balibar, who claims that the ideal role for Europe is that of a “vanishing mediator,” in Godard’s film it is not the Europeans who disappear but the people of Sarajevo. In Notre Musique, we observe the inhabitants of Sarajevo going about their daily lives, but ironically it is the visitors from elsewhere—Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, French author and sculptor Pierre Bergounioux, French architect Gilles Péqueux, and French writer and philosopher JeanPaul Curnier—who are allowed to make “profound” statements about the past suffering of the people of Sarajevo. The film contrasts the clichés of the European intellectuals who attend the Rencontres européennes du livre with the expressionless faces of the Bosnians who serve them champagne, escort them to their conference, or drive them to various locations as they spout ideas like: “Violence leaves a permanent scar. To see your fellow man turn on you leaves a feeling of deep-rooted horror.” The question we have to ask is: if this is no longer an appeal to immediate action, then whom do these moral judgments serve? Notre Musique does not, however, simply criticize European intellectuals for identifying with or projecting their values onto the people of BosniaHerzegovina. Instead, it examines the complex historical, geopolitical, and aesthetic correspondences made by Europeans, Americans, and the global

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news media in order to understand pertinent geopolitics and to historicize and legitimize intervention in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although most of the film is set in postwar Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995) is linked via metaphor and analogy to World War II and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such correspondences have proven to be quite controversial: for example, Chantal Ackerman and Andrew Sarris accused Godard of being anti-Semitic when comparing Palestinians to victims of genocide (and implicitly, Jews to Nazis). However, it was not Godard who invented such connections. In their appeal for intervention, the international news media likened Slobodan Milošević to Hitler and the genocide of eight thousand Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica to the Holocaust, and in his poem “Speech of the Red Indian,” Mahmoud Darwish drew parallels between the Native American experience of colonization and dispossession of their land and the Palestinians’ traumatic experience of displacement and exile. Lines from this poem are even recited by Native American actors inside the bombed-out Vijećnica library, addressed to what appears to be a librarian registering donated books in an empty room.31 The confrontation between Judith and Mahmoud Darwish allows us to rethink the relation of subject, other, and enemy, and the possibility of coexistence even when facing the interwoven, traumatic histories of killers and victims. However, it is worth noting that Godard’s cinematic efforts aim to expose how historical allegories have been used to provide a perspective to a global community that is unacquainted with the situation of certain communities, regions, and ethnic populations, not to anchor contemporary politics on an established moral paradigm of historical victims and victimizers. It was the combination of these two analogies that caused so much controversy, since it pointed to a fundamental asymmetry: Bosnian Muslims slaughtered by Serbs (though both communities were victims of atrocities during World War II) could be compared to the Jews during the Holocaust, but Palestinians killed or displaced by Israelis could not. Godard makes this problematic comparison even more explicit in the lecture he delivers on image and text for the Rencontres européenes du livre, pointing out that during the Holocaust, concentration camp inmates labeled those who had given up the will to live “Muselmänner” (Muslims), and adding that “the Jews became the stuff of fiction, the Palestinians, of documentary” (figures 4.5–4.6). Subtler than Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie

FIGURE 4.5

In his lecture in the middle of “Le Purgatoire” section of the film Godard juxtaposes two images: one is of the Jews coming to Israel.

FIGURE 4.6

In his lecture in the middle of “Le Purgatoire” section of the film Godard juxtaposes two images: one is of Palestinians being moved out of Israel.

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Miéville, and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1976), which juxtaposed an image of Golda Meir next to Hitler, such claims question the limits of representation or the limitations of historical and political analogy. Even though Godard distinguishes between fact or document and narrative fiction, given his own treatment of documentary and fiction footage in “L’Enfer” it is unclear what such a distinction means. Especially when Godard adds, right after these images from “L’Enfer” are shown (one on top of the other): “We say that facts speak for themselves. But Céline said, ‘Sadly, not for much longer.’ ” And in his lecture on image and text, shot-reverse-shot never becomes a form of suturing—it remains only juxtaposition. However, juxtaposition does not amount to a form of synthesis; rather, it establishes the uncertainty between oppositions and correspondences. The juxtaposition of the photographic image of Jews coming to the British Protectorate of Palestine in 1948 next to Palestinians leaving what became the state of Israel the same year suggests that there is both a distinct opposition and a certain likeness between these two images. Furthermore, as Godard explains: As soon as you freeze an image in a movement that includes twenty-five others, you notice in a shot you have filmed that suddenly there are billions of possibilities; all the possible. Permutations represent thousands of possibilities[;] you notice that there are entire worlds contained within [a] woman’s movement, corpuscles, galaxies, different each time, and that you can travel from one to another in a series of explosions.32

In the same lecture at the Rencontres européennes du livre Godard argues that: “shot and reverse-shot are part of the basic grammar of film, but examine closely these two images from [Howard] Hawks [His Girl Friday, 1940], you will see that it’s the same thing twice.” Godard goes on to repeat an earlier assertion made by Darwish (in the interview with Judith) about the truth having two faces. Yet while Darwish points out that the only reason the world is interested in the plight of the Palestinians is because they have the Jews as their enemy, Godard juxtaposes two photographs from the Holocaust. On the first photograph taken of a man during the Holocaust, the word juif ( Jew) is written on the top left-hand corner, but written on the second photograph of a man taken inside a concentration camp, we see the word musulman (Muslim).33 It is not the image but the text that causes

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us to compare and contrast these two images. As Godard puts it, “the field of text had already covered the field of vision.” These two images, however, are not placed next to each other; between them the pan of a woman’s arm occurs, ending with her holding a photograph that we do not see. Instead of offering a reading of these photographs, the film interjects shots of spectatorship to draw attention to the practice of reading images and the process by which images or figures become legible. Samuel Weber calls this point of legibility, “the ‘critical point’ . . . in which it reaches a phenomenal intensity  .  .  . that erases and effaces itself, although not without leaving traces, out of which something called ‘history’ is pieced together.” This legibility is set on a constellation of “individual and dividual, singular and multiple [relations], but [it is] never simply generalizable in the manner of concepts.”34 When earlier in the film (during Godard’s lecture) after the image of the “Muselmänner” appears, we see a young man holding a photograph that Godard has used to illustrate his comment, “the image is joy, but beside it lies the void.” The photograph is of a theatrical image of death holding the mask of death from Eisenstein’s never-completed film Que Viva Mexico (shot in 1930). Both figures are common emblems used to personify death, yet this time they are captured in the same frame—here, there are no easy analogies to be made, only a correspondence between subjects (of humanity or inhumanity), nonsubjects (death or bare life), enemies, victims, spectators, and the invisible witness (the camera). Notre Musique demonstrates that the relation of victim to victimizer is not stable with respect to ethnic, religious, or national identities; rather, such boundaries are tenuous, open to multiple border-crossings, continual gestures of “piecing together” histories, filmic aesthetics, technologies, and correspondences. As Judith Butler notes: No political ethics can start from the assumption that Jews monopolise the position of victim. “Victim” is a quickly transposable term: it can shift from minute to minute, from the Jew killed by suicide bombers on a bus to the Palestinian child killed by Israeli gunfire. The public sphere needs to be one in which both kinds of violence are challenged insistently and in the name of justice.35

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The problem arises when such acts of violence cannot be considered equally atrocious, when they emerge as a complex set of issues regarding history, territory, belonging, national identity, nationalism, religious beliefs, and geopolitics. Levinas explains: “There is a certain measure of violence necessary in terms of justice; but if one speaks of justice, it is necessary to allow institutions and the state; to live in a world of citizens, and not only in the order of the Face to Face.”36 But if we agree with Levinas that all suffering is useless then how can we support a system of justice that requires violence as a means to an end? Is there such a thing as violence without suffering (see chapter 3)? By focusing on the here and now (the actual), “Le Purgatoire” suspends such judgments. Rather than flowing toward some virtual (mythic) past or toward a possible image of the future, it presents (in the sense of making present) various attempts at constructing or reconstructing a common experience and shared or comparable values. But it also presents us with just as many impasses. “Le Purgatoire” wanders from one image, place, situation, and philosophical contemplation to the next. However, by bringing people from Israel, Palestine, the Americas, and Western and Eastern Europe to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Godard locates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the genocide of Native Americans, and the legacy of the Nazis in this purgatory between an undetermined past and an indeterminate future. This section of the film focuses on transitions—passing trams, street scenes, moving vehicles, dialogues, exchanges—and transitory spaces—airports, trams, marketplaces, streets, lecture halls, waiting rooms, bars, and the inside of cars. It is not clear how this section of the film is ordered, how or why it moves from one place to another. “Le Purgatoire” begins with the two trams crossing paths in what seems to be the early morning or late afternoon and is accompanied by the opening bars to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” But the music of Tchaikovsky (and with it the sounds of war) fades, and the hum of a running motor accompanied by the visual shot of a Sarajevo taxicab (at nighttime) quickly replaces it. This nighttime scene is replaced by the sound and image of an Air Bosnia plane that has presumably just landed, which again is replaced by the opening dialogue between Godard and the fictional character Ramos Garcia (played by Rony Kramer). In this case, rather than seeing who is speaking, we watch the close-up of a woman’s feet and legs walking toward Godard and Ramos. The film emphasizes movement, but it is a movement without a logical order or

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direction: settings change and time alters from day to night and back again. But we are given no compass to understand the temporal ordering of scenes. Throughout “Le Purgatoire” we hear the sounds of car horns, traffic, trams, and ambient street noise. Scenes seem to take place between passing movements that are themselves presented as a series of de-chronologized moments. The first scene in “Le Purgatoire”—the dialogue between Ramos and Godard—takes place at a bar in the Sarajevo airport. In this scene, we find Godard sitting, drinking a beer, waiting for someone to arrive. Yet the conversation quickly shifts from the reason why Godard has come to Sarajevo to Henri Curiel, the Egyptian-born Italian Jew who founded and led the Democratic Movement for National Liberation until he was expelled from Egypt in 1950. Ramos admits that his father’s life trajectory was similar to that of Curiel. Like Curiel, he was part of the radical left that immigrated to France and championed third world liberation movements, including the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria and other anticolonial groups. But more importantly, Curiel was the first to initiate peace talks between Israel and Palestine before he was assassinated in France in 1978. By recalling Curiel and the role that radical Jewish-Egyptians played in Middle Eastern politics and the peace process, Godard grounds “Le Purgatoire” on the possibility of reconciliation. But reconciliation, like dialogue, requires mediators and translators such as Curiel. And the role of the translator, the intermediary, or the traveler whom Balibar “associates with the essential function of the intellectual” is challenged in the second scene when one of the Bosnian translators and guides poses the question: “Why don’t humane people start revolutions?” Godard and Bergounioux answer: “because [ pause] humane people make libraries [ pause] and cemeteries.” Godard, Bergounioux, Darwish, Goytisolo, and the other intellectuals in the film argue that there is a difference between those who engage in events (those who fight wars) and those who make history or write poetry (make monuments, make sense of, qualify, and judge human actions). The question is not whether events or experiences can be translated into language, narrative, or images—they can. The real problem has to do with what such translations or mediations can achieve. As Weber observes: “Translation thus suggests a conception of medium that would be very different from that of the transparent interval between two fixed points. Instead of diaphanous transmission and

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transparency, translation brushes up against a past and in so doing opens itself to the future.”37 The film presents itself as just such a medium, featuring Darwish, who is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and French but speaks to the Israeli journalist in Arabic while she responds in Hebrew. Similarly, Goytisolo who is fluent in Arabic and French speaks only in Spanish but is translated into French by Ramos. As exiles, Darwish (from Palestine) and Goytisolo (from Spain under Franco) use language as a bridge to connect imaginary or potential visions of the past to possible futures. Yet neither past nor future can be a fixed point as each is always subject to translation, mediation, and possible reconciliation; thus, the poets’ relation to homecoming or return can only exist through metaphor.

BRIDGING The great Stone bridge which, according to the ideas and the pious intentions of the Grand Vezir from Sokolvići, was meant to link the two parts of the empire, and “for the love of God” make easier the passage from West to East and from East to West, was now in fact cut off from both East and West and abandoned like a stranded ship or a deserted shrine. . . . Now the bridge in reality no longer linked anything save the two parts of the town and those dozen or so villages on the one or the other side of the Drina. —Ivo Andrić, Bridge on the Drina

As a regime of knowledge production, Balkanism relies on figurative language and metaphor. For the Ottomans, as well as for Western colonial cultures, the Balkans formed the “bridge” between the East and the West, a metaphor naturalized by Ivo Andrić, in his Nobel Prize–winning novel, The Bridge over the Drina. That metaphor of the “bridge” induces endless hermeneutical circles which transform a “bridge” into a “wall,” dividing rather than connecting. —Dušan I. Bjelić, Balkan as Metaphor

Many critics have read the central image of Notre Musique as Mostar’s Stari Most—the famous sixteenth-century Ottoman bridge that collapsed under

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heavy Croatian artillery fire in 1993 and was later reconstructed—as a metaphor for bridging the past and the future. As Gilles Péqueux summarizes: “we must restore the past to make the future possible. Combine the pain and the guilt . . . two faces and one truth, the bridge.” The metaphor of the bridge, however, does not open itself to a possible future; instead, it points to a mythic past where the Balkans marked the divide between the West and the East. A bridge is quite often the privileged metaphor applied to the Balkans—a place that was once considered a metaphorical land bridge, a virtual crossroads between Europe and Asia, Christendom and Islam, civilization and barbarism (or at least the wild frontier between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires).38 It is the site where the so-called clash of civilizations takes place. In Notre Musique, the bridge does indeed have two faces: on the one hand it represents reconciliation, return, or homecoming; on the other, the inherent notion of division or opposition present even in reconciliatory discourse. But it is not clear if there is a bridge that can connect these two sides. The bridge as metaphor places the Balkans (and in this case Bosnia-Herzegovina) in an in-between space that is neither here nor there—for Balibar it is the symbolic center of Europe but remains on its margins, while for Žižek the Balkans function as Europe’s unconscious.39 Metaphor literally transfers the signification of one appellation to another, constructing a figurative bridge between two different objects, events, shores, or people.40 Metaphor, like the bridge, therefore, requires a leap of faith: the transformation of poetic (arbitrary) relations of two different things into naturalized discourses of representation. Rather than signifying a simple connection (a unity through contact), the bridge, like the water below, also stands in-between, pointing to the separation of the two metaphorical designations whether East, West, North, or South or inserting itself between concepts like civilization and barbarism. The bridge is a form of disjuncture and contamination; by reaching across, it connects and divides, links and juxtaposes, preserves and erases. It is the act of touching that contaminates definitive meanings of North, South, East, and West, and their ethnic or national borders, thereby confusing the boundaries of self-contained entities. The Old Bridge of Mostar is one of the most overdetermined images the international media used to represent the “senseless violence” produced by ethnic nationalisms in the former Yugoslavia. But as Heidegger reminds us,

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the bridge can never be only a symbol: it is a dwelling that gathers together a complex set of relations of humans to things, locations, spaces, boundaries, and the horizon.41 It is here, before the ruined bridge, that the paths of Godard’s two Israeli protagonists ( Judith and Olga) are connected (but do not cross) and where the various discourses on ethics, history, and the possibility of open dialogue between enemies converge. But rather than celebrate the possibility of such choices, Godard challenges their implications. The scene that begins with the actual footage of the bridge collapsing into the green waters of the Neretva River has been read as bridging all of the various discourses and tensions that appear throughout the “Purgatoire” segment of the film. While many critics read the image of the bridge as a metaphor for the film, I argue that the film does not just make bridges between “L’Enfer” and “Le Paradis.” Nor does it bridge Native Americans and Palestinians, Palestinians and Bosnian-Herzegovinians, or the various ethnic groups within Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore, it does not make a bridge between Nazis and Americans or Israeli occupiers of the West Bank (as other critics have argued). The film does build bridges, but it also interrupts such analogies by placing them both in and out of context. Notre Musique simultaneously associates and disassociates events, atrocities, and iconic images, pointing to the difficulty of reading one person’s or group’s suffering in terms of another’s or equating atrocities. Instead, Godard offers his viewers a constant play and replay between the other and enemy that never manages to solidify into a clear distinction. While the decontextualized (generalized) images of war and its victims built on binary models of opposition point to similarities, these same contextualized images point to differences. The bridge marks the spot where the general (iconic image of war) confronts the singular or specific historical context of the civil war. What makes the scene of the bridge collapsing stand out is that it is the only time in the film where we hear actual sounds of warfare. Like the foundfootage sequences used in the “L’Enfer” section, the footage of the bridge is accompanied by music, but in addition we hear the sound of actual gunfire matched with the image of the collapsing Stari Most. This is also the only historical or documentary footage to appear in “Le Purgatoire.”42 But it is not clear how this documentary footage can bridge the other segments of purgatory, since it suggests that the war cannot be defined by a simple metaphor (with two faces, truths, or sides). The image of the bridge and the various ruminations in “Le Purgatoire” are far more complex. This scene

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shifts away from the memory and impact of the Bosnian Serb bombardment of, and on, Sarajevo to the Croat-Bosniak war that occurred roughly at the same time as the siege of Sarajevo. The sound of warfare creates a sound bridge between Sarajevo—where we see a woman with her child seemingly lying lifeless or sleeping on her lap—to the image of the bridge, which collapses under heavy bombardment. But this sound bridge does not connect the two images. Instead, it creates an uncertain relation between the postwar shot of the woman and child, the suffering of the children of Sarajevo (in the past), and the civil war(s) in Herzegovina (as referenced in and with the image of the bridge). It is the sound bridge (gunshots accompanied by music) itself that produces a chronological and geographical uncertainty about the images’ relation. The sequence starts with the bridge blowing up and the ambiguous image of mother and (wounded or sleeping) child and ends with the bridge haunted by ghosts of the past. But it is not a multiethnic collection of Balkan ghosts that return to haunt the ruins of the Stari Most (as seen in iconic texts by Ivo Andrić, Ismail Kadare, or Nikos Kazantzakis);43 rather, Native Americans appear at the base of the bridge. If Godard is suggesting that the vision of traditional Native Americans can stand in for Jews, Palestinians, Herzegovinian Muslims, Croats, or Serbs, it is a failed analogy. However, it does not fail because it is inoperable; in fact, it works and has been widely circulated. But it works by way of generalizing and disfiguring each image. Instead of generalizing the image of the bridge as an image of reconciliation, this scene presents us with another set of uncertainties: are the Native Americans who appear in their traditional dress a symbol of the ghostly past? If so, whose past do they present: the Native Americans, Native Americans as imagined by a Palestinian poet (Darwish’s “Speech of the Red Indian”), Palestinians, or the “natives” of Mostar? In this particular context the analogy seems to provide a critique of the image of the bridge in the background, which was at that point undergoing repair. By becoming cliché, the metaphor only works on the most generic levels. It cannot make a bridge; it only points to the confrontation of two texts: the one that Judith holds in her hand (Levinas’s Entre Nous) and the vision of Darwish’s “Speech of the Red Indian” before the Stari Most. It is not clear whether it is Judith who envisions the Native Americans before the bridge or whether this imagery is inspired by Darwish’s poem or Levinas’s ethical philosophy.

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FIGURE 4.7

From amateur video taken by a Croatian soldier as the Croatian army explodes the Old Bridge at Mostar in 1993.

FIGURE 4.8 Judith envisions Native Americans standing in front of the Old Bridge that is in the process of being reconstructed.

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One of the problems facing the former Yugoslavia and cities like Mostar (once a multiethnic community) is that each ethnic group claims to be the original occupants of a particular locality. The Bosnian and Herzegovinian Civil Wars (1992–1995) were fueled by such claims to traditional heritage. And if the city of Mostar continues to be divided along ethnic lines, then the bridge, like the ghosts of the Native Americans, only symbolizes the violence of war, the abyss between, and the partitioning or cleansing of the various ethnic groups from either side of the city. Rather than undo such obvious political analogies, Godard reveals the underlying generalizing efficacy of such correspondences. Similarly, the footage of the collapse questions the status of the bridge as a visual or philosophical metaphor for either dialogue or ethics—that is to say, as a means of reaching across to connect the past to the future, pain to guilt, victims to victimizers. In this context, Judith and Péqueux use Levinas’s Entre Nous, a philosophy of ethics that espouses the obligation to the other who suffers and dies, as the basis for their dialogue. In Entre Nous, Levinas examines how we face the other, and in the face of the other how we meet the demand of the Biblical maxim “Thou shalt not kill.” But this notion of the other remains somewhat illusive, as it cannot be reduced to the simple recognition of an other who is like me. Instead, Levinas argues, we cannot communicate with or know the other as we would an object of knowledge. The other is a relation that we have “with the absolutely exposed . . . bareness and consequently with what is alone and can undergo the supreme isolation we call death.”44 This relation is sealed by the fact that we recognize the persecution of the other. The relation with the other is, therefore, not a matter of choice but an inescapable ethical responsibility. “Ethics begins before the exteriority of the other, before other people, and, as I like to put it, before the face of the other, which engages my responsibility by its human expression, which cannot be—without being changed, immobilized—held at a distance.”45 It is the face or ethical demand of the other that frames the discussion between Judith and Péqueux as a discussion of the self as an ethical subject, who is obliged to ensure the well-being of others even though there may be no reciprocity. Judith uses Levinas’s text to question the correspondence between his notion of ethics and the historical significance of the bridge we see before us—asking questions like, “if the face symbolizes ‘thou shalt not kill,’ how can we make a face with stones?” Péqueux uses the same text to address and

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answer Judith’s questions—answering with another line from Entre Nous: “the relationship between me and the other is not symmetrical, at first the other matters little to me, but it is the other for whom I am responsible.” Although they read literally from the same page in Levinas’s text, their dialogue appears to be disconnected (asymmetrical), pointing again to the theme of miscommunication (or the need for translation). But Péqueux’s added comment—“here Muslim, there Croatian”—leaves us with the problem of identifying the other from the enemy. But ethics cannot imply choice, nor should the other as a general concept have a particular face. That is, the face should not be recognized as representing one ethnic group as opposed to another. It is not the level of recognition of difference that ultimately matters (difference exists). It is a much deeper ethical response that matters, which is not predicated on this recognition or difference. As Levinas argues, “Ethics is not a dialogue with this other who suffers, only a dialogue of the soul with itself, a coming to terms with one’s own guilt.”46 Although Levinas clearly points out that ethics prohibits a dialogue, Godard turns Levinas’s philosophy of ethics into a dialogue (showing that ethics is already a form of mediation, a form of confrontation). Godard has chosen his characters to read from “Philosophy, Justice, Love,” because it is in this chapter that we see Levinas present a limit to the order of face-to-face relations (“Thou shalt not kill”) and a limit to the love one is supposed to have for one’s neighbor. Here Levinas indicates that the question of justice—a question of right and wrong—lies at the limit of unconditional ethics and responsibility toward the other. It is Levinas’s bridge between ethics and justice (the general and the particular) that Notre Musique challenges. The fundamental confrontation in “Le Purgatoire” is not between the individual subject and his or her own guilt but between ethics and politics. Notre Musique calls on Levinas’s theory of the other in order to reveal the ethical conundrum inherent in politics that fail or purposefully set out not to give us an other to whom we are ethically obliged but an enemy to whom we owe no such moral obligation. As Levinas puts it, “there is an ethical limit to ethics.”47 Because Judith has just interviewed the poet laureate of Palestine (Mahmoud Darwish) in a previous scene, we are reminded of the statement Levinas made in a radio interview about the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians (in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in 1982) where he did not see the face of the other in the Palestinians. Instead, what he saw in

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the face of the Palestinians was “alterity,” and “in alterity,” he argued, “we can find an enemy.”48 For Levinas, the enemy does not belong to the discourse of ethics; it belongs to the realm of politics. That is, political agency separates the enemy (who has the possibility to act) from the other (who represents a state of being persecuted or being acted upon). The trauma of being acted upon is the primary relation that constitutes both the subject and the subject’s responsibility toward the other who suffers—the other represents the recognition of one’s own vulnerability in the other’s persecution or exposure to violence. Yet the problem is that this other is presented both as an invisible universality and as the historical face of Judaism: for Levinas, the other is modeled on the historical suffering of the Jews. As Judith Butler observes: If Jews are considered “elect” because they carry a message of universality, and what is “universal” in Levinas’s view is the inaugurative structuring of the subject through persecution and ethical demand, then the Jew becomes the model and instance for preontological persecution. . . . To say persecution is the essence of Judaism not only overrides agency and aggression performed in the name of Judaism but preempts a cultural and historical analysis that would have to be complex and specific through recourse to a singular preontological condition.49

By linking the suffering of the Jews under Nazism to the state of Israel, Levinas ends up preempting cultural and historical analysis in the wake of the Holocaust. His refusal to bridge ethics to politics leaves us with an aporia when we try to apply his model to the Bosnian Civil Wars: in order for Bosnian Muslims to be considered other (the persecuted) they must be likened to the history of Jewish suffering—as was the case with the genocide in Srebrenica, the massacre in Tuzla, and the bombardment of Sarajevo and Goražde. But in Herzegovina, where the fighting was mostly between the Catholic and Muslim populations, this analogy to the Holocaust was not and cannot be applied, as the two remaining ethnicities remain “enemies.” Rather than make an analogy between the state of Israel and Nazism, as in Ici et ailleurs, Notre Musique forces us to think about the Holocaust not as an ethical model but as a loaded political analogy. The politics of reading contemporary sociopolitical impasses in terms of predetermined “historical events,” as well as historical name-calling (labeling someone a “Hitler,”

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“Nazi,” “fascist,” or evoking Auschwitz, concentration camps, and ethnic genocide), serves first to distance current predicaments—setting them in the absolute past where they have already been judged (sanctioned or condemned)—and second, to install figures like Saddam Hussein, Bosnian Serbs, Islamic fundamentalists, and so forth, into an ontology of radical evil. This sets up a double irony: on the one hand, the gesture of humanizing the face of the other who suffers means making it look like those who suffered during the Holocaust; on the other hand, dehumanizing the enemy means stripping him or her of a face, and thereby our responsibility to treat him or her nonviolently. While Notre Musique confronts the problem of defining and distinguishing terms like “ethics” and “politics,” it also demonstrates that at the root of this problem is the confusion of “before” with “after” or the singular with the universal. The reconstruction of the bridge, which is equated to the reconciliation of ethnic groups in Herzegovina, as Péqueux suggests, “is like rediscovering the origin of language,” in which “before” and “after” are confused. Péqueux gives the example that before written language, in Sumer, “after” was used to speak about the past, and “before” to indicate the future. We have a similar problem with ethics and politics. If ethics is contingent on suffering (as discussed in chapter 3) then it must come after politics (a politics that is synonymous with violence and trauma), and ethics is then directed toward the future. Thus, the “before” (politics) is projected onto the future (ethics), but as Butler points out, ethics is also presented as preontological—it is before “before.” As preontological it must precede politics, but it is ironically contingent on politics to be manifest. This particular notion of ethics seems to function like an icon, which as Godard describes it, is “without movement, depth, and artifice—the sacred.” The problem with treating ethics and the suffering of the other as sacred is that it continues to confuse the singular event that happens in a specific historical past (like the Holocaust) with a universal demand—“Thou shalt not kill”—which in turn constitutes our ethical responsibility to the other. The film suggests that Levinas’s articulation of ethics neglects to analyze how the image of the face or the bridge mediates between ethics and politics. Godard likens this oversight to the cinematic technique of shot-reverse-shot:

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People think that the camera always films straight on, that they are seeing reality because they are staring at it straight on. Even a philosopher like Lévinas thinks that when you really see someone’s face you could never want to kill him. The shot-reverse-shot technique is wrong. The true reverse-shot must be more or less aligned with the two figures. . . . Lévinas often has good ideas, but when he talks about the gaze of the other that cannot be killed, the other who is such that he can’t be killed, he is doing a bad reverse-shot. Film can touch on such questions perhaps. It can be because I don’t have Lévinas’s intellectual capacity.50

While shot-reverse-shot is a basic technique in film grammar, Godard argues that rather than align the perspective of two different figures, it collapses the two into a repetition of the same. In his lecture in Notre Musique about image and text, Godard gives the example of a shot-reverse-shot in Hawks’s film His Girl Friday, where we see what appears to be Cary Grant talking to Rosalind Russell on the telephone (figure 4.9). Godard argues that you see “the same thing twice” because “the director is incapable of seeing the difference between a man and a woman,” but he observes that “it is worse with two things that are alike.” At this point he pulls out two other images: the first image is a photograph of a woman holding a child as she rides a horse. The photograph is shot through barbwire and is labeled “Kosovo,” suggesting that the woman is fleeing Kosovo under threat of violence. The second image is a detail from Giotto’s painting The Flight into Egypt (1304–1306) where we see Mary riding a donkey and carrying the infant Christ. This image is labeled “Egypt.” The two images are strikingly similar. The only difference is that in Giotto’s painting Mary and Christ are heading in the opposite direction from the mother and child in Kosovo. Godard then repeats the line about the two faces of the same truth. This time, however, the phrase is used to suggest similarities in, rather than differences of, perspective. These images focus on suffering, but the fact that they look the same suggests that there is an additional aesthetic value to how we read suffering (or the face of the one who suffers). For Godard the repetition of aesthetics of suffering does not show suffering; instead, it demonstrates the inability of the artist or photographer to see differences between two events—between the sacred and the historical (as in the case of Megalexandros). So rather than representing two truths, the aesthetic

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FIGURE 4.9 The shot-reverse-shot of Cary Grant speaking to Rosalind Russell on the telephone, from Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940).

reproduction of gestures and images is considered by Godard to be a product of accounting—adding one event to another. Yet the adding up of similar images transforms both events rather than simply adding one to the ledger of the other. For example, the Giotto painting ends up generalizing the meaning of the photograph from Kosovo, making the image seem almost untimely—uprooting it from its historical context by turning it into a replica of a sacred narrative. At the same time, the image of mother and child presumably fleeing Kosovo indicates that the suffering of mothers and children becomes something timely, and possibly political. The likeness of the two images has more to say about the visual grammar of suffering—how we recognize or read suffering—than it does about actual suffering itself. Similarly, the image of the bridge in Mostar recites a long visual and literary tradition of placing the Balkans at the crossroads of empires and civilizations, but the bridge does not “connect pain and guilt,” as Péqueux (echoing Levinas) projected. In fact, the bridge was not repaired; instead, the stones that were retrieved from the Neretva (seen numbered and placed in order in the scene where Péqueux and Judith discuss Levinas in front of

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the ruined Stari Most) were placed in a cemetery (of stones from the old bridge) rather than used for its restoration. The Stari Most was, therefore, simply reproduced to look like the original, suggesting that it “reestablishes tourism” rather than creates a dialogue between the past and the present, suffering and accountability, and between warring sides. As Godard notes: Gilles Péqueux was fired and replaced by a Croat who made a bridge like any other, constructed out of new stone clad to make it look authentic. It’s what they do on DVDs: a restoration. All the stones I filmed, which were retrieved from the river and individually numbered, weren’t used—though watching the film the viewer thinks they’re going to be. They’re now in a spot the inhabitants of Mostar call “the cemetery of stones.”51

Thus, the bridge marks the gulf, or what has become unbridgeable in our approaches to war and its aftermath. As Heidegger tells us, “there is no bridge here—only the leap.” Rather than being predicated on plain lack, signification “draws toward absence  .  .  . we are pointers pointing toward what ever withdraws, this pointing we call a sign. It points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal, the sign stays without interpretation, withdrawal is an event, [and] we are a sign that is not read.”52 The act of withdrawing ourselves from the sign disfigures both the poetics of expression and the singularity of the experience leaving traces of gestures and monuments—names, heroes, histories, and bridges with uncertain origins. These unreal bridges bear mythical burdens of history, as well as territorial and ethnic rights; they come equipped with signs that give directions from self-appointed centers of civilization; they overpass the alleged backwater of empire, progress, and geopolitics. Godard suggests that the past and the future are virtual images or fables, not unlike the shot-reverse-shot or point and counterpoint that cover up the abyss between. His characters Judith and Olga are also virtual figures that represent different possibilities: Judith focuses on the possibility of dialogue, looking at the bridge as a dwelling, a place to think about distance and location, and visits the classroom where the children of Mostar learn about their bridge—which can also be seen as the search for common ground, even if the class is ethnically segregated. Her double, Olga, seems instead to be more interested in the “dialogue of the soul with itself,” for she is the one who contemplates the relationship of the sacred to martyrdom and guilt. Yet it is not just Olga who takes the

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leap, Judith’s dialogues are also a radical gesture toward establishing ethical relations with the other (which, following Levinas, is both internal and external) and the enemy. Olga, who first appears in the film as she runs through the streets of Sarajevo, introduced by lines from José Lezama Lima’s poem “La luz es el primer animal visible de lo invisible,” now replaces Judith. Consequently, the theme of dialogue is replaced by ethics as its main focus. Yet it is the visible images of war, traces of war, and the ruins of war, the music, the audible encounters between people, the spaces they inhabit, and the play of light that point to this invisible presence of virtual (spectral) pasts and virtual (spectral) futures. It is at this juncture between the image of the bridge and an out-of-focus image of the street that marks the transition between the two characters. These two scenes are also joined with a sound bridge, and like the introduction to the sequence shot in Mostar, we are reminded of the “L’Enfer” section. This time it is not by way of found footage but a voiceover that recalls the previous royaume. We hear what seems to be an internal monologue of a woman telling us, “it is . . . like . . . an image, but a distant one. There are two people side by side. I am next to her. I have never seen her before, but I recognize myself.” The voice-over seems to link Judith and Olga, who appear in the film side by side but at a distance. The shot of Olga, however, is out of focus, and can easily be mistaken for Judith. Olga resembles Judith just enough to have confused some of the audience and even some film critics who saw them as two faces of the same person. What distinguishes the two is a thematic break that moves away from the various discussions about the possibility of reconciliation to a discussion of ethics as a dialogue with the self. This thematic break is announced by way of Olga’s direct address to the camera; however, her direct address is muted—that is, we see her lips move but we cannot hear what she is saying. Instead, we seem to hear the words “I don’t give a damn” coming through her—the result of an audio delay in the voice-over that places our hearing of her words in a 360-degree reverse shot, a close-up shot from behind Olga’s head. The voice appears unmoored from the body, and like a ghostly presence, it seems to pass through Olga rather than animate her image. Seemingly ironic, the theme of ethics is introduced with the words, “I don’t give a damn.” But Olga’s ethical dilemma does not stem from an absolute obligation to another that (or who) owes us nothing in return. Rather,

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it points to how such an obligation is predicated on an assumption that life is worth living. In a conversation with her uncle Ramos, Olga recites from the opening lines of Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”53 This question must only be thought if there is no god. Hence, while Olga may represent an ethical standpoint, ethics itself, unlike the need for dialogue, is presented as a secular discourse that casts doubt on the absolutes it is said to represent. Pure ethics can only exist without the demand “Thou shall not kill,” and the conjoined threat of eternal damnation, since these demands and threats do not ask us to be ethical; they ask us to obey, or else. Ethical demands, however, offer us the kind of certitude that Godard (in his cinematic lecture) argues can only come from the imaginary. He gives the example of Denmark’s Elsinore [Kronborg] Castle, which is deemed “nothing special” by Werner Heisenberg but becomes special when called “Hamlet’s castle” by Niels Bohr. For Godard, the identity of the real castle is uncertain (subject to renaming, new connections, and erasures) while the imaginary identification “Hamlet’s castle” offers us certitude. But the imaginary does not function as a “real image”; rather, it functions like the imago of the symbolic, where the subject is identified or, as Godard puts it, where the “field of the text has already covered the visual field.” However, the introduction of the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting in Copenhagen (1941), complicates this analogy by adding powerful political overtones, since it was in this period that Bohr was trying to assess whether Heisenberg was producing an atomic weapon for the Nazis. Simultaneously, by introducing uncertainty through Heisenberg, Godard asks us to apply the uncertainty principle to the image and the moving image. But it is this complex set of relations—between uncertainty and certainty, the real and the imaginary, shot and reverse-shot, ethics and politics—that comprises “notre musique.” In this same lecture, Olga is confronted with texts that appear in the form of images: she holds four different photographs, and each one is a title card with white writing on a black background (similar to the title cards that precede each of Notre Musique’s three kingdoms. The first card reads, “Et la deliverance?” (And deliverance?); the second, “Et la victoire?” (And victory?); the third, “Ce sera mon martyre” (That will be my martyrdom);

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and the last, “Je serai ce soir au paradis” (Tonight I will be in heaven). These texts seem to narrate (or make demands on) Olga’s fate; however, they are also quotations—in fact, they are the title cards from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which Godard referenced in Vivre sa vie (1962), where Nana Kleinfrankenheim (the prostitute played by Anna Karina) mirrors the emotional expression of Dreyers’s Joan of Arc (played by Jeanne Falconetti). Unlike Judith, who is seen “exhausting the limits of the possible,” waiting in a seemingly endless present for a dialogue to take place because she assumes life is worth living, Olga wants to act as if there are no sides— whether that means before or after, heaven or hell.54 But the film does not leave us hanging around in “Le Purgatoire,” nor does it allow us to dwell on the bridge; it takes a leap into “Le Paradis” with Olga who heeds the call of ethics and asks her fellow Israelis to die with her for peace—she is taken for a terrorist and shot by an Israeli military sharpshooter. It is this gesture (an appeal for peace in Israel), which is suspended between messianic hope (for dialogue or reconciliation) and the existential questioning of such hope (ethics), that produced such strong reactions from critics. By enacting the confrontation of hope with skepticism, the belief that life is worth living with the possibility of living as if there were no god (no fear of judgment or moral demands), the film juxtaposes the discourse of ethics, the sacred, and politics, demonstrating the way these discourses and the images used to present them end up actualizing and modifying each other. For instance, at the close of “Le Purgatoire,” we are reminded that the rhetorical trope of “two truths” can be attributed to alleged enemies (Israelis and Palestinians, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Croats), abstractions (the possible and the impossible, the visible and the invisible, life and death), or forms of political action (dialogue or radical acts, shot-reverse-shot). The coupling of truths is doubled and redoubled but always returns in a modified form. The process of repetition or doubling is itself performed through the image of “return,” which is marked by both arrival and departure. The actual arrival and departure of the cast of characters to and from Sarajevo is marked by this uncertainty. The first image we see inside the Sarajevo airport (at the end of “Le Purgatoire”) is the reappearance of a question mark (the bright yellow neon sign indicating where to find the information desk). But this return is different in that we see neither Judith nor Olga leaving Sarajevo—as we saw Judith arrive. Instead,

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FIGURE 4.10 The DVD that Olga gives Godard before his departure from Sarajevo foreshadows her death.

we only see the double image of Olga’s face reflected in the shiny surface of a DVD. As Godard presumably waits for his plane’s departure, he is handed a digital videodisk containing a film shot by Olga. When he opens the case we see her image reflected on the disk (figure 4.10). This double image provides the viewer with a spectral image that either foreshadows Olga’s death or reflects back on her actual life from outside of time (before or after her death). The image makes it appear as if there is a gapping hole where her left eye should be, recalling other images of death (skulls and masks of skulls) that we have seen throughout the film. It is as if she is confronting her own image (not to be confused with the soul’s confronting its own guilt), but it is not clear which of the two images is the real one—for both are images. It is the interval, the relation of the two (both before and after), as Godard suggests, that provides us with the real image—a disjuncture, the gesture of movement, uncertainty, or an aporia. Yet one should note that it is Godard who produces this uncertainty by

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holding the DVD at an angle so that we can see these two images confront each other. In so doing, he returns us from the general (a narrative of the return of the same / certitude) to the particular (repetition as difference / uncertainty), confounding a clear association of the image with representation. As Elena del Rio writes: Godard strips the image of its representational properties, while foregrounding the incantatory qualities that turn the image into a disclosing event or gesture. Godard is not interested in the visible as a static aesthetic form or fixed ideological construct; rather, his attention to bodily gesture and movement acts out an involvement with the visible as a mode of constant becoming, where figures come into being from a latent ground of visibility and virtuality.55

What makes this double image stand out is that it juxtaposes these doubles or reflections within the same frame, and unlike Eisenstein’s image of death holding a mask of death, this image is made to move with Godard’s own hand movements. Similar to the establishing shot of the film, this is a still image that moves, and is created through and as movement itself—“the latent ground of visibility and virtuality.”

“LE PARADIS”: IT IS LIKE AN IMAGE La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. —Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences56

Una antigua leyenda de la India nos recuerda la existencia de un río, cuya afluencia no se puede precisar. Al final su caudal se vuelve circular y comienza a hervir. Una desmesurada confusión se observa en su acarreo, desemejanzas, chaturas, concurren con diamantinas simetrías y con coincidentes ternuras. Es el Puraná, todo lo arrastra, siempre parece estar

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confundido, carece de análogo y de aproximaciones. Sin embargo, es el río que va hasta las puertas del paraíso. —José Lezama Lima, Confluencias57

Paradise is not situated on the margins of Europe in some future Sarajevo but on the banks of Lake Geneva—the neutral center of Europe and the capital of international banking.58 It also happens to be Godard’s backyard, and he makes this connection visually obvious in the prelude to “Le Paradis.” Godard is pictured tending to his garden when he receives a phone call from Ramos who informs him that Olga has died. Rather than just hear this news, Godard accompanies this story with a slow traveling shot that pans over the vivid red, pink, blue, purple, and yellow geraniums in his garden and then fades to black, revealing briefly an image of a woman’s body lying on the ground. The insertion of found footage is once again reminiscent of the establishing shot of the film (and “L’Enfer”), since it also appears overexposed and color-saturated. But this time we are sure that the woman in the footage is dead because her face is covered with a white sheet. This image—revealed only for a few seconds—dissolves back into darkness before we enter “Le Paradis,” which is lush and green. Rather than sharply distinguish “Le Purgatoire” from “Le Paradis,” the minimalist piano music and natural sounds that accompany the camera panning over the flowers in Godard’s garden serve as a sound bridge between the two segments. Only when we arrive in “Le Paradis” do we no longer see flowers; instead, we see Olga dressed in bright red (as she was the first time she appeared walking down the streets of Sarajevo). The muted, fleeting conversations and melancholic musical excerpts of “Le Purgatoire” have been replaced by natural sounds—birds, insects, rain falling in the woods, running water, waves on the shore, and wind through the forest—and the minimalist, yet more spiritually inspired, music of Arvo Pärt and David Darling. However, it is hard to tell if these nature sounds are diegetic or extra-diegetic, since both composers use natural sound in their work. Furthermore, “Le Paradis” is framed by two extra-diegetic (acousmatic) voice-overs. At the beginning of the ten-minute sequence, we hear the echo of the voice-over we have already heard in “Le Purgatoire,” linking the two protagonists ( Judith and Olga). The lines—“There are two people standing side by side. I am next to her. I’ve never seen her before, but I recognize myself. It is like an image, but a distant one. But I have no memory of

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all that. It must be far from here. Or later on”—are partially repeated. Rather than link the two characters, the repetition of these lines seems to confuse our sense of time and our ability to associate this voice subject with a visual subject. It is not clear whether this echo comes before or after the previous scene in “Le Purgatoire.” For instead of associating this voice with the image of Olga (as the previous scene did), the repetition of these lines by the same woman’s voice now distances the voice from the image. Olga is seen walking through the lush green woods, but rather than provide the intimacy of an internal monologue, the voice now seems to comment on Olga from a distance, much like a conventional voice-over. However, this is no ordinary voice-over, which offers its authority or omnipotence while remaining unseen.59 Instead, this voice whispers, reciting incomplete thoughts; it is repetitive and indecisive. It echoes the previous scene’s uncertainty about identity (of the self ) and identification with another or the other. But the mere repetition of these lines, over a deep focus shot, ungrounds the previous articulation of the voice that links Olga to Judith and to the subject of an internal monologue—that is to say, a subjective perspective that is objectified. Instead, the voice now remains an acousmatic (disembodied) subject: Olga is simply nearby, not the subject with which the voice helps us to identify. Yet by virtue of its acousmatic presence and placement next to non-diegetic music and natural sounds, the voice makes us question what, in fact, we take for diegetic sound. Could the sounds of nature played over the scene (birds, insects, running water, etc.) also be sound objects? The confusion over the location and subjectivity of the voice also discourages the association of natural sounds with the natural settings they animate in “Le Paradis.” This unmoored voice points to itself as a recording, possibly, of the dead Olga, an echo of the past, or a reflection on death from outside of death. But as a recording, it undermines any feelings of intimacy we may have established with the voice, rendering it uncanny. These recorded or repeated words point to the impossibility of representing death—death may be certain, but it cannot have an image or any form of representation. The echoes of nature, affective music, and the recording of the human voice are rendered unnatural, undead. Contributing to this uncanny effect, the images of paradise are vivid, lush, and tranquil while paradise itself is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.

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The gates of paradise are not guarded by St. Peter but by American Marines who play the “Marines’ Hymn” on a cheap transistor radio—“If the Army and the Navy / Were to look on Heaven’s scenes / They would find the streets are guarded / by the United States Marines.” This vision of paradise is not free from the biases of new world order politics and the discourse of Pax Americana. “Le Paradis” is as exclusive as Club Med, but also claustrophobic. A Marine stamps Olga’s wrist before she is allowed to enter, and all of the Marines guard the gates with automatic rifles, wearing 1940s-style uniforms. There is no view of open space or sky, and paradise is shot entirely in the overgrown, green wooded area around and on the edge of Lake Geneva. Its inhabitants do not bathe in the Word of God but read pulp fiction: one man reads David Goodis’s Street of No Return—which in French is titled Sans espoir de retour (No hope of return)—and the closing lines of the film are from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely,60 only that Velma (the novel’s femme fatale) is replaced with Olga (the film’s martyr). These obvious references to pulp fiction cast a dark shadow not only on paradise in and of itself but also on paradise as an image or metaphor to describe the sacred. Notre Musique’s vision of paradise demonstrates how such visions tend to project historically specific contingencies inscribed in religious doctrine and religious iconography onto the unknown (for example, Dante’s trilogy or the religious iconography used by Godard in his lecture). Such a vision can only be an anamorphosis of a certain kind. As Mondzain puts it: “The figure of death cannot reveal itself in the negative to become, miraculously, the figure of life. It can only lose itself in another figure, that of the death of death.”61 Godard’s vision of paradise is both socially exclusive and deeply influenced by worldly politics—it represents rather than imagines a certain truth. This return of the political forces us to confront the various aporias that appear throughout “Le Purgatoire”—between ethics and politics, imaginary certitude and uncertainty, the traces of the real or imaginary true (the ideal), and simulation or the image as deception (idolatry). But we are not left with an iconic image like the “Madonna of Cambria,” which Godard describes as “l’icône [ pause] pas de mouvement, pas de profondeur, au aucune illusion, le sacré” (the icon, without movement, without depth or artifice, the sacred) in his lecture scene. Rather, we see Olga in close-up, looking off onto another horizon.

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THE POETICS OF CONFRONTATION The image is joy; besides it lies the void. All the power of the image can only be expressed though it. —Jean-Luc Godard, Notre Musique

Representation makes ideas visible through images, but it cannot contain the moving image’s ability to circulate, modulate, transform, and disfigure the idea itself. This does not mean that Notre Musique denounces all images, identities, or representations as distortions; rather, the film does not engage in practices of evaluation, judgment, and identification that embrace any one representation over another. On the contrary, it forces various confrontations of images, representations, and ideas. It engages multiple forms of montage in an attempt to show that there is no one image, quality, perception, or concept (of suffering, war, good, evil, national identity, justice, right, and so forth), only a relation of images, qualities, perceptions, and concepts among themselves.62 The poetics of confrontation, therefore, does not end up positing ideas—making political, ethical, aesthetic, or philosophical claims—or replacing them with images.63 What it does instead is present ethics as a form of thinking, a poetics of relations. By showing how thought is created out of an assemblage of images, sounds, and lighting effects, Notre Musique exposes how images have been used to reduce thinking to some form of prejudged dogmatic, orthodox, or moral image of thought. That is, it does not mistake this creative assemblage of perceptions, representations, and recognitions with truth. Instead, it offers us clichéd images and quotations, overexposed footage, and even clichéd philosophy demonstrating how commonsense truths about war, justice, retribution, or reconciliation can only amount to conflicting sets of relations (aesthetic, political, ethical, and philosophical). In Notre Musique, confrontation occurs between moral positions, aesthetics, and politics, foregrounding a series of dilemmas generated by the various processes of identifying right from wrong, good from evil, just from unjust, and human from inhuman. This results in a series of questions: If we accept the concept of universal human rights then how do we enforce such rights without resorting to violence, which ends up categorically defining one group as inhuman (not worthy of those same rights)?64 If all suffering is unjustifiable, then how can

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we respond to the suffering of others without the use of force, which we in turn justify through social abstractions such as the state or international law?65 How do we produce art that provokes a sensible response—which is emotionally invested yet not so overrun with emotion as to obscure the full complexity of any given situation and promote a predetermined reaction? While Notre Musique does not provide answers to such dilemmas, it also does not treat these issues in the abstract, where they can be dismissed with easy moralism (by simply redrawing generic differences between what is human and inhuman, just and unjust) or equally easy relativism (by claiming that there is no ethical, just, or thoughtful response to the radical singularity generated by specific differences). With Notre Musique, Godard once again directs his meditation on such dilemmas to the civil wars in BosniaHerzegovina, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Europe’s complicity in the Nazi Holocaust. But, unlike his previous reflections on Bosnia-Herzegovina ( Je vous salue, Sarajevo, 1993, and For Ever Mozart, 1996), the Palestine-Israeli conflict (Ici et ailleurs, 1976), and the question of coming to terms with the Holocaust (Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988–1998, and Éloge de l’amour, 2001), Notre Musique is far less didactic. Rather than making controversial visual analogies (such as juxtaposing Golda Meir and Hitler) or showing what appear to be Serbian paramilitary soldiers kicking (presumably Bosnian Muslim) civilians during the civil war (as he did in Je vous salue, Sarajevo), Notre Musique does not appeal to our sensibilities by presenting us with analogies or oppositions. Instead, the film asks us to think about how to break this vicious cycle of violence, suggesting that such analogies and oppositions only fuel the cycle by producing new modes of analogy (that is to say, new “Hitlers”) and opposition. Even if Godard recycles images and quotations that he used in previous films to provoke a sense of moral outrage, in Notre Musique he does not advocate any political agenda outside the politics of critical thought. Instead, the film ruminates on the problematic relation of ethics to politics by examining how the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, and the Holocaust have been continually framed and reframed by journalists, historians, philosophers, and artists. In their attempts to make sense of the present they make correspondences between the present and the past, but each new correspondence transforms the image, quality, and meaning of these events. As a result of numerous correspondences, the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and

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the Holocaust have become inextricably linked. Through the interplay of media, critical thinking, and moral philosophy, these events have been installed into a network of correspondences driven by similitude and analogies that link Serbs to Nazis, European Jews to Palestinians, and the Holocaust to the state of Israel.66 What the film does, however, is directly respond to international outcries for justice that are framed as general differences—where the “for” and “against,” good and evil, right and wrong are always already determined by appellations like “forces of good,” “axis of evil,” “radical evil,” “rogue states,” “terrorist states,” “making the world safe for democracy,” and images of victims, victimizers, and their champions, which are clearly identified by a label or likeness to another image. By treating the image as a moralizing image, the image slips into dogma because the moralizing image turns the image into a transcendent object—an identity (evil, the victim). The repetition and re-assemblage of images, texts, sound objects, voices, and music reveal underlying practices of representation that prejudge events, opening up a space for ethics and thought. Since cinema is more than a mere image of thought (an act of demonstration and signification), it also is a process that reveals its own fabrication of images and sounds, relations, and ordering of time. That is, cinema can visualize (make present) its own devices of fabrication, thus demonstrating how modes of signification are also what Deleuze calls “powers of the false.” Aside from the ethical and conceptual practice of cinema, Godard reminds us that the making of cinema is deeply connected to commercial interests. Because cinema is a speculative enterprise, it is designed to appeal to consumers; as Godard puts it, cinema “boils down to entertainment.” This boiling down to entertainment positions ethics and philosophical thought in direct relation to commerce and consumption. But in the case of representing traumatic events of the magnitude of the Holocaust or the Siege of Sarajevo, profit, politics, and entertainment are concealed by the greater demand that cinema adhere to conventional ethical standards— where the question of ethics is already foreclosed, as in the case of Welcome to Sarajevo. The work of Godard proves that the image is not however, an a priori given of representation but rather a structure elaborated by the filmic economy itself. That is, the image ceaselessly reforms itself and is reformed with figures, which are also always reinventing themselves or being reinvented.67 Though the question of the entertainment value, ethics, and politics of representation may lie at the heart of the debates as to whether

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or not cinematic depictions of war or violence result in their aestheticization and thus romanticization, the moving image is never bound to such economies. Cinema cannot engage with such representations, identifications, or memories without transfiguring them, making visible the various layers of time. It is the repetition and variation of images, sounds, and citations that prevents us from reducing these convergences into a metaphorical rendering of identity, the past, or memory. Deleuze describes the work of repetition as “a work of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.”68 The repetition of images, phrases, sounds, and citations produces also a thought-cinema. But rather than thinking through images (establishing relations), this type of cinematic reflection requires that we consider the assumptions these various relations are making. The work of repetition cannot claim to give us a new image of truth or to resurrect some historical reality; repetition suspends the very principle of reality, by pointing out that these convergences of images, sounds, and texts are neither authentic nor stable. What we are left with is a process that summons the logic of the very relations it sets up. Whether he is aware of it or not, Godard’s assemblages—of texts, soundtracks, music, and images— do not simply fetishize the image, nor do they undermine the impact that these images, sounds, or words exert upon the viewer. Instead Notre Musique aims more toward a mixture of experimentation and critical thought than judgment. It asks us to think about how can we judge what is the other from what is the enemy when both depend on proximity and both practice opposition through distancing or universalizing.

EPILOGUE The Politics of Confrontation

She was softening, melting, collapsing onto the sand. And a beast was stepping towards her dragging the sea behind him— light in step as a dancer, white as a boulder, a snowy mountain, a ship’s sail, a lie. —Moniza Alvi, “Europa and the Bull”

The phenomenon of “political modernity”—namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. —Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe

I

n “Europa and the Bull” (2008), Moniza Alvi associates “the lie” with whiteness, emphasizing how “white” has been imbued with racial connotations since the late eighteenth century.1 In her poem, the lie and the bull have become synonymous and are described as “Orchardwhite, / violet-white, / rose-white.” Yet the final line of the stanza—“not

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white at all”—implies that the “white lie” of the bull is, in fact, a set of monumental lies. For Alvi, the sexualization and racialization of this “white lie” minimizes the lies we circulate about rape, abduction, immigration, and cultural differences inside what is now called Europe—which, as she also reminds us, is predicated on a myth relating to sexual assault, kinship, territorial conquest, and the euphemistic names that poets, novelists, and historians give to events like sexual assault or concepts like identity. Yet, as the poem suggests, it is not enough simply to demythologize the long history of “white lies” used to justify violence and power of and in Europe. Demythologizing may push us toward a deeper understanding of violence—acts of radical destruction or groundlessness—but it often also leads us back to identity politics; to new divisions that demark the destructive from the affirmative, victims from victimizers; and to new calls for weeding out “bad” elements, for punishing rogue states or entire ethnic groups. In the last few years there has been a surprising return in public discourse to the labeling of these “bad elements” as xenophobic bigots, primitive, tribal, or ignorant villagers, fascists or right-wing zealots. Yet there is little attention given to understanding why these elements have expressed such hostility and anger. This sense of shifting borders, uncertainty, and even deep feelings of anger pervades contemporary European experience, and it has produced many reactionary responses that repeat such identitarian practices—a return of and to myths of national origin, national purity, and the idea of Europe as a fortress that must be protected against invasion. For instance, rather than carefully considering the political and social climate in which the attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, and the targeted attack of the editor and eight other staff employees of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo ( January 7, 2015) took place in France, or why there is a larger percentage of French citizens of Middle Eastern descent joining radical Islamic groups than other European nations,2 the response by French president François Hollande and the French government was to defend the Republic and republican values, declare that France was “at war against terrorism ( Jihadist terrorism which threatens the whole world and not just France),” decree martial law, seal the borders, and conduct thousands of raids on and arrests in mostly Muslim communities.3 But the French government went even further by attempting to amend the French Constitution and increase governmental authority to combat terrorism, including proposals to strip dual citizens of their French citizenship (if convicted of terrorism), expand

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surveillance, and detain suspects for 144 hours without charges. Coupled with the attacks in Paris and then in Brussels on March 22, 2016, the ongoing refugee crisis (with individuals and families seeking asylum in Europe coming from war, persecution, and severe economic deprivation primarily in the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe) has met with similar reactions: the complicated negotiations among European leaders to respond to the refugee crisis in a unified and systematic manner gave way to widespread criticism about the inadequate handling of the refugee crisis by European leaders, particularly the lack of thought put into how the influx of refugees would affect European populations. German chancellor Angela Merkel has been singled out in this criticism when her vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, told the Social Democratic Party, “Germany will receive more than a million refugees this year.”4 It is this anger and frustration with European government’s want of adequate plans to deal with refugees paired with the ever-increasing austerity measures already in place within Europe that has helped to fuel mass protest movements like the Brexit—which, much to the surprise of even some of those British citizens who voted for Great Britain to leave the European Union, narrowly won the popular vote on June 23, 2016. Frontline countries like Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Italy, and Greece are caught in a bind: they are among the financially least capable of dealing with large numbers of refugees, and at the same time they are being confronted with growing pressure from the populations of the wealthier northern European states to close their borders to more refugees. As a result, these nations have changed from being transit states to housing and caring for the onslaught of the refugees from wars advocated and supported by European states. The overwhelming response on the part of many of the frontline states (particularly on the eastern borders of Europe) has been to block and deport refugees— often by using force. There is no singular or clear logic or ground on which calls for division, expulsion, rejection, and containment are justified. This sense of groundlessness that gives shape to resurgent nationalisms does not stem solely from external threats to Europe or from the “non-Europeans” within Europe; it also emanates from the very place that gave us the myth of Europa. The Greeks, who voted in a referendum to refuse to pay the country’s European creditors (in the summer of 2015) as a desperate attempt to end the draconian austerity measures placed on them by the IMF, the European Union, and

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the European Central Bank, are now being threatened with financial warfare: in exchange for yet another bailout, the IMF has demanded that the Greeks privatize government assets, raise taxes, reduce pensions, and shrink the economy, all of which will most likely provoke mass emigration of qualified and globally competitive Greeks and drive those too poor to leave further into poverty. Ironically, it is this long history of violence, which Alvi evokes, that often serves as the groundwork for identity politics—creating subjects (out of separation anxiety), heroes, victors, victims, victimizers—and therefore transforms brute violence into something that might not, on the surface, look like violence (moral right, justification, retribution, protection, preemption, etc.). In a recent discussion with Srećko Horvat, Yanis Varoufakis, and Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek invokes Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, where she writes that “Auschwitz was no instructional institution,” meaning that surviving Auschwitz did not turn victims “into saints who have become better people for the experience”; in other words, there was nothing redeeming about Auschwitz.5 Or as Žižek puts it, “there is nothing liberating in extreme suffering, Auschwitz was in this sense an ethical catastrophe.”6 For Žižek, the victim’s universal empathy for those who suffer is also a “white lie.” As Russian Ark, O Megalexandros, Notre Musique, and the performances and films of Marina Abramović have shown, the experience of suffering cannot alone constitute an ethical subject that stands for or against Europe. Ethics must also question the way that suffering is aesthetized and politically deployed. Therefore, it must also involve the practice of questioning that allows for the attribution of subjectivity— whether in the form of opposition between Europa and her nemesis; analogy between the mythic Europa and contemporary refugees, migrants, or displaced peoples; iconic resemblances; or narratives of inclusion and exclusion (identity politics). The works I have analyzed throughout this book have in common a certain relentlessness: a refusal to take sides, to provide us with easy moralism or “new” subjects while returning to the same old politics of analogy, opposition, identity politics, and resemblances to past historical events. Instead, they give us radical politics—one that is always unstable, subject to modulation or transformation, and never free from ungrounding the terms we have taken as self-evident, essential, or universal. Pasolini labeled this type of cinema cinema impopolare (unpopular cinema)—unpopular because it unthinks conventional expectations and truisms

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and thus makes readers and spectators feel uncomfortable with the ideological, psychological, or sexual narratives they may have used to identify themselves.7 Mythopoetic cinema refutes attempts to revert to the myth of Europa as an origin story signifying violation (Europe’s violation of its others or enemies) that ends up extending this violation to contemporary sexual, geopolitical, and immigration policies. Such claims to authenticity (whether nationalist or genealogical) only lead us back to a practice of identification that is based on the logic of analogy and opposition. The return to a myth of origin fixes us within representational and narrative forms of identification. Rather than insisting on identification, even the classification of the very mode of critique (dialectical materialism or symbolism, opposition or analogy), mythopoetic cinema produces a strategy to unthink the perpetual branding of movements, ideas, and individuals (for example, as European and non-European). It is a call for a radical critique of identity politics. By recalling the mythic figure or the narrative of origin, this cinematic strategy does not simply reproduce and juxtapose a series of identical figures; instead, it shows how these figures of origin “presuppose a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, untamed differences . . . all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation and opposition.”8 The figure of origin is not only preformed; it is also subordinated to an identity that is in turn located in space and time. However, the figure that returns in mythopoetic cinema can never be identical to this “original” figure of limited difference or identity. The act of repetition produces a sense of dissymmetry, returning the figure to a swarm of differences that cannot be contained by the same historically specific limitations. The figure does not return as identical to one that existed in the past but as a recombination of one element of one instance and another element of another instance. The cinematic image is revealed as a product of many, even problematic, fusions: these mythic figures are at once mechanical and commercial, uncanny and iconic, a ghostly image of the past and a potential image to come. While cinema may always be narrative or recall iconic images (conjuring modes of identification), “it is also dysnarrative in so far as it is affected by repetitions, permutations and transformations.”9 Mythopoetic cinema shows that capturing or even reciting images is not the same as unlocking (demystifying) them. There are literally thousands of images of Europa, and yet, as I have argued, these images do not provide us with any knowledge about

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Europe (as some general category or sign). Instead, these films and works of art cast doubt on the same narratives and images of Europe they choose to make present. The aim of mythopoetic cinema is to challenge the way that mythic figures signifying national or European identities are used to patrol the borders of Europe. It takes seriously the power that these myths continue to play in the policies (or lack thereof ) regarding the treatment of migrants, the uneducated, financial crises, emerging markets, citizenship, and cultural politics and practices. Unlike Alvi, who reminds us of the violence inscribed within Europe’s myth of origin, Dipesh Charkrabarty attempts to distinguish the violence of actual (provincial) Europeans from the universalist ideals put forward under the aegis of Europe. In an ironic twist, he points out that the Enlightenment incarnation of Europa that dressed itself up as the ideal of humanist secular Europe ended up being, in actuality, a white male colonial settler.10 Yet in the wake of the expansion of the European Union, the sovereign debt crisis of 2008 and 2009, the recent immigration crises, and the attacks in Paris and Brussels, more actual Europeans have fallen short of the empowered white male expansionist proposed by Alvi and Chakrabarty by becoming more dispossessed and provincialized. We should not confuse provincialization—which Chakrabarty associates with the plurality, untamablity, and untimeliness of actual events and individuals—with growing inequality. But the continual reanimation of nationalist and ethnocentric discourses in Europe has helped to align provincialism with poverty in the eyes of the European global elite. This “provincialization” of Europe has helped buttress existing stratifications and produce a new assemblage of wealth and power that dictates rigid fiscal standards—the European Fiscal Compact and the Permanent Stability Mechanism—over growing numbers of the disenfranchised. Disenfranchisement coupled with the immigrant crises and the Paris and Brussels attacks, as well as the rapes and mass acts of sexual harassment in Germany on New Year’s Eve 2016, have helped to fuel ultra-right-wing movements that often turn away from the governance and policies of a unified Europe toward separatist neonationalist imaginaries. The divisions between the European elites, the poor, and immigrant populations are expedited by residual nationalism that reifies divisions between Western, Eastern, Southern, and non-Europeans. Somehow the more successful European states and their leaders have managed to stir up local,

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disenfranchised populations with the threat of what are perceived as “backward” (childish, lazy, ignorant, corrupt, misogynist, or racist) Greeks, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Italians, Cypriots, possibly also French, and even some Germans. Disenfranchised populations have turned against the ruling neoliberal elites, but they have also turned against the immigrant populations, giving rise to ultra-nationalist parties and movements such as Golden Dawn (ෟǓ໖໵ཬߥ ম࿱ဎ˗ۭ͘ࢆ‫ݰऺ–ߥڗ‬࿰ۭ༓ Ǘ࿰ࣹ༓) in Greece, the Front National in France, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Great Britain, Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (PEGIDA) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Alleanza Nazionale and Casapound in Italy, the Dansk Folkeparti (DF) in Denmark, Svoboda in the Ukraine, and the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) in Austria.11 The tenacity of ideals like “the Protestant work ethic,” the frugal “Swabian housewife” (referring to Angela Merkel and her economic policies), the Megáli Idéa (Greek irredentism), ethnic purity, and other national identifications continue to justify these “white lies” about privilege in terms of ideals—merit, superiority, and belonging. Although Europa and all the “white lies” that accompany the myth haunt Europe, the mythical figure of Europe remains for Chakrabarty a paradoxical one that is simultaneously “indispensible and inadequate.” This complex and problematic figure of Europa—which has metamorphosed into the secular humanist ideal of European “political modernity”—has colonized and structured the way we think about the world. “Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history.”12 But concepts like the citizen, the state, the legal notion of rights, the human, the subject, and so on already contain within themselves contradictory impulses (universal, particular, and ethnonational), mutually defining sets of oppositions (citizen and noncitizen, modern and antimodern, human and inhuman), and a priori understandings (what is right, justice, or what constitutes a legitimate nation-state). What appears to be “indispensable” to Chakrabarty is not only the individual modern political categories (enlightened liberal democracies) but also their relation to thinking itself. Even if we accept Edmund Husserl’s argument that Europe is a pure transcendental idea, unrelated to Europe’s

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empirical history, we must realize that we are accepting the idea as an abstraction severed from the taint of historical events and the political propaganda of any given age.13 These types of abstract concepts and categorical distinctions form an image of thought (representation that passes itself off as thinking) rather than perform the act of thinking itself. It is this decoupling of universal thought from conflicting empirical evidence and events that Chakrabarty finds “inadequate.” But the mere acceptance that universal truths—such as kinship, religion, ethnonationalism, justice, right, or even common sense—are necessary to thinking already prejudices everything. According to Deleuze, the universal does not enlighten the particular event or experience; the recognition of particular experiences gives rise to the universal. Recognition of experiences and events are only perceptible when they are repeated; hence, recognition always conflates difference (the return) with the same: “The image of thought is only the figure in which doxa is universalized by being elevated to the rational level. However, so long as one only abstracts from the empirical content of doxa, while maintaining the operation of the faculties which corresponds to it and implicitly retains the essential aspect of the content, one remains imprisoned by it.”14 The realization of such an Enlightenment vision of Europe, as Saba Mahmood observes, is contingent on a particular notion of sovereignty: a secular but centralized state that organizes society into political, economic, religious, and familial domains. In this narrative, “both the ethics of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience are considered to be goods internal to the doctrinal separation that secularism institutes between operations of the state and church, between politics and religion.”15 For Mahmood, secularism does not neutralize the political sphere—making it free from religious beliefs—as much as it produces a particular kind of religious subject that is compatible with liberal state politics. Religion becomes a form of expression rather than, as Mahmood sees it, the profoundly affective relation between human beings and their modes of faith. By pairing liberalism with secularism, the construct of the subject is coupled with a particular mode of intellectual critique—one that defends the freedom of expression even if it means blaspheming religious figures, as for instance the cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in the Danish newspaper Jylland-Posten in 2005. The problem for Mahmood is how we prioritize rights—particularly the right to freedom of expression and the right to practice one’s chosen religion.

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The distinction between defending the right to disseminate an idea and agreeing with that idea has always been key to free speech activism. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending this.”16 Yet in many cases the right to free speech has been conflated with representations of the Danish cartoons that were later republished in Charlie Hebdo. These images have caused a backlash from both religious and secular figures around the world. The cartoons—which conflate terrorism with Islam—play into a long tradition of ethnic stereotyping, and defending them is fraught with contradictions. But defending one’s affective relationship to faith without question is also troubling. This encounter between freedom of expression, freedom to practice one’s chosen religion, and the subsequent freedom from discrimination continues to trouble Europe, particularly when Europeans are challenged to respond to violent events. The immediate and overwhelming public response to the killing of the editor and eight other members of the Charlie Hebdo staff was to demonstrate in solidarity with the victims of the attack. Millions of people throughout Europe marched under the banner “Je suis Charlie.” This allowed liberal democratic groups to defend the right to “free speech” (regardless of the message) while right-wing, anti-immigrant groups (such as PEGIDA in Germany) marched behind the same banner, fanning Islamophobic fears and promoting anti-immigrant political policies. Emmanuel Todd characterizes these mass republican demonstrations (on January 11, 2015) as “marked by hysteria, by densification and also by expansion, as a reconquest of the lower-middle classes. . . . The emotional shock resulting from the horror of 7 January presented the possibility of a reaffirmation of the ideology dominating France: free trade, the social state, pro-Europeanism, and austerity. What is new, and really disturbing, is the obsession with Islam, the frenzied secular discourse that is spreading throughout the upper half of the social pyramid.”17 For Todd, the pairing of secularism and neoliberalism is dangerous. Yet, unlike Mahmood, he points out that what stands for secular discourse is in fact something else: it is “zombie Catholicism.” At the heart of these mass demonstrations is the fear of the Islamic other in Europe that incites, as Samuel P. Huntington described, a clash of civilizations based on the “revival of religion,” which is as divisive as it is ethnocentric.18 The discourse of secularism only serves as a foil for xenophobia. Todd sees Europe and Islamophobia as intrinsically linked, but this

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link is less a product of secularism than it is a direct result of failed neoliberal policies that have wreaked havoc on the national economies of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus, as well as on the working class throughout Europe. Todd concludes that only by upholding secularist principles (including the right to blasphemy) and embarking on a project of accommodation with Islam (the freedom to practice religion) can France reinforce the Republic rather than subvert it by giving voice to religious arguments, whether they be pro-Christian, anti-Christian, pro-Islamic, or anti-Islamic. At stake in this “uninterrogated identification of secularism with liberalism” is the practice of critique. Critique, as Stathis Gourgouris writes, “is always political in a profoundly democratic sense, . . . it inhabits the domain of doxa, not dogma, and certainly not logos as it has come to be understood.”19 Critique is a necessary antidote to the countless examples of representation that prejudice the way we perceive events and lead us to forgone ethical deductions. Western films continue to exaggerate the villainy of Eastern Europeans and relegate the emerging political conflicts and economic crises in the Balkans and former Soviet Union to the background against which narratives of espionage—for example, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol ( J. J. Abrams, 2011), The Avengers ( Joss Whedon, 2012), A Good Day to Die Hard ( John Moore, 2013), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Kenneth Branagh, 2014), and numerous James Bond films—as well as terrorism or war games—for example, Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997), Fourth Angel (John Irvin, 2001), and Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001)—are played out. Many other Western European narrative films and documentaries that deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkans have also presented simplistic moral scenarios by portraying cultural, political, and historical complexities in black-and-white terms. Régis Wargnier’s Est/Ouest (winner of Les Étoiles d’or du cinéma français, 2000, and nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Picture of 1999) depicts the evils of Stalinism through the eyes of a Frenchwoman who, after marrying a Russian doctor, has to escape the horrors of the Soviet Union and return to the free West. Elie Chouraqui’s Harrison’s Flowers (2001) relies on the personal narrative of a woman who refuses to believe her husband has died in Vukovar (Croatia), goes to retrieve him, and encounters the stock Serbian rapists as well as barbaric violence and chaos. Die Vierte Macht (Dennis Gansel, 2012) delivers the moral message that terrorism, oil, and global capital are deeply connected but that there is no freedom of the press to make such connections

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public in Russia. Members of the press who seek to uncover such connections between government and the reigning oligarchies are met with censorship, brutal violence, incarceration, and assassination. Although many of these narratives tend to be tragic in form, they do not produce a moral revelation or open a space for thinking. Instead, by reaffirming the Western moral position, they simply legitimize Western political actions and stances. Since 2005 cinematic representations of the tumultuous transition from socialist states to liberal democracies have all but disappeared, but representations of evil communists, civil war criminals, and ultra-nationalist characters from Eastern Europe have reemerged in the gaming industry. For example, the character Niko Bellic, who appears in Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2008), is a Serbian war criminal and the main antihero of the game; Vladimir Makarov (not to be mistaken with the soccer star from the USSR) is the antihero of three different versions of Call of Duty; and Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin is the antihero of Metal Gear, to name only a few. These patently stereotypical characters have proven to be more profitable and influential in creating a popular imaginary of Western global politics, reaching millions of gamers worldwide. These oppositions produce others, but they are merely an abstraction of an encounter—the unique encounter is transposed from a foundational expression into a legible relation out of which a two-dimensional, negative identity is formed. It is an identity that relies on the recognition of difference, but here the singular expression of difference is translated into a general understanding. Mythopoetic cinema, by contrast, does not function like an oppositional practice as described by Deleuze. Rather, it performs the unthought, revealing how opposition is just another form of representation that disguises itself as thinking. What remains unthought is the transformation of empirical facts, situations, and experiences into images or identities. Identifications such as European and non-European (implicitly democratic and nondemocratic, human and inhuman) fall into an irresolvable problem since they rely on analogies that imply generic (absolute) and singular (relative) differences and resemblances at the same time; they therefore pass judgment on events, qualities, values, and political actions without being able to say what constitutes individual differences. As Deleuze puts it: “There is a significant difference between generality, which always designates a logical power of concepts, and repetition, which testifies to their

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powerlessness or their real limits.”20 The civil wars in the Balkans, the Russian wars in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, the annexation of the Crimea and the conflict in the Ukraine, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the emergence of right-wing neonationalist movements in Europe have been judged, historicized, and used as paradigms of radical evil (providing us with a moral logic), but they remain unthought in and of themselves and in relation to each other. In mythopoetic cinema, there is no equating of the image to representation or images to matter (in the form of indices, deixis, or traces), and there is always some form of mediation (a shifting, figuration, or translation) that links and unlinks images, representation, and material reality. Rather, mythopoetic films point to what Rancière calls “the absence of measurement”—the instability between the idea and its aesthetic representation or empirical presentation.21 Practices that utilize analogies or affinities (resemblances) to produce concepts mistake thinking for representation. Instead of playing into the politics of representation (a practice of identification through resemblances and associations), mythopoetic cinema pursues radical critique that leads to the practice of unthinking (the unlinking of such resemblances and associations). Mythopoetic cinema challenges us to rethink the constructs of difference and opposition. While it cannot provide us with a stable image of thought (whether the common good, justice, or nothingness), it offers us a set of images in relation to texts, technology, ideas, and criticism that reflect on an ethics of existence—images that may still have much to contribute to current political discourse that attempts to bridge universalism with singularity. Images of World War II or conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Rwanda are both radically singular—they point to a specific instance within a particular context captured by one person onto the filmic medium—and infinitely exchangeable—they are used to illustrate generic moral and historical ideas about human nature, national culture, and geopolitics. Similarly, the numerous citations (of poetry, philosophy, literature, and popular culture) used to describe the horrors of these wars signify specific critical reflections as well as generic commentary on experiences and situations suffered or endured by others. To illustrate this point, in a scene from Notre Musique the French sculptor and writer Pierre Bergounioux is asked, “Do writers know what they are talking about?” To which he replies: “No, certainly not, Homer knew nothing about battlefields, slaughter, victories,

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or glory. He was blind and bored. He had to settle for recounting what others did.” The impasse between the profound and the banal forces us to confront not only the limits of representation—a representation incapable of accounting for the ever-evolving sets of associations that radically change the meaning of events—but also “the powerlessness at the heart of thought.”22 Unlike any other medium, according to Deleuze (and Artaud before him), cinema possesses the power to unthink (disassociate) relations, images, and events. That is, rather than making thought into an image of thought via analogy, resemblance, or opposition, cinema can reveal the “hole in appearances” or make us see the “figure of nothingness” that marks the “crisis in confidence of thought.”23 This “hole in appearances” is made visible by the blank spaces between images, the constant juxtaposition that links and unlinks images, such as those of the blown up and then “reconstructed” Stari Most; the figure of Megalexandros persistently recycled from ancient pagan, medieval Christian, ethnic-nationalist, militant revolutionary, and oedipal-patriarchal iconography; or the Hermitage Museum bracing itself against, but also embracing, a deluge of contradictions. This “crisis in [the] confidence in thought” questions conventional correspondences and distinctions that have been made between ethics, politics, and aesthetics. It does not, however, “suppress politics and aesthetics in the name of ethics,”24 nor does it suppress ethics and aesthetics in the name of politics; instead, it aims at a mixture of experimentation and critical thought rather than judgment. How can we judge the other from the enemy when both depend on proximity but practice varying forms of oppositional logic (identifying subjects by distancing or universalizing)? Mythopoetic cinema is a provocation that asks us to think by bringing together far-reaching ideas, sensibilities, and images rather than imposing on the medium abstract mental processes that end up reproducing a politics masked by moral certitude. These films remind us that certainties are not entirely separable from uncertainties. A moralizing image slips into dogma because it turns a transcendent object into an identity (evil, the victim). Instead, the repetition and re-assemblage of images, texts, sound objects, voices, and music reveal underlying practices of representation that prejudge events, opening up a space for ethics and thought. In the mythopoetic cinema of Sokurov, Angelopoulos, Abramović, and Godard, the reimaging of the figure of Europa (with all its contradictions

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and complexities) confronts the idea of Europe (as an image of thought) not just by contrasting these mythic figures of ambiguous origin and their many metamorphoses with the universalized, rationalized, and enlightened versions but also by confronting us with a radical form of repetition. It is the scale of repetition that forces us to see multiple differences and similarities all at the same time. In these films, various incarnations of Europe and Europa are reanimated as ideals that confront empirical realities; as monumental histories that confront aporia, disjuncture, multiple erasures, and effacements; and as icons that over time are unmoored from any specific symbolic meaning. While the repetition of an image of thought produces recognition that in turn gives rise to various forms of repetition, it also confuses thinking with representation. Here even Deleuze assumes that the image in the image of thought is complicit in representation. In other words, representation might be dogmatic, but the image used to animate various forms of representation is far less contained than the ideas attributed to it. These films demonstrate that the image thinks, but not in a manner consistent with representation. The moving image animates Europe (but also reanimates Europa), implying a certain bringing to, or back to, life of all of the contradictory identity politics that go along with it. In so doing, it undermines notions of time understood as traditional linear narratives or natural cycles. Reanimation turns time (including identity politics, political history, and the history of political movements) into something untimely, inorganic, and ghostly. It occupies or haunts other moments or returns again and again in a serial form, blurring the distinctions between historical, political, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. Similarly, such reanimations question the status of the “life” of an image or idea. Life, as reanimation, is something that is also nonorganic and untimely. Reanimation, an inherent feature of cinema itself, can be an intense form of upheaval— “a shock to thought,” or an affective experience evoked by the technological capacity of the cinematic apparatus to present (as in create a sense of presence). But the spectral quality of these reanimated images of Europe do not easily lend themselves to categorization. Mythopoetic cinema’s obsessive reanimation of the figure of Europe unthinks structures of thought and modes of identification by exposing the prejudices and constraints of Western thought—that is to say, how thinking is often predicated on a priori concepts (for example, the good, the true, common sense or a general

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model of the subject, desire, will, and justice). Instead, it offers us Europe as an assemblage work that is simultaneously creative, poetic, critical, and confrontational, but not containable. This groundlessness of critique has been branded, usually in the negative, as a form of cynicism, irony, hopelessness, or passive nihilism, as an endless circuitous discourse. But this needs to be reexamined. Why do we think that identity politics provides us with affirmative solutions to complicated problems when critique does not? The real problem with critique and mythopoetics is that they are risky; they do not deliver clear messages, instruct us on how to ethically proceed, or provide us with a world picture in the same way that identity politics promises to do. However, we must remember that identity and identificatory politics come with narratives, ideologies, and attached political and economic agendas that often determine how power can and will be deployed. What is so appealing about the branding of a “new Europe” or new movements is not that they are new and exciting, or that they provide a new sense of community, but that their outcomes have been foreclosed—they give us a sense of self and place us in relation to a world that is already enframed. Mythopoetics asks us to think about what we tacitly also accept when we appropriate these images of ourselves in relation to others.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

The myth of Europa has acquired various dimensions over the centuries—in one version, she is abducted by Zeus, who changes himself into a white bull and swims from Tyro (or Tyre) on the coast of Sidon to Crete in order to seduce (rape) her; in another, she becomes a Phoenician princess, and an emblem of eroticism and sacred marriage—but her image (riding the bull) continues to be reproduced. In an attempt to debunk this myth, Herodotus offers a less fantastic version that Europa was abducted by Cretan merchants in a ship shaped like a bull and taken to Crete as an offering to King Asterius. Herodotus, Histories IV, ed. and trans. Carlos Hude (Oxford: Oxford Classical Texts, 1993), 45. Ibid. Anthony Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent,” in The Idea of Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34. Gilles Deleuze argues that analogy produces identities at the same time as it makes value judgments: “analogy is itself the analogue of identity within judgment.” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 33–35. I am indebted to the many conversations and exchanges I have had with scholars working in European and Eastern cinema. My work has been and continues to be in dialogue with that of Dušan Bjelić, Svetlana Boym, Rosalind Galt, Daniel Goulding, Peter Hames, Anikó Imre, Dina Iordanova, András Kovács, Pavle Levi, and Anca Parvulescu. See Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Anikó Imre, Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), East European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (New York: Routledge, 2005), and A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: An Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema, ed. Richard

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8.

9.

10.

11.

INTRODUCTION Taylor, Nancy Wood, Julian Graff y, and Dina Iordanova (London: BFI Press, 2008); Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe (London: Wallflower, 2003) and Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media (London: BFI Press, 2008); Peter Hames, The Cinema of Central Europe, 24 Frames Series (London: Wallflower, 2004); Rosalind Galt, The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); András Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008); Daniel Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Anca Parvulescu, The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014). Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), Kindle ed., 20. Bordwell argues that each film contains “transtextual norms” (21), and as a result he proceeds to read the poetics of cinema through six “norms” that he identifies as the “P-words: particulars, patterns, purposes, principles, practices and processing” (24). He proposes a cognitive (“mentalistic” and “naturalistic”) approach to poetics: “It assumes that we can characterize the spectator’s embodied mind as engaging with the film” (43). In his polemic against what he labels and disparages as “grand theory,” he distinguishes his own aims as those of a scientist: “I am actually aiming at ‘science.’ I’d say, rather, that I’m trying to join the tradition of rational and empirical inquiry, a broader tradition than what we usually consider to be science” (3). But here he seems to suggest that somehow cinema can be examined factually, and that while images do not speak for themselves, facts might indeed speak for themselves (e.g., his assertion about DNA, global warming, and gravity). What is unclear, is how these selected facts serve as analogies for understanding cinema; moreover, he seems to distance poetics from facts. See Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Mytho-poetic Cinema,” Third Text 43 (Summer 1998): 43– 57, and “Theory by Other Means: Pasolini’s Cinema of the Unthought,” International Social Science Journal 63, no. 207–8, special issue on “States of Theory,” ed. Tom Ford (2012): 93–112. Thomas Elsaesser’s European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), Rosalind Galt’s New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Mark Betz’s Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones’s Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010) are texts that tackle the problematic appellation of Europe post 1989 but seek to address the emergence of complex hybrid identities, new understandings of borderlands, and a new European cinema that reflects such historical differences. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 54. Heidegger questions how thinking can become homogenized and

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12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

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points out the danger in such one-track thinking, which “reduces everything to a univocity of concepts and specifications, the precision of which not only corresponds to, but has the same essential origin as, the precision of technological process” (ibid.). See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 46–47. Here he argues: “The instituted trace cannot be thought of without thinking the retention of difference within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a scientific concept of writing. . . . These oppositions have meaning only after the possibility of the trace. The ‘unmotivatedness’ of the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is announced as such—without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or continuity— within what is not it. Is announced as such: there we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined as ‘non-living’ up to ‘consciousness,’ passing through all levels of animal organization. The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity, which metaphysics has defined as beingpresent starting with the occulted movement of the trace.” François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), xvii. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in a Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 46–47. Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968); Federico Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1962). Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). See the chapter entitled “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” 159–97. For an extensive history and reading of these maps, see Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 70–76; John Brian Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Darby Lewes, “The Feminine Landscape or Gynocartography: Treating Women Like Dirt,” Mercator’s World 4, no. 1 (2000): 42–51. Hay, Europe, 116. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 189. In The Radetzky March, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Overlook, 2002), Joseph Roth writes: Nature had forged endless horizons for these dwellers on the frontier, drawing around them a mighty circle of green forests and blue hills. They . . . dealt in coral for the peasant girls of nearby villages, and for those other peasants over the border, on Russian soil, they dealt in feathers for feather beds, in tobacco, in horsehair, in bar silver, in jewelry, in Chinese tea, in fruit from the south, in cattle and

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INTRODUCTION horses, poultry and eggs, fish and vegetables, jute and wool, butter and cheese, woodlands and fields, Italian marble, human hair from China for making wigs, raw-silk and finished-silk merchandise, Manchester cotton, and Brussels lace, galoshes from Moscow, Viennese linen, lead from Bohemia. . . . The people in this district were swamp-begotten. For evil swamps lay far and wide to either side of the high road and over the whole face of the land. Swamps that spawned frogs and fever, deceptive grass, dreadful enticements to a dreadful death for the unsuspecting stranger. . . . But all who had been born here were familiar with the malignity of the marshland, and they themselves were tinged with this same malignity. In spring and summer, the air was thick with the deep and endless croaking of the frogs. Under the sky, equally jubilant larks rejoiced. It was an untiring dialogue between sky and marshland. (120)

21.

22.

23.

24.

See Richard Esbenshade’s “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 72–96. As Barbara Einhorn argues, nationalist self-identification offers a convenient legitimization for this collective erasure and forgetting because “it defines the former Soviet Union as the quintessential Other, and state socialism as a foreign system imposed from outside.” Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993), 8. In The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), Svetlana Boym argues that in the immediate post-Soviet period, nostalgia was a taboo topic, but it exploded in relation to “the unrealized dreams of the past visions of the future” and, more importantly, as the mourning “for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (5–6). According to Boris Groys, the process of “returning” to Europe “is the complete destruction of every kind of heritage, a radical, absolute break with the historical past and with any kind of distinct cultural identity. . . . Even the name of the country ‘Russia’ was erased and substituted by a neutral name lacking any cultural tradition: Soviet Union. The contemporary Russian, post-Soviet citizen thus comes from nowhere.” Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 154. Central Europe has no physical boundaries dividing it from both Western and Eastern Europe—it stretches from Switzerland and Germany in the West to Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia in the East. It has usually been defined in opposition to the Ottoman and Russian Empires in the East and the more liberal West. Yet historically the region was part of the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Imperial Germany. It has also been defined as a region where German peoples lived and mixed with Slav and Magyar populations. Although it was initially Germancentric, it acquired new meaning during the Cold War. Central Europe was redefined by the Warsaw Pact, and again after the Cold War by Donald Rumsfeld as “New Europe.” The term took on another political meaning in the writing of exiled writers such as Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz, Jenő Szűcs, Josef Škvorecký, Danilo Kiš, and György Konrád,

INTRODUCTION

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

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who presented Central Europe as the “Third Way.” That is to say, while they rejected Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, they were critical of Western capitalism and identity politics. Instead, they presented Central Europe as the spiritual heart of Europe. See Milan Kundera’s “Un occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale,” Le Débat 27 (November 1983). The title of the piece recalls the myth of Europa being kidnapped by Zeus. Mitteleuropa presents another German-oriented perspective of the eastern part of Europe. The term “Mitteleuropa” is attached to the theories of Friedrich Naumann’s vision of a post–World War I unification of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which belonged neither to the French West nor to the Russian Empire, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Austrian-centered spiritualized construction of a “Mitteleuropäer.” This notion reappeared in the glasnost period and represented nostalgia in the East for Europe, yet not nostalgia for empire. In Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Maria Todorova points out that “ ‘Balkan’ is an unstable term that emerged from primarily journalistic and quasi-journalistic literary forms (travelogues, political essays, and academic journalism), yet by the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, and the first World War, the term took on new meaning: ‘Balkan,’ while overlapping with ‘Oriental,’ had additional characteristics as cruelty, boorishness, instability, and unpredictability. Both categories were used against the concept of Europe symbolizing cleanliness, order, self-control, strength of character, sense of law, justice, efficient administration, in a word, the culturally higher stage of development which also ennobles human behavior” (119). Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Balibar argues that this hierarchy is created as “a system of concentric circles: the first posed as the ‘true’ Europe in opposition to the ‘outer Europe’ that is still asking to be ‘Europeanized.’ The latter is in turn divided into a first zone of economic and partial political integration (countries that are ‘candidates for entry into the European Union’), the goal being to preserve for as long as possible the difference in salary levels while managing the competition between the ‘leading’ countries of the European Union and the integration of its political structures, a second zone of ‘inner’ colonization (the Balkans; not only Kosovo but a broad surrounding zone including Albania and most of the former Yugoslavia), and finally a third zone of predatory capitalism (who profits from the Russian financial crisis? Where do the diverted IMF credits go?)” (169). Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Man in Debt, trans. Joshua David Jordan (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012), 158. See Anthony Pagden’s “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent” (33–54), Michael Herzfeld’s “The European Self: Rethinking and Attitude” (139–70), and Luisa Passerini’s “From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony” (191–208) in The Idea of Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union (New York: Polity, 2012), 56–60. Heidegger suggests that “we are still not yet thinking”; rather, we are “blinking,” which is to say “playing up and setting up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true

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32.

33. 34.

INTRODUCTION and valid—with the mutual tacit understanding not to question the set-up.” To think, therefore, must be more than to question; it must question all truisms, all self-deception about history that prevent us from hearing the language of thinking. Hence, for Heidegger, the “unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow” (What Is Called Thinking, 74–79). Lazzarato, Making of the Man, 158. See also Alain Badiou, “St. Paul, Founder of the Universal Subject,” in St. Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 27–38, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13. Raùl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 1995), 73.

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE: ALEKSANDR SOKUROV ’S RUSSIAN ARK 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). José Alaniz, “Crowd Control: Anxiety of Effluence in Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” in The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, ed. Birgit Beumers and Nancy Condee (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 170. Dragan Kujundžić, “After ‘After’: The ‘Arkive’ Fever of Alexander Sokurov,” Art Margins, Spring 2003, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/film-a-screen-media-sp-629836893 /272-after-qafterq-the-qarkiveq-fever-of-alexander-sokurov; republished in Quarterly Review of Film & Video 21, no. 3 ( July–September 2004): 219–39, doi:10.1080/10509200 490437952. J. Hoberman, “And the Ship Sails On,” Film Comment, September–October 2002, 54. See also Pamela Kachurin and Ernest A. Zitser, “After the Deluge: Russian Ark and the (Ab)uses of History,” NewsNet: News of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 43, no. 4 (August 2003): 17–22. Dorota Ostrowska, “Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” Film-Philosophy 7, no. 32 (October 2003): 4, http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n32ostrowska. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 13, 50. Kujundžić, “After ‘After.’ ” Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 57– 124. Nietzsche describes monumental history as “deceiv[ing] through its analogies. With its seductive similarities, it attracts the spirited man to daring acts and the enthusiastic man to fanaticism. . . . Monumental history is the theatrical costume in which they pretend that their hate for the powerful and the great of their time is a fulfilling admiration for the strong and the great of past times. In this, through disguise they invert the real sense of that method of historical observation into its opposite. Whether they clearly know it or not, they certainly act as if their motto were: let the dead bury the living” (84).

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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Narod refers to the people and is a term used frequently in Soviet discourse as a political concept (popular rule), but it is not clear in the film who are the people of the ark, or if the ark is for “the people.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. See Birgit Beumers, “And the Ark Sails on . . . ,” in Beumers and Condee, Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, 183. Beumers points out that the marquis is not interested in the paintings, only in Catherine II’s acquisition of the Crozat collection; however, Stazione’s Death of Cleopatra was not part of the collection and was not purchased until 1968. While this is not noted in the film, the painting is passed over in a midrange shot. The camera also seems to follow the marquis’s disinterest in the paintings, scanning over them quickly without even mentioning Giovanni Francesco Barbieri’s Assumption of the Virgin (1623). Nietzsche describes the antiquarian as having “a very highly restricted field of vision. He [or she] does not perceive most things at all, and the few things, which he does perceive, he looks at far too closely and in isolation. He cannot measure it and therefore takes everything as equally important” (Untimely Meditations, 78). See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165–82. Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 82. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 95, 97. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 3. As Boym points out, nostalgia became a disease and the affix stemming from the Greek algos came to describe a series of newly recognized ailments. Ibid., 8. Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 11. He writes: “Aura and authenticity are analogous to each other. Both have to be framed historically rather than ontologically. Modernist decisionism declared both of them dead and gone, but both have proven to be quite resistant to all manner of ideological critique. The desire for the auratic and the authentic has always reflected the fear of inauthenticity, the lack of existential meaning, and the absence of individual originality.” Ibid., 20. Raoul Eshelman’s “Sokurov’s Russian Ark and the End of Postmodernism,” Artmargins, July 30, 2003, accessed May 13, 2004, http://www.artmargins.com/content/cineview/es helman.html. Eshelman writes: “Basically, performatism reacts against the infinite regress, decentrification and subjectlessness peculiar to postmodern discourse by creating narrative, spatial or ethical frames which center and simultaneously constrict simple or ‘dense’ subjects, who are induced to overcome the inhibiting frames around them.” André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, essays selected and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. Maxim Gorki, “Kingdom of Shadows,” in Movies, ed. Gilbert Adair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 10. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 95.

244 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 15, 16. Ekaterina Boltunova, “Unity, Disintegration, and Monarchy: Romanov Russia in Recent Scholarship,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 871. Ernest A. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court,” Historically Speaking 7, no. 2 (November–December 2005): 35. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 18. She continues: “To understand the situation in Russia, one can no longer stay at the level of cultural representation; one needs to look into the politics. Restorative nostalgia is often sponsored from above, however populist, homey, and ‘grass roots’ it appears to be.” The ball full of ghosts is reminiscent of Anna Akhmatova, Poem Without a Hero and Selected Poems, trans. Lenore Mayhew and William McNaughton (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1989), see line 113. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (one of the first texts written in vulgar idiom) begins: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai in una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita. . . . Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (“Midway along the journey of our life / I found myself in a darkened wood / the straightforward path had been lost. . . . / Abandon all hope those who enter”), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1012/1012-h/1012-h.ht. This is the entrance to the old palace of Peter the Great, which was partially razed to build a theater for Catherine the Great. Kujundžić, “After ‘After.’ ” Lindsey Hughes, Romanovs: Ruling Russia from 1613–1917 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2008), 3. Kachurin and Zitser, “After the Deluge,” 17–22. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 55. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 106–7. Bazin accuses Eisenstein and the Soviet montage theorists of putting their “faith in the image” instead of putting “faith in reality”; see André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? 1:24. In this essay, he writes: “Every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered” (26). Yet what is important for Bazin is that the whole, the entirety of what is shown, is preserved and not broken apart: “[N]eorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one” (97). For Bazin, reality is the cinematic illusion made fact (actualized). Lisa Tarhair, “Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed,” Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): 145, accessed March 13, 2016, http://www.film -philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/1034. Tarhair convincingly argues that Cavell “takes the emphasis off the confusing idea of realism that obscures Bazin’s thinking and replaces it with the notion of presence.”

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

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Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 169. Ibid., 165. Rodowick continues: “Digital capture, synthesis, and compositing are the three principal creative operations of digital cinema. Digital capture may be considered as analogous to video recording in a number of ways [but] . . . the image is not ‘one,’ for the light recorded on charge-coupled devices is already fragmented into a discrete mosaic of picture elements, which are then read off as distinct mathematical values. The process of conversion or transcoding separates the image into mathematically discrete and modular elements whose individual values are open to any number of programmable transformations.” See also Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). He argues: “For a computer, a film is an abstract arrangement of colors changing in time, rather than something structured by ‘shots,’ ‘narrative,’ [and] ‘actors’ ” (302). According to Eisenstein, the viewer must be moved by a sense of pathos in order to achieve an intellectual understanding; that is, she must be led to an emotional experience before being enlightened by the film: “pathos . . . is that which makes one applaud and cry. In short, it is everything which puts one ‘outside of one’s self.’ In other words, it could be said that the activity of pathos proper to an artwork involves bringing the spectator to ecstasy. Ex-stasis literally means ‘going outside of one’s self ’ or ‘going outside one’s usual state.’ ” Sergei Eisenstein, Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969): 10–11. Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Studio International 190, no. 978 (November– December 1975): 171–75. Wollen points out that Eisenstein’s intellectual montage comes as a result of emotional manipulation: “The most clearly avant-garde passages and episodes in Eisenstein’s films (experiments in intellectual montage) remain passages and episodes, which appear as interpolations within an otherwise homogeneous and classical narrative. There is no doubt that the dramaturgy is modernist rather than traditional—the crowd as hero, typage, guignol—but these are not features that can be attributed to a break with rather than a renovation of classical theatre. They are modes of achieving a heightened emotional effect or presenting an idea with unexpected vividness or force” (173). Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 151. Emphasis in original. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 2002), 210. Manovich’s analogy between digital media and Vertov’s film translates various technological layers into layers of interpretation. The analogy also seems to lack analysis of the cinematic apparatus at work in Vertov’s film in favor of the layers of presentation, representation, and interpretation. See also Dziga Vertov, “WE: A Variant of a Manifesto,” in Kino-Eye: Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 9. Eshelman, “Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” 3. For a more detailed list of examples, see Alaniz, “Crowd Control,” where Alaniz provides time-codes and enumerates various examples, such as the image of the camera and crew in the reflection of the carriage window just 2:14 into the film. These erasures recall the lines of Osip Mandelstam’s “The Stalin Epigram” (written in 1933), in Against Forgetting, ed. Carolyn Forché, trans. W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown (New York: Norton, 1989), 121.

246 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE Svetlana Boym, “From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia,” Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 145. For a reading of the notion of spirit and nation as a performance of the sacred, see Eshelman, “Sokurov’s Russian Ark.” See Anatoly M. Khazanov, “Ethnic Nationalism in the Russian Federation,” Daedalus 126, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 130–38. In 2000, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were canonized as “passion bearers” by the Russian Orthodox Church. However, in 1981 they had already been canonized as “holy martyrs” by the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. Ironically, it was Peter the Great who curtailed the power of the Orthodox Church in his Spiritual Regulations (1721), and subordinated the Church to a secular government bureau: the Holy Synod. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 45. Stanley Kauffman, “Remembrances,” New Republic, December 16, 2002, 26. Kujundžić, “After ‘After.’ ” Mihály Zichy was a Hungarian painter who painted the courts of Aleksandr II and Nicholas I. In 1874, he painted the Ball in the Concert Hall in the Winter Palace During a State Visit by Nasr ed-Din, Shah of Persia, May 1873. Adolphe Ladurner, a French painter, painted interior spaces of the Hermitage and Winter Palace. The scene in the film where the tsar’s Imperial Guard march in the palace alludes to his The Heraldic Hall in the Winter Palace St. Petersburg (1838). Luigi Premazzi’s Hall of Dutch and Flemish Masters (1858) seems to have influenced the way that Russian Ark frames and colors the scene inside this room. There are also exceptions to the allusions made to European painters and their depictions of the Winter Palace and Hermitage: the Russians Edward Hau and Konstantin Ukhomusky painted many interior scenes from the Winter Palace in the Romantic tradition of the mid-nineteenth century. Their work also seems to have influenced the staging of the film; however, they are better known for their depictions of interior spaces than courtly scenes. Most of these paintings are now owned by the Hermitage State Museum, but many of them were, ironically, acquired under the Soviets. The image of the final ball reenacted in the film is reminiscent of the Ball at the Assembly Hall of the Nobility in St. Petersburg on 23 February 1913 (Dmitry Nikolaevich Kardovsky, 1915). Arkadii Ippolitov, “Gorod v farorovoi tabakerke,” in E. D. Shubina, Moi Peterburg (Moscow: ELLE, 2003), 210–15, quoted and translated in Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), x. Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, trans. anonymous (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 123. Ibid., 364. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 364–65. Wolff points out that Custine, “with perfect aristocratic aplomb,” made “nonsense out of geography, as he located Russia in the context of Eastern Europe: ‘There is between France and Russia a Chinese wall—the Slavonic language and character. In spite of the notions with which

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60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

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Peter the Great has inspired the Russians, Siberia commences on the Vistula.’ ” Wolff describes this quote from Custine as including “almost every basic element of the eighteenth century’s invention of Eastern Europe,” adding that “[o]ne may observe that Custine’s ‘Chinese Wall’ of 1839 prefigured the ‘iron curtain’ of 1946 as the barrier between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.” Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 365. The Hermitage continues to divorce the contemporary and the Soviet period from the museum itself. The entire collection of contemporary art and even some of the most iconic works of modern art have been placed across the square in the General Quarters. In 2014, this is also where the Manifesta exhibit was held. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter,” 35–39. He concludes that such histories “simply echo the old debates about continuity and change, the role of ‘Great Men’ in history, and the inevitability of the choice between Russia and the West” (39). William Johnson, “Russian Ark,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Winter 2003/2004): 48, doi:10.1525/fq.2004.57.2.48. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 366. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1996), 29. See Norbert Elias, Power and Civility, vol. 2, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982) and The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Michael Gordin, “The Importation of Being Ernest: The Early St. Petersburg Academy of Science,” Isis 91 (2000): 16. Gordin observes: “Peter’s court was Western only in the sense that it was patterned after the Baroque courts of late 16th century Italy: it centered on ceremony, emblems, and panegyrics in a manner not seen in Western Europe since the golden age of Florence. This ‘cultural lag time’ has been attributed to the fact that Russia has imported its courtly culture from German states, which were themselves behind France, Italy and England.” He argues that “the purpose of Peter’s reforms [was] to create a new class of the Russian ‘elite,’ which primarily entailed education . . . borrowed from the Berlin Academy of Science, but despite Peter’s gestures toward social mobility, this civilizing process was not meant to go all the way down the social ladder. . . . He merely wanted it to appear estate-blind, in effect these reforms were meant to form a new class formation” (11–13). See also Marc Raeff, “Seventeenth-Century Europe in EighteenthCentury Russia? (Pour prendre congé du dix-huitième siècle russe),” Slavic Review 41, no. 41 (Winter 1982): 611–19, accessed March 13, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2496860. See Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, 29–33. Ivan S. Eubanks points out: “Alexander Griboedov is shockingly absent, at least in his capacity as a dramaturge, from Russian Ark, despite the fact that Sokurov sets up the perfect opportunity to honour him. The opportunity in question is the scene depicting the Persian envoy’s official apology to Nicholas I for the violent deaths of Russian ambassadors to their nation. Griboedov was one of the murdered diplomats, and his death may have been Russia’s greatest loss in that incident precisely because he was such a great playwright. Yet in Russian Ark, Griboedov is remembered only as a diplomat, not as a

248

70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

1. FLOATING ON THE BORDERS OF EUROPE dramaturge” (66). See Ivan S. Eubanks, “The Irony of Absence in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 26, no. 1–2 (2012): 57–75, accessed March 13, 2016, http://language-linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/study-areas/australian-slavonic-and-east-european-studies-asees-journal. Ippolitov, in Goscilo and Norris in Preserving Petersburg, x. Peter the Great is presented as somewhat of a stranger himself. While he is humiliating one of his nobles, we hear the invisible speaker say, seemingly in reference to this European figure: “He was obviously a foreigner, why would he be so rude otherwise.” Of course, many of the tsars were indeed “foreigners” in that like all European aristocracy, they came from various noble houses (in this case mainly German and Prussian) outside their own empire. But here we are asked to think about Peter’s distaste for all things Russian, his brutal treatment of Russian nobility, the Orthodox Church, and his attraction to if not identification with Europe. If Peter makes up the keel to this Russian ark, then what does it mean to be Russian? Boym, “From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia,” 149. The film replaces the controversial spiritual adviser of Tsarina Aleksandra, Grigorii Rasputin, with Elizabeth so as to further legitimize the royal house. “The Bronze Horseman” juxtaposes the great monuments and feats of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great with a lowly bureaucratic functionary, Yevgeny, who takes refuge under the statue of Peter the Great during the great flood of 1824. The poem shifts from praise of the city to the story of Yevgeny, who goes mad once he realizes that his sweetheart has perished in the flood; it follows his madness, anger, death, and burial in a pauper’s (unmarked) grave. Dragan Kujundžić, “Louvre: L’Oeuvre of Alexander Sokurov,” Diacritics 43, no. 3 (2015): 14–15.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS : FALLING IN AND OUT OF DREAMS 1. 2.

3.

Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2. For an in-depth analysis of the division between official history and local culture, laographia, or folklore, see Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Herzfeld outlines the tensions between the idealized (Romantic) vision of Greek culture and the direct experience of Greek social life. Michael Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence: Discourse of Crypto-Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 900–901. Herzfeld continues by arguing that “[c]rypto-colonialism is, thus, about the exclusion of certain countries from access to the globally dominant advantages of modernity.” This continued marginalization has also affected academic research on the subject. As Herzfeld explains, “In dramatic contrast with ‘subaltern studies’ in the Indian subcontinent or ‘postcolonial studies’ in sub-Saharan Africa, the study of crypto-colonies has remained marginalized” (921–22).

2. O MEGALEXANDROS 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

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For example, figures that embody Christian, Saracen, Ottoman, Balkan, Venetian, French, Slavic, Vlach, or pagan traditions. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 133. Deleuze continues: “There is a fundamental reason for this new situation: contrary to the form of the true which is unifying and tends to the identification of a character (his discovery or simply his coherence), the power of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible multiplicity.” Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Tony Mitchell (1980), “Animating Dead Space and Dead Time: Megalexandros,” in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, ed. Dan Fainaru ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 29. See Romilly Jenkins, The Dilessi Murders: Greek Brigands and English Hostages (London: Longman, 1961), 12–13, in which he points out that the Greek constitution (1864) was introduced alongside the collapse of King Otto’s reign and into an atmosphere of political quibbling that relied on brigandage to advance the interests of the various political factions. Brigands were used to terrorize the electorate and, in Athens, even to seize power by force. These same factions (of Alexandros Koumoundouros and Dimitrios Bulgaris) took advantage of the Dilessi affair (if not orchestrating it outright). Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64–65. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1969), 20. Although West satirizes the degraded Romantic vision of the Balkans in the post-Ottoman period, she cannot help but wish them “the Fatherland of their desire,” which will make them “citizens of paradise.” This comes from US president Lyndon Johnson’s response to the Greek ambassador to Washington, Alexander Matsas, over the situation in Cyprus in June of 1964. Quoted in Philip Deane [also Philippe Deane Gigantès, Gerassimos Gigantès, and Gerasimou Tsigante], I Should Have Died (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), 114–15. The quote continues: “[W]e pay a lot of American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me a talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.” According to former US foreign service officer William Blum, as soon as the liberal George Papandreou was elected as Greek prime minister in February 1964, joint efforts were undertaken by the Greek royal court, military, and intelligence service (KYP), the American military, and the CIA stationed in Greece to unseat him. A military junta overthrew Papandreou in 1967. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (New York: Zed Books, 2014), 34–39. Dan Georgakas, “A Reconsideration of Theodoros Angelopoulos’s Alexander the Great,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 1 (May 2000): 177. Angelopoulos’s Italian anarchists come from the tradition of Malatesta’s anarcho-syndicalism and its radical antimonarchism, as well as of Kropotkin’s and Reclus’s notions of geographical freedom, a freedom from nations and their borders. For a discussion of Angelopoulos’s radical politics, see Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso, 1999), 107–9.

250 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Gerald O’Grady (1990), “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” in Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 70. See Dan Georgakas, “Angelopoulos, Greek History and The Travelling Players,” in The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 39. Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Edna Fainaru (1991), “Silence Is as Meaningful as Any Dialogue: The Suspended Step of the Stork,” in Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 79. See Yannis Hamilakis, “The Other ‘Parthenon’: Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 2 (October 2002): 308. However, Greece was often personified by the Great Powers as a ravaged woman in need of their help. For a discussion of the implications and reactions by Greek scholars to the German historian Fallmerayer’s argument that the Greeks were chattels of Oriental dominion, see Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 75–96. The invaders were mostly Alepates and Saracens, who ironically were also brigands much like the klefts; the latter are associated with Digenes Akrites and the border guards (akritis), who were named after him. See Brizio Montinaro’s memoir on the making of O Megalexandros, Diario Macedone: con Anghelopulos sul set di ‘Alessandro il Grande’ (Milan: Il Formichiere, 1980), 95. Herzfeld points out that songs about Digenes Akrites (which were classified by the founder of Greek folklore studies, Nikolaos G. Politis) often overlap with “kleftic songs and ballads.” (Ours Once More, 120). Similarly, Kyriakos N. Demetriou argues that the nineteenth-century Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’s five-volume History of the Greek Nation (published between 1860 and 1874) presents Alexander the Great as the first Hellenist and Greek nationalist who unified the ancient, Byzantine, and modern Greeks—a prototypical European colonizer who civilizes the barbaric Orient. “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19, no. 1 (May 2000): 23–60. Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 34–36. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 241–42. Parnassus became an infamous site of brigandage, primarily through Western European literary and poetic works. See, for example, George Francis Savage-Armstrong’s “The Brigand of Parnassus: A.D. 1881” (in his book of poems A Garland from Greece, 1882) and Edmond About’s Le roi des montagnes (1857). Angelopoulos demonstrates that this “reckoning road” (treis keleuthoi) ironically draws together the anonymity of numerous narrators who shaped the oral narrative of Megalexandros and the Delphic Oracle with its maxim: “know thyself.” Angelopoulous and Mitchell, “Animating Dead Space,” 28. This use of “in times of old” can also be seen as a reference to the Old Testament.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

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Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 10–19. See Sarah F. Green, Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), where she argues that the many ethnic non-Greeks in Epirus and Macedonia were Hellenized in the process of “modernization.” She writes that the western Kasidiaris region “highlights the way modernization practices are always inflected by (diverse) ideological assertions about the way things are, in their pursuit of putting into effect the way things ought to be. The diversity and sometimes the open conflict between these attempts at modernization generated a sense that even ‘Western’ modernity is not a homogenous, ontologically identifiable philosophy and set of practices, but is both singular and multiple simultaneously” (219). But in marginal places like the mountainous areas of northern Greece, this created certain gaps in competing modernist narratives, leaving some peoples, histories, and traditions unnamable. As Horton points out: “Angelopoulos deserves a lot of credit for opening up a large topic that Greeks have generally been uncomfortable discussing . . . the question of Greek identity . . . mixed blood, mixed language, mixed customs, and continually shifting borders have meant that there really was no such person as a ‘pure Greek’ ” (Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 66). This paradox was played out in the handling of the Dilessi affair by Greek officials. Until the First Balkan War of 1912–1913, Macedonia was still part of the Ottoman Empire. But by the time of the Dilessi affair, Greek officials—ashamed of the continued presence of brigandage—claimed that brigands were not Greek but Vlach, Slav, Albanian, and Ottoman. In some stories she is a nun and in others she is a widow; in this case it is Megalexandros’s mother/wife who appears to be a widow or to have had a child out of wedlock. Angelopoulos’s costume and art director (Giorgos Ziakas) fashioned these men on nineteenth-century kleftic figures. Like “Macedonian,” the term kleft also became controversial. Klefts had lost their status as iconic heroes of Greek independence, only to be represented as decidedly non-Greek (Vlach, Albanian, Slav) or debased Greek traitors and petty thieves (listis). In 1833, when Athens was declared the capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Greece, it was “a provincial town of about 10,000 people.” Eleni Bastéa, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. Leo von Klenze, Memoirs, 105, quoted in Bastéa, Creation of Modern Athens, chapter 1, n1. Bastéa comments: “ ‘Athens, a European affair’ meant just that: Athens, at least at its inception as the Greek capital, was a European, a Bavarian, but not a Greek affair” (119). The Royal Palace of Athens (later called the Old Royal Palace) was designed by the Bavarian architect Friedrich von Gärtner. It served as a residence for the royal family or family members from 1843 until 1922. Beginning in 1929, substantial remodeling and renovation was undertaken by the architect Andreas Kriezis, and since 1934/1935 the Hellenic Parliament has been housed in the building. Bastéa, Creation of Modern Athens, 20.

252 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il ‘cinema di poesia’ ” (1965), in Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 256. This interpretation coincides with Romilly Jenkins’s and Rodanathi Tzanelli’s suspicion that the Dragoman was involved in the kidnapping of the British nobles and that the brigands were being advised by someone with direct ties to the opposition parties of the Russophile Koumoundouros and the Francophile Bulgaris (though the evidence seems to point more strongly toward Koumoundouros). This event incited an international crisis and did indeed cause the government headed by Thrayvoulas Zaïmis to fall. This prison is reminiscent of the infamous Makronisos Island, used to house and “rehabilitate” exiled political prisoners during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). The island was used to incarcerate political prisoners until the end of the military junta (also called the Regime of the Colonels) in 1974. For a detailed account of the political prisoners of the civil war, see Polymeris Voglis, Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War, 1945–1950 (New York: Berghahn, 2002). Angelopoulous and O’Grady, “Angelopoulos’s Philosophy of Film,” 73. He resembles Papaflessas (born Georgios Dimitrios Flessas), a kleft who wore the Alexandrian helmet and tsarouhia shoes during the revolution in 1821, as well as numerous others who copied Papaflessas afterward, such as Theodoros Kolokotronis. The lyrics are from Madame Arthur (1927) by French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert: “Madame Arthur est une femme / Qui fit parler . . . d’elle longtemps / Sans journaux, sans rien, sans réclame / Elle eut une foule d’amants.” Guilbert, enshrined in the work of Toulouse Lautrec, was an authority on medieval French folklore and awarded the Legion of Honor in 1932 as an “Ambassadress of French Song.” While the music inside the palace changes from a French cabaret song to an Austrian waltz, it ends with a British ditty written by William Cory and sung by Lord Lancaster and his entourage. This song serves as a bridge to the next scene, where they continue by singing “The Eton Boating Song” (also written by William Cory) on the (now) empty streets of Athens: “But we’ll row, row forever / Steady from stroke to bow, / And nothing in life shall sever / The chain that is round us now, / And nothing in life shall sever / The chain that is round us now / Others will fill our places, / Dressed in the old light blue; / We’ll recollect our races, / We’ll to the flag be true” (available at http://www.etoncollege .com/BoatingSong.aspx). These lyrics stress that now there is an unbreakable link between Europe and Greece and that even if this group is killed, it will be replaced by others. As their voices fade out another sound emerges, that of the laterna, played by a laternis in fustanella dress. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The original reads:

Ǔ໵ࠗԆߥǓ͘ड़Ԇ‫ڗ‬࿰ࠗ‫ڗ‬໵Ǔड़ड़Ԇۭࠗ‫ڗ‬ဎ͘›ࠗǓ›࿰ड़ङྦǓဎ͘ဎ ݅ٗɘǓࠗဲဎ›‫›ࠗ͘ڗݰ‬ङဎྦǓ‫ߥڗ‬ ͘ྦǓဎ۟ٗߥ›‫ࠗڗ‬੝ङश›࿰ۭ͘Ǔߥ Ǔࢆ͘‫ݰ‬Ǔߥɘड़͘ྦǓ‫ڗݰ‬ဎ

2. O MEGALEXANDROS

253

˳Ԇ‫ݰ‬໵ǓԆङဎ࿰›͘‫ݰ۟͘͘ݰݰ‬ङဎࢆ‫ڗ‬ड़‫ڗ‬࿰ۭǓ ࠗ‫ڗ‬ဎड़͘࿰໵Ǔۭ›Ԇဎළ‫۟͘ڗࣹݰ‬ဎ͘໵ɘǓဎࠗǓྦဲࠗǓ›ǓဎۭǓࣹԆǓ Sunbeam, of all that ever dawn upon Our seven-gated Thebes the brightest ray O eye of golden day How fair thy light o’er Dirce’s fountain shone Speeding upon their headlong homeward course Far quicker than they came the Argive force; Putting to flight The argent shields, the host with scutcheons white. Against our land the proud invader came To vindicate fell Polyneices’ claim. (Sophocles, Antigone, bilingual ed., trans. F. Storr [Cambridge: Loeb, 1912]; English version can be found at http://www.online-literature.com/sophocles/oedipus/3/)

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

Megalexandros enters to the cue of both the sunbeam and “in full armor” (›ǓဎۭǓࣹԆǓ) this is the last word that Lancaster utters. It seems as if the recitation of Antigone conjures up Megalexandros. While liberal philhellenes have represented the battles of Marathon and Salamis as victories for European democracy over “Oriental despotism,” here it is unclear whether Megalexandros represents the European victory over the East (Hellenism of the East) or the return or turn toward despotism (Orientalism in the West). Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 208. See Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 195. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1977), 100. Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Francesco Casetti (1977), “Rhythms of Silence to Better Underline the Scream: The Hunters,” in Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 25–26. Ibid., 25. Béla Balász, “The Close-Up and the Face of Man,” in The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 122. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 82. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, “Monuments of Time: The Works of Theo Angelopoulos,” in Postwar Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader, ed. John Orr and Olga Taxidou (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 402. Yiorgos Seferis, “Mythistorema, 3,” Collected Poems, expanded ed., trans. and ed. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 294.

254 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS See chapter 11 in Theatricality as Medium, where Weber analyzes Artaud’s theater of cruelty as a disavowal of the “tyranny of meaning.” Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 202. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 290. Angelopoulous and Casetti, “Rhythms of Silence,” 24. Raymond Durgnat, “Angelopoulos: The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God,” Film Comment 26, no. 6 (November–December 1990): 43–46. Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Michel Demopoulos and Frida Liappas (1974), “A Journey Through Greek Landscape and History: The Travelling Players,” in Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 22. Horton, Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 46. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 160. She adds that the “time of the image is determined to a large extent, externally.” Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, 240. Angelopoulous and Mitchell, “Animating Dead Space,” 29. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 37. David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 67. As J. K. Campbell explains, brigands, like klefts, were often “forced to leave society because of the injuries they had suffered or the disorder they would provoke, [but they] returned to prey on it.” J. K. Campbell, “The Greek Hero,” in Honor and Grace in Anthropology, ed. J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 138. See Victor Roudometof, “Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14, no. 2 (October 1996): 263. Ibid., 281–82. As Victor Roudometof argues: “In his Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos attempted to ‘prove’ an unbroken unity and continuity of Hellenism from antiquity to the present: he did so by connecting modern Greece to Philip II’s Kingdom of Macedonia and the empire of Alexander the Great.” Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 73. The fact that Dostiko was deserted at the end of the Greek Civil War led to speculation that its inhabitants had fled to Albania, Yugoslav Macedonia, Bulgaria, and other socialist countries. This speculation also suggested that its inhabitants were sheltering, or were themselves, members of the Greek Communist Party (ELAS) and the Democratic Army, and that some were possibly of non-Greek (Slavic, Koutsovlach, or Albanian) descent. Horton, Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 62. The theme of incestuous relations between mothers (who are also sisters) is repeated with the boy Alexandros and his alleged mother, who toward the end of the film invites him into the warmth of her single bed.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS 79.

80.

81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 97. In fact, the only scene where we see the villagers actively defy Megalexandros is the one where they use their rationed water to lament the passing of their compatriots, whom he had executed. However, this act of defiance is a double gesture: it is coupled with mourning and self-sacrifice, which links it to a feminine form of protest, since mourning is a woman’s profession. As Weber explains: “For Antigone the conflict is not, as is often supposed, between ‘human law’ and ‘divine law’; rather, it arises from a pronouncement, a kerygma, whose claim to have the force of law is illegitimate, because from the very start it is directed primarily at singular beings determined through their positions within a family” (Theatricality as Medium, 129). Although Megalexandros does not quote the line—“Remember the baths where you were murdered”—from section 3 of Seferis’s “Mythistorema,” or the similar line by Orestes in the scene where he calls upon his father, Agamemnon, to rise up and help him avenge his own murder, “Remember the bath in which you were murdered, father!” (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers), Megalexandros does recite the rest of “Mythistorema” section 3 in full, and the poem seems to foreshadow his demise. David H. Porter, “Aeschylus’ Eumenides: Some Contrapuntal Lines,” American Journal of Philology 126, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 327. There appear to have been few historical cases of brigands raping women, since they were afraid of upsetting the populations that harbored them ( Jenkins, Dilessi Murders, 176). See Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), part 1, chapter 2, and part 3, chapter 1. The camera pans over the people of Dostiko, who gather in the square to survey the carcasses of the sheep, and then follows the trail of blood that flows from the sheep to the bloody feet and the hardened faces of Megalexandros and his men. Clearly, Angelopoulos had studied the historical events surrounding the Dilessi murders, since the brigands did ask for amnesty in direct contravention of the constitutional article stating that the king’s pardon without a trial could only apply to a civil case, not a criminal one. Because the brigands did not originally ask for amnesty, Jenkins, Tzanelli, and others suspect that a political adviser suggested this to them, knowing that the request and its subsequent denial would cause the government to fall. The Zaïmis government refused to grant the brigands amnesty, preferring to uphold the constitution. Here Angelopoulos demonstrates the tension between the Greek government that wished to maintain its constitutional legitimacy and the British diplomatic corps, which put pressure on the government to save the British nobles by any means necessary. On the other hand, the Greek constitution of 1864 was drawn up in response to the rampant corruption of the monarchy and its reliance on brigands to enforce its “legitimacy.” This new constitution was based on the Napoleonic Code and was, therefore, far more democratic than the existing (British) laws. Angelopoulous and Mitchell, “Animating Dead Space,” 29.

256 89.

90. 91. 92.

2. O MEGALEXANDROS Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90, 91. Deleuze explains: “In truth, the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other” (90). Georgakas, “Reconsideration,” 178. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 94–95. Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Michel Grodent (1985), “A Withered Apple: Voyage to Cythera,” in Fainaru, Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, 46–47.

3. IN BALKAN: MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ AND THE POLITICS OF THE SUFFERING BODY 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. Tracey Warr, ed., The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), 112. Charles Atlas quoted in James Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 238. Westcott, When Marina, 237. The use of the term “shame” by her critics and biographers is rather curious. When applied to the Balkans and the peoples of the Mediterranean in general, the term harks back to the long history of social anthropology of the region that set up a dichotomy between honor and shame. Such resonances, whether conscious or unconscious, suggest that the peoples of the Balkans are again being subjected to ethnographic study or social and personality typologies. The metaphor of the Mediterranean, as Michael Herzfeld argues, is a “political weapon,” which is deployed as a means of excluding the backward (but uniform) South or the exotic (timeless) East from the advanced (diverse) Northwest. For this reason, Herzfeld argues that “Mediterraneanism” stands alongside Orientalism. Michael Herzfeld, “Of Horns and History: The Mediterraneanist Dilemma Again,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (November 1985): 778–80. Westcott, When Marina, 238. Charles Atlas quoted in Linda Yablonsky, “The Epic Performance: Marina Abramovic, Doug Aitken and Matthew Barney Are Leading the Way in a New Kind of Durational, Theatrical Art,” Art Newspaper 225 ( June 2011). James Westcott, “Artist Marina Abramović: ‘I Have to Be Like a Mountain,’ ” Guardian, March 19, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/mar/19/art-marina -abramovic-moma. Timothy Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3. Stefany Anne Golberg, “Alternating Currents—Abramovic and Tesla,” Old Town Review, August 2004, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.fluxfactory.org/otr/golbergma rina.html. This is a rather ironic statement coming from someone who, in an aside, shames Abramović on a personal level for being a “Serbian apologist” and then refuses to see her own act of shaming as a political act. Instead, she accuses Abramović of collapsing the personal and the political.

3. IN BALKAN 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

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Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917–31. She points out that such statements veil the degrading, generalized nationalism of “public communications in which all Serbs are identified with Chetniks, all Croats with Ustashas and all Muslims with Islamic fundamentalists or balijas, fascist collaborators” (929–30). Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 107–13. Dubravka Ugrešić, “The Confiscation of Memory,” in “The Ghosts of Yugoslavia,” theme issue, New Left Review 218 ( July–August 1996): 36. Antonin Artaud, quoted in Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, by Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 65. The term “Balkan” is attributed to the Turks without so much as a reference in any of the following books: Mihailo D. Stojanović, The Great Powers and the Balkans, 1875–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453 (Hillsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1958); and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. We do not know if the term “Balkan” is Ottoman Turkish (if so, it does not necessarily mean “dark wood” but “honey and blood”), or whether it derives from spoken Turkish. If the latter, was it Seljuq or Oghuz Turkish? Todorova’s criticism is directed against the inappropriate generalizations that accompanied the mapping of a “typology” of varying household structures found in different parts of preindustrial Europe. The other major discussion in her book refers to the image of a particular form of complex family found in the Balkans, the zadruga. According to Todorova, it would be wrong to assume that the zadruga—the term itself being a neologism—was the traditional and dominant family form in the historical Balkan region. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. Marina Abramović, The Biography of Biographies (Milan: Charta, 2004), 12. Abramović writes: “The idea to stage my life . . . was like a revelation. It was a way to see myself outside of myself, and it helped me to have a distance from the pain. . . . For me it is important to make clear that it is not just a work about my life. It is much more about the idea that the performance can belong to anyone who is able to perform it. The Biography can go on without me” (12, 14). Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 56. Julie A. Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 23. See, for example, Europa, Europa: The Century of the Avantgarde in Central and Eastern Europe, curated by Ryszard Stanislawski and Christoph Brockhaus, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (1994); Beyond Belief: Contemporary

258

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

3. IN BALKAN Art from East Central Europe, curated by Laura J. Hoptman, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, curated by Zdenka Badinovac, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (1998); After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, curated by Bojana Pejić, Moderna Muzeet, Stockholm (1999); In Search of Balkania, curated by Roger Conover, Eda Cufer, and Peter Weibel, Neue Galerie, Graz (2002); Blood & Honey: The Future Is in the Balkans, curated by Harald Szeemann, the Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg, Vienna (2003); and In the Gorges of the Balkans: A Report, curated by René Block, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2003). As Bojana Pejić puts it: “[A]t the time, God somehow vanished from the Yugoslav territory.” Bojana Pejić, “Balkan for Beginners,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 330. Tzvetan Todorov, The Totalitarian Experience, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (London: Seagull Books, 2011), 29–30. By the end of the chapter, Todorov wants to argue via Montaigne that totalitarianism perfected the pleasure of seeing others suffer, but he does not convincingly tie such a perverse pleasure to communism as an extreme expression of the sadistic gaze. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 142. Taylor writes: “My view of performance rests on the notion of ghosting, that visualization that continues to act politically even as it exceeds the live. Like Phelan’s definition, it hinges on the relationship between visibility and invisibility, or appearance and disappearance, but comes at it from a different angle” (ibid.). Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 94–95. Borrowing from Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 thesis on liminality and the rites of passage, Turner describes the ritual process as having three stages: the first phase is one of separation and detachment from social conditions; the second is the liminal or antistructural phase, which seems to erase the body’s social markers, thereby rendering the body ambiguous; in the third phase the individual or group is reinscribed into the community. See Mary Edith Durham, Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans (New York: Macmillan, 1929), and Camilla Norman, “The Tribal Tattooing of Daunian Women,” European Journal of Archaeology 14, no. 1–2 (2011): 133–57. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 128. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 134. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 51. Arendt writes: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 126–55. Ibid., 133. Deleuze explains: “The power of the false exists only from the perspective of a series of powers, always referring to each other and passing into one another. So that

3. IN BALKAN

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33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

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investigators, witnesses and innocent or guilty heroes will participate in the same power of the false the degrees of which they will embody, at each stage of the narration.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 163, 274. See also Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 297–310. Rancière argues: “The Rights of Man are not the rights of a single subject that would be at once the source and the bearer of the rights and would only use the rights that she or he possesses. If this was the case, indeed, it would be easy to prove, as Arendt does, that such a subject does not exist. But the relation of the subject to his or her rights is a little more complicated and entangled. It is enacted through a double negation. The subject of rights is the subject, or more accurately the process of subjectivization, that bridges the interval between two forms of the existence of those rights” (301). Tatiana Flessas, “A House Haunted by Justice: Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Law Text Culture 9 (2005): 216, accessed April 23, 2016, http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol9/iss9/10. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 239. Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 201–38. Felman writes: “I argue that the trial is, primarily and centrally, a legal process of translation of thousands of private, secret traumas into one collective, public, and communally acknowledged one” (227). She goes on to conclude that the trial “was a singular event of law that, through its monumental legal record and its monumental legal chorus of the testimonies of the persecuted, unwittingly became creative of a canonical or sacred narrative” (236). See Shoshana Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992). Here she argues that the film functions as a voice and also operates as a witness. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 134–44. Carolyn J. Dean, “Minimalism and Victim Testimony,” in “History and Theory: The Next Fifty Years,” theme issue, History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 94. She argues that rather than express trauma, “the denial and displacement of the victims’ traumatic experiences take place in the form of recounting and acknowledging loss and suffering as if the victim were no longer affected by his or her past and thus is able to express the appropriate amount of ‘reticence’ and detachment” (95). Ibid. Dean describes minimalism as a product of the 1960s, which “is not only a sophisticated style, it is also often conceived as an antidote to the alleged media exploitation of the Holocaust and as insurance against the unstable and narcissistic representations of the event associated with overwrought memory” (87). Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathans: How Do Actors Macrostructure Reality?” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr and Aron Cicourel (London:

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43. 44. 45.

46.

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48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

3. IN BALKAN Routledge, 1981): 277–303. See also Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 15. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 146–47. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 218. See Peggy Phelan, “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows,” in “Theorizing the Performer,” theme issue, Theatre Journal 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 569–77, http://www .jstor.org/stable/25069529. Phelan argues: “In her early solo pieces, Abramović, like Piper, considered performance art a laboratory for experiments in consciousness. But whereas Piper was interested in how consciousness might be changed by politically progressive and sophisticated performance, Abramović was interested in pushing her own consciousness to its limit” (570). Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53. Here Scarry refers to torture, but Abramović’s performances often replicate this obscenity, which makes them so transgressive. Yet the replication of such radically singular events means that transgression is not unique to torture. See Chrissie Iles, “Cleaning the Mirror,” in Marina Abramović: Objects, Performance, Video, Sound, ed. Chrissie Iles (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford; Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer, 1995). Abramović in an interview, in Anna Daneri, Marina Abramović (Milan: Charta, 2002), 29, 30. Phelan, “Witnessing Shadows,” 577. Phelan frames her discussion of this encounter with what she calls “the condition of witnessing,” yet it is not clear what this condition is, since what can be witnessed is not pain, or any sentient experience for that matter—these experiences remain silent or “unmarked,” to borrow one of her own terms. Instead, she points to what is made visible as “the fragility of life and a more general sense of connection to one another that exceeds simple geophysical, ideological, or cultural proximity.” Here performance seems to dissolve into its context, “the face-to-face encounter” that makes visible the Levinasian “ethical bond.” This seems odd, given that Phelan has contributed so much to the discussion on the radical singularity of performance art. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 165–72. Latour argues that actor-network theory has “nothing to do with offering still another compromise between micro and macro, actor and system . . . on the contrary, we do not claim that interactions do not really exist because they have to be ‘put into’ a context, nor that context never really exists because it is always ‘instantiated’ through individual practice” (171). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 31. Scarry, Body in Pain, 53. Catherine Mills, “Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2007): 134–35, doi:10.1215/10407391-2007 -005. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge

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56. 57. 58.

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University Press, 2002), 63–77, doi:10.1017/CCOL0521662060. See also Scarry, Body in Pain, 172–73, where she argues: “To describe one’s hurt in an image of agency is to project it into an object which, though at first conceived of as moving toward the body, by its very separability from the body becomes an image that can be lifted away, carrying some of the attributes of pain with it.” See Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (September 2006): 77–92, doi:10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.77. Scarry, Body in Pain, 53. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 93–94. For a thorough analysis of the subjectile, see Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” 61–157. Derrida argues that “a subjectile appears untranslatable. . . . [T]hat is to say the support, the surface or the material, the unique body of the work in its first event, at its moment of birth, which cannot be repeated, which is as distinct from the form as from the meaning and the representation” (65). Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 98–99. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 252. Latour continues: “it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where ANT’s political project resides . . . it’s because the definition of what it is for a social science to have political relevance has also to be modified. Politics is too serious a thing to be left in the hands of those who seem allowed by birthright to decide what it should consist of ” (252–53). For a description of trafficking pain, see Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, “Traffic in Pain,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 7–12. Scarry describes this gap between the suffering body and the witness to suffering as one that is mediated by an empathetic perception that alters the one who witnesses the other’s suffering: “If one imagines one human being seeing another human being in pain, one human being perceiving in another discomfort and in the same moment wishing the other to be relieved of the discomfort, something in that fraction of a second is occurring inside the first person’s brain involving the complex action of many neurons that is, importantly, not just a perception of an actuality (the second person’s pain) but an alteration of the actuality (for embedded in the perception is the sorrow that it is so, the wish that it were otherwise). Though this interior event must be expressed as a conjunctive duality, ‘seeing the pain and wishing it gone’ ” (Body in Pain, 289–90). The assumption here is that witnessing is identical to what Bergson called embodied perception. What Scarry discounts are other forms of witnessing that might also actually alter our sentient perception but not amount to empathy (e.g., enjoyment, indifference, confusion). See also Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 77–101. Scarry, Body in Pain, 119.

262 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

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70. 71. 72. 73.

3. IN BALKAN Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 33. Bojana Pejić, “Balkan Baroque: Balkan Mind,” in Balkan Epic (Milan: Charta, 2006), 28. According to Pejić: “The first day it was a Russian ballad from the 1950s, sung by a very popular female Yugoslav singer; second, a city ballad originating in Serbia; the third day it was a folk song from Dalmatia (Croatia). If the performance could last six days, she stated, she would sing a melody from all other Yugoslav ex-republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), xxx. Carlo Ginzburg, “Freud, the Wolf-Man, and the Werewolves,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 146–56. See also Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), where they argue that Freud dismisses the Wolf-Man’s use of words, pointing out that in Russian siestorka (sister) and shiestroka (sixter or pack of six) are very close, and in German “sechs” (six) sounds like “sex” in English (all languages that the Wolf-Man could speak). See also Vladimir Bovan, “Yugoslav Oral Lyric, Primarily in Serbo-Croatian,” Oral Tradition 6, no. 2–3 (1991): 148–73, accessed April 24, 2016, http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/6ii-iii/bovan. Within the Yugoslav context, Bovan points out that the figure of the wolf appeared in ritual songs about prosperity. “Wolf songs (vučarske pesme) were not sung on a specific day, but rather during the winter season when men went from house to house with a stuffed wolfskin and sang songs to assure that in that year the wolf ‘ne dođe s planine’ [‘would not come from the mountain’] and ‘da ne kolje ovčice’ [‘that he would not kill the lambs’]” (152). See Aleksandr V. Gura, “Coitus in the Symbolic Language of Slavic Culture,” Folklore: The Electronic Journal of Folklore 30 (October 2005), accessed April 24, 2016, http:// www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol30/gura.pdf. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 35. They refer to Ruth Mack Brunswick’s “A Supplement of Freud’s History of Infantile Neurosis,” in The Wolf-Man, by the Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 268. They conclude the chapter on the Wolf-Man by arguing: “We are criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected Oedipal statements exclusively. . . . We are criticizing psychoanalysis for having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own name” (38). Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. Phillip Reiff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 12–13. Gil Anidjar, “Of Rats and Names (Reflections on Hate),” Historein 8 (2008): 30, accessed April 24, 2016, http://www.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historein. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 162. See Dušan I. Bjelić, “The Balkans: Europe’s Cesspool,” Cultural Critique 62 (Winter 2006): 33–66, doi:10.1353/cul.2006.0002.

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See Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 63–71. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 15. Carolee Thea, “Venice: The Venice Biennale 47th International Art Exhibition,” Sculpture Magazine, http://www.scultpure.org/documents/scmag97/venice/sm-vnc47.shtml. The name “Butcher of the Balkans” is not original; it was also given to Ante Pavelić, leader of the Nazi puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia, who declared that the aim of his government would be the “purification” of Croatia and the elimination of “alien elements.” Pavelić was one among other Ustaše (Croatian Nazis) who was protected by the Vatican, moved to South America via the “ratlines,” and died peacefully in Spain. Ethnic cleansing is also not unique to the 1990s: during the 1940s, 600,000 Jews, Roma, and Serbs were exterminated, and during the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 various groups (Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Serbs) were “cleansed” from various regions of the Balkan Peninsula. Pejić, “Balkan Baroque: Balkan Mind,” 28. Vesna Kesić, “Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women . . . ,” in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 318. Kesić continues, arguing that this reduction of women to the suffering body of the ethnos or nation allowed even figures like US law professor Catherine A. MacKinnon to acquiesce to nationalist arguments. By labeling rape warfare as “genocide by procreation,” MacKinnon and the media that espoused a similar argument ended up “appropriat[ing] and reinforc[ing] racist ideology, because it accepts that the nation or ethnic group can be destroyed by procreation, that is, by its enlargement through the dilution of ‘ethnic blood.’ ” Similarly, in Lene Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 1 (2001): 55–75, the author distinguishes between how the media and leading Western feminists treated rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “The juxtaposition of Serbian intentional and Bosnian spontaneous rape imply, however, on the other hand, an accommodating attitude towards ‘spontaneous, private’ rapes. By arguing that there are two kinds of rape in this war, the intentional ones which are part of a strategy of warfare and the spontaneous ones which (presumably) happen because of (temporarily) unchecked male sexual drives, this position leaves room for an acceptance of a construction of rape as an ‘unfortunate, but expected’ act in warfare” (63). See also Patricia Albanese, “Nationalism, War, and Archaization of Gender Relations in the Balkans,” Violence Against Women 7, no. 9 (September 2001): 999–1023, doi:10.1177/ 10778010122182875. In the introduction to Balkan Epic (Milan: Charta, 2006), Adelina von Fürstenberg writes: “[D]uring this performance she was seated on a pile of bones that she cleaned of their remaining meat and cartilage one at a time in a purification ritual for herself and the massacres taking place in the Balkans” (10). Zoe Kosmidou, “Transitory Objects: A Conversation with Marina Abramović,” Sculpture Magazine 20, no. 9 (November 2001), http://www.scultpure.org/documents/scmag01 /nov01/abram/abram.shtml.

264 82.

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3. IN BALKAN As Katherine Verdery shows in The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), the reburial of the dead in postsocialist Eastern Europe is a form of ethnic cleansing. Prince Lazar was not, of course, the only corpse on the move: after German reunification, the remains of Fredrick the Great and his dog traveled from Baden to his palace in Potsdam; the remains of Tsar Nicholas were buried in the family chapel in St. Petersburg; and numerous pre-socialist figures were returned to the pantheon of national heroes—Ante Pavlević’s remains are still awaiting return to Zagreb, a city that has returned him to its pantheon of Croatian national heroes. Indeed, we have witnessed the emergence of many “local” Balkan academic discourses: ranging from Serbian intellectuals involved in producing the myth of Kosovo; Greek archeologists’ claims over ancient history and Alexander the Great; and Albanian writers’ assertions of their autochthonous Illyrian legacy (preceding the Slavic tribes); to Macedonian historians’ rewriting of history textbooks since 1991. Sarah F. Green, Michael Herzfeld, and Jasminka Udovicki have shown that “Balkan” is more a term of intricate connection than one of total fragmentation. See Sara F. Green, Notes from the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Jasminka Udovicki, “The Bonds and Fault Lines,” in Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, ed. James Ridgeway and Jasminka Udovicki (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Abramović in an interview with Aaron Moulton, “Marina Abramović: Re: Performance,” Flash Art 38, no. 244 (October 2005): 89. Catherine A. MacKinnon links pornography to rape in Bosnia. See, “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,” in Mass Rape: The War Against Women in BosniaHerzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994): 75. She not only implicates pornography for inciting rape, but rape for inciting pornography: “With this war, pornography emerges as a tool for genocide.” See also Vesna Kesić, “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,’ ” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5, no. 2 (1994): 267–80, http://repository .uchastings.edu/hwlj/vol5/iss2/5. The “anthropological turn” refers to the turn toward thinking about social and political relations as opposed to logical structures with rational actors to understand contemporary life. It looks at emotions, belief, media, and culture as integral parts of social relations and social change. Louisa Avgita, “Marina Abramović’s Universe: Universalizing the Particular in Balkan Epic,” Cultural Policy, Criticism and Management Research 6 (Autumn 2012): 19, accessed April 26, 2016, https://culturalpolicyjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/issue6_agvita _marina_abramovic.pdf. She writes: “In this historical moment of economic crisis Abramović’s ahistorical Balkanness contributes to the naturalisation and depoliticisation of the harsh neoliberal attack against the welfare state” (25). As evidence, Avgita uses a clip of Abramović at a MOMA fundraiser. Yet this type of argument conflates the art, the artist, and the artist in the context of fundraising. Avgita seems to take issue with

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Abramović curating extravagant galas at art museums and galleries, and she displaces this argument onto the Balkan Epic. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 178. David Carrier, “Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic,” Modern Painters, March 2006, 118. Adelina von Fürstenberg, introduction to Balkan Epic, 10. This marks the song as a national anthem similar to those used by the Christian empires of Byzantium and Russia, which petitioned God to save the people, grant victory in war, and preserve the empire “by the virtue of the Cross.” Many of the customs recounted in Balkan Erotic Epic can be found in T. P. Vukanović, “Obscene Objects in Balkan Religion and Magic,” Folklore 92, no. 1 (1981): 43–53, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1260250. For example, he writes: “Among Croats in the localities Cakovec and Sunsnevo Selo there was a custom about the beginning of the twentieth century that the husband should kneel by his wife if she is having a difficult childbirth, take out his phallus and make a sign of the cross with it over his wife’s breast. It was generally believed that she would then be delivered quickly and easily of her child” (49). See also Juraj Božičević, “Občaji u Sušnjevu selu i Čakovcu,” Zbornik za narodni život i običaje Južnih Slavena (Zagreb) XV [1910]: 234. Vukanović continues: “Among Serbians in the region of Stari Ras (Serbia), there is a custom that when a young girl falls in love with a young man, she ought to catch a small fish in the evening and to put it into her vagina when going to bed. The next morning she takes out the fish, which has died during the night, and fries it until it is charred and, after having crushed it to powder, she puts it into the cup of coffee she offers to her lover. It is believed that the young man needs must fall in love with her after having drunk it” (“Obscene Objects,” 49). And again: “Among Serbian frontiersmen in Croatia in the nineteenth century, the bee-keepers used to take their own little children to the beehive yard, take off their shirts from their posteriors and touches each beehive with the child’s naked posterior. According to popular belief it is as efficacious a method of healing ‘as but by my child’s posterior!’—‘Ne jela vas tudjica, van moga djeteta strazn-jica!’ ” (ibid.). See also N. Begović, Život i obićaji Srba graničara (Zagreb: n.p., 1887), 321. “In Ohrid (Macedonia), when a woman sends her child somewhere outside the house and has no other means to protect him from bewitchment, she slaps the child’s posterior three times with her left hand and then rubs his face with it” (Vukanović, “Obscene Objects,” 49). See also St. Tanović, “Urok—uročovajne u okolini Djevdjelije,” Glasnik Etnografskog muzeja u Beogradu IX (1934): 44. And lastly: “Further, in the region of Herzegovina, near the little town of Bileće, when caterpillars of some plant pest appear on vegetable crops, particularly on cabbage, the people catch one of them early in the morning before the sun has risen, and tie it with a black thread on some child’s phallus, leaving it there until it dies. It is believed that this action will cause all the other caterpillars which would appear in the garden in the course of that summer to perish” (Vukanović, “Obscene Objects,” 49).

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4. NOTRE MUSIQUE : ON THE RUINS OF THE DIVINE 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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Victor Burgin, “Seeing Sense,” in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 51. Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images (Paris: Fabrique éditions, 2003). Rancière writes: “l’image n’est pas une exclusivité du visible. Il y a du visible qui ne fait pas image, il y a des images qui sont toutes en mots. Mais le régime le plus courant de l’image est celui qui met en scène un rapport du dicible au visible, un rapport qui joue en même temps sur leur analogie et sur leur dissemblance. Ce rapport n’exige aucunement que les deux termes soient matériellement présents. Le visible se laisse disposer en tropes significatifs, la parole déploie une visibilité qui peut être aveuglante. Il pourrait sembler superflu de rappeler des choses aussi simples. S’il faut le faire, pourtant, c’est que ces choses simples ne cessent de se brouiller, que l’altérité identitaire de la ressemblance a toujours interféré avec le jeu des relations constitutives des images de l’art” (15–16). Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Representation, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 51. The expanded quotation reads as follows: “It is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference, and far from resolving difference by tracing it back to a foundation, opposition betrays and distorts it. . . . On what condition is difference traced or projected on to a flat space? Precisely when it has been forced into a previously established identity, when it has been placed on the slope of the identical which makes it reflect or desire identity, and necessarily takes it where identity wants it to go—namely, to the negative” (62). See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Travistock, 1977), 54–62. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 172. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 171–87. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 179–80. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 143–51. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 91. Jean-Luc Godard, “My Approach in Four Movements,” in Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, trans. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1986). Here Godard argues that montage “has never really existed. . . . Montage is a continent that hasn’t existed and that, I think, will not exist” (242–48). See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 129, where he argues that narration implies a system of judgment, which links it to “the true.” Places and moments do not themselves constitute the true; they only determine its terms or elements. However, the true is constantly being modified as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologized moments. See Richard Neer, “Godard Counts,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2007): 135–73. Neer argues that enumeration is Godard’s paradigm for montage, but counting must also involve the decision of what counts. “Counting, as mattering, is not simply or

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14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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21. 22. 23. 24.

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straightforwardly an arithmetic procedure. It is, on the contrary, the constitution of a sequence as such” (147). See interview with Artavazd (Arthur) Peleshian in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 93–103. Peleshian defines “distance montage” in opposition to Eisenstein: “Eisenstein’s montage was linear, like a chain. Distance montage creates a magnetic field around the film. . . . Sometimes I don’t call my method ‘montage.’ I’m involved in a process of creating unity. In a sense I’ve eliminated montage: by creating the film through montage, I have destroyed montage. In the totality, in the wholeness of one of my films, there is no montage, no collision, so as a result montage has been destroyed. In Eisenstein every element means something. For me the individual fragments don’t mean anything anymore. Only the whole film has the meaning” (95–96). That is to say, distance montage works like intuition: it does not follow filmic conventions like continuity editing, which helps to orient the viewer in space and time, and audiovisual syncing, which links images to sound. Here images and sounds function as forms of affect. Peleshian is not interested in shocking the spectator by producing a provocative juxtaposition of shots. Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinema: The Archeology of Film and the Memory of a Century, trans. John Howe (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 109. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 3. Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 23, chapter 23. Ibid., 451. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Meridian / New American Library, 1960), 112. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper, 1962), 348 [262]. Here death is presented as “the possibility of being able no longer to be there.” The difference between “the impossibility of a being-able-to” and “the possibility of being able no longer to be there.” See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Pointing out the underlying paradox of Heidegger’s statement, Derrida writes: “It is not only the paradoxical possibility of a possibility of impossibility: it is possibility as impossibility” (70). Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4. For a reading on the politics of war images, see Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 63–100. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 256. The number of civilian casualties (6,626) comes from Ewa Tabeau, ed., Conflict in Numbers: Casualties of the 1990s Wars in the Former Yugoslavia (1991–1999), Testimonies 33 (Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, 2009), 582–86. The figure 6,626 includes all ethnic groups, though Tabeau points out that 65 percent of the civilian casualties in Sarajevo were Bosnian Muslims.

268 25.

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27. 28.

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4. NOTRE MUSIQUE Rencontres européennes du livre (European Literary Encounters) is an event organized annually since 2000 by the André Malraux Cultural Centre in Sarajevo. Godard took part in 2002. In Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008) the author argues: “Becoming a citizen of the citizenry of photography means rehabilitating the relation between the photo and photography, between the printed image and the photographic event—that is, the event that took place in front of the camera, constituted by the meeting of the photographer and photographic object that leaves traces on a visual support” (166). Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006), 6. See Slavoj Žižek, “Against Human Rights,” New Left Review 34 ( July–August 2005): 115– 31, where he argues that “universal human rights are effectively the right of white, male property-owners to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers and women, and exert political domination” (129). See also Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 117–22, where Balibar via Hannah Arendt points out that the “right to have rights” must be protected by a constitution. Jean Baudrillard, “No Reprieve for Sarajevo,” Liberation (Paris), January 8, 1994, accessed May 2, 2016, http://www.ctheory.net/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo. Baudrillard continues: “Loss and suffering, just like the global debt, are negotiable and for sale on the speculative market, that is, the intellectual-political market—which is in no way undermining the military-industrial complex of old & sinister days.” Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with Michael Witt, “The Godard Interview: I, a Man of the Image,” Sight & Sound 15, no. 6 ( June 2005): 29, accessed May 2, 2016, http://www. old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/313. Mahmoud Darwish, “Speech of the Red Indian,” trans. Sargon Boulos, in The Adam of Two Edens: Poems, ed. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). Notre Musique uses lines from two sections of the poem:

The white man will never understand the ancient words here in spirits roaming free between sky and trees. Let Columbus scour the seas to find India, it’s his right! He can call our ghosts the names of spices, he can call us Red Indians, he can . . . twist all the errors of the North wind, but outside the narrow world of his map he can’t believe that all men are born equal the same as air and water, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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He took his fill from the flesh of our living and our dead. So why is he bent on carrying out his deadly war even from the grave? When we have nothing left to give but a few ruinous trinkets, a few tiny feathers to embroider our lakes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isn’t it about time, stranger, for us to meet face to face in the same age, both of us strangers to the same land, meeting at the tip of an abyss? (section 2)

Winds will recite our beginning and our end though our present bleeds and our days are buried in the ashes of legend. (section 4)

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

Narboni and Milne, Godard on Godard, 461–62. In the notes to Notre Musique, Godard refers to Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 329. See also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), wherein Agamben demonstrates how a new form of ethics emerges from the figure of the Muselmann, that of “bare life.” For a more detailed analysis of Sofsky, Agamben, and the use of this term, see Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 138–62. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 314–15. Judith Butler, “No, It’s Not Anti-Semitic,” London Review of Books 25, no. 16 (August 21, 2003): 19–21, accessed May 2, 2016, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/judith-butler/ no-its-not-anti-semitic. Levinas, Entre Nous, 105. Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 94. See Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). In “Ethnic Dance Macabre,” Guardian, August 28, 1992, http://www.egs.edu/faculty /slavoj-zizek/articles/ethnic-dance-macabre/, Žižek writes: “For a long time, the Balkans have been one of the privileged sites of fantastic investments. Gilles Deleuze said: ‘Si vous

270

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

4. NOTRE MUSIQUE etes pris dans le reve de l’autre, vous etes foutu [sic]’—if you are caught in another’s dream, you are lost. In ex-Yugoslavia, we are lost, not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language of Europe but because we pay in flesh the price for being the stuff of others’ dreams.” Jacques Derrida tells us: “Metaphor, therefore, is determined by philosophy as a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights set on, and within the horizon of, the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning. . . . Metaphor is dangerous and foreign as [it] concerns intuition (vision or contact), concept (the grasping or the proper presence of the signified), and consciousness (proximity or self-presence); but it is in complicity with what it endangers, is necessary to it in the extent to which the de-tour is a return guided by the function of resemblance (mimēsis or homoiōsis), under the law of the same.” Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in The Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 270. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 159. The footage was taken by Eldin Palata, a soldier fighting on the Muslim side in Mostar on November 9, 1993. I am referring to Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ismail Kadare’s The ThreeArched Bridge (1978), and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Masterbuilder (1910). Levinas, Entre Nous, 104–5, 162, 168. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 35. Ibid. Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 293. When asked: “Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?” Levinas answered: “My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong” (ibid., 294). Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 90–93. Jean-Luc Godard, The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews, 2000/01, trans. John O’Toole (Bern: Gachnang and Springer, 2002), 19. Godard and Witt, “I, a Man of the Image,” 28. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 8–10. Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955), 3.

4. NOTRE MUSIQUE 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

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Pindar, Pythian 3. Elena del Rio, “Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty,” in “French Cinema Studies, 1920s to the Present,” special issue, SubStance 34, no. 3 (2005): 62–63. The English translation of Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” reads: “Nature’s a temple where each living column, / At times, gives forth vague words. There Man advances / Through forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn, / Who follow him with their familiar glances.” Poems of Baudelaire, trans. Roy Campbell (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952). The Lima text translates: “An ancient legend of India reminds us there is a river whose tributaries cannot be known. In the end its flow becomes circular and begins to boil. A tremendous confusion can be seen as it sweeps along, things totally unlike and trivial coexist with jewel-like symmetries and harmonious love. This is the Puraná, carrying everything in its waters, always seeming to be in confusion, with no analogue or likeness possible. And yet this is the river that leads to the gates of Paradise.” José Lezama Lima, Confluencias: Selección de ensayos, ed. Abel E. Prieto (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1988), 429; José Lezama Lima: Selections, ed. Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 121. Lake Geneva, the city-state of John Calvin, who is responsible for the death of Miguel Servet or Servetus (quoted earlier in the film). Lake Geneva recalls two truths: Calvin’s, that no man can ever earn his salvation by any amount of good works; and Servet’s humanist defense of the free choice of human beings and his open criticism of the doctrine of predestination. Before being prosecuted in Geneva, Servet was persecuted and condemned to be burnt at the stake by the French Inquisition in Vienne, Dauphiné (France). See Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18–22. The last line of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely reads: “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.” Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (New York: Penguin, 2010), 306. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 208. For a further discussion on the principle of multiplicity or plurality and the distinction of image from thought and experience in Godard’s work, see Richard Dienst, “Breaking Down: Godard’s Histories,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (London: Routledge, 2006), 125–32. Critics have been divided on Notre Musique: some have dismissed it as obscure; others view it as deeply pessimistic, Eurocentric, combative, and obscure: Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Winter of His Discontent,” Chicago Reader, January 28, 2005, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2005/0105/050128.html; Peter Bradshaw, “What Is He Getting At? . . . Notre Musique,” Guardian, May 20, 2005, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/may/20/3. Others see it as less a reflection on humanity’s inability to overcome inhuman acts like wars, genocides, and atrocities, while others still see it as misguided optimism that ends up allowing

272

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67. 68.

4. NOTRE MUSIQUE Godard to make inappropriate analogies between himself and the Israelis or Palestinians, and Jewish victims of the Holocaust and Palestinian victims of Israeli security forces. (Chantal Ackerman accused Godard of anti-Semitism at the Toronto Film Festival.) See Peter McCarthy, “The Truth Is Two Faced: Godard at the Margins of Bad Faith,” Art Margins, October 18, 2007, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.artmargins.com/index .php/film-a-screen-media-sp-629836893/128-the-truth-is-two-faced-godard-at-the-mar gins-of-bad-faith; Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), 557–60; Michael Cieply, “An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy,” New York Times, November 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes .com/2010/11/02/movies/02godard.html; and Tom Tugend, “Is Jean-Luc Godard an Anti-Semite?” Jewish Journal, October 6, 2010, http://www.jewishjournal.com/cover _story/article/jean-luc_godard_to_get_honorary_oscar_questions_of_anti-semitism_re main_201. Jean Narboni wrote: “Je me souviens très bien de notre débat sur cette fille, juive israélienne, qui, dans Notre musique, se rend dans une salle de spectacle avec une bombe, pour la faire sauter afin de clamer son désir de paix, et dans la sacoche de laquelle on découvre, après l’avoir abattue, qu’elle avait, non des explosifs, mais des livres. Qu’il ait fait cette relation avec les juifs qui se seraient laissé exterminer dans les chambres à gaz pour faciliter la création d’Israël, non, je ne peux pas l’affirmer.” Quoted in “Godard et la question juive,” Le Monde, November 11, 2009, http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article /2009/11/10/godard-et-la-question-juive_1265204_3476.html. I have no interest in arguing about Godard’s personal ideas; instead, I read the film as thought-cinema that does not offer up ideas, or qualities like optimism or pessimism, but problems to think out. Here I am not just pointing to the criticism of the discourse of humanism (which concerned thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard) but current debates over how to address the gap between the universality of human rights and the political rights of citizens. See Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, eds., “And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights,” special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), esp. Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” (297–310), doi:10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-297; Étienne Balibar, “Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible? New Reflections on Equaliberty” (311–22), doi:10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-311; and Wendy Brown, “ ‘The Most We Can Hope For  .  .  .  : Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism” (451–63), doi:10.1215/ 00382876-103-2-3-451. As Jacques Rancière puts it: “Human rights become the privilege of the avenger.” Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Polity, 2009), 131. “In truth, the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other. Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Noli Me Tangere: Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema,” Wiley Companion to Godard, eds. Tom Conley and Thomas Kline (New York: Wiley, 2014), 460–61. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 8.

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EPILOGUE: THE POLITICS OF CONFRONTATION 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Moniza Alvi, “Europa and the Bull,” in Europa (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 15, also found at https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/03/poem-of-the -week-moniza-alvi. Even if these numbers are relatively small, they feed into right-wing anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic politics. According to the BBC, “converts do appear to make up a substantial portion of those attracted to [Islamic State] from France.” BBC News, November 19, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30119868. See also Olivier Roy, “EuroIslam: The Jihad Within?” National Interest 71 (Spring 2003): 63–73, and Robert S. Leiken, “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” Foreign Affairs 4 ( July–August 2005): 120–35. For an English simultaneous translation of Hollande’s speech to the French parliament on November 16, 2015, see “Paris Attacks: Hollande Says ‘France Is at War,’ ” November 16, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34836367. “Merkel’s Deputy Expects Germany to Get Over a Million Refugees in 2015,” Reuters, October 11, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-poll -idUSKCN0S50GA20151011. See Ruth Klüger’s interview with Nomi Schwartz, “Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered,” Bookselling This Week, December 7, 2001, accessed May 28, 2016, http:// www.bookweb.org/news/still-alive-holocaust-girlhood-remembered. See “Europe Is Kaput: Long Live Europe!” (discussion at the Southbank Centre, London, November 15, 2015), accessed May 28, 2016, http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/what son/europe-is-kaput-long-live-eur-94011 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjx AArOkoA0. See Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Theory by Other Means: Pasolini’s Cinema of the Unthought,” in “States of Theory,” ed. Tom Ford, special issue, International Social Science Journal 63, no. 207–8 (March–June 2012): 93–112, and Kriss Ravetto, “Heretical Marxism: Pasolini’s Cinema Impopolare,” in Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna, ed. R.  L. Rutsky and Bradley J. Macdonald (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 225–48. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 50. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 132. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5. PEGIDA was founded in Dresden by Lutz Bachmann in 2014 in response to what the movement saw as the “Islamisation of the occident.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 152.

274 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

EPILOGUE Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 324. Glenn Greenwald, “In Solidarity with a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons,” Intercept, January 9, 2015, accessed May 28, 2016, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015 /01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons. Emmanuel Todd, Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 189–90. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 26. Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 46–47, 61. Gourgouris questions the rationale for pairing secularism and liberalism in Mahmood’s work: “[B]ecause she does not even raise the question of their equivalence as a preliminary self-critical step in her argument, Mahmood confounds the terrain, possibly hoping she can hit both targets at once. But this way she misses the fact that you cannot conduct an antisecularist argument by simply attacking liberalism without falling into the habit of argumentation that advances the antiliberal agenda of U.S. Conservative Republicanism. This is one way Mahmood’s argument is conservative, whether she intends it or not” (46–47). Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 13. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007), 38–43. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 168. This notion of the unthought or the powerlessness of thought is derived from a network of different theories from Martin Heidegger to Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Louis Schefer, and Antonin Artaud. Deleuze draws his concept of the powerlessness of thought from What Is Called Thinking? wherein Martin Heidegger suggests that “we are still not yet thinking”; rather, we are “blinking”—that is, “playing up and setting up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid—with the mutual tacit understanding not to question the set-up.” Hence for Heidegger, the “unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow” (What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray [New York: Harper and Row, 1968], 74–79). It is this notion of the unthought within thought that forces us to think, Blanchot argues. In Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), Blanchot attributes this figure of the unthought to Artaud (59). This form of thought without image or representation begins to unthink what has been set up as “truth,” and it is this form of dissociative cinema that attracts Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, 147–48). For an in-depth discussion of Deleuze’s notion of thought cinema, see D.  N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 170–93. By “image of thought” I refer to Deleuze’s criticism of philosophy that “begins with the object or the subject, with Being or with beings.” This a priori image “prejudges everything” (Difference and Repetition, 131). Deleuze attributes the “hole in appearances” and the “figure of nothingness” to Artaud and to Blanchot’s reading of Artaud in Le livre à venir, and their discussion of what is unthought in thought. However, as Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier points out, Deleuze bends Blanchot’s notion of the outside to fit his

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notion of the unthought as thought-provoking. This blind spot promotes thinking even if it is forever outside of the formulation where it takes on form. See Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Image or Time? The Thought of the Outside in The Time-Image (Deleuze and Blanchot),” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 105.

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INDEX

Abramović, Marina, 4, 19, 125–36, 141; Balkan Baroque (1997), 21, 126, 262n65; Balkan Erotic Epic (2005), 19–21, 24, 126, 160–67, 265n93; The Biography (1992), 131; Count on Us (2003), 126, 137, 138–40, 160; deconstructing the myth of the Balkans, 150–68, 233, 256n4; Delusional (1994), 127–28, 131–32, 137; performing suffering, 21–22, 144–48; Rhythm 0 (1974), 128, 141, 147–48; Rhythm 5 (1974), 137–38, 139; Seven Easy Pieces (2005), 133; Thomas Lips (1975, 1993, 2005), 133–34, 137, 139 Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg), 58 Ackerman, Chantel, 190, 272n61 Adenauer, Konrad, 18 Adler, Sarah, 172 Aeschylus, 99; Libation Bearers, 110, 116, 255n83 Agvita, Louisa, 162–63, 164, 264n88 Akhmatova, Anna, 36 Akrites, Digenes, 66, 68, 78, 82, 102, 250n21 Alaniz, José, 45; “flub catalogue,” 45, 245n45 Aldrich, Robert, 180; Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 175, 180, 182 Alexander I (tsar of Russia), 56 Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 185 Alexander the Great, as iconic figure, 21, 54, 65, 66, 68, 77, 78, 81, 82, 88, 91, 96, 102–3,

106, 120, 122, 249n11, 250n21, 254n75, 264n83 Alexandra (tsarina of Russia), 60 Alexei (tsarevitch of Russia), 39 Alighieri, Dante, 37, 171, 173, 174, 215; La Divina Commedia, 37, 171, 173, 174, 244n29 Alvi, Moniza, 221, 224, 226; “Europa and the Bull,” 221–22, 273n1 American Civil War, 185 Anastasia (Bluth and Goldman), 38 Anderson, Benedict, 12, 35 Andrić, Ivo, 196, 199; The Bridge on the Drina (1945), 196, 270n43 Androutsos, Odysseas, 68 Angelopoulos, Theodoros, 4, 19; and Greek politics of the 1970s, 65–80; and the history of Greece, 87, 121–24, 233, 250n25, 251n33; I Kynighi (1977), 76, 123; Meres Tou ’36 (1972), 75, 123; Mia aioniotitakaimiamera (1998), 65; O Megalexandros (1980), 19, 21, 24, 65–124, 205, 224, 233, 251n32, 253n47, 255n80; and poetics, 90–101, 105, 110–16, 119, 249n12, 235n51, 255n87; O Thiassos (1975), 65, 75–76, 98, 123, 254n64; Topiostinomichili (1988), 65; To Vlemmatou Odyssea (1995), 65

306

INDEX

Anidjar, Gil, 155–56, 184, 262n71, 267n21, 269n33 Antigone (Sophocles), 91, 114, 253n46, 255n81 Antonutti, Omero, 94 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 175, 182 Arendt, Hannah, 142–44, 258n29, 259n32, 259n36, 268n28 Aristotle, 4 Artaud, Antonin, 129, 254n59; and subjectile, 129, 151, 257n13; and unthought, 233, 274n22 Arvanitis, Giorgos, 115 Asia, as Other to Europe, 1, 2, 7, 13, 25, 54, 63, 69, 74, 80–81, 82, 197 Assange, Julian, 224 Atlas, Charles, 127, 131 Avengers, The (Whedon), 230 Badiou, Alain, 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81 Bakić-Hayden, Milica, 128, 257n10 Balász, Béla, 94, 253n53 Balibar, Étienne, 12, 25, 70, 83, 189, 195, 197, 241n1, 268n28 Balkan Baroque (Abramović), 21, 126, 262n65 Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović), 19–21, 24, 126, 160–67, 265n93 Balkan Wars (1912, 1913), 105, 130, 241n27, 251n31, 263n79 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 9, 182 Baudelaire, Charles, 212, 271n56 Baudrillard, Jean, 188–89, 268n29 Bazin, André, 34, 40, 244n37, 254n63; long-take of, 40–41 Behind Enemy Lines (Moore), 230 Benjamin, Walter, 33, 93; and aura, 33; and Verfremdungseffekt, 93 Bergounioux, Pierre, 189, 195, 232 Biography, The (Abramović and Laub), 131 Bjelić, Dušan, 196, 237n6, 262n73, 263n79, 269n38 Bjørnstad, Ketil, 173

Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 141, 152, 180–83, 274n22 Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 147, 149, 150, 152, 260n46, 260n52, 261n54 Bohr, Niels, 209 Bolshevik Revolution. See Russian Revolution Bordwell, David, 4, 238n8 Bosnian and Herzegovinian Civil Wars (1992–1995), 201, 203, 217, 232 Boym, Svetlana, 12, 27, 32, 36, 59, 240n22, 243n6 Brandt, Willy, 18 Brecht, Bertolt, 93; and Verfremdungseffekt, 93 Brexit, 10, 223 Bridge on the Drina, The (Andrić), 196, 270n43 brigands, 68, 74, 80, 87–88, 101–6, 109, 111–16, 123–24, 249n7, 250n19, 251n31, 252n39, 254n72, 255n83; klefts, 68, 76–77, 82, 88, 250n19, 254n72, 252n40 British Museum, 50 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 51 Burgin, Victor, 170, 266n1 Butler, Judith, 141, 145, 149, 150, 188, 193, 203, 204, 260n51, 267n22, 269n35, 270n49 Büttner, Tillman, 40, 44 Byron, Lord, 67, 68, 84, 90, 99, 103, 121; “The Isles of Greece,” 67, 71, 79, 83, 90, 91, 123 Camus, Albert, 209; Myth of Sisyphus, 209 Carrier, David, 164, 265n90 Carroll, Lewis, 180, 181, 182; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 182 Casapound, 227 Castellio, Sebastian, 174 catharsis, 93, 110, 157, 159 Catherine the Great (tsarina of Russia), 33, 39, 46, 54, 56, 58–59, 244n32, 248n74 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 192 Chabod, Federico, 7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 221, 226–28, 273n12

INDEX Chandler, Raymond, 215 Charlie Hebdo (magazine), 222, 229, 274n16 Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera; Vertov), 43–45; montage in, 46 Chiaureli, Mikheil, 16 Christianity, 8, 13, 21, 55, 68, 70, 78, 82, 92, 96, 99, 102–3, 134–35, 139, 165–66, 230, 233, 265n93 Churchill, Winston, 104 cinema vérité, 15 Cold War, 4, 10–13, 19, 35, 51, 61, 104, 122, 240n24 Colebrook, Clare, 130 Coulibeuf, Pierre, 132, 153 Count on Us (Abramović), 126, 137, 138–40, 160 Crito (Plato), 89, 90, 115 Crozat collection, 56, 243n11 Cuban Revolution, 138 Curiel, Henri, 195 Curnier, Jean-Paul, 189 Custine, Marquis Astolphe de, 29, 247n59; as character in Russian Ark, 30–31, 41–42, 46, 50–51, 53–57, 59–61 Cvetković, Svetozar, 17–18 da Vinci, Leonardo, 102; The Last Supper, 102; “Vitruvian Man,” 138 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante Darling, David, 173, 213 Darwish, Mahmoud, 169, 172, 174, 186, 189, 190, 192, 195, 196, 199, 202, 268n31 Dean, Carolyn, 144, 259n39 del Rio, Elena, 212, 271n55 Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 140, 142–43, 231, 272n62; analogy, 237n5; difference, 35, 170–71, 218, 225, 237n9, 266n11, 274n23; “geological layers,” 186; and Guattari, 132, 155, 255n79, 257n19, 269n3; identification, 249n5; judgment, 71; opposition, 170; “out-of-field,” 28; point of view, 130–32; “powers of the false,” 97, 142–45, 168, 258n31; repetition, 35, 98, 118–19, 136,

307

140–41, 157, 170, 180, 225, 231, 234, 237n5, 266n11, 269n39, 274n22; subjectification, 146; truth, 98; universal and particular, 228; unthought, 233–34, 274n20 Delusional (Abramović), 127–28, 131–32, 137 de Man, Paul, 121, 256n91 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 180–83, 239n12, 261n58; and aporia, 79, 105, 111, 173, 183, 203, 211, 215, 234, 267n20 Destricted (Abramović), 160, 161–63 Dieu, Nade, 172 Die Vierte Macht (Gansel), 230 difference, 35, 98, 205, 218, 225, 239n12 digital cinema, 26, 34, 40–43, 45, 211, 245n39 Dilessi affair (1870), 70–71, 78–79, 99, 251n31 Dilessi murders, 72–74, 249n7, 251n31, 255n87 Doane, Mary Ann, 99, 254n66 Documenta, 131 Dolci, Carlo, 30 Donstov, Sergei, 57 dragoman, 72, 95, 252n39 dream, idealism, 35, 76, 110, 117, 119–22, 186; of becoming like Europe, 20, 31, 35, 49, 52–55; of belonging, 49, 63, 69, 77, 120; interpretation of dreams, 155–56; and mythic origins, 1, 2, 3, 4, 21, 70, 83; and narrative identity, 43, 51, 67–68, 78, 90, 121–22; nostalgia for a lost past, 48–49, 63, 65–67, 69, 74, 77, 83, 90, 100, 140, 240n22, 270n39 Durgnat, Raymond, 98, 254n63 Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex; Pasolini), 108, 254n67, 273n7 “1812 Overture” (Tchaikovsky), 194 Eisenstein, Sergei, 16, 37, 39, 41, 178, 185, 212; Alexander Nevsky (1938), 185; Battleship Potemkin (1925), 39, 182; and montage, 37, 41–43, 178–79, 244n36, 245n40, 245n41, 267n13; Oktyabr (1927), 37, 38, 41; Que Viva Mexico (1930), 193, 212 El Greco, 56 Elizaveta I (tsarina of Russia), 39

308

INDEX

Éloge de l’amour (Godard), 174, 217 Entre Nous (Levinas), 174, 194, 199–203, 266n9, 269n36, 270n44 Eshelman, Raoul, 34, 44, 243n20, 245n44 Est/Ouest (Wargnier), 230 ethics, 18, 169, 171, 174, 216; and aesthetics, 22, 169–73, 180–81, 215, 219, 224, 232–33, 269n33; and human rights, 22, 153; and identity politics, 125, 151, 208–10, 228; and Latour, 151–53, 201–4, 208–9; and Levinas, 149–50; and violence, 125–26, 180–81, 190, 198, 217 ethnic cleansing, 135, 158–59, 263n77, 264n82 Europa (mythic figure), 1–3, 6–7, 8, 25, 221, 223–27, 233–34, 237n1, 239n15, 241n24, 273n1 “Europa and the Bull” (Alvi), 221–22, 273n1 Europa Regina (map), 8–9 Europe, 26, 65, 69, 126, 172, 174, 184, 194, 197, 213, 237n6, 252n44, 257n20; in crisis, 5–7, 10–15, 24, 63, 75–76, 86, 122, 156, 185, 217, 222–23, 226–27, 229, 235, 238n10, 264n82, 273n2; as a desired identification, 12–13, 18, 19–21, 25, 33, 36, 49–50, 54–58, 121–24, 197, 221, 233–34, 240n21, 240n24, 246n55, 246n59, 247n69, 248n71, 270n39; as a fortress, 3, 7, 10, 22–24, 66, 122, 130, 134, 184–85, 225–26, 241n27; and historical revisionism, 5–9, 15, 32, 35, 74, 75, 83, 160, 163–66, 188–89, 217–18, 222, 228, 230, 240n23; origin of civilization, 1–4, 6, 35, 50–54, 67, 70, 89, 231, 241n26 “Europe” (character in Russian Ark), 53–54, 55, 57–62, 67, 83, 89 European Union, 11, 13, 19, 21, 71, 75, 86, 122, 223, 226, 241n30 Falconetti, Jeanne, 210 Felman, Shoshana, 143–44, 259n36 Flessas, Tatiana, 143, 259n33 For Ever Mozart (Godard), 175, 217 Fort Apache (Ford), 175, 178, 185 Foster, Hal, 163, 265n89

Foucault, Michel, 112, 135, 255n85, 258n23, 266n4, 272n62 Fourth Angel (Irvin), 230 Freud, Sigmund, 106, 153, 155, 159; and “the Rat Man,” 153–54, 155–57; and “the Wolf-man,” 106, 154–55, 262n70 Front National, 227 fustanella, 88, 252n44 Gabriel, Sigmar, 223 Gelovani, Mikhail, 18 Genette, Gérard, 4 Georgakas, Dan, 119, 249n11, 250n14, 256n90 Ginzburg, Carlo, 155, 262n67 Giotto, 205, 206; The Flight into Egypt, 205 Glinka, Mikhail, 49 Godard, Jean-Luc, 4, 167, 180, 195, 233, 270n50, 271n60; Éloge de l’amour (2001), 174, 217; the face, 150; For Ever Mozart (1996), 175, 217; Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), 174, 217; human rights, 22; Ici et ailleurs (1976), 190, 192, 203, 217; and the icon, 93, 215; and the image, 169–76, 185–86, 192–93, 211–12, 217–19; Je voussalue, Sarajevo (1993), 217; montage, 170–73, 198, 205, 266n10; mythopoetics, 20, 22; Notre Musique (2004), 20, 22, 24, 93, 167, 169–219, 224, 232, 268n25, 269n33, 271n61; and philosophy of ethics, 199–205, 207–12; and Sarajevo, 189–95; Vivre sa vie (1962), 210 Golberg, Stefany Anne, 128, 256n9 Golden Dawn (Λαϊκός Σύνδεσμος–Χρυσή Αυγή), 86, 227 Good Day to Die Hard, A (Moore), 230 Goodis, David, 215 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 18 Gordin, Michael, 54, 247n67 Gorilla Bathes at Noon (Makavejev), 15–17 Gorki, Maxim, 34 Gourgouris, Stathis, 12, 35, 48, 79, 230, 246n52, 250n23, 274n19

INDEX Goytisolo, Juan, 173, 189, 195, 196 Grand Theft Auto IV, 231 Grant, Cary, 205, 206 Great Northern War (1700–1721), 39 Greek Civil War (1946–1949), 67–68, 74–75, 104, 123, 252n40, 254n76 Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), 68, 71 Greekness, as a concept, 21, 68–70, 76–79, 82, 110, 123 Greenwald, Glenn, 229 Griboedov, Alexander, 57, 247n69 Griffith, D. W., 176; Birth of a Nation (1915), 179 Guattari, Félix, 105, 132, 155, 255n79, 257n19, 262n69 Guevara, Che, 138 Guilbert, Yvette, 89, 252n43 Gura, Alexandr, 155, 262n68 Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 241n30 Hansen, Lene, 158, 263n79 Hardt, Michael, 19, 242n32 Harrison’s Flowers (Chouraqui), 230 Hartog, François, 6, 239n13 Hau, Edward, 50, 246n55 Hay, Denys, 8–9, 239n15 Heidegger, Martin, 31, 98, 180, 181, 183, 207; Being-towards-death, 180–81, 183, 243n14, 267n19; bridge as metaphor, 197–98, 207, 270n41; das ding (thing), 31; Dasein, 98; thinking, 238n11, 239n11, 241n31, 270n52, 274n22; and Unheimlichkeit, 124 Heisenberg, Werner, 209 Hellenes, as the original Europeans, 2, 3, 69, 78, 81–82, 90 Hermitage (St. Petersburg museum), 20, 27–30, 33, 36–37, 40, 45–47, 50, 54–59, 62, 66, 233, 246n55, 247n61 Herodotus, 2–3, 6–8, 11, 237n1, 237n2, 239n13 Herzfeld, Michael, 70, 78, 241n29, 248n2, 248n3, 250n21, 256n4, 264n84 His Girl Friday (Hawks), 192, 205 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 174, 217

309

Hitler, Adolf, 16, 18, 190, 192, 203, 217 Hofer, Johannes, 32 Hollywood, 15, 185 Holocaust, 22, 144, 171, 175, 190, 192, 203–4, 217, 218, 224, 259n36, 259n40, 272n61 Horton, Andrew, 94, 105, 250n14, 250n22, 251n30, 251n65, 254n77 Horvat, Srećko, 224 human rights, 22, 151, 188–89, 216, 227, 267n24, 268n28, 272n62 Huntington, Samuel, 229 Husserl, Edmund, 227, 273n13 Huyssen, Andreas, 32–33, 243n18; and nostalgia, 32–33; and ruins, 32, 243n18 Ici et ailleurs (Godard, Mélville, and Gorin), 190, 192, 203, 217 identity politics, 5, 23, 117, 121, 127–29, 141, 219, 234; and cinema, 17–18, 28–29, 37, 209, 214; and collective identity, 77–78, 219; and ethnic identity, 83, 91, 125, 129–32, 135, 158, 167; and Europe, 5–8, 13–15, 20–24, 25–26, 55, 69, 222, 224–25, 240n23, 240n24, 241n29; and history, 3, 15, 22, 173, 175; and hybridity, 5, 7, 11, 83, 247n65, 251n30; and national identity, 31, 35, 48–50, 67–68, 168, 194, 216; and subjectivity, 130–31, 133, 151, 156, 167–68, 170, 225, 231, 233–35, 237n6, 266n3 I Kynighi (The Hunters; Angelopoulos), 76, 123 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 223–24, 241n27 Ippolitov, Arkadii, 50, 58, 246n56 Islam, 7, 13, 21, 23, 197, 204, 222, 227, 229–30 “Isles of Greece, The” (Byron), 67, 71, 79, 83, 90, 91, 123 Ivan VI (tsar of Russia), 54 Izetbegović, Alija, 159 Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Branagh), 230 Janscó, Miklós, 98 Je voussalue, Sarajevo (Godard), 217

310

INDEX

Johnson, Lyndon, 74–75, 113, 249n10 Johnson, William, 53 Jugonostalgija, 129 Jylland-Posten, 228 Kadare, Ismail, 199, 270n43 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 14, 258n29 Karadžić, Radovan, 157 Karapiperis, Mikis, 105 Kardovsky, Dmitry Nikolaevich, 62; Ball at the Assembly Hall of the Nobility in St. Petersburg on 23 February 1913 (1915), 62 Kauffman, Stanley, 49, 246n53 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 199, 270n43 Kennedy, John F., 18 Kerenski, Alexandr, 38 Kesić, Vesna, 158, 263n79, 264n86 KGB, 47 Khazanov, Anatoly, 48, 246n49 Khmelnisky, Oleg, 56 kino-eye, 44 kino-pravda (cinema truth), 44 Kiossev, Alexander, 160, 166 Kiš, Danilo, 174, 240n24 Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich), 175, 180, 182 Klenze, Leo von, 83, 251n35 Klüger, Ruth, 224, 273n5 Kolokotronis, Theodoros, 68 Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg; Pudovkin), 37 Koselleck, Reinhart, 8; and counterconcept, 8, 23, 239n16 Kramer, Rony, 194 Krleža, Miroslav, 25 Kronstadt Rebellion (1921), 39–40 Kujundžić, Dragan, 26, 27, 34, 37, 50, 62, 242n3, 248n75 Kurenkova, Tamara, 56 Kusturica, Emir, 4 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 106, 108 La Divina Commedia (Alighieri), 37, 171, 173, 174, 244n29

Ladurner, Adolphe, 50 Lanzer, Ernst. See Rat Man Latour, Bruno, 145, 146, 151, 152, 260n42, 260n44, 260n50, 261n60; and “actornetwork-theory,” 145–47, 259n42 Laub, Michael, 131, 259n37 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 15, 241n28, 242n32 Lenin, Vladimir Illych, 17, 134 Levinas, Emmanuel, 141, 151, 169, 174, 183, 204, 206, 208, 260n49, 261n57, 270n48; Entre Nous, 174, 194, 199–203, 266n9, 269n36, 270n44 Libation Bearers (Aeschylus), 110, 116, 255n83 Lima, José Lezama, 208, 212–13, 271n56 liminality, 136, 258n25 liminal subjects, 25, 136 long-take, 37, 40–41, 66, 92–93, 98–99, 112, 114, 173 Louis XIV (king of France) 54, 59 Lyotard, Jean-François, 22, 272n62 Macedonian Question, 82, 104–5 Mack, Ruth, 155, 262n69 MacKinnon, Catherine A., 161, 263n79, 264n86 Mahmood, Saba, 228–29, 274n15, 274n19 Makavejev, Dušan, 4; Gorilla Bathes at Noon, 15–17 Maltese, Francesco, 30 Mandelstam, Osip, 47 Manovich, Lev, 43, 245n43 Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, 49 Marshall Plan, 82 Marx, Karl, 134 Marxism, 36, 169 masquerade, 1, 2, 57, 59 Matasas, Alexander, 75 Mbembe, Achille, 22, 242n33 Mediterranean, 1, 25, 80, 94, 256n4 Megáli Idéa (Greek irredentism), 86, 227 Meir, Golda, 192, 217 Meres Tou ’36 (Days of ’36; Angelopoulos), 75, 123

INDEX Merkel, Angela, 75, 223, 227 Mertus, Julie, 131, 257n18 Metaxas, General Ioannis (Greek dictator), 67, 75, 105 Metropolis (Lang), 183 Mia aioniotitakaimiamera (Eternity and a Day; Angelopoulos), 65 Mieris I, Frans Jansz van, 51 Mikhailovich, Nicholas (grand duke of Russia), 48 military junta, in Greece (1967–1974), 67, 75, 249n10, 252n40 Mills, Catherine, 150–51, 260n53 Milošević, Slobodan, 128, 157, 190 Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Abrams), 230 Mondzain, Marie-José, 68, 215, 248n1, 253n55 montage, 26, 41, 218; and Eisenstein, 37, 40–43, 179, 244n36, 245n41; and Godard, 170–73, 175, 178–82, 266n10, 267n13; and Pasolini, 99; and Peleshian, 179–80; and Vertov, 44–46, 216, 267n13 Montesquieu, Charles de, 180; The Spirit of the Laws, 181–82, 185, 267n16 Mulvey, Laura, 40, 244n34 Murray, Timothy, 128, 256n8 mythology, 1, 8, 32, 270n40 mythopoetics: definition of, 3–7; filmic examples, 15, 17–19, 22–23, 25; and the practice of critical thought, 83, 225–27, 231–35 “Μυθιστορημα Γ,” 67, 92, 95, 100, 110, 119, 253n57, 255n82 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 94, 253n54 narikača, 158 nationalism, 11, 194; Balkan nationalism, 131, 135, 159, 165, 194, 197, 257n10; ethnonationalism, 13, 135, 165–66, 228; in Europe, 223, 226; Greek nationalism, 99, 122, 128; and the nation-state, 12–13; Russian nationalism, 25–26, 55, 254n73, 263n79; transnationalism, 11, 99

311

NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Negri, Antonio, 19, 242n32 Neumann, Iver, 52, 55, 247n65, 247n68 Nicholas I (tsar of Russia), 46, 57–58, 61 Nicholas II (tsar of Russia), 20, 27, 29, 38–39, 48–49, 58, 246n55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 7, 27, 30, 32, 34, 118, 239n14, 243n23; and antiquarian history, 27, 30–31, 243n15; critical history of, 27, 31–32; judgment of, 32–33; and monumental history, 27–29, 242n8 Non-Aligned Movement, 10, 138 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 13, 76 nostalgia, 12, 17, 19, 26, 33, 48–49, 92, 134, 241n25; and Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia, 27, 32–36, 240n22, 241n25, 243n18, 244n27, 246n47 Notre Musique (Godard), 20, 22, 24, 93, 167, 169–219, 224, 232, 268n25, 269n33, 271n61 Nouvelle Vague, 15 Oedipus, 80–82, 104, 105, 106, 110, 154, 157 Okhrana (Russian secret police), 39 Oktyabr (October; Eisenstein), 37, 38, 41 O Megalexandros (Angelopoulos), 19, 21, 24, 65–124, 205, 224, 233, 251n32, 253n47, 255n80 opanka, 165 Orestes, 110, 111, 116, 117, 255n82 Orlov, Alexei Grigoryevich, 54 Orthodox Church: Russian, 48, 54; Serbian, 134, 135, 246n51, 248n71 Osipenko, Alla, 56, 57 O Thiassos (The Travelling Players; Angelopoulos), 65, 75–76, 98, 123, 254n64 Otte, Hans, 173 Otto (king of Greece), 74, 83, 249n7 Ottoman Empire, 3, 12, 35, 83, 87, 197; conquest of the Balkans, 10, 77, 240n24; heritage in Eastern Europe, 70, 74, 78, 84, 196–97, 249n9; rule over Eastern Europe, 21, 68–70, 74, 81, 83, 102, 104–5, 251n31, 257n14

312

INDEX

Pagden, Anthony, 3, 237n4, 241n29 Palestinian–Israeli conflict, 190–92, 194, 210, 217, 232, 272n61 Pankeiev, Sergei Konstantinovitch. See Wolf-man Papandreou, Andreas, 78 Pärt, Arvo, 173, 213 PASOK, 19, 76, 78 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 4, 69, 86, 93, 98, 108, 171, 224; and cinema impopolare, 69, 224–25; cinematic theorem, 177; dead time, 99; Edipo Re (1967), 108, 254n67, 273n7; free-indirect, 86, 93, presente storico, 99 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (Dreyer), 209–10 Patriotische Europärgegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (PEGIDA), 227, 229, 273n11 Pavelić, Ante, 157 Peacemaker (Leder), 230 Peeva, Adela, 166 Péqueux, Gilles, 172, 174, 189, 197, 201–2, 204, 206, 207 Peleshian, Artavazd, 179; and distance montage, 179, 267n13 Peter III (tsar of Russia), 54 Peter the Great (tsar of Russia), 20, 27, 29, 35, 39, 46–48, 52–54, 58–59, 246n59, 247n62, 247n67, 248n71 Petrine Reforms, 27, 54, 58–59 Phelan, Peggy, 135, 146, 258n24, 260n45, 260n49 philhellenes, 3, 90, 253n47 Plato, 89, 99; Crito, 89, 90, 115 Porter, David, 110, 255n83 Premazzi, Luigi, 50 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 37 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 55, 59; “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), 37, 59, 62 Putin, Vladimir, 62 Que Viva Mexico (Eisenstein), 193, 212

Ran (Kurosawa), 178, 185 Rancière, Jacques, 142, 171, 259n52, 266n2, 266n6, 272n62, 272n63, 274n21, 275n24 Rašković, Jovan, 157 Rasputin, 60, 248n73 Rastrelli, Bartolomeo, 50 Rat Man (Freud case), 155–56 Reagan, Ronald, 18 reanimation, 33–35, 165, 226, 234 Red Army, 47–48, 138 Red Army Faction, 138 Red Brigades, 138 repetition (as disruptive force), 15, 21, 23, 33–34, 78, 80, 98, 108, 115, 118, 124, 132, 135, 136–41, 157, 159, 163, 170, 180, 205, 210, 212, 214, 219, 225, 231, 233–34 Rhythm 0 (Abramović), 128, 141, 147–48 Rhythm 5 (Abramović), 137–38, 139 Riefenstahl, Leni, 15–16, 18 Rimbaud, Arthur, 184; and “je est un autre,” 183–84 Rodowick, David, 40, 41, 43, 244n35, 245n38, 274n22, 275n23; and digital cinema (image), 40–43, 245n39, 245n42 Rossi, Carlo, 50 Roth, Joseph, 11, 239n20 Roudometof, Victor, 105, 254n73 Ruiz, Raùl, 24 Russell, Rosalind, 205, 206 Russian Ark (Russkijkovcheg; Sokurov), 19–20, 24, 25–30, 33–64, 66, 224, 243n20, 245n44, 246n48, 247n69, 248n75 Russian Revolution, 33, 37, 40, 47, 49, 60, 61, 62, 171 Russian tsars (Romanov dynasty), 20–21, 27–28, 30–31, 36, 40, 46, 49–55, 60 Russkijkovcheg. See Russian Ark Russo-Japanese War, 39 Sabra and Shatila massacres (1982), 202 Saint George, as national icon, 66, 68, 88, 96–97, 103 Saint John the Baptist, 51, 56, 101–2, 124

INDEX Šajkača, 165 Sarris, Andrew, 190 Scarry, Elaine, 147, 149, 150, 152, 260n46, 260n52, 261n54 Seferis, George, 67, 95, 99, 110; “Μυθιστορημα Γ,” 67, 92, 95, 100, 110, 119, 253n57, 255n82 Seven Easy Pieces (Abramović), 133 Sibelius, Jean, 173 Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944), 28–28, 41–24, 47–48, 58 Simić, Goran, 186 Socrates, 90 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 4, 19–20, 25–26, 36, 44–45, 49, 54, 56, 58, 63, 66, 233; Russian Ark (2002), 19–20, 24, 25–30, 33–64, 66, 224, 243n20, 245n44, 246n48, 247n69, 248n75 Sophocles, 91, 99; Antigone, 91, 114, 253n46, 255n81 Soviet Union, 3, 5, 16–17, 35–37, 47, 230, 240n23 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 181–82, 185, 267n16 Srebrenica, 159, 190, 203 Stalin, Joseph, 16, 18, 47, 104; purges of, 61; and Stalinism, 76, 230 Stamatelopoulos, Nikitas, 68 Stanzione, Massimo, 30 Strauss, Johann, 71, 89 Stavrianos, Stavros, 130, 257n14 Stiglmayer, Alexandra, 161, 264n86 Stojanović, Mihailo, 130, 257n14 subject, 34, 93, 101, 114, 136, 141, 156, 196, 259n32, 272n62; countersubjects, 172; desubjectification, 151, 243n20; and discourse, 161–63, 166, 184, 209; of the gaze, 28–29, 214, 274n23; and identification, 42, 70, 130–32, 224, 233–35; and ideology, 23, 34, 193, 201–3; nonsubject, 193; postcolonial subjects, 19, 227–28, 248n3; self, 144–52, 209; and the spectator, 28; subjecthood, 144, 259n32; subjectification, 146–47, 151, 256n4;

313

subjectile, 129, 151, 257n13, 261n58; subjective point of view, 28, 41, 71, 85–86, 93, 128; subjectivity, 21–22, 97, 125, 128, 141–42, 146, 149–52, 158, 167, 214, 224; subjectivization, 131, 259n32 Syntagma Square, 85–86 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 98 Taylor, Diana, 135, 258n24 theatricality, 57, 58, 93, 97, 113, 115, 128, 132, 140, 143–44 terror, 13, 92; and brigands, 249n7; global, 92; jihadist, 222, 229; Red Terror, 48; Reign of Terror, 53 terrorism, 13, 210, 222, 230 terrorist states, 218 time as a construct, 1, 22–23, 26, 37, 41, 45, 55–56, 66, 98–99, 131–32, 135, 140, 146, 173, 178–79, 186–88, 194–95, 208, 211, 225, 234, 245n39, 253n56, 267n13, 269n31, 274n22; dead time, 93, 99, 161, 249n6, 254n66; epic time, 80–81, 161, 163, 181, 186, 250n57; historical time, 26–35, 37, 58, 76, 79–81, 99, 161–63, 242n8, 247n67; narrative time, 80–81, 93, 98, 186, 251n57; real-time, 42, 45–46, 93; time-code, 245n45; time-image, 92, 99, 245n39, 249n5, 258n30, 266n5, 273n9, 275n23; untimely, 21, 40, 42–44, 54, 57, 79, 132, 135, 163, 206, 214, 226, 234, 242n8, 243n12, 256n4 Tintoretto, 56 Tito, Josip Broz, 126, 129, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139 Third Estate, 51 Thomas Lips (Abramović), 133–34, 137, 139 Todd, Emmanuel, 229, 230 Todorov, Tzvetan, 4, 134, 258n22 Todorova, Maria, 125, 130, 241n26, 257n1 Topiostinomichili (Landscapes in the Mist; Angelopoulos), 65 To Vlemmatou Odyssea (Ulysses’ Gaze; Angelopoulos), 65

314

INDEX

Truman Doctrine, 82 Tsipras, Alexis, 87 Turner, Victor, 136 typage, 16, 42, 245n41 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 129 Unterberger, Christopher, 50 unthought, 18–19, 172, 231–32, 242n31, 273n7, 274n22 Vakulinchuk, Grigory, 39 van Rijn, Rembrandt, 47; Danaë, 57; The Return of the Prodigal Son, 47; The Sacrifice of Isaac, 47 Variant of a Manifesto, A (Vertov), 43–45 Varoufakis, Yanis, 224 Velouchiotis, Aris, 68 Venice Biennale, 126, 153 Vertov, Dziga 43, 46, 245n43; A Variant of a Manifesto, 43–45; Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929), 43–45; and montage, 46 Vivre sa vie (Godard), 210 Wagner, Richard, 16 Wakefield, Neville, 160 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 150

Weber, Samuel, 98, 193, 195, 253n49, 254n61, 255n81, 269n39 Welcome to Sarajevo (Winterbottom), 189 Westcott, James, 127–28, 256n4 Whose Is This Song? (Peeva), 166 Wieviorka, Annette, 144, 259n39 Winter Palace (St. Petersburg): as a film set, 20, 37–38, 49–50, 246n55; as residence of the Russian tsar, 27, 29, 57–58, 60, 62 Wolff, Larry, 10, 51 Wolf-man (Freud case), 154–55 Wollen, Peter, 42, 245n41 World War I, 38, 39, 61, 175, 241n25 World War II: and Greece, 67, 68, 76, 78, 86, 104, and the occupation of the Balkans, 134, 139, 154, 156, 157, 175, 193, 190, 234; and the Soviet Union, 58, 61 Yeliseyev, Lev, 56 Yugoslavian National Liberation War (1941–1945), 134, 153 Zeus, 1, 2, 237n1, 241n24 Zichy, Mihály, 50 Žižek, Slavoj, 108, 129, 188, 197, 224, 257n11, 268n28 Zulu (Endfield), 178–79, 185