New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory 1501322494, 9781501322495

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Waldron, Dara. "Dedication." New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. v–vi. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Jan. 2020. . Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 January 2020, 13:09 UTC. Access provided by: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Copyright © Dara Waldron 2018. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

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For John and Mary, for Dad and Mam. (In memory of John, in memory of Dad, 1945–2016)

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Dedication pp. v–vi

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments pp. ix–x Introduction pp. 1–16 Chapter 1. Nonfiction as a speculative mode of inquiry : Subjectivity and the films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell pp. 17–36 Chapter 2. (Self as) modèle environments : Nonfiction film pp. 37–54 Chapter 3. The utopian promise: : John Akomfrah’s poetics of the archive pp. 55–72 Chapter 4. “In my mind, my dreams are real” : Abbas Kiarostami and the roots of new nonfiction film pp. 73–116 Chapter 5. After Kiarostami: : Cinemas of (speculative) nonfiction pp. 117–140 Chapter 6. Nonfiction, the cognitive turn, and Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (1993) pp. 141–164 Chapter 7. The poetic mode, depiction, and nonfiction: : Sense-value and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously pp. 165–180 Conclusion pp. 181–190 Filmography pp. 191–192 References pp. 193–200 Index pp. 201–214 9781501322495_pi-200.indd vi

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea that pivots New Nonfiction Film arose during a conversation with the artist and filmmaker Ben Russell in Dublin in 2014. A  book of some sort would have materialized even if I had not had this conversation, but maybe not in its current form. I’d like to thank Ben for planting the seed that day. Much of the content of the book came together on the back of similar conversations and correspondences with the filmmakers whose films I  explore in New Nonfiction Film:  Ben Rivers, Pat Collins, and Gideon Koppel. I’d like to acknowledge the importance of these correspondences to thinking of nonfiction as a category of film. I thank Gideon Koppel also for the critical feedback he offered on early drafts of the book, and Ben Rivers for permission to use the shot from his film The Sky Trembles for the book cover. Much of New Nonfiction Film took its first steps, like most academic books, at conferences and symposia. Many of those who participated in the panel debates around these events were vital to the conceptual gestation of the book—from those at Visible Evidence in Delhi and Toronto in 2014 and 2015, to Screen in Glasgow in 2014, and Imaginaries of the Future events in Belfast and London in 2016 and 2017. It was during a break at Screen in 2014 when perusing the many books and bookstands that I  bumped into my editor Katie Gallof. Katie was extremely personable, and has remained so since becoming my editor for the book. She has managed, sometimes without knowing, to keep my somewhat obsessional and neurotic tendencies under wraps. I’d like to acknowledge Katie and the Bloomsbury editorial team more generally for their support throughout the publication process. A large section of New Nonfiction Film was written during the summer of 2016 when I was hiding myself away and writing was a nice release from trying personal circumstances. Friends and colleagues were a support at this time, and a number deserve special mention in this regard: Michael G. Kelly, Lorraine Neeson, Robert Purcell, Conal Lowry, Breda Lynch, and Des MacMahon. To write, however, would have been inordinately more difficult without the support of my family. My wife Ylva has shown patience and love, as have Anton and Karl. Ylva’s honesty in everything is an inspiration. My sisters Sheila and Kate, my mother Mary, and my Swedish in-laws have

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contributed in their own way. Thank you is maybe a small gesture, just to begin. As an additional note, three chapters rework and extend previously published journal articles. “Nonfiction as a Speculative Mode of Inquiry:  Subjectivity and the Films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell” was published in a shorter form and with a shorter title, “Nonfiction as a Speculative Mode of Inquiry,” in Millennium Film Journal 66 (October 2017). “The Utopian Promise: John Akomfrah’s Poetics of the Archive” was originally published with the same title in the Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media series in Open Library of the Humanities in February 2017. “The Poetic Mode, Depiction and Nonfiction:  Sense-Value and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously” originally appeared as “The Poetic Mode as Depiction: Sense-Value and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously” in Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 8 (May 2014). I’d like to thank the respective editors of these journals:  Grahame Weinbren, Kenneth White (MJF), and Deane Williams (SIDF) for permission to reprint these articles in an altered form. I’d finally like to acknowledge the Lisson Gallery in London, along with John Akomfrah, for kind permission to use stills from John’s films, as well as the acknowledged filmmakers Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Pat Collins, and Gideon Koppel for permission to reproduce images from their films in this book.

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FIGURE 0.1 A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness: Close-up of Robert A. A. Lowe as he screams into the microphone

Nonetheless, both films have been nominated or have received awards in categories given over to documentary film, whether at Sundance or at other significant festivals. The film 20,000 Days received the world cinema award in documentary at Sundance, even though it has been described as everything from a “mock rock doc” to a “fictitious portrait,” while A Spell—which is also a film concerning a singer musician though lesser known than Cave, Robert A. A. Lowe—won the New Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, while it was nominated for the Silver Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2014. Ben Kenigsberg, writing in the New York Times, praised A Spell for its accessibility, calling it “hypnotic on an intuitive level,” yet, at the same time, made little or no reference to its accreditation as a documentary production, a film that documents the wanderings of an American avantgarde musician across the plains of Northern Europe (Kenigsberg, 2014). John Semley, in Slant, however, called it a “docu-fictional” exploration, even if neglecting to theorize the properties of the “docu-fictional,” When Lowe’s character breaks from this space, escaping into the night alone, en route to who knows where, it underscores Spell’s central concern:  that utopia is a construction, an experience that is made up, not found but created. All social formations are possessive of their own pleasures and problems. But each may contain moments of rare gratification and meaning. In the film, Rivers and Russell prove themselves able to sculpt (or maybe even just reveal) these pockets of meaning. It makes their docu-fictional exploration of community, seclusion, and rejection feel like that rarest of things: a gift. (Semley, 2014)

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The panel discussion that day at Darklight was purposefully concerned with evaluating the docu-fictional trajectories of much experimental film today, with discussion points on ethics and aesthetics, truth and reality, in the context of cultural production classified as hybrid to any particular degree. A screening of The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2014) and a Q & A with its director, Joshua Oppenheimer, who had been at the receiving end of much criticism for working with the perpetrators of genocide in present-day Indonesia, kick-started the festival, and many of the issues that were raised made their way into the panel discussion. Is a film ethically compromised when the filmmaker has spoken about employing fictional strategies when engaging with the life of a real person:  a subject? Taking the subject, as opposed to a film character, to be a subject precisely because they are the same in “real life” as in the film (whether the subject is Nick Cave, Robert A. A. Lowe, or, in Oppenheimer’s case, the perpetrators of genocide). Forsyth and Pollock spoke about the challenges faced when working with Cave to script a film purposively “about” Cave, and the fictional strategies used to explore the subject’s persona as something perplexing and complex, to get at the deeper truth of Cave within the constraints of the portrait film. I spoke about my conversations with Gideon Koppel concerning the history of documentary. I mentioned Koppel’s admission—if it should qualify as such—during a Q & A in 2011 that much of sleep furiously, which has also been the recipient of numerous accolades within the documentary field, had been scripted. I spoke about the disdain shown by many members of the audience when Koppel mentioned that his mother, Pip, who appears in the film’s opening sequence teaching schoolchildren to work with clay, had once worked in the school but that the sequence in itself, scripted in advance, was, for want of a better word, staged. It seemed that the common understanding, and I use “common” here because the audience for the Q & A was made up of members of the public as well as students, consisted of a clear distinction, understood as a boundary, between “staged” and real, as if the opposition was anything but arbitrarily defined. And such was the assumption around this that many of the audience members, when I spoke with them afterward, had altered their opinion of the film in light of this admission on Koppel’s part. Having assumed that the film they had watched was a documentary feature, many were under the assumption that Koppel had transgressed a fundamental code of documentary filmmaking, and had therefore manipulated the real for aesthetic gain. However, it is worth pointing out, as I was adamant to do that day, that Koppel has never proposed that his film be received as a documentary, when documentary film is set in the context of critical definitions that make clear the distinction between staged and real. The title for the Darklight panel, “What’s Up Doc?” is an obvious pun on Bugs Bunny’s infamous retort, soundbite even, and is meant to reflect the emerging hybridity of films that, coming to fruition in recent years, makes reference to a crisis in and around documentary filmmaking, documentary

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that is being critically challenged by forms of becoming that mongrelize the genre from within. In most cases, or at least many cases, these forms are taken up by artists. However, when I  mentioned the research I  had undertaken in sleep furiously, and my own discussions with Koppel about a history of cinema of which documentary, or the actuality film (as it was known in its heyday), is a formative part of the avant-garde and therefore art canon, I wondered whether certain occurrences and trends within recent art documentary can be understood as a return to earlier filmmaking practices. As opposed to mongrelized hybridizations of the documentary form, I spoke about the origins of documentary in the avant-garde. Documentary—as a type of film—originates with filmmakers like Joris Ivens and Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, who celebrated a genuinely artistic medium that rivals other mediums of art practice. Ivens’s masterpiece The Bridge (1928) illustrates this point. The Bridge is a short film concerned with a newly constructed verticallift railway bridge in the city of Rotterdam, revealing the bridge from many different angles while exploring the newfound medium of film in its capacity to “portray” the modernist spectacle of the bridge in the new machine age, of which cinema is an incendiary and formative part. Hence, the camera, as a product of the machine age, is demonstrated helping to explore the magnitude and spectacular engineering of a bridge that is also a product of this age. The film is as much about cinema as the bridge it celebrates. As Ian Mundell notes, The film announces its agenda from the very start, with a presentation of three different views of the camera itself, as if in a technical drawing. It then proceeds to examine the bridge from all angles, up and down its towers, along the rails, in amongst the winding gear. But alongside this inevitable, almost abstract mechanical process is a story: a train is speeding towards the city; it must stop and wait for the bridge to be raised; when the bridge descends, it can continue on its way. For all his analysis, Ivens cannot give himself up entirely to the abstract. (Mundell, 2005) Mundell doesn’t zone in on the abstraction of a train crashing through the bridge, with the steam rising from its engine, and the film drawing to an enthralling conclusion. A set of unusually angled shots of the train pummeling at an incredible speed along the bridge is a sudden almost-dramatic twist that suggests some kind of potential disaster is about to occur at the end, only for the train to travel over the rail bridge, and the technology to function as it ought. At this point, and as the film concludes, there is a short abstract shot of a white background with an animated black square that grows bigger and smaller in time. The animation makes direct reference to Kazimir Malevich’s masterpiece Black Square (1915). Black Square is celebrated as a quintessential moment in the history of modernist avant-garde painting, a kind of ground zero in the painterly etching out of the formal boundaries of medium specific artworks. Irrespective of what the painting actually

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purports to mean, or the discourse around its reception as an event that marks the emergence of abstraction as a genre of modernist painting, Ivens’s decision to reference the painting like this says something of where he situates The Bridge. While on the one hand he likens the formal adventures undertaken in the film, by way of unpacking the medium specificity of film, to Malevich’s undertaking in Black Square, on the other he gives a narrative context to Malevich’s somewhat mysterious paintings, which nonetheless demonstrates the affinity his aesthetic adventures have with the modernist avant-garde of which Malevich is a pervasive force. The point in mentioning this, in turning however briefly to this classic of the documentary tradition, is that Ivens, who went on to forge a remarkable career across activistbased reportage documentary, used the film to demonstrate the aesthetic sensibility he shares with Malevich and, in doing so, to identify the specific qualities of the medium, irrespective of its status as fiction or not. Koppel had mentioned the 1920s avant-garde when situating his own formal concerns in the production of sleep furiously in relation to documentary history that day. When responding to the question “What’s Up Doc?” as part of the panel at Darklight, however, I made reference to this as a way of understanding the poetic, call it fictional for want of a better word, underpinnings of a tradition of filmmaking that has, arguably from its inception, been prey to the kind of hybridity that The Bridge demonstrates. For The Bridge is a film that, while trying to make specific—in the act of making—its own formal and filmic principles, does so by way of an engaged hybridity: in this case a mutual becoming with the medium specific field of abstract painting. It was only in the years after The Bridge, with Grierson’s impact and the consolidation of documentary as a type of filmmaking regulated by its own ethical and industrial codes that an industry emerged in which the documentary form was streamlined as a result. The relationship between the documentary tradition and the art-making tradition may well have changed in this time, but it was never broken as such. There was never a significant moment when art and documentary were estranged, when the alignment between film and the avant-garde espoused by European filmmakers such as Ivens and Vertov was broken. There was, as we all recognized that day, an increasing regulation of the documentary film in industry from which emerged certain codes and principles of filmmaking described as “ethical” and an observational approach that included, at least after Grierson, shaping the actual world objectively as opposed to staging a world to fit a particular view of it. Following the panel discussion that day, on which Ben Russell sat, I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of Russell’s and Ben Rivers’s collaborative feature-length A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, followed by a Q & A with Russell, followed again by a dinner where I was able to discuss the film with Russell in more detail. While the film left an incredible mark on me and for a myriad of reasons, mostly because of the tempo and tripartite temporal structure and the relative silence of the protagonist/

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subject, who moves across Scandinavia, I left the dinner intrigued more than anything by Russell’s admonition that both he and Rivers, two filmmakers whose films take up a considerable portion of this book, regarded the film as “nonfiction,” but not necessarily as documentary. Schooled to think of both categories as interchangeable, as signifying the same “thing,” I mulled over this comment for some time, on whether it was simply semantics on Ben’s part, or whether there was an argument to be made that nonfiction can be ordained as different to documentary. The seeds for the present study were born during this discussion. I began, in this moment, to think of nonfiction as a category of art that was caught in the crack between the world of cinema and the world of art making. The interest that I fostered in certain films engaged fundamentally with the real, or at least claiming the real in the sense Brian Winston accords to the documentary impulse, had grown out of an interest in the questions posed to the documentary tradition in these films (Winston, 1995, 246). I left the dinner table to take a plane to Stockholm, and was intrigued by the idea that my interests, which seem to sway between fiction and non-fiction, might converge around what is called nonfiction. I  started then to think of this category as a category of art, and the artists working in nonfiction as artists who are trying to get at the relationship between art and truth that goes right back to Heidegger’s writings on art. This concern, however, had grown in tandem with my own interest in the filmmaking notes kept by legendary French filmmaker Robert Bresson,1 who is an integral reference point in this book and in the new nonfiction film as it is proposed here. My interest in the aphoristic notes Bresson kept is premised on the fact they grew out of a practice bound to a type of filmmaking that sought, to access, via fiction, the truth. Bresson’s notes are about cinematography, but he writes about how the cinematographer differs from the dramatist. His emphasis is on the actor as a modèle, a use of actors that differs from dramatic storytelling. Although I explore Bresson’s focus on the fictional in Chapter 1 of the following text, it was only after the discussion with Russell that I started to consider my interest in films that took the relationship between fiction and non-fiction from a Bressonian or post-Bressonian position to task that weren’t straight up fiction. Nonfiction, not “non-fiction,” was something I began to think about in relation to art, generally, but also to art as I  saw it in the context of Bresson’s contribution to cinema. Could there be a “cinema of nonfiction”? Or a “new nonfiction film” that aspired to the category of art, taking issue with strategies of documentary? It is not surprising then that Russell has pointed to the influence of Bresson on the preproduction, writing, and casting of A Spell, in relation to the aesthetic decisions he and Ben Rivers, his codirector, had taken. This decision is premised on pushing the non-fictional subject to its limits. As such, Robert A. A. Lowe plays himself but is never referred to as Lowe, and doesn’t speak at any length in the film. The subject/character dichotomy—a definitive axis

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in film—is important in this regard (as is the term “social actor,” used by Bill Nichols to describe subjects who act as themselves within the framework of documentary production) (Nichols, 1991, 42). Russell specifically mentions the modèle as inspiration. Bresson would come to rest his filmmaking practice on casting nonprofessional actors in fictional roles, so it is noteworthy that Russell and Rivers reference the fact that Lowe is actually playing himself in A Spell. He is a modèle. But he is a modèle of himself. Rivers talks about using film to create a reality in and of itself. Speaking in an interview around the time of A Spell’s release, he makes the point: It’s both actual and fictional, in the same way that Jake is actual and fictional in Two Years at Sea. This is what Ben and I both do, we mix actual situations with things we need, in order to make the film that we want. It’s about setting up the right conditions to make not a representation, but something that exists on the screen in and of itself. We lived with the people for almost a month so we could find the material we needed. (Fitzgibbon, 2014) That a film documents reality and is fictional too is of course a paradox. Yet there is no doubt a structural relationship between fiction and nonfiction found in practically all forms of film (irrespective of whether they’re called documentary or something else). Rivers’s admission that neither he or Russell are interested in representation is vital to understanding documentary considered as inadequate for addressing what they actually do in their filmmaking practice, but also for understanding why Russell prefers the term nonfiction as a critical descriptor for A Spell. I believe that representation, although not the essential concern of the new nonfiction film as I consider it here within the framework of art and poetics, cannot be dismissed tout court, and the sense of existing in the cracks between actual and fictional makes the work produced valuable on an aesthetic level. A Spell might not be a representation of Robert A. A. Lowe, but neither can we dismiss outright the “fact” that Robert A. A. Lowe is on screen doing things he normally does. It is this abiding conflict, “rift,” that is the point of analysis, turning to Rivers and Russell in the first chapter of this book, a chapter that theoretically positions their films under the title of the new nonfiction film.

A certain ratio (of negation) The word “non-fiction” is characterized by the hyphen that comes between “non” and “fiction” but is often “mistakenly” spelt as nonfiction. Nonfiction is a word that suggests a cancelling, as opposed to rejection of fiction as a structural component. In literature, however, the spelling nonfiction seems to carry more weight as the term of choice. Eric Barnouw’s much-referenced

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historical compendium of documentary, the book titled Documentary:  A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1993), gives some indication as to why non-fiction and documentary are interchangeable terms. The underlying assumption is that documentary and non-fiction are the same thing, or that although documentary can exist in multiple realms at once—photography, legal texts, official paperwork—Barnouw’s title has, as a raison d’etre, the manifestation of the document in what is otherwise known, as he indicates in the title, as non-fiction film. However, taking this assumption to task is not just a semantic issue, for if we think of “nonfiction” as signifying a cancellation or negation of fiction, we can perhaps alter slightly our understanding of this history to include more experimental forms. We can understand how the use of fictional methodologies built around filming real life can help to get at the truth of the actuality in question, or at least our understanding of an actuality that is always—in some sense—mediated when presented in any film form. My concern in the following is “nonfiction” as a category of artistic production that can help theoretically position certain “experiments” undertaken in moving image in recent years that engage the three areas of art, poetics, and documentary theory. From a semantic point of view, I’m interested in the idea that Russell seems to get at that “fiction” is actually included in the word “nonfiction” in such a way that it can be read as to suggest someone is saying “non” to fiction just as it muscles its way in. The book is premised on my own conviction then that films—by directors such as Gideon Koppel, Abbas Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, John Akomfrah, Pat Collins to name but a few discussed in what follows— are best classified under the category of the new nonfiction film or the cinema of nonfiction, and so the book explores the advances made by these films in the area of art appreciation or understanding. Just one conviction fleshed over the early stages of this book is that “nonfiction” (as opposed to “non-fiction” as theorized from the outset) can be understood primarily as a form of art production that advances the poetics of moving image in relation to film that engages with real people in real situations. Hence, when I refer to documentary theory, I am making reference to a body of knowledge that has evolved in Film Studies and Art Theory around the theory of filming real life truthfully. So, it is important from the outset to note that the book’s origins are in the field of the documentary arts although its final contribution may be to art and poetics. The reason this is so is that the body of film that is explored under the umbrella of new nonfiction film is best understood—in my opinion—as a cluster of films as opposed to a specific genre. My concern in addressing this cluster is to begin a conversation that will then contribute to the discourse around film poetics and art. The simple aim of the book as I describe, then, is to expand the discussion around these forms at present, so that they still exist in the margins but are not caught in the cracks.

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When, for example, over the course of analysis here (as in the discussion of time in Chapter 3), I turn to award-winning filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, who has spent most of his working life involved in making films that grow out of the archive, and who has a practice that deals inordinately with the limits of representation (or the potentiality of the archival image to usher forth a coming into being,) I am actually, in this context, exploring systems of representation, challenging the hegemonic means of rendering what’s real. Akomfrah himself speaks about the anti-hegemonic nature of his practice, working individually or as a member of the various collectives he has formed, as a rupturing of the given, a kind of inquiry that involves bringing into being, calling forth what is to come, as opposed to simply documenting what is already there. Calling this coming into being truth is a problem in that truth more often than not depends on who is claiming it. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, for example, rallies against an accountant’s truth in his Minnesota Declaration,2 a text that articulates somewhat confrontationally (when working with real-life subjects in actual situations) his concerns with the ecstatic truth of film in general. Herzog claims, There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. (Herzog, 1995) Herzog and Akomfrah, Koppel, Kiarostami, and to some extent all the filmmakers discussed in this book, have an unorthodox relationship with “documentary,” and are often seen as formative members of the community, but something of “black sheep” within that community. All have, in one way or another, challenged the conventional understanding of film as formulated within, for example, the verité tradition Herzog takes as his point of contention, and all, I argue in this book, try to operate on the “deeper strata” that Herzog calls the “mysterious and elusive” of the poetic. New nonfiction, as I argue in what follows, is tied at the hip to non-fiction and documentary forms, even if its fundamental rhetoric and concern is to channel, as Herzog mentions, a deeper truth borne of the experimentation central to an art practice. Herzog, however, being the contrarian that he is, is also loathe to call himself an artist, preferring to use the term artisan, which brings with it all the medieval associations of the guild. Yet Herzog’s concerns with selfclassification as a filmmaker, artist, or artisan raises significant issues for what follows in this book. Practically all the filmmakers addressed can be said to navigate between the gallery and the cinema as a setting for their films. It is worth pointing out that galleries have become, in recent years, spaces for the exhibition of independent cinema, given that a significant number of independent cinemas have closed across the Western world.

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“The 1990s,” Maeve Connolly notes, witnessed a resurgence of interest in cinema and the cinematic on the part of artists and curators alike, evidenced by the prevalence of moving image installations within the gallery. Some of these works directly reference the history of film, but others could be described as cinematic because they display notably high production values, involve the use of large scale projection, recall the physical spaces of cinema through installation design, or involved scripted or directed action in front of the camera. (Connolly, 2012, 46) Connolly is writing specifically about artist film, and more pertinently artists who work with moving image in dialogue with the history of cinema (and by extension, documentary). The past twenty years have witnessed an even greater cross-pollination of cinematic forms in the arts, so that filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami have been invited to install in gallery spaces. In the case of such artists, the gallery has come calling as a direct result of a prestige or prominence within cinema. Chantal Akerman has showed her back catalogue as part of a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London recently while Ben Rivers and Ben Russell are both adept in navigating the art and film worlds: film festivals and the black box otherwise known as the gallery. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness came in two forms: a cinematic release and a release that formed the backdrop for gallery installation. More recently, Rivers released his Moroccan-based feature-length The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Not Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Rivers, 2015), at the same time as a major exhibition opened at the BBC in London in the summer of 2015 that reflected in various different ways on the context in which that work was made. The exhibition, in this sense, served as a kind of bridge between the setting for the film and all the research involved in shooting in Morocco, and the cinematic release itself. One of the reasons for turning to the films I do in this book under the rubric of nonfiction is to come to an understanding of the relationship between art cinema, contemporary art, poetics, and documentary theory, around the ever-changing concept of film.

Acts of experimentation . . . There are other reasons for titling this book New Nonfiction Film, though, which are important to emphasize. There is the sense that the innovation and formal endeavor of all the filmmakers discussed has, as its sine qua non, a concern with the impulse to experiment with film form. But the film form in question is not easily categorized as fiction or non-fiction. In fact, nonfiction

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is proposed as a suitable category for understanding art of recent years that sits on the walls between galleries and cinema, sometimes falling into one, other times another. While there is a longstanding history of “experimental film” from Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, and Stan Brakhage, through to Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, as well as feminist activist filmmakers, from Yoko Ono to Tracey Moffat, and Chantal Akerman, who have worked with footage taken from “actual” real life, the rise of black box spaces in gallery venues, and the emergence of multiple platforms through which moving image is installed, projected, and exhibited has changed the dynamics in which film and cinema has been produced and received. Experimental film, although a significant subcategory of cinema and artist film, is linked historically to the avant-garde in Europe and the United States, but it is still debatable whether the filmmakers discussed in this book consider themselves as avant-garde artists, removed entirely from the mainstream. John Akomfrah, as just one example, has made numerous films for broadcast television, as has Chantal Akerman. And there still exists a swathe of misconceptions about experimental film that is problematic for its academic reception and its continuing legacy within multiple fields of exhibition. Grahame Weinbren explores, for example, the gradual divorce that took place in the 1970s between non-narrative and experimental documentary as a topic of critical and intellectual scrutiny (and the idea of “experimental film” with regard to this) on the back of the increasing influence of P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film (2002), a book he regards as destructive to the very field of cinematic inquiry that it apparently celebrates. “Visionary Film,” he notes, not mixing metaphors, is reactionary. Backed up by a monolithic pre-Foucault view of history as casual and linear, its theoretical approach is based on the literary analytic techniques of Paul de Man and Harold Bloom. Because of these very qualities, it was well understood by the young English professors. They were trained in reading and analyzing poetry and de Man and Bloom were the intellectual heroes of their party. (Weinbren in Hatfield [ed.], 2015, 7) Weinbren identifies one of the destructive mishaps of the Sitney monograph as the failure to champion durational film, an area I  gather to mean the experience of time generated by the film. And one of the reasons he overlooks the durational, which became such a significant issue of concern for artists working in the aftermath of Minimalism, is that he displays a limited understanding of what was happening in the art world at the time. Weinbren also talks about the hemming in, the closing of boundaries that were relatively fluid prior to Sitney’s intervention in the field, one of which was the dialogue that was beginning to open up with documentary and the theory of the documentary image. Although the reasons for describing

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the body of films discussed in what follows as “new” will become more apparent in the course of analysis, suffice it to say—qua Wienbren—that it is an attention to time-based qualities that is one such starting point. As the book begins with the films of Rivers and Russell, it is perhaps pertinent to recall that when I spoke with Ben Russell after the screening of A Spell, the first thing I mentioned was the durational quality of the film. I have also had similar conversations with Gideon Koppel about the attention he gives to the changing seasons over a calendar year in sleep furiously, as well as with Pat Collins about his concerns with place, memory, and landscape in Silence (Collins, 2012). Many of the films explored in the book have been shown in galleries and cinemas, and need to be understood in the context of both. I will not try to suggest that new nonfiction is a type of documentary film based on a new configuration of time, but that it is a kind of art that engages multiple forms of experimental inquiry that draws on the theory of documentary film. It is important then to state that “new nonfiction” is not a methodology of documentary film specific to a mode of durational filmmaking but a film practice or poetics in an intimate conversation with documentary theory. Indeed, the book is concerned—in a more implicit sense—with three categories that surface or come to light over the course of the text’s movement through the terrain of the new nonfiction film, and under which the three sections of the book can be loosely situated. These all come under the heading “S.” Each section is qualified as a contribution to what might be termed, from the outset, the “three S’s” constituted as Subject, Story, and Sense. Each section is loosely determined by a thematic S, and the first third of the book, exploring the films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell as a mode of nonfiction considered speculative in nature comes from my own interest in these filmmakers’ exploration of the Bressonian modèle as an alternative to the “subject” of documentary film.3 By exploring the way in which these films have helped evolve the new nonfiction film as a challenge to orthodox understandings of the subject, I  examine methods of filming the subject or filming the self, as well as the reasons for developing such methods, as confronting the subject of documentary film for specifically cinematic and artistic ends. Because the “subject” is the first concern of this inquiry, nonfiction is employed as a category useful for evolving an aesthetic of speculative inquiry, and one, I  argue, that cuts into debates about the subject of documentary film. Focus in the early chapters of the book is given to Ben Rivers’s collaborative work with Jake Williams, a semi-reclusive subject who lives in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, who Rivers met via a mutual friend, and who he casts as himself in his first feature-length film Two Years at Sea (Rivers, 2011). Because the majority of the film’s footage is of Jake living in his own habitat, and is shot in a remarkably austere 16mm black-and-white, the dividing line, if there is one, between cine-portrait, postapocalyptic disaster

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film, and speculative utopian fiction is tread in a fascinating manner. In the second part of this opening section, I expand on the implicit concerns with Two Years at Sea, to consider another British film released at much the same time and which can also be categorized under the umbrella concept of new nonfiction, John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project (Akomfrah, 2012). Akomfrah’s remarkable portrait of the public intellectual, founder of cultural studies, and leading light in the New Left, Stuart Hall, is, unlike Two Years at Sea, made up primarily of archival footage taken from the BBC, weaving together footage of Hall based on his contributions to a whole array of public matters from the new Left to feminism, to LGBT rights and the refugee crisis. I suggest in this chapter that The Stuart Hall Project can be viewed as a certain reification of Akomfrah’s ongoing work in the archive, and a significant contribution to an art-making practice that is versed in the evolving forms of the new nonfiction film, especially around the issue of time and the subject. This chapter, along with Chapter 2, takes the “utopian” as a thematic concern that binds Rivers’s and Akomfrah’s projects together conceptually, and which is proposed as a constitutive component of their contemporaneous aesthetic form. The second section of the book turns to the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, taking as its principal concern the second of our three S’s:  “story.” Kiarostami turns to feature-length fiction later in his career having made his name working on government-funded documentaries, and the main film under analysis in this section is widely regarded as Kiarostami’s cinematic masterpiece:  Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1989). Based on a true story, the film is nonetheless a feature-length that parodies the documentary form, taking truth as it is articulated around differing codes of cinematic storytelling to task. Kiarostami’s contribution to a cinema of nonfiction is based on narrative whose wider purpose is the unveiling of truth via fictional means. Again, the issue of cancelling the fictional in the name of something real comes to the fore as a concern of “nonfiction” as a mode of artistic inquiry caught in the cracks between the world of art and the world of cinema. Also included in this section is a short examination of the oeuvre of Irish documentarian filmmaker Pat Collins, particularly his award-winning Silence (Collins, 2012). I trace a line of evolution from Kiarostami to Collins based on an understanding of the cinema of nonfiction as a form of speculative inquiry that challenges the documentary mode. Collins, who I  have met with on a number of occasions to discuss his practice, is relatively open about the influence Kiarostami has had on the trajectory of his filmmaking, ever since he codirected a documentary about him, some of which focused on Kiarostami’s visit to the Aran Islands where Flaherty famously shot his masterpiece of ethnographic non-fiction Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934). Collins’s first feature-length film Silence is inspired by his own treading of Kiarostami’s oeuvre, found most specifically in CloseUp and the Koker trilogy (made in the aftermath of the tragic earthquake in

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the north of Iran), films which can be seen to experiment in the cross section, the “breach” between fiction and non-fiction film. This section, which is predominantly concerned with Collins’s internationally acclaimed Silence, a feature-length film that was made in the years following Ireland’s recession, is titled “After Kiarasotami.” The chapter puts forward the argument that Collins is one of a number of contemporary filmmakers who mine the breach between fiction and non-fiction in ways that—following Kiarostami—are best categorized as new nonfiction. Silence is something of a departure for Collins, who is best known as a documentary filmmaker. Silence, however, has proved difficult to classify in its distribution, although it has been critically received—in many quarters— as a “quasi-documentary” experimentation in what I have tentatively called the “breach” between fiction and non-fiction. I  argue, therefore, that the film is best understood as new nonfiction film, particularly in its attention to subjectivity and story, character, and narrative, when positioned in a contextual relationship with forms of film inquiry explored earlier. Silence is part “slow cinema,” part document of modern Ireland, part inquiry into the relationship between home and exile, and part “found story.” But it is also, I argue in this chapter, above and beyond, a film that draws together the three S’s that frame the discussion in this book in a particularly innovate way. My concern, however, in this chapter comes out of the conviction that the film is best understood under the umbrella term “speculative nonfiction” and can therefore be seen to enter into a cinematic dialogue not just with Kiarostami but also with the filmmakers addressed earlier. The final section of the book, under the auspice of the final “S,” turns to sense as a category pertaining to films that occupy the space between documentary, understood historically as an imparting of factual and objectively accumulated knowledge, and “art” when thought of as an object that seduces and orients the senses toward the personal, subjective, but at the same time, dare I say it, universal. Having located the increasing interest in the “affect” as a phenomenon that operates on a different plane to reason or fact, or at least the rational, in theories of documentary film production and reception thus far, this final section can then turn to films that are concerned with sense-making and truth via the intermediary of sense. There has been an increased interest in “sense” among film theorists as a way of relating to visual media that accords with a certain regime of truth that perhaps throws into relief the orthodoxy of knowledge and knowledge production, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and cognitive film studies, both of which have had a major impact on the direction documentary film studies has taken in recent years. This final section will offer a comprehensive analysis of this new direction, and the way in which it feeds our understanding of nonfiction as an aesthetic category built on strategies of depiction. Depiction, understood in the context of the book’s wider aims in that it relates to pictorial production, is generally seen as

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specific to aesthetic strategies. However, in this section I explore depiction in the context of documentary per se. This involves looking at the image as both carrier of indexical truth and bearer of personal affect. It also involves analyzing the relationship between the constructed and recorded as bearing upon the wider relationship between fiction and non-fiction. The final section of the book turns to one of the most influential European filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century to expound upon these ideas: Chantal Akerman. I explore D’Est: Bordering on Fiction (Akerman, 1993), a film the Belgian filmmaker made when traveling across Eastern Europe in the early 90s, part of an installation first shown at the Walker Centre in Minneapolis. The final third of the book explores this idea of “Sense,” understood in the context of the film project as both work of art and a purported historical document of a time; a true rendering of Eastern Europe in moving image. Akerman’s film is explored from the perspective of a filmmaker who is also the daughter of holocaust survivor parents who themselves hail from the east. My interest in D’Est is motivated by the subtitle “Bordering on Fiction,” which directs the spectator toward borders, no doubt influenced by the dissolution of borders that defined the historical rupture of 1989, but also the dissolution of the border between fiction and non-fiction that motivates this book. Another consideration, however, relating to the border as concept, is the border between the memory of daughter and mother, and the way the experiences of one impacts the other, even if such experience is never actually spoken about. This relationship, which is really a trans-generational crossing of borders, is sensed, without being articulated clearly in the course of the film. From this tentative observation comes an exploration of sense in the context of self-inscription, an exploration that flows—somewhat seamlessly—into the final feature-length film up for discussion: Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously. Like D’Est, I  come at sleep furiously as a film operating on two distinct levels, one of which observes and reports on a particular socioeconomic constellation, and another that is closer to a portrait of a M/other figure that is, in this second latter sense, understood as depiction. sleep furiously is a similarly quiet film about the town of Trefeurig in mid-west Wales, and two of its most prominent subjects living there, Pip and John. Although the film takes the form of an observational study of a way of life threatened by the advances of globalization, and one that suggests little or no self-inscription on the part of the director (Koppel never makes his presence felt directly), subtle suggestions, hints are given throughout that Koppel is indeed operating on a number of different levels:  the objective and subjective, rational and sensual, documental and pictorial, the last of which involves a somewhat subtle inscription dependent on imposing the personal, the “my story,” on the filming process. By laying the focus on an indexical object, a direct plea to the senses is made. Thus, the director’s “intention” with regard to the pictorial

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image is foreground. This final point of analysis follows on from the study of D’Est in addressing the complex relationship between documentary as observed reality, and depiction as an act of creative intervention in the real, focusing on the multiple levels the film operates on at the same time. My interest here, however, is on what I term “sense-value”: a kind of rubric for understanding nonfiction film as encasing the tenuous rift between earth and world, otherwise known as fact and fiction.

Notes 1 Bresson’s published writings are drawn from the notes he took, the reflections he conducted on his own philosophy of filmmaking as it developed in his lifetime. These notes were collected in the 1970s and published finally in English in 1996 as Notes on the Cinematographer (1996). Given that it is now recognized as one of the most influential texts on film written in the twentieth century, it is surprising more attention has not been accorded its significant impact in Film Studies research. 2 Herzog wrote The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema when he traveled to the city in 1999 to attend a month-long retrospective of his films. He famously scribbled the declaration in a hotel room. The declaration takes issue with the type of truth that has become synonymous with documentary film and the ethical accusations against the method of documentary filmmaking he uses to make his films. The declaration was produced at a time when more and more artists and experimental filmmakers were thought to be turning to forms synonymous with a certain kind of documentary filmmaking, such as cinema verité, which is the main point of attack for Herzog in his short treatise on the subject. 3 I recently published an article that is titled “ ‘Near Documentary’ as PostBressonian Aesthetic: Cinematographic Dialoguing between Jeff Wall’s Adrian Walker and Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea,” which coined the term post-Bressonian to conceptualize the use of Bresson’s modèle in what are deemed nonfictional contexts. Therefore, when I make reference to the “postBressonian” in the remainder of this book, I make reference to the theoretical conclusions drawn in this body of research. It is also worth stressing that this article served as a kind of sketch book for what would materialize as New Nonfiction Film. I have been fascinated for some time with Bresson’s rejection of “character,” and his musings on the cinematic as a distinct art form.

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1 Nonfiction as a speculative mode of inquiry: Subjectivity and the films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell

It could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX, After Finitude Ben Russell and Ben Rivers are self-described itinerant filmmakers. They are also, in this sense, extremely productive artists whose films straddle the line between experimental doc and reflexive ethnography, and who often work with communities of interest in a largely unorthodox capacity. In 2013, both Russell and Rivers collaborated on the feature-length film A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, leading Russell—as discussed in the introduction— to categorize the films he and Rivers make as nonfiction (as opposed to documentary). Russell inadvertently brackets the nonfiction film apart from categories believed to be synonymous with “documentary.” The two Bens, as they are sometimes referred to in experimental film circles—such is the overlapping level of concern in their practices—have explored the relationship between documentary and aesthetic form for over a decade, albeit on different sides of the Atlantic and initially unbeknownst to one another. Both are artists (I use the word artists because this is what they believe themselves to be) whose work, and the methods involved in this work, help establish a cursory understanding of the new nonfiction film as

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we begin the journey of this book, as an aesthetic category for engaging with progressive moving image and cinematic practices. Both are artists who have used documentary theory as a platform, helpful in exploring the relationship between film and reality, art and reality, and character and subjectivity. By the time Russell and Rivers came to codirect A Spell, both had amassed a portfolio of experimental film as likely to be screened in city galleries as film festivals or art-house cinemas. Both have moved along a terrain that has opened with the increased circulation of the moving image in the digital era, even if—paradoxically—both have been quick to champion film as a medium of choice. As well as an interest in film as a medium, A Spell displays both filmmakers’ concern with ethnography, borne of a mutual interest in the groundbreaking oeuvre of Jean Rouch. Both artists had just tasted critical success when they began working on this film—Rivers with his first feature-length Two Years at Sea, a film that continued an ongoing concern with exotic, unconventional characters who have removed themselves from society, often with an obsessive interest, creative or academic, in mind; Russell with Let Each One Go Where He May (Russell, 2009), a neo-Rouchian exploration into Surinam’s colonial past. For his first foray into feature-length filmmaking, Rivers revived a working relationship with the somewhat hermetic Jake Williams, the subject of his earlier film This Is My Land (Rivers, 2007). Both films about Jake are shot in black-and-white 16mm stock, capturing Williams’s unorthodox life in the Highlands.1 Russell’s rise to prominence as an experimental filmmaker was established before Let Each One, his reputation as one of the United States’ leading filmmakers cemented with the Trypps series. Since then, he has continued reconfiguring the boundaries of the ethnographic film, in ventures such as A Spell and Atlantis (2014), both shot in Europe, and in his most recent project that has led him to return to Surinam to further examine the mythology of the region. Rivers and Russell are highly productive in their own right and their individual and collaborative work helps—I argue here—establish the new nonfiction film, as opposed to documentary, as a category in itself. Nonfiction film can be considered a reflexive ethnographic approach to the real, procured in methods employed by artists to engage and treat subjectivity in their films. In what follows, I want to sketch out the main methods and criteria in question here.

Not documentary . . . Nonfiction is often presented as a category interchangeable with documentary. The emergence of documentary as a category of choice in the 1930s coincided with a broadening of the distinction between fiction, shorts or feature-length filmmaking, and nonfiction/non-fiction, films considered to, put bluntly, represent reality truthfully and objectively (that is, without

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aesthetic intervention). Grierson famously described documentary—a quote that has circulated historically as much as any—as the “creative treatment of actuality,” bringing aesthetic concerns to bear on the process. Documentary, in this precise sense, is a byword for the filming of real life, or at least stories and reports that are not fiction. With this in mind, it is helpful to read Grierson’s comment as methodological: the treatment of recorded real life, editing together of footage, commentary, and so on, is what he means by creative. But while we can consider as the artistry involved in documentary films, we can also consider the creative as referring to the areas of invention involved in editing the recorded impressions of reality—the image sequences or audio commentaries—that come together during the postproduction process. As we set out on the journey of this book, it is not my aim to establish Rivers’s and Russell’s films, or at least the methodology I want to explore in the making of the films discussed, under a Griersonian rubric of documentary. This opening chapter takes a somewhat different approach, setting out a methodology that is identified in key works that lead up to and include both filmmakers’ collaboration on A Spell, that qualify, or can be understood, under the rubric of the new nonfiction film. I  want to suggest that this “methodology” is an aesthetic of the subject that is best approached by turning Grierson’s comment slightly to the left. Nonfiction, taking Grierson’s comment to task in this way, can be considered the speculative treatment of subjectivity. To speculate on subjectivity is not simply to embellish in artifice, to turn into fiction. As I hope to illustrate in this chapter, to speculate requires concerted engagement with the ontology of film, inclusive of which is an exploration of another’s “character” outside the strict delineation of fact and fiction. Rivers’s first film with Jake Williams reveals an attention to place and subject that has subsequently become his hallmark. This Is My Land is a fifteen-minute film that Rivers himself situates within the lexicon of documentary:  the observational. What changes then when he returns to work with Jake five years later, on a feature-length that incited much debate about the “nature” of documentary and fiction? I  suggest Rivers’s relationship with Jake, or rather his treatment of Jake changes irrevocably in this time. This Is My Land was made very soon after Rivers had met Jake and the resultant film, not dissimilar to the later Two Years at Sea in cinematographic form (both are filmed in 16mm black-and-white film stock, which leaves a flickering material trace integral to the artistic experience of the film), is aesthetically different. There is no “context” given to the series of vignettes dedicated to Jake’s habitual life-form, and the form is distinguished by the silence of the lone “subject,” a silence maintained by Jake throughout the film. In addition, Two Years at Sea carries none of the signature features that mark This Is My Land out as—as Rivers himself attests—observational documentary (Fitzgibbon, 2014). There is no recognition of the camera’s presence on Jake’s part that would qualify

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as acknowledging Rivers’s presence in his environment, and there is no contextual information given, no dialogue or voiceover that (giving the viewer an anchor to navigate or contextualize) would suggest a definitive or anthropological qua ethnographic methodology has been drawn from in its making. Rivers has been keen to point out in an interview the difference in approach: This Is My Land was a more fragmented, observational document. I was watching Jake in his daily activities and filming what I  thought was necessary and then piecing it together like a collage. But with the second film, Two Years at Sea, I wanted to be much more controlled because the film was meant to be feature length, so I had to think about the structure. Jake and I  collaborated to make an exaggerated portrait of somebody very much like him, but not him. He is really noisy and chatty—he likes to talk, he likes visitors, and obviously there is none of that in the film, so it’s a fiction. (Fitzgibbon, 2014) Even with the change in approach, the exaggerated in the “exaggerated portrait” Rivers refers to requires some detailed analysis (we should note that the portrait film is—even if problematically so—located within a subgenre of documentary). The portrait film is predicated on time, Paul Arthur says, “intertwined with the dynamics of subjectivity” (Arthur, in Margulies, 2002, 114). Patrick Tarrant adds to Arthur’s point in calling the portrait film “a study of people in the process of negotiating the past and present simultaneously” (Tarrant, 2013). Time and duration are important, if not integral features of both films about “Jake.” Both generate a palatable tension. This tension does not, however, account for the “exaggerated” element completely; it doesn’t tell us why Two Years is more exaggerated in form than This Is My Land. The change in approach is, however, also an effect of a more refined collaboration. Because Rivers and Jake would become friends following the production of This Is My Land, the relationship invariably changes, making Rivers more comfortable in collaborating with Jake.2 Jake is the focus of both films but the treatment of subjectivity in Two Years, I  would argue, results from a refined rendering of the modèle concept as theorized and then put into practice by Robert Bresson in his writings and films. Bresson brings to fruition the concept of modèle as part of a wider attempt to think of cinema as an art form in and of itself, an art form with its own set of internal concerns not shared by the theater. Bresson uses the concept to address what it is about cinema that distinguishes it from art forms that advocate “character” as a principal form of address. Character, in the sense Bresson takes issue with, is too concerned with conscious expression, too concerned with the expression of thoughts. Jake doesn’t talk to anyone during Two Years at Sea, and is known only through his actions and the objects he engages with. I have explored Jake’s

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FIGURE 1.1 Two Years at Sea: Jake stares up at the caravan he constructs on the treetops

rendering as a modèle in a recently published article (in a nonfiction context) on Two Years at Sea, a significant concern of which is the rendering of the subject outside of the fictional form, but the modèle is also referenced as an influence by Russell in interviews about his films.3 The modèle’s importance to Rivers and Russell is expressed at this point, and is important in that the concept is integral to the discussions throughout this book. Robert A.  A. Lowe, the musician and friend of Russell, is cast as a modèle in A Spell, a figure not unlike the Pansa brothers in Let Each One (and indeed Jake in Two Years) who is also silent throughout the film. None of these “characters” speak, and their presence brings with it a mysteriousness, from the opening scene to the last. On the decision to draw on the modèle concept when filming Lowe in A Spell, Russell notes, We often talked about Bresson’s idea of the model, the blank canvas— you wouldn’t even call them a performer, they’re there, they’re present, embodied in that place. So, one of the first things you have to do is have someone get rid of any of their affect, any kind of semblance of acting. It’s almost like anti-directing. (Violet, 2014) The casting of Lowe as a modèle as noted here (Bresson always worked in fiction) is premised on eradicating the consciousness of performing roles Bresson writes about. Bresson returns over and over again to the ontological condition of his actors, and talks about his desire to penetrate the veil of conscious awareness that he identifies with the theater. The modèle deployed by Rivers and Russell has a similar premise but is based on a speculative approach to the subject most prominent in the directorial collaboration A Spell. Michael Sicinski sheds some light, if somewhat indirectly, on the speculative treatment of the brothers as they set out on a mythical journey in Let Each One, a treatment

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FIGURE 1.2 Let Each One Go Where He May: The Pansa brothers move through the terrain in relative silence

of the subject that would seem, along with Two Years, to lay the foundation for the later collaborative A Spell. The film takes place in Suriname, centering on two Saramaccaner Maroon brothers, Monie and Benjen Pansa, as they journey from the outskirts of Paramarimbo along a path their ancestors blazed 300  years ago while fleeing their Dutch slave masters. The film’s title comes from an episode in Surinamese oral history in which the Gods arrive to release the slaves. Russell’s adoption of this injunction as the film’s title, while utterly natural and charged with a politicized poetry, becomes less and less obvious the more time one spends in the film’s company. (Sicinski, 2009) The brothers’ silence journeying into the heartland of postcolonial myth and fantasy is alluring, and their names and even status as brothers is never revealed in any overt fashion. Like the treatment of Robert A. A. Lowe as modèle in A Spell, and indeed Jake in Two Years at Sea, no attempt is made to reveal their identity, even if the directors refer to them as the subjects of the film ex post facto. This is their journey, even if—paradoxically—scripted for them as such. The brothers, like Lowe, and Jake, are friends of the director, and this mutual friendship plays an integral role in the speculative treatment of their subjectivity in the

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filming. It is as if they are cast as models of themselves, and their journey is part of a filmic speculation as to what they would and could become on film. It is therefore necessary to know and understand the actual life of the subject before any speculative engagement with character can take place. Rivers’s most recent film piece, The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, extends this inquiry further. The film is about a film being made by Rivers’s friend, the Spanish experimental filmmaker Oliver Laxe, in the Moroccan hills; the director he plays is abducted by nomads and has his tongue cut out before being made to dance for his abductors in a dress made of tin cans. Laxe is a modèle who is literally silenced by his abductors in the film, but he is also a friend of Rivers who is collaborating on making the film with him. This coextension of friendship, subject, and character is, as I address later in the chapter, a significant feature of what I call in this book the new nonfiction film. There is a cultivation of the self on film, otherwise perceived as the subject, as a modèle, which is premised on understanding what is true about the character of the self as the artist in question sees her. It is therefore necessary to explore the modèle as a specific feature of these films (I title this concept “the self as modèle”), in relation to the body of work Bresson has left behind relating to the concept. The modèle is deployed in a fictional capacity by Bresson. Any other variant of deployment would appear to be at loggerheads with the kind of observational documentary that deals with subjectivity as real and tangible, and therefore antithetical to the categories of the fictional and speculative. Bresson notably turned away from professional actors in his fictional films from the late 1950s onward, regarding the minimal level of psychological expression in untrained nonprofessionals as particular to the needs of film as opposed to theater. The modèle is said to purify film from its theatrical influence, at the same time relieving the characters of unnecessary artifice. Bresson is renowned for putting modèles through incredibly rigorous routines, repeating scene after scene until all unnecessary “expression” is weeded out and the human body assumes the status of an automaton. In the 1975 text Notes on the Cinematographer, the spurious notes Bresson had taken in the course of a long filmmaking career, the stripping bare of the modèle, is underlined in short Nietzscheanlike aphorisms with a certain poetic affect. The “two-and-fro of the character in front of his nature” forces the public to look for talent on his face, instead of the enigma peculiar to each living character. (Bresson, 1996, 43) Bresson champions the “mechanistic” qualities of a modèle for whom the true enigma of living character is procured on screen. “No intellectual or cerebral mechanism,” he notes, “simply a mechanism” (Bresson, 1996, 43). For Bresson, the mechanistic manifests as a way of acting without conscious

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intent, particular to the modèle, as attention is drawn to the enigmatic peculiarity of the form, thus enticing the spectator to engage the faculty of the imagination when deciphering, or coming up with reasons, for the enigma of the character in question. It is the enigmatic that can be considered an aesthetic rationale for probing those ontological qualities Russell refers to when he says he wants Robert A. A. Lowe to take the form of a blank page.

The mechanistic “in itself ”/the speculative treatment of subjectivity . . . Rivers has also detailed the changing relationship with Jake from making the observational ciné-portrait This Is My Land—when the director and his subject were in the early stages of an emerging friendship—to the speculative modes of production that took form when returning to work with Jake for Two Years at Sea five years later. Rivers and Jake were merely acquainted before the first shorter film was made, in the early stages of an emergent friendship, but the collaborative process that developed during the making of Two Years at Sea came out of a friendship that had grown in the interim of both films. Rivers’s loose script can, I would argue, be read as a speculative treatment of Jake as subject of the film:  a collaborative working relationship integral to the filming process. Rivers imagines certain activities, such as that which comes to fruition in the lake sequence when Jake is shown floating around a nearby lake on a raft-like object, premised on a speculative rendering of the self. But the speculative rendering involves proposing activities to be filmed that Jake considers “true” to “character,” which he can agree to or decline, based on whether he feels the activities that Rivers suggests represent him adequately. The subsequent filming of Jake’s perceived “character” is a kind of collaborative inquiry into the modèle, the secondary aim of which is to get at the enigmatic quality of subjectivity as such. In other words, the aim is to exorcize conscious awareness of performance so that the modèle becomes—when acting—a “mechanistic in itself.” The difference between a speculative rendering of the modèle and Bresson’s fictional rendering is that Jake is “Jake,” a variation of himself. In Rivers’s film then, Jake is both Jake and “Jake.” We are therefore in a position to characterize, given these differences, Two Years at Sea as a speculative form of nonfiction film; a form that requires a certain understanding of “character” that emerges through friendship. And so, while the film may appear to take the form of an exaggerated observation of a subject given the activities Jake undertakes in the film, the exaggerated element comes from speculating on the kind of things Jake would do on film if given the opportunity. The artist/filmmaker and film subject engage in a dialectical qua speculative inquiry into “character”; that is, they collaborate

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on scripting certain activities involved in making the work. It is likely, at least I would suggest, this shared approach compelled Rivers and Russell to begin collaborating on a film in the first place. And given that it appears as if certain key criteria must be met in order for the self as modèle to come to fruition in the nonfiction form, we can speculate as what these criteria might look like. 1 The subject, as opposed to the actor, is asked to perform as a modèle. 2 The director/artist, who is friends with the subject, speculates as to the “character” of that subject, while entering into a collaborative creative process with the subject. 3 A dialectical relationship opens up between director and subject as modèle, which involves the mutual recognition and appreciation of the aesthetic aims of the project. These criteria are loose, open to interpretation, and used to establish characteristics common to the films in question. Criteria 1 concerns the casting of the self as a modèle as discussed thus far. Criteria 2 is an indication of the friendship between director/artist and subject needed to create the kind of world particular to nonfiction film. The last criteria, 3, is a reference to the artistic production that accrues from the ensuing relationship. That Russell’s Let Each One and the later A Spell is kin to Rivers’s Two Years—in its methodological approach—lies not just in fulfilling these criteria, but also in the specifically speculative treatment of the subject as modèle that results from this. Let Each One is particularly interesting in this regard because, over the course of the film, the Pansa brothers journey up river for some unexplainable event, and act as ciphers for the postcolonialist condition of which they are a part. Like Robert A.  A. Lowe’s journey in A Spell, which appears to end when he is seen applying corpse paint and performing in a black metal band, the journey reflects the methodology used making the film, that is, the speculative process involved in working with subjects. This infers that the actions undertaken by the subjects of both films echo the actual methodological treatment of them by the artist. A journey concludes with a kind of ritual, where the subject is seen turning himself or herself into an object of sorts, an “in itself,” echoing the speculative journey undertaken by actor–subject and artist (there is an echo of the procedures used in making the film). Let Each One appears to “document” the brothers traveling up river, without any rationale offered for where they are going, and their eventual participation in a Saramaccan ritual. The brothers perform the ritual when donning the costumes associated with their own ethnic code, in order to relive the traumatic event that marks their history. The content of the film as

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FIGURE 1.3 A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness: Lowe sets the dacha alight as the film comes to its conclusion

such, which involves assuming the role of object, in itself mirrors Russell’s undertaking in making the film. That is to say, the brothers’ desire to investigate the nature of their own postcolonial subjectivity echoes Russell’s exploratory, speculative interrogation of subjectivity when making the film. Just as the brothers use models, or costumed objects to speculate on postcolonial Saramaccan subjectivity, Russell casts the brothers as models of themselves so as to explore the condition of postcolonial subjectivity (by employing myth and fantasy). The film’s self-reflexivity is therefore subtle, designed, as Michael Sicinski notes, To record and preserve a part of traditional Saramaccan culture. The audience members are friends and family, all playing a role in the documentation, as is Russell himself. So, we are not witnessing an example of “ethnographic film,” captured on the fly. It is auto-ethnography, the deliberate inscription of Maroon cultural history. But like any cultural production, it is also effort. (Sicinski, 2009) A Spell charts similar territory, ending with a black metal concert that echoes on a reflexive level the film’s implicit concern with the modèle (to the point that Lowe is shown actually painting his face). Over the course of the film, the “subject” qua modèle Robert A. A. Lowe, journeys across the Scandinavian wilderness, silent and unspoken, from Estonia up to Finland, before being filmed as a member of the black metal super group Queequeg performing in an Oslo club.4 In the first two instalments of a “triangular” and suitably

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nonlinear structure, Lowe struggles to integrate into a commune that exists as a temporary autonomous zone, before going out alone into the wilds of Finland, where he spends a considerable amount of time in congress with the wilderness. However much he tries to embrace the romantic, he is soon quick to reject this solitary rural life. The middle sequence ends with Lowe sitting in his room, corpse painting his face, before setting fire to the wooden dacha where he has stayed. This “act” signals the shift into the final “zone” of the film, set in the confines of a small Oslo club. It becomes apparent, given the ecstatic swirling of the camera, that Lowe is performing in a black metal band and that his corpse painted subcultural “identity” is a formative part of the scene in question. Considerably different in appearance from the subject of the other two parts, he performatively embraces—like the brothers at the end of Let Each One—the object form, the in itself, mediated through the corpse painted body as a rotting dead object. One of the questions generated by such an ending is: Why black metal? Lowe isn’t exclusively a black metal musician. His involvement with this often-conceived nihilistic subgenre of the metal fraternity has, as its modus operandi, a similarly ritualistic, object-oriented, focus. Black metal involves the pretense that the body, in death, assumes the status of object, reduced to rot in the world’s dark matter. Taking the form of a “dead object,” the subject screams in a particular way, as if carried to the depths of a dark indifferent universe. Lowe’s only real show of emotion therefore arrives at a point when he takes the microphone and screams into it, before retreating to his place among the musicians. The film comes to an end as Lowe removes the paint from his face, before facing out into the bright lights of the modern metropolis. All of the aforementioned films, when taking This Is My Land as a preparatory interlude between observation and speculation, can be classified as elaborations on a methodological framework of nonfiction, conceived eminently as a speculative category. It is therefore not surprising that the formative elaboration of such a method has coincided with the emergence of a particular branch of philosophy called speculative materialism, a branch that also takes as its sine qua non the speculative consideration of the “in itself.” In fact, Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2008) can be considered a handbook for Rivers and Russell. It is a handbook with regard to the pioneering speculative inquiry of the films, such is the need to think—imagine even—an in itself unique to film. For Fabio Gironi, “the speculative turn” concerns “dominant modes of inquiry and their neglect and marginalization of ‘things’ and ‘materials’ as inert and politically irrelevant elements in human-centric social structures,” and is a championing of the thing’s “full dignity as ‘actants’ to be recognized when mapping a morethan-human world” (Gironi, 2012, 363). Ending this section, we ourselves can ask whether the films of Rivers and Russell are part of the “speculative turn” Gironi refers to, brought to bear on the more-than-human life world of film.

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Part II This inquiry can be pursued further in relation to Ben Rivers’s most recent feature-length film (at least at the time of writing), (with its wordy title The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers, an indirect reference to Paul Bowles’s story A Distant Episode [1947] on which the film is loosely based), as new nonfiction. Although I see the film as helping establish—if not fitting completely—the criteria on which such a category can rest, I  want to explore the way the film reflects upon and widens the intrinsic concerns with the subject of nonfiction as explored in the last section. As such, The Sky Trembles is an experimental film that not only problematizes the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, but also challenges the theory of the documentary subject presented in certain forms of ethnography. As a result, the film helps establish nonfiction as a mode within the broader realm of experimental film, taking—in the process— what I call a reflexive turn. I use the term reflexive, as misunderstood as it can be, to describe a film all too aware of its formal properties, its concern with ethnographic films in this way, while exposing fundamental fault lines that pertain to ethnographic filming of subjects as “others.”5 The last section claimed that Russell and Rivers have established, or at least have drawn upon a methodological principle of the self as modèle in their films, a form that is specific to the new nonfiction film (as a viable concept for engaging a certain type of experimental film process deeply engaged with debates in documentary theory). One of the central concerns of this inquiry is the form of collaboration that takes place between the modèle and the director, which I claim differs to the way it is proposed and utilized by Robert Bresson both in his text Notes on the Cinematographer and in his subsequent films. In addition to this, this collaboration is said to involve speculating on the core being of the self as modèle in a way that is considered creative to director and subject. Its premise, however, is a respect for the modèle as Other intrinsically opposed to the kind of “respect” that is a condition of much traditional ethnography and observational documentary film.6 And while any evaluation of “respect” is, at best, subjective, this section explores the way in which the treatment of the subject is addressed in The Sky Trembles with recourse to the issue of respecting the Other.

A film about a film within a film adapted from a short story . . . The Sky Trembles is something of a departure for Ben Rivers in his filmmaking career. The film is—in part—a film within a film. It begins as a faux documentary given over to tracking the problems experienced by

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director Oliver Laxe when filming on location in Morocco. It is unclear what type of film Laxe is making, although it would appear to be a documentary peppered with the filming of activities that seem to be staged or constructed. Laxe is following a caravan of Moroccan nomads through the Atlas Mountains as they attempt to bring one of their comrades home for burial. The film, whose content is given to us in minimal snippets of information, seems—in some ways at least—to echo the concerns of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, 1999), in documenting traditional burial rites in rural communities—in this case, Morocco. Like The Wind Will Carry Us, the film also concerns the act of filmmaking, and turns in upon the filmmaking process as the focus of its content. Laxe is directing the film that might well become Mimosas (Laxe, 2015) but he is also the protagonist of a film being made about his own. There are therefore two auteurs, friends, working together on the same production. Mimosas, Laxe’s second feature, was since released to considerable acclaim, and has been characterized as an experimental documentary someway between fact and fiction. Given that Mimosas received the Nespresso Grand Prize at Cannes, the film Laxe appears to be directing has consolidated his standing as a ground-breaking artist, an auteur, in his own right (his first feature length, We Are All Captains [Laxe, 2010], is also a minor masterpiece, putting Laxe, like Rivers, at the center of new experimental film). Things take a turn in The Sky Trembles, however, when Laxe, while experiencing the difficulties of filming on location, travels off set by car, only to be captured and brutally assaulted by local nomadic bandits. There is a change in tone at this point, a kind of fugue form materializing against the earlier linear structure of the film, which brings the self-reflexive narrative to a sudden halt. Guy Lodge, therefore, wonders, To what degree the onscreen auteur’s struggle is being represented or fabricated is anyone’s guess:  Could Laxe, repurposed as another director’s leading man while helming his own project, be reflecting Rivers’ own authorial presence back at the man behind the camera? Are they conspiring to project their shared neuroses as simultaneous conveyors and creators of story worlds? The hall-of-mirrors possibilities are endless—albeit somewhat contingent on knowing Laxe’s real-world identity. (Lodge, 2015) For Lodge, audience recognition of Laxe as the auteur is required to get the somewhat neurotic underpinnings of the “story”, for these underpinnings to become apparent to the viewer. He intimates that Laxe as auteur is a platform to explore Rivers’s own repressed anxieties about instrumentalizing traditional cultures for aesthetic gain. This is all the more pronounced in the second half of the film when the narrative turns so that events appear to follow the trajectory of Paul

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Bowles’s story, A Distant Episode, on which Rivers has said the film is loosely based. Laxe is traveling by car, as he appears to momentarily abandon his film set, only to be upended by Reguibat nomads and have his tongue severed before being dressed in a suit made from the ends of tin cans and made to dance when beckoned by his new masters. “Time turns elastic,” Lodge notes “as the newly metallized, mechanized Laxe—now effectively a walking wind chime—loses any human sense of perception. In turn, he is remotely objectified by Rivers’ camera, which returns to his point of view only in fleeting, frightened flashes” (Lodge, 2015). It is worth noting that the Bowles story centers on a linguistics professor, as opposed to a film director, who is traveling through Morocco (referenced anecdotally), and who unintentionally offends the group of natives who imprison him, and turn him into an object of admiration for their ends. The same series of events occur in The Sky Trembles, which is why we are encouraged to see the story take the form of a modern adaptation. However, to adjudge the film to be a straightforward adaptation of Bowles’s story is to mistake the manner in which it is employed specifically by Rivers and, more importantly, how the essential features of Bowles’s fictional narrative are used in the context of the nonfiction film. Lodge’s mechanistic reference is important in this regard, not least because a criterion of new nonfiction (as speculative) is the casting of a subject as himself or herself, albeit in the form of a mechanistic in itself, reworking Bresson’s mechanistic modèle. One can see then, in Laxe transitioning from European avant-garde director, making a film about extraneous others in the Moroccan desert, to a mechanized “object,” a mirror image of what happens in nonfiction as a speculative mode of inquiry. In this sense, the process of filmmaking enacts an auto-critique of the documentary production Laxe is making in the film. The Sky Trembles offers a critique of certain types of filmmaking like those Laxe undertakes. The methods of inquiry into the subject that Rivers draws on when casting Laxe as the director of his own film, however, can also be read as a critique of the approach to filming natives as depicted in the film.

A marriage of form and content The Sky Trembles tracks Laxe directing his film Mimosas, so that Rivers can make a film that is, in fact, his own. This type of piggyback filmmaking is unusual, in that the process of making one film becomes the content of another, and the production of one film grounds the production of another. Again, the line between fact and fiction, “reality” and its transition into something other than fiction (yet not wholly discernible as this or that) is central to the aesthetic vision of the film. Laxe is Rivers’s friend, a director who is undertaking the same act of filming in Morocco as him. He is also

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the protagonist director of Rivers’s film. It is therefore difficult—if not impossible—to discern the point at which a self—the director of one’s own film, Mimosas—is found to be performing another role (as in the character of the film someone else is making). Similarly, the Moroccan nomads are being asked to perform activities that appear real, but are possibly staged by Laxe, so as to add dramatic effect to the “documentation” of the ritual. Given the many controversies that have plagued documentary films, the ethnographic film since its inception—Flaherty’s excursion in the Artic, or the Aran Islands are just two examples—a recourse to staging scenes can be said to upend the impartiality required to observe an ethnic culture without dramatic intervention. That the majority of people on set are apparently Moroccan locals gives the impression that Laxe is making a documentary about local traditions. However, the impression is also given of a filmmaker, no doubt Western, prone to the same interventions in the “reality” that he is intended to record as Flaherty et  al., yet enacting the kind of relationship with his subjects that Grimshaw and Ravetz stress to be at the core of the observational turn (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2009). For Grimshaw and Ravetz in particular, the main concern of observational cinema is to furnish a cinema of reality committed to the minor nuances of everyday life, all the while rejecting a spectacle-infused commercially driven cinema. Such a cinema would involve a more than transaction-based relationship between subject and filmmaker. It is also a cinema based on a principle of observation that respects the subject’s personal space. There is no real suggestion that Laxe’s relationship with his subjects is built on disrespecting tradition, given the way he relates to them. He does appear committed to capturing the nuances of a life as perceived by an ethnographer-type filmmaker believed to have immersed himself in the culture of the other. He seems respectful toward his subjects. However, he is prone to the type of exaggeration and spectacle that has little basis in really knowing them. He appears to be filming the ritual in such a way as to put a Western spin on that which is essentially other to Western life. At one point, when the crew are dropping the body of the deceased from a height, we see—up close—all the paraphernalia of deception around the filming process, a mummified wrapping inside of which there is no body. It now becomes apparent that parts of the ritual are staged. This suggests Laxe’s capture is some kind of karma for having imposed the profane on the sacred Arabic burial traditions of the natives. In Bowles’s short story A Distant Episode, the protagonist is a French professor of linguistics whose knowledge of the Moroccan dialects he studies gives him a false sense of security; he somehow believes that because he is committed to preserving near extinct dialects, he is somehow protected from the violence of an Other he too wants to protect. Yet he believes that his desire to preserve the language will lessen the threat the Other poses to

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him. The professor is convinced that his activities will be seen as noble. Yet his attempt to preserve threatened languages may well be interpreted as an attempt to slow down the process of modernization that could lift these native speakers out of their materially impoverished state. In this sense, the professor is an oppressor. And looked at from this perspective, Bowles’s story is a remarkably subtle attempt to illustrate the disparity between self-perception and the perception of the Other. The logic of respecting and helping the Other, when evolving out of a perception of “help” that is essentially Western in focus, is built on a kind of one-way violence of its own. Far from “doing good,” the attempt to preserve the language of the Other is perceived as another tentacle in a colonial process of repressive subjugation. The brutal severing of the professor’s tongue, rendering him mute, is not just shocking in that it dismantles the tools of his profession, but also shocking because it inverts the process through which the colonizer unwittingly silences those whose language he seeks to “protect.” Laxe suffers the same fate in The Sky Trembles, perhaps for the same reasons. His film is about a funeral rite that is also an archaic custom. But his interest in this custom is never revealed. While from one perspective the filming of such a rite would seem noble in its aims, making a “record” of a dying custom that will help to preserve that custom, from another it is simply a form of oppression that seeks to exploit archaic customs for voyeuristic pleasure. When we consider this second perspective more clearly, we come to understand the limits of a filmmaking process built on observation alone, in the sense that the “look” is already the carrier of a not so explicit violence: the violence of the gaze. The apparent “immersion” of Laxe the director in the Moroccan way of life, which is illustrated by a rugged appearance and traditional apparel, conceals the fact that his “look” in itself is a carrier of a long-standing colonial violence that goes back decades, if not centuries. The Sky Trembles is, however, a little more nuanced than an adaptation of Bowles’s story would at first suggest. The “silencing” of Rivers’s protagonist puts him in line with the protagonists of other Rivers’s films, most notably those discussed as part of a paradigm of new nonfiction in the previous section of this chapter, encouraging the spectator to think more intently about this film as a commentary on that paradigm as such. For while the “silencing” of Laxe in the film is, like in Bowles’s story, barbaric, it is offset—at least for those of us familiar with Rivers’s oeuvre of films—by the knowledge that Laxe and Rivers are collaborating together to make this film. The film therefore performs, in the process, an auto-critique of Laxe’s filming of subjects in the other film. Laxe’s transformation into a mute, dressed in a suit made from the bottom of tin cans, is harrowing from the perspective of film “content”: the story of a Western filmmaker in Morocco. But from the perspective of form, the film performs a self-critique of the

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other film’s status as ethnographic documentary: a film about Morocco by Oliver Laxe. The transition from speaking director, who hands out instructions to the natives whose customs he believes he is helping to preserve, to silent modèle, has added meaning in the context of Rivers films more generally. In this other context, we can see the way collaborating with Laxe brings the mechanistic in itself of the modèle into effect, as a way of filming the subject. Although Rivers’s approach to filming has had a utopian impetus, dealing largely with isolated figures committed to singular pursuits “outside” the main economy, The Sky Trembles is something of a departure. The capture and then torture of Laxe by the same ethnic group he is making his film about, is more appropriately approached as a dystopian return of the repressed. The adaptation of Bowles nonetheless helps speculate on what might happen to a director when dropped into a culture he wants to film in, faced with the limitations of knowing a native Other. Laxe, the director of Mimosas and friend of Rivers, plays the director of a film that appears to be his film, although we cannot be sure if the film he is shown directing is the same that will materialize as Mimosas. We can say, however, that Rivers’s relationship with Laxe is not that different to his relationship with Jake except in this case a fictional text is used as a source of speculation for what might happen to Laxe if he doesn’t engage with his subjects in a certain way. Both films fulfill the self as modèle criterion set in the context of a mechanistic in itself, as distinct from simply documenting a “subject,” and

FIGURE 1.4 The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers: Laxe escapes from his imprisonment, running into the desert

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both can be viewed as giving rise to films that take issue with the limitations of the observational ethnographic film. The dance at the end of The Sky Trembles also evokes the end of Ben Russell’s earlier feature-length film Let Each One Go Where He May, however different the circumstances in which each modèle finds him or herself. Laxe, dressed from head to toe in his now customary tin can dress, evokes the costume-wearing Pansa brothers dancing to commemorate their community. The difference in circumstance is notable, however, in that Laxe is forced into dancing for his captors. The modèle as mechanistic in itself is director and modèle at once. Laxe is the director of his film and an actor performing a role in his friend’s film. The Sky Trembles is, in this sense, a kind of speculative warning from one to the other of what might happen to a subject qua director who assumes they have integrated into the “reality” of the ritual they observe.

“I don’t care about the Other. I am the Other.” Both Laxe and Rivers have discussed the tribulations of making both films at once, in conversation with Kieron Corless of Sight & Sound; with Laxe opening up on the manner in which his role-playing allowed him to address his own ego as a filmmaker (aware of Bowles’s story) who had lived for an extended period in Tangiers (four years), and Rivers expounding on a fascination with Bowles’s short story. Asked the expected and somewhat customary postcolonial question about whether The Sky Trembles can be perceived as a revenge narrative built on the premise of filming “the other,” a kind of warning shot to those who would arrogantly assume to know the culture they look upon from a distance, Laxe asserts adamantly, “I don’t care about the Other. I am the Other.” Apart from rejecting a philosophical concept that has dominated so much of academic discourse in the last forty years, and has been central to the emergence of postcolonial studies as a discipline in itself, Laxe makes apparent the central premise of the film: to question the perception of the Other as that which needs to be preserved, all the while kept at a manageable distance. If a concept such as post postcolonial can be coined, it might be best suited for engaging such films that subvert the ethical injunction to respect the Other in this way, when such respect is conditioned by a subject compelled to take a distance from the Other. It is for this reason that Laxe’s assertion “I am the Other” is so provocative: it compels us to realign our perspective with, in the case of The Sky Trembles, the desert nomads. Rivers and Laxe also point to the protagonist of Bowles’s story as an arrogant Westerner, who assumes he knows and therefore respects an

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Other, a point that is helpful when negotiating the film’s broader moral imperative: to critique the ethics of observational ethnographic filmmaking as depending on a one-way impression of someone’s else reality. This is why Laxe saying “I am the Other” is of interest regarding his transformation. We can conclude by saying The Sky Trembles can be understood as a film about the fictive perception of Others as much as the fiction required to speculate about Others. Laxe’s reduction to an object of amusement for the nomads can be viewed as a parody of documentary productions that claim to represent the subject simply by developing a one-way understanding of them, and a celebration of nonfiction film as art. I now want to turn to an earlier film of Ben Rivers to address the self as modèle concept in more explicit detail. The point here is to sketch out the artistic merit gained from working with the subject in a way that differs from the one-way relation critiqued in films such as The Sky Trembles.

Notes 1 This turn to the outer regions and abandoned corners of the world has been approached as part of a wider interest, especially in contemporary art, in place. The distinction Doreen Massey makes between space and place is central to this. Place differs from space in that it is defined by the interactions between subjects; it is defined by the human interaction that takes place in the space. “Within the academic literature,” Massey writes when exploring place as conceptualized in the late twentieth century, “there has been a continuation of the tendency to identify ‘places’ as necessarily sites of nostalgia, of the opting out from Progress and History. There was, within the discipline of geography a fiercely negative reaction, on the part of some Marxist geographers in particular, to the move to include within the compass of radical geography a focus on ‘locality studies’ ” (Massey, 1994, 5). In this regard, Rivers and Russell are in some way—as filmmakers—contributing to an important discussion of place, and in particular the opting out from progress and history. 2 Rivers has made a number of commercial films with Jake, in addition to these. Interestingly, he has shot these films in color, as opposed to the signature 16 mm Botex black-and-white, a film stock that is no longer made today. 3 I mentioned the essay in question “ ‘Near Documentary’ as Post-Bressonian Aesthetic: Cinematographic Excursions and the Dialogue between Jeff’s Wall’s Adrian Walker (1992) and Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea (2011)” in the previous chapter. 4 As part of the research for this chapter, I attended a number of events given over to an area of popular music culture research known tentatively as Black Metal Theory. This is an area of theory concerned with the emergence in the early 90s in Norway of a form of heavy metal music defined by a lo-fi punk aesthetic and an interest in pre-Christian Scandinavian culture, the paganism associated with the Viking past. Black Metal Theory extends, however, beyond these interests, to address gender, performance, nationalism, and the relationship between music

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and the Far Right. I was particularly interested in the choice of black metal in the context of the film, given that Robert A. A. Lowe is in fact an avant-garde American artist. 5 By using “post postcolonialism” as a critical term, I am referencing postcolonial debates around the internal conflicts of the field. Taking Alex Callincos’s assumption that postcolonialism is a refuge for aspects of postmodernism as given, “post postcolonialism” is a concerted effort on the part of artists and filmmakers alike, not just to critique postcolonial orthodoxies but also to move beyond the limitations of postmodernism as a form of reflexive critique. 6 Bill Nichols has distinguished the observational mode of documentary from the participatory mode, emphasizing the observationalist mantra to preclude nonintervention in the observed reality as a fundamental condition of filming. Much of Rivers’s practice as a filmmaker and artist can be interpreted as a reflection of this condition as an idea; its paradoxicality and its reductive idea of reality. My own criticism of observational documentary lies in its relative naivety: it bypasses any engagement with the cinematic as a fundamental property of all cinema. It’s an approach that fetishes “reality” as that which we all simply perceive as given.

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2 (Self as) modèle environments: Nonfiction film

We cannot (and should not wish to) determine how a new generation will address the contradictions of documentary; but the least we can ask is that they should be aware the contradictions exist DAI VAUGHAN

Ben Rivers’s interest in the removed, out of the way life of the recluse feeds into his practice in many ways. Above all else, it is an interest in subjectivity and art making. It is also an interest in interrogating the relationship between art and reality. The status of “my land” is of particular concern to the first film made with Williams, This Is My Land, where a kind of personalized space takes shape that is emphasized in the film’s title. Rivers has, however, made a series of films with Jake since, from commissions, adverts, to feature-length releases and gallery-based art installations. The meeting of artist, subject, and collaborator is worthy of a study in itself. For the present purposes, however, I want to focus on Two Years at Sea, touched on earlier, in more depth, sketching out its status as a kind of art described as new nonfiction. My decision to focus on this film relates to the discussion of the cinema of nonfiction, and the relationship between the idea of nonfiction films and conceptual understandings of art as touched on in the conclusion of the previous chapter. The utopian can also be considered in formative terms here to signify the “non-place” of cinema, an imaginary world that exists only in the form of an art object or a speculative construction that is cinematic. Nonfiction emboldens a not yet: cultivating a world both real and of the cinema. In others words, nonfiction is a “rift” or crack, which is also a non-place.

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Rivers speaks about drawing on the utopian as a methodological concern, going as far as to suggest that “utopia in the present is cinema.” The making of films, he states to Catherine Fitzgibbon, is utopian in the way it offers us an opportunity to build “model environments cinematically” (Fitzgibbon, 2014). This approach (in and of itself) to making films fuels my own critical concern with Rivers’s approach as nonfictional in essence, even when the artist is held to documentary as a term when describing the collaborative ventures undertaken with Jake. This chapter picks up on concerns with the “self as modéle” criterion proposed as specific to nonfiction that is speculative in form. Chapter 1 proposed a way of considering nonfiction in terms of subjectivity as a set of methodological criteria the artist or filmmaker follows, which draws on certain ideas that have evolved in documentary for artistic purposes. This chapter follows up on this as a concerted analysis of the post-Bressonian concerns in Two Years at Sea around these methods, from the perspective of nonfiction specifically. In this chapter, then, I explore Two Years from the perspective of the “self as modèle.” The self as modèle is considered the anchoring component of the film as art work, with art a categorization that doesn’t frequent exploring the modèle as a real self. I  would venture to say it is precisely the self’s status as modèle that problematizes while challenging the status of Two Years as a documentary feature. But I also want to elaborate on nonfiction as formative to discussions that come to fruition later in this book. The “self as modèle” is not only helpful for understanding new nonfiction as playing on the documentary impulse, it is also helpful for considering types of art that engage with documentary theory and poetics. In this sense the obvious lack of dialogue in Two Years at Sea, the film’s reliance on diegetic and non-diegetic (nonlinguistic) sound, frequents certain accusations that have plagued the theorization of art forms as documentary: didacticism. In fact, it is the lack of inveterate truth claims that by and large account for the charm of Two Years at Sea, cultivating in the film a certain mystery not unlike that evoked in the early avant-garde documentary, or the actuality films of the 1920s discussed earlier. It is almost impossible not to see the grainy black-and-white image, and its quirky materiality, as contributing to the “aesthetic” appeal of Two Years at Sea. One is reminded of classic avantgarde films like Joris Ivens’s Rain (1928), which are similar in form, when watching the film. Dai Vaughan’s writings on documentary—gathered together in the now classic text For Documentary (1999)—are a considerably unorthodox intervention in the emergent field of Film Studies. Vaughan is a theorist (although he himself also worked extensively and very successfully as an editor) for whom any such division between documentary and fiction relies on the spectator position. For Vaughan, it is important to recognize the lack of an imminent or inveterate nature prior to the spectator’s reception of the image. It is not so much the processes involved in making the film

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that interests Vaughan the theorist, but the reception of what is made. “The definition of documentary in terms of the viewer’s perception—i.e., as material perceived as signifying what it appears to record—avoids some of the wilder consequences of attempted definitions,” Vaughan states, “which, with their stress upon the status of the pro-filmic, inevitably end up in disputes about whether this or that reality is as real as it might be” (Vaughan, 1999, 66). The last chapter teased out Russell’s and Rivers’s contribution to this debate (by means of an aesthetic praxis) through the application of certain criteria evolved for considering nonfiction film that was speculative in nature. New nonfiction film of this type involved the absorption of the self in activities, founded, in a post-Bressonian context, on collaboration. This chapter now turns to the “model” to elaborate on this criterion as a theorization of the new nonfiction film in terms of an art work that takes a certain cue from theories of the documentary subject. While it can be disputed without being fully dismissed as a “record” of Jake’s life, Two Years at Sea can also be said to derive its aesthetic potency from intensifying documentary codes considered generic to the form, one of which I  want to explore more extensively in this chapter. My interest is in the treatment of the subject as a modèle, intensified in and through the depiction of Jake as “Jake.” The point of this chapter is to explore the depths of meaning that accrue from the self, cast as modèle, in a nonfictional context. I want to explore the self as modèle in the context of the documentary subject as theoretical concept. “What documentary does,” Vaughan notes, is to specify that the image shall not be dissociated from the actuality. Though the label “documentary” may be affixed at whim, its confirmation requires that the viewer interpret the film in this specified sense: that a shot must retain its “vertical” relation to actuality while functioning “horizontally” as a constituent of a film world. The term documentary thus describes, strictly speaking, not the nature of the material but the chosen manner of our response to it. (Vaughan, 1999, 102–103) Vaughan sees the “manner of our response” as the key concern regarding the reception of so-called documentary material. This chapter, taking its cue from such a claim, asks: What is the modèle of nonfiction a model of? Because nonfiction as a type of film is designed to elicit a certain rift or tension in the material, I now want to explore this tension as it comes to fruition in Two Years at Sea regarding the somewhat paradoxical coding of “Jake” as the self as modèle. Just as Vaughan believes that the response determines the inveterate status of documentary material, it is a certain response to pro-filmic images as records and constructs at once that, I will argue, is important in nonficton films. I now want to explore and develop this point further.

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Into the abyss This Is My Land takes the form of a fragmented document, an apt description considering Rivers is observing his subject closely. Two Years at Sea, by contrast, as argued in Chapter  1, is better understood as a fictional/performative collaboration; an expedient example of the kind of constructed utopian methods Rivers believes film offer him access to. Of course, one person living in his environment (given that, for Claeys and Sargant, the standard definition of utopia suggests “A non-existent society described in detail and normally located in time and space”) (Claeys and Sargant, 1999, 1) is a speculative but also contentious rendering of utopian space. Yet given that the concept of the utopian is more often than not used to describe imaginary societal forms, it has currency of sorts. The collaborative production involved in making Two Years at Sea might just qualify as utopian praxis, when the building of a “reality for itself” in film is equated with “model environments.” Rivers observes his subject Jake from a distance in This Is My Land, giving a certain precedence to his interaction with objects and things, and the set of activities Jake undertakes in this space. There is, nonetheless, something of a different texture to the way Two Years at Sea unfolds; the film makes no reference to Jake living in this remote part of Scotland. What emerges is a mysterious kind of place with its own locus of constellations. By making the “horizontal” Vaughan talks about palatable as a filmic property, a kind of virtual reservoir of meaning, the film can be said to heighten the allure of place while preserving the film’s status as a record of this place. It is precisely this scaling of two possibilities at once that makes it so intriguing, carrying the spectator along with it. It is important then that film, considered as the outcome of a utopian and artistic praxis that builds its own environment, and film as a record of the subject in his home environment can be distinguished in kind. One of the reasons Two Years at Sea is such an open text, aesthetically, is that it encourages both of these readings at the same time, inciting the interpretative gaze around the self (as the subject of the land) and the self as modèle. It is also worth noting, in addition, the influence that science fiction as a genre, a natural home for utopian musings and practice, has had on Rivers’s canon of works, in particular “last man” texts from the romantic period to the present.1 Jake, considered in this context, is the archetypical “last man.” Indeed, Slow Action, the film made before Rivers completed Two Years at Sea, is influenced by a strain of didactic utopian science fiction influenced by documentary reportage. The choreographed observational style of Slow Action, considered as faux ethnographic documentary, signposts the science fictional utopian credentials from the outset. A  haughty female voice-over is also used to inform the viewer of how they should perceive the tripartite records of island life that are

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the main focus of the film. The science fiction writer Mark von Schegell also collaborated with Rivers on the film script, providing the voice-over material that accompanies the images. In a recent book-length study on the genealogy of utopia as a concept that has been heavily contested by scholars for centuries now, Ruth Levitas notes, Outside academic circles, the term utopia is used frequently, but with very little rigor. Colloquial usage reiterates More’s pun: the good place is no place; utopia is a nice idea but totally unrealistic. Sometimes the positive connotations are missing altogether and utopian becomes synonymous with unrealistic. Sometimes utopian is viewed even more negatively and equated with totalitarianism. Within utopian studies one would expect both a more positive orientation to utopia and a greater degree of reflection on the use of the term . . . Definitions in terms of form also governs the subject-matter of utopian studies. Most work falls into one of two empirical areas, communal societies and utopian literature. (Levitas, 2010, 179–180) Levitas brings “no” and “place”—the etymological rooting of utopia—to bear on the fictional island made famous by Thomas More (it is interesting to consider the title Two Years at Sea, which is never explained in the actual film, as a curt reference to Jake’s travels as an attempt to find utopia. Jake returns after two years looking to find the island More famously found himself). That utopia is a place that will never or cannot realistically exist in the future is categorically rejected by Levitas. When positive utopian orientations are said to bring a configured notion of what a place could or might be to bear on an existing space, the real becomes—in essence—a model environment. This, at least, is how I  read Rivers’s model environments in utopian terms. Rivers, like Levitas, is interested in the orientation of utopia. Because there is a lack of contextual information, the utopian credentials Levitas speaks of are established in subtle rather than direct terms. The filming of Jake in 16mm monochrome, for example, intensifies semiotic associations between utopia and early cinema from the outset. The aesthetic decisions taken by Rivers in rendering Jake’s life in this way generates a certain curiosity around his decision to live in this place at this unspecific time. Two Years at Sea also forges the “reality for itself” that Rivers likes to call utopian, by leaving open any diegetic spatio-temporal location: the “no place.” Rivers’s fascination with “last man” epics, which exist in close proximity to utopian literature, is aligned to an interest in the kind of communities Levinas locates as utopian. Communal societies and “last man” epics have a considerable legacy in the utopian/dystopian studies Levitas describes. It is also interesting that a proportion of reviewers of Two Years at Sea were quick to locate the film within these readily existing (yet often dialectically

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opposed) genres. Some read Jake’s environment as utopian, others as dystopian, some even finding the film to be a depiction of a postapocalyptic Scotland. Claiming Two Years at Sea to be dystopian in form, Jake can be said to exist not solely as a recluse with a considerable amount of time to engage his solipsistic fantasies, but one forced do so out of necessity. The world depicted in Two Years at Sea is, in this sense, far from the materialization of Jake’s private fantasy, but a place he has been forced to retreat to because, taking the film to be a “last man” epic, something akin to environmental crisis has ensued. Williams’s existence is, on this reading, defined by the things left discarded around his home, old photographs that show him surrounded by people, with their eerie sense of a dystopian loss.2 A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness draws on a similar landscape, this time filmed between Norway, Finland, and Estonia, to that depicted in Two Years at Sea. As pointed out, the film’s sole protagonist is Robert A.  A. Lowe, playing himself, trying to adapt to the vestiges of an intentional community in Estonia, before breaking out in the wilds of Finland. Rivers’s signature style is discerned in many of the film’s quieter moments, and again little context given to the characters/subjects makes it difficult to classify the film as a strict documentary. A Spell has a similar structure to Slow Action, with three extended sequences based on different island locations of former utopian communities. A voice-over comments throughout on the difficulty in curating island life forms, in a way that aestheticizes the observational/ ethnographic approach as faux science-fictional documentary. These islands are remnants of a once collective desire, expressions of a once recognizable utopian impulse that cannot, by its very nature, actualize. Utopia is—in this sense—an ideal to strive for yet never reached. Slow Action differs from earlier Rivers films in its dry narrative commentaries written by Mark von Schlegell. The voiceover is an ethnographic curator, the film perhaps a critique of the art world where it has largely been exhibited, with each section detailing the significant historical features of the “curated” communal society that is reflected on in the film, which is also utopian in theme. As a precedent for Two Years at Sea, the dry commentary on the aspiration of these mini-societies expands on the idea of utopia as a future ideal, as opposed to what might be termed—and by way of contrast—the utopian present, “it is one of the paradoxes wound into the idea of utopia that it must fulfil simultaneously the ideal for both the state and the individual. Usually the former necessity proves it’s undoing” (Rivers, 2010). The question of whether utopian impulses have little or anything to do with the materialization of utopia is one of the recurrent debates in the intellectual scrutiny of the concept. In addition, utopia has been interpreted to mean the erosion of desire symptomatic of the totalitarianism Levitas warns of. Totalitarianism, which Hannah Arendt addresses in her definitive study, is a sustained annihilation of subjectivity specific to, indeed celebrated in an aesthetic of the self. It is therefore interesting to decode Two Years

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at Sea as a film openly playing with the utopian/dystopian affect, not just because it’s been received as a critique of the denigration of selfhood, but because it’s also been celebrated as a film about one man’s contentedness when living on the margins of society, isolated and alone. Eli Zaretsky argues that, totalitarianism, according to Arendt, differs from tyranny in that it works upon private life . . . the groundwork for totalitarianism is laid through the isolation of the individual and the weakening of the judicial, ethical and interpersonal relations that sustain individuality. (Zaretsky, 1997, 215) Totalitarianism—as Zaretsky implies here—is synonymous with stateoriented distortions of a once utopian promise; when interpersonal relations break down, and the once promised utopia becomes, in a dialectical shift, a dystopian nightmare. It is not surprising that the mood and texture of Two Years at Sea, in that it’s dialogue-free and centers on a lone individual, fashioned, for some critics, a picture of a subject exiled by totalitarian power. Jake’s life, on this viewing, is the result of an ecological nightmare at the end of history. Two Years at Sea is something of a departure, if not a major one, from the intellectual commentary of Slow Action. Considered as art that takes the form of a document of a near-apocalyptic future, it is a film with a markedly different feel to the observational Slow Action and This Is My Land; its slower tempo and minimal snippets of information regarding the trajectory of Jake’s life, encourage more imaginative projections as to what or who Jake is. The filmed diegesis can therefore be interpreted as an either/ or: Jake’s personal utopia based on desired solitude, or a dystopian enclave characterized by isolation that Arendt identifies with totalitarianism. The point is that the cinema of nonfiction, or the new nonfiction film as it can also be called, makes both outcomes possible, with the rift between an aesthetic quality of the work. Isolation and utopia are not therefore mutually exclusive; in nonfiction they can exist together. Julia Kristeva’s study of Arendt focuses extensively on the great German philosopher’s exploration of “isolation” and “desolation” as philosophical primers for engaging twentieth-century experiences of totalitarianism. For Kristeva, Arendt’s contribution to the world of letters is felt in recasting sociological–historical problems as specifically moral ones. Jake, taking the form of self as modèle, can be perceived as a model for the isolated exemplar of the Epictetus “lonely man” Kristeva focuses on in Arendt’s thought. The “lonely man” (also the “philosopher king”) thinks for those who can’t, seeks out the solitude Jake has managed to procure for himself to think about the world. Considering that Jake is cast then as the “lonely man,” the contraptions, machinic platforms that he builds help focus his thinking. Jake’s isolation from those once close to him is, in this sense,

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a result of the incidental need—as a thinker—to isolate himself from the “they”; the “chatter” Heidegger famously associated with the inauthentic self (all of which suggests his life, in adverse relation to this, is a striving for authentic being). And as Kristeva says about the solitude Hannah Arendt figures as a bridge to thought, it is a demand that is vital to the modern age. Arendt vigorously defended the demanding solitude of the thinker that is threatened by modernity, (and) she also warns of its hidden danger of desolation—that may be realized, if the thinker inadvertently finds himself losing the gift of friendship. (Kristeva, 2003, 142) The lack of dialogue particular to the film form, and which is such a defining feature of the subject in general, amounts to a scarcity of information, and means there is no way of knowing—in any definite sense—whether Jake is a thinker cast in solitude, bravely swimming against the tides of conformity, or a desolate “last man” who has lost the gift of a friendship otherwise perceived as the public realm. In this latter sense Jake is rootless, desolate, using objects to engage the land anew simply as a consequence of his unwanted isolation from others. The question as to whether he is a model for the isolated thinker concerned with the problems of modernity, or a model for someone who is lost in the wilderness in the aftermath of the apocalypse is never resolved. The outcome, the either/or decision, depends on projections made about the self as modèle; that is, the position the spectator takes regarding the status of the film form. And yet, the fact that we can’t exclude the thought that this is real, that is really Jake in this world means we can’t—at the same time—adjudge the film to be a pure fiction. Rivers has spoken about speculating as to what Jake would do when making the film and, as a result, the film itself can still be considered a portrait of sorts. It is the tension that emerges from all these “could bes” or

FIGURE 2.1 Two Years at Sea: Is this a post-apocalyptic landscape or simply a forlorn place?

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“what ifs” that encourages us to try to decide either/or and which is part of the film’s aesthetic appeal as an artwork; an appeal that I would suggest or I am suggesting is typical of the cinema of nonfiction. Two Years at Sea is part of a wider movement in contemporary art practice toward utopia and dystopia that draws its inspiration from late nineteenth-century science fiction in cross-fertilization with the burgeoning tradition of socialist utopianism. Since the 1980s, dystopia has gathered currency as a genre in itself and, once the ugly duckling of the utopian “family tree,” has now become a legitimate arena for exploration in its own right. Two Years at Sea, as an “open text” inviting interpretation of a lone subject’s engagement with the landscape, can be perceived as obscuring, if not collapsing, the dialectic on which the utopian/dystopian division rests. At the same time, given the wider discourse around the film, Rivers speaks of Jake as both the subject of a model environment procured with Rivers and the subject of a land where he in fact resides. There is a tension then integral to the aesthetic experience of a film, which pulls the spectator in two directions at once—toward the “self” Jake “is,” and toward the modèle “Jake”; both knitted together in unison as the “self as modèle.” For Andréa Picard, “Two Years at Sea harbours enough mystery and ambiguity to invite multiple readings, though it nonetheless joins what Rivers calls his ‘post-apocalyptic last man films’—ones that exist in the future even though they look like they’re from an ashen, distant past” (Picard, 2012). As Picard points out, to engage the film as a premonition of the future is not unreasonable; a time when, no matter how much Jake “connects” with his sublime surroundings, he lacks that ability to process his surroundings as a place: he simply lives alone in an abstract formless landscape. Taking the proto-dystopian emphasis on totalitarian oppression, in light of Picard’s comment, as a platform for semiotic analysis, “Jake” is a last man left with the time to think about others because there are no others. In another sense, Jake chooses the wilds of Aberdeenshire as his own utopian enclave, and expects others to join him. The references Rivers makes to Jake as the subject of Two Years, although never referenced in name in the film, can be considered definitive as a ploy— offering a semblance of the “real”—in helping to “articulate the material” as material; in this sense Jake is in fact a real self (cast in space and time). However, the lack of information given about Jake as Jake in the film itself is what cultivates the self as modèle, investing in the image a considerably open semiotic status. Jake is never referred to in the film by name. He is, however, referenced as Jake Williams by Rivers in interview, the same Williams that Rivers worked with on This Is My Land, in the marketing of the film and in the material information released around its release. In interviews on the film, Rivers explicitly references Williams as the film subject, an intriguing game of reference that merges fact and fiction. The specific address to the “material” Vaughan references is a considered attempt on Rivers’s behalf to

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confront the viewer with the premise of the film: the fact that Williams is Williams in view of the spectatorial perception of him as self and modèle. One of the most alluring sequences of Two Years at Sea involves Jake building a raft from bits and bobs he picks up around his home. Cobbling bits and pieces together, Jake is then filmed drifting aimlessly around a lake on the raft, all the while hemmed in by the surrounding hills. I  already explored this multi-sensual perceptual engagement with the land in another publication, looking at how it reflects on Rivers’s own project with Jake. I  now want to pursue this discussion further as an evolved consideration of the modèle as “last man,” and the semiotic of the self as modèle as an either/or, a kind of rift in the work and aesthetic quality of the film. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is an interesting comparison in this regard, in that first it includes other people; it is not simply a “last man” narrative. However, like Two Years, the modèle in A Spell spends considerable time on their own, pensively exploring the natural world, and the lakes of the north. In both films the camera is held in medium shot for a long take on the self as modèle sitting in Zen-like stillness in a lake. At a certain point in Two Years at Sea, having journeyed to the lake, Jake returns to his home, leaving the viewer unaware of the insights that might have been borne from this. Whether the journey has been a success, whether his perceptual understanding of the landscape has been invigorated, inciting his senses anew, remains open to semiotic conjecture. Taken as a model in the form of “last man,” Jake’s absorption in the act of building the raft is either a consequence of abandonment in the landscape or self-initiated isolation from others. The picture of Jake thinking on his raft, as the camera cuts to a God’s eye view of him gazing toward the sky, is helplessly romantic,

FIGURE 2.2 Two Years at Sea: Jake builds a raft as a way of exploring his surroundings, to potentially connect with the natural environment

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an illustration of Jake qua man in a symbiosis with “the earth,” and thus utopian (in this society man has come to live on his own, no longer requiring social interaction), or dystopian in the sense that he is alone, left with only snapshots of the past. In contrast, the unnamed protagonist of A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, “acted” by the musician Robert A. A. Lowe, journeys in the course of the film from an intentional community in Estonia to the wilds of Finland, where he lives, for a period of time, alone. His time in Estonia involves living with a community of expats, where little space is afforded being alone, to engage in a meditative environment with the Self. Very much in the background at the outset, Lowe, cast as the protagonist of the film, rarely engages in dialogue with others, or at least dialogue the viewer is allowed to share. His fellow community members are seen discussing the merits of life in community, the need to find autonomous spaces from the “they,” while Lowe is shown simply listening attentively to them. The second third of the film sees the action shift abruptly to the wilds of Finland. In some of the most stunning sequences of the film, the camera follows Lowe as he travels through rocky terrain toward a lakeside hut. Unlike the opening third of the film, Lowe is, throughout this journey, alone. He never meets or interacts with another self. Like the raft sequence in Two Years at Sea, a sequence is given over to spending considerable time fishing in what appears to be a lake (although it is possible this is the Baltic Sea), as the camera in medium long shot records Lowe’s slow movement from the right-hand side of the frame to the center. During this he sits motionless in a boat, absorbed by the serene activity. Rivers and Russell cut then, with a beautifully contrasting image, to a high-angle sideways shot of Lowe as he explores a rock formation covered in moss, before he is shown from a reverse angle exploring the woodlands, foraging for food. A  quick succession of close-ups follow the focus on framed pictures that have been left adjacent in the cabin, a number of magazines that appear dated, before returning to Lowe as he applies corpse pain to his face, having camped the night before around a fire. Critics of A Spell were quick to compare the magazine photographs adorning the hut Lowe stays in, the close-ups of which contrast the shots of the landscape in which he appears diminutive in comparison, with the photographs that are littered around Jake’s ramshackle home in Two Years a Sea. Lorian Long believes this material serves as a reminder to the viewer of the difficulty Lowe experiences at this point in the film, seeking isolation— the difficulty of experiencing solitude in an absolute form, Musician/artist Robert A.  A. Lowe (of Lichens and Om) carries the remainder of the film, as we watch him embark on a solo journey through lush moss and ice and thickets swarming with insects to an empty cabin, where he sits reading, his long fingernails patiently turning each page. He takes his time. There’s a sense of mystique to his wanderings; we

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have no idea what or why he is doing what he is doing, or where he is going, but something else is lurking. Much of the last half of the film, in the midst of attempting to parse its own impact, veers off into a flood of images and journeying through landscapes that are both transcendental and terrifying in their hugeness. (Long, 2014) Jake stares into the fire at the end of Two Years at Sea, a moment when the model—at least perceivably—merges with the darkness of the cinema screen. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, by contrast, shifts in tone, from Robert A.  A. Lowe engaging with the landscape in a moment of solitary isolation, living alone, to the epiphanic moment when he corpse paints his face and sets the hut he has stayed in alight. In the final sequence of the film, without Rivers and Russell offering any indication about what he is doing, or indeed why, the camera cuts to a black metal band Lowe is performing in in a medium sized unnamed Oslo club before a small number of metal enthusiasts. The singer of the band is Hunter Hunt Hendrix, the legendary lead singer of American post-black metal band Liturgy. Liturgy, as an act, caused something of a stir on the US black metal scene when refusing the signifiers associated with the scene, in addition to Hendrix’s ruminations on the genre as reaching a transcendentalist phase in his music. This sequence consists, however, of close-ups of the band, Hunt Hendrix included, in black metal paraphernalia—corpse paint, black leather, studded jewelry— as they perform together. As the performance concludes, Lowe takes the microphone, reaching an elegiac crescendo, and screams. The end of the film—perhaps intentional on the directors’ part— encourages a retrospective comparison of each episode of the triptych form, the first sequence built around “fitting in” to an intentional community, the second an attempt to etch out a space for the meditative Self to reach a romantic symbiosis with the Earth; the final episode defined by the utopian plurality experienced in the moment. Like Two Years, minimal information is given about a film that might be a new age ethnographic document following an itinerant nomad in search of acceptance in a globalized world, or a fictional inquiry into the possibility of utopia. Like Rivers’s Two Years at Sea, there is an uncertainty around Lowe as self—Lowe is an experimental musician and sound artist—and modèle, while the silence he maintains adds mystique to his role in the film. His decision to burn the hut and lose himself in what many would perceive as degenerate musical production is either hedonistic self-indulgence, or a genuine attempt to reach selftranscendence, all of which bears heavily on the film’s status as a mode of nonfiction that is speculative in nature: this is what Lowe would do if given the opportunity. We can also speculate as to what sequences of the film are scripted, and what are actual records of a journey, just as we can speculate as to whether the final sequence should be seen as self-reflexive, reflecting collaborative practice, a praxis Rivers has referred to as utopian in form.

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But the overriding point is that the either/or is integral to the experience of the film: an aesthetic that comes out of the utopian method involved in the making of the film as communal coproduction. The final sequence is set in Oslo. This sequence features Hendrix in corpse paint he famously rejects when performing in his own band—irking black metal traditionalists in the process—performing in the spiritual home of black metal, with the club taking the form of “model environment” Rivers describes as utopian in its remit. Lowe as modèle, however, performs as himself in what is essentially a scripted collaboration with the filmmakers, in what emerges as a kind of mutual becoming. It is interesting to consider the importance of black metal to this sequence, given Hendrix’s discussion of the genre as reaching a transcendental phase in his music. For me, black metal’s virtue is that it can, using a combination of history, sound, and audacity, activate a connection to a sort of transcendental field, the perennial occult, the Absolute . . . that it touches the spiritual and poetic channels of impossibility that are closed up most of the time. Or, at least, this is a potential within black metal. It can be isolated from other aspects of black metal and enhanced by means of cross-fertilization with other resonant forms of music. The task of Transcendental Black Metal is this isolation and enhancement. (Hendrix in Stousy, 2011) Hendrix’s reading of black metal’s enhancement of isolation tallies with my reading of nonfiction as a filmmaking practice that absorbs the self in the process of creating a film about themselves. We can also approach A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness as a filmic triptych through which various “degrees” of absorption in creativity are explored: the three episodes corresponding to the panels of a medieval triptych (even the painting of the face prior to the performance at the end of the film evokes the praxis of casting the self as modéle). Like Two Years at Sea, A Spell is characterized by varying degrees of absorption experienced by the self as modèle, until, that is, in the final episode Lowe appears to transcend the self in the kind of mystical rapture associated with medieval ecstasy. The irony is that such rapture is experienced in a model environment where music—the origins of which are associated with ritualistic church burning in Norway, along with notorious cases of homicide among its members—is being performed (the murder of one of the foundational figureheads of black metal, the guitarist of pioneering black metal band Mayhem, Euronymous, by another figurehead, Vark Vigernes, is the most notorious of these). The camera, having followed the musicians in close-up, slowly pans the members of the audience as they gaze upon the performance in relative silence; they now appear at the same level as the performing musicians. None of the band members returns their gaze. As such, the “world” of A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness and Two Years at Sea is a considerably ambiguous one, defined by the casting of the self

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as modèle. This ambiguity derives from, Rivers suggests, cinema’s capacity to construct model environments from actual places. It is precisely in such environments that the “reality for itself” Rivers also speaks of materializes as real on film. And given that scripted content makes up a significant portion of Two Years at Sea and A Spell as projects that engage the profilmic world of the self, it is vital to remember that the script Rivers, and Rivers and Russell, propose, helps construct the world that is then filmed. But it constructs this world in collaboration with a self cast in the form of modèle. It is also worthwhile, in further exploring the ambiguity that exists between the world as it is and the world as it comes to be in the process of making a film, to contrast the ending of Two Years at Sea with that of A Spell. The former film ends with Jake staring at the fire, with his absorption captured by Rivers in close-up, before fading into the blackened screen. Jake never looks out toward the spectator position, so his absorption, and failure to look at the camera position is notable. By contrast, Lowe takes to the microphone at the end of A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, his scream an elemental and generic feature of the black metal genre, with his eyes closed shut. The important point is the emphasis given to the “subject” of the film, in the case of A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness Robert A. A. Lowe, in the case of Two Years at Sea, Jake. There is something intriguing, not quite fictional or fully fictional about the space where the self resides when each film comes to a conclusion. We know Jake is Jake, and Lowe is “Lowe.” But in both cases, the subject is the self as modéle.

“What”—“Who” This combination of self and model, which I term the self as modèle, brings multiple representational energies into play: the self, the modéle, and, as is explored later in this book, reality and representation. This chapter’s focus has been a teasing out of these energies as they pertain to both “record” and artistic “construct,” marked by a furnishing of the category of subject I have called here the self as modèle. The distinction between “what” and “who” that Hannah Arendt makes in her later philosophy, as etched out in most explicit terms in two texts, The Human Condition (1998) and The Life of the Mind (1971), offers a remarkably fertile theoretical framework for exploring the distinction between the self, the modèle, and the self as modèle, as a classificatory concept for engaging the poetics of new nonfiction as such. “Who are we?” as opposed to “What are we?” That is the revelation whose inherent tension enlivens Arendt’s political and philosophical work,” notes Julia Kristeva (Kristeva, 2003, 172). But it is precisely this tension that Two Years at Sea

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enlivens around the pertinent issue of “what” kind of being Jake is—recluse, hippy, “last man,” “philosopher king,” hermit—in contradistinction to “who.” The aim is to stimulate the audience to perceive a “who” considered, importantly, as a consequence of “what.” The “who,” for Arendt, is “implicit in everything a person says and does” (Arendt, 1998, 179). “It is more likely the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and mistakenly to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life,” Arendt goes on to state, “always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters” (Arendt, 1998, 179–180). Arendt’s emphasis on “visible only to those he encounters” tallies, to a certain degree, with the creative relationship theorized as lying at the base of the criteria for new nonfiction film. Bresson, as if responding to the theorization of said criteria, notes, “The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them” (Bresson, 1996, 4). Assuming that the relationship between filmmaker and modèle is designed to explore the “who” Arendt qua Bresson speaks of, we can then say Rivers spends time with Jake, befriends and comes to understand “who” he is. He lives with and has long discussions with him, while observing the kind of activities Jake undertakes everyday. The filming process can then offer a portrait of Jake as a self in his home while the focus on the self as modèle helps explore the ontology of the who around the film form. Jake is encouraged to collaborate creatively with Rivers, so as to bring out “what remains hidden from the person himself,” to reiterate Arendt’s reading of this ontology. The “who” is made up of features the subject is, Arendt claims, unaware of, features otherwise perceived by others, without these features ever having been established as ontological qualities. The “who” emerges from the collaboration between Rivers and his subject, in and around the casting of the self as modèle. Unlike Bresson’s fictional modèle, Rivers’s fidelity is to the modèle as a real person. The casting of Jake as “Jake” can be approached then as an effort to draw out the qualities in him he isn’t aware of, qua Arendt and Bresson, while founded on a fundamental paradox: the truth of the self comes through in a more authentic capacity with the interjection of speculation. Jake, as “Jake” is absorbed, made to feel unaware of the camera’s presence, when acting out scenes that are scripted with him, scenes that are considered ontologically consistent with his view and Rivers’s view of him. Arendt explains the “who” and “what” position more thoroughly, so as to offer a means of aesthetically engaging the duality of both positions with regard to future chapters. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always falls into an already existing web

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FIGURE 2.3 Two Years at Sea: The isolation of the thinker or the alienation of modern man?

where their immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life-story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact with. It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it “produces” stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things. These stories can then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works. (Arendt, 1998, 184) The “who,” we conclude, accounts for the disclosure of Jake as a self in the course of Two Years, which comes about in the filming with Rivers, and which “ ‘produces’ stories with or without intention” (Arendt, 1998; 84) via this same process. Two Years at Sea cultivates the “who” (considered here as the self) and incites spectatorial projection around the “what.” This chapter has explored the “what” with regard to Jake as “last man” or “philosopher king,” while seeking to illustrate the care Rivers gives to cultivating the singularity of the “who.” Jake, as “who,” is cultivated when absorbed in the creative process with Rivers, a creative process of filming and making that differs from the process he entered into with Rivers for the earlier film discussed at the outset:  This Is My Land. Rivers has even stated that this earlier film took an observational approach to the subject, an approach that is based primarily in looking, focusing the camera on Jake. Two Years at Sea, I now conclude, is as much a product of the changing dynamic between Jake and Rivers, friendship and art making, as it is Rivers’s collaborative approach to making a film with Jake. In conclusion, we can now say that in absorbing Jake in making the film along with him, the speculative “who” is aligned

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to the “what.” The emphasis on being two things at once, as I  hope to have illustrated in this chapter, can now be explored more generally from the perspective of time, in and around the role of the archival image in montage form.

Notes 1 I am making specific reference here to a certain turn in contemporary art toward utopia as a concept suitable for critiquing the neoliberal present. This is also concurrent with a turn toward the use of documentary methods as a format based in knowledge claims. This relationship between knowledge claims and art, which I touch upon as an issue underpinning this book’s explicit inquiries in the conclusion, is taken to task through a form that has become synonymous with sober truth claims, thus giving the art itself certain legitimation as research. This, as I mention in the conclusion of the book, is no doubt a product of the times we live in. Two recent publications that deal directly with this issue are Paolo Magagnoli’s Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (2015) and T. J. Demos’s The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (2013). 2 Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013) is an interesting comparison to Two Years at Sea and for reasons that are anything but obvious. Both films are shot in Scotland, and both are filmed in a quasi-documentary style set in an ambiguously framed time period. Both could also be described as art-house films that challenge traditional science-fictional forms; conflating the semiotics of the actual with the possible.

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3 The utopian promise: John Akomfrah’s poetics of the archive

The archive, especially the moving image archive, comes to us with a set of Janus-faced possibilities. It says, “I existed at one point and it’s possible that I could exist differently.” But in order to find that you need something else, which is not in the archive, which is the philosophy of montage. Montage allows the possibility of reengagement, of the return to the image with renewed purpose, a different ambition. JOHN AKOMFRAH

You and me, what does that mean? Always, what does that mean? Forever, what does that mean? It means we’ll manage, I’ll master your language, And in the meantime, I’ll create my own, By my own. TRICKY, “Christiansands”

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The time of nonfiction A recurring point of discussion until now has been the relationship between space and time in the context of the image. More specifically, the emphasis has been the relationship between the staged and a pro-filmic reality. Dai Vaughan’s formalization of documentary as a category of film that requires a sign-reading predisposition in the spectator to be understood as such is formative in this regard. We must consider the film space as a semiotic “what space?” The motivating question is: Can we formulate an understanding of the film space as a “this” or a “that”? And its subject as a “who” or a “what”? To some degree, this chapter, in that it turns the critical lens upon another British contemporary artist working exclusively in moving image, John Akomfrah, extends this inquiry further, focusing on the issue of temporality explicitly. Akomfrah and Rivers are somewhat different in their approach to filmmaking. Both share an interest in the utopian, but for Rivers this is an exclusively utopian method that can be accredited to making films, building model environments. For Akomfrah, it is a utopianism that relates to the potentiality of the archival image in montage; inclusive but not exclusive to the cinematic image per se. To some extent this chapter is a little bit of a sideways turn, in that what I am really interested in, with regard to Akomfrah’s work, is a fictive understanding of the image in relation to the subject, but primarily the fictive as the energy of a promise to the future. By taking this sideways turn, I want to explore what I am calling—in this book—the new nonfiction film, in temporal terms, and do so with regard to a coming together of “non” and “fiction” around the somewhat slippery territory of the fictive. Susan McManus’s writings on the fictive is of importance here, in that she draws on the concept to explore the relationship between the utopian and the poetic as a trangressive activity around what I see as aligned to a certain type of art making. For the purpose of this present chapter, the fictive stands for a certain deconstructive energy that pertains to the image in its potential to reconfigure the actual. McManus doesn’t so much as make reference to the Deleuzian “virtual,” but the fictive is a concept concerned with the relationship between virtuality and actuality when cast as possibility, and this is an important point, in the broader reaches of utopianism per se. Making reference to Adorno and Bloch discussing utopianism, McManus focuses on the term “resist.” To resist, in this sense, is to resist a standardized viewpoint on actuality that is—at once—exclusive (McManus, 2003, 4). Utopianism is, in this sense, a bridge into that more than elusive concept of the inclusive. It is also, McManus notes with reference to Adorno, a way of thinking about artefacts such as images when considering the fictive to designate the creative reordering of actuality before it is reduced to an epistemology of the given. Adorno’s thoughts on the way capitalism shuts off

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such a fictive energy, elaborated with a certain renewed vigor later by Mark Fisher, offers an interesting way of thinking about artistic and filmmaking strategies that are marked as documentary platforms and colonized—to a certain degree—by those who want to make them account to actuality alone (Fisher, 2009). There is little need to trace a history of documentary that has seen it become so exclusively aligned to the rational and purposefully epistemological, but there is a need to get at the tension that has been allowed to gather around the distinction between “art” on the one hand, with its affective potentialities, and “documentary” on the other as a type of film that concerns only present “issues.” A  duality is often made to exist in an age when dualism, postdeconstruction, has—for many—had its day. In what follows then in this chapter, the duality critically taken to task, is that of art and archival report in the context of the archive as that which encourages us to think past and future at once. Time, in the sense that we think the time of nonfiction, is a kind of promise to the future that exists already, is immanent to the image. My concern, and this why I’m taking this detour, is that this takes the form of a specter that is best understood—certainly from the perspective of art— around the concept of nonfiction. Turning to the temporal is a turn to the inclusive in that I  ask how we think of a time-based medium, from the perspective of a time that is inclusive. How can we think of film that is about the “now” and also about the specter of the future, when the future is that potential that is part of, yet always interrupts the present? But before we begin this investigation, it is instructive to note Akomfrah’s nominal status as a “poet of the archives,” an artist whose filmmaking and art is notable for its use of archival footage. A central concern of the keynote speech given by Akomfrah at the annual documentary-based conference Visible Evidence in Toronto, August 2015, was the utopian promise of the image, with particular emphasis given to the archival image. Akomfrah spoke about the promise of the film archive and the utopian relationship between film, the archive, and the future. Not surprisingly, he supported his point with an illustration of archival footage. Surprising, however, was the explicit reference made to Claude Lanzmann’s widely recognized masterpiece Shoah (1985), a film that reenacts moments of immense trauma for victims of the Holocaust. Akomfrah emphasized the power of Shoah in its capacity to affect. Although Akomfrah also used other examples in his address that afternoon, this reference was, nonetheless, somewhat surprising for many audience members. It was surprising given that Akomfrah’s work has been celebrated for its habitual reworking of the archive in montage (that also draws on multiple film forms), a practice that is marked by the innovative combination of sound and voiceover. Akomfrah, for many, is a filmmaker who operates on the margins of the documentary spectrum and rarely, if ever, uses processes of reenactment in his films.

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As a member of the audience, I felt somewhat exhilarated during the talk. I was taken aback that Akomfrah used this film to illustrate his point. I had the feeling, without really knowing, that there is no actual archive of the Holocaust to draw on: that is, there is no actual documentary footage from the time that present day filmmakers can draw from at will. Akomfrah films, at the level of form, bear little resemblance to Shoah. And yet, when I came to reflect on Akomfrah’s proposition that evening, the affinities began to surface. With Lanzmann’s direction, it is the survivors who take the form of an archive, while the process of reenacting the trauma for the camera is akin to the formal engagement with the archival image that Akomfrah spoke of. For Lanzmann, the survivors are the archival material, and the film itself the archive. Turning this relationship a little to the side, we have an all too virtual archive, which the poet must make actual. Only when doing so is the “actual” transformed into the real accordingly. In another sense, only when the virtual properties of the archive are set in montage can the actual be transformed as a political entity. My response to Akomfrah’s statement, in the context of the many examples he drew upon, thus rested on the belief that the duty of the artist is to elicit the promise of the virtual and to make it actual, whether the promise contained in actual memory or the memory contained in images. Yet, even with the heavily theorized nature of the utopian (as a concept), Akomfrah’s remained a somewhat general observation, piquing my interest in the specific filmic context of the archive as standing for both future and past (at once). This chapter, therefore, offers a way of understanding this statement in the context of a type of film I am calling in this book the new nonfiction film. I  explore it as a theoretical claim first. Then, in what will constitute a second aim, I address the practical relationship between archive and promise from the perspective of two films, which Akomfrah directed (as part of collaborative ventures) and which bookend his filmmaking career:  Handsworth Songs (Akomfrah, 1986) and The Stuart Hall Project (2012). My interest in time here is that of a time that is inherently critical of its linear and teleological rendering, which seeks to encase the image in a specific this or that, shutting off its potential. Handsworth Songs takes the form of an experimental “report” on riots that took place in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, the city considered as the home of British Cultural Studies and one of Britain’s most culturally diverse urban centers. Directed by Akomfrah for the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), of which he is a founding member, the film develops an approach to montage designed to explore the impact of the riots, and the system of their unfolding. The Stuart Hall Project, which I  turn to in the final section, was made almost thirty years later. It draws almost entirely on archival BBC material to make an experimental report (that is not unlike Handsworth Songs), the subject of which is British intellectual Stuart Hall,

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the founder of British Cultural Studies, and one of the first black British television presenters. In the analysis that follows, the “archive”—taken in its vernacular context—is understood as a historical resource with the purpose of safeguarding time as “past,” and serving as an official record of the past filmically. “The archive,” Michael Zryd notes, is an official institution that separates historical record from the outtake; much of the material used in experimental found footage films is not archived but from private collections, commercial stock shot agencies, junk stores, and garbage bins, or has literally been found in the street. (Zryd, 2003, 41) The archive, in light of Zryd’s analysis, is a record; a kind of prosthetic memory for the masses. In this sense, a nation’s archive is a collection of records that is particular to the historicity of a nation state. Recent philosophical writings on the archive have focused on the concept as particular in its genealogical formation, and therefore helpful for engaging with the psychology of memory and memory processes. “The concept of the archive,” Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever (1996) (a text given over to considering the power invested in archival forms of material memory), “shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it” (Derrida, 1996, 2). Derrida is teasing out the genealogy of the word arkhe (and archaeon) from the original Greek translation as origin and law, so as to consider law as the power that bestows official status on the archive. It would be a leap of sorts to invest the archive with definitive utopian credentials from this, but, and this is perhaps crucial in this regard, Derrida does say that the archive has “a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow” (Derrida, 1996, 36). However, with reference to Derrida and the influence of his writings on the BAFC, Jean Fisher suggests, It is hegemonic culture—government and media—that assembles the historical archive, withholds or releases its content and authorises its interpretative discourses. These are subject to ideological manipulation: as BAFC suggest in Mysteries of July (1991), people’s lives are subject to an “ongoing political reconstruction,” which obliterates transmissible experience. For the diasporic artist to disarticulate this archive is, then, a subversive act insofar as it usurps the power of authority to control meaning. (Fisher, 2007, 25) Fisher explores the subversive “disarticulation” of meaning in practices such as those undertaken by Black Audio. Her essay takes the Derridean view of the archive, one of forgetting (as much as remembering), as formative

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of the approach taken by the collective. The utopian, which indirectly figures in this account, and indeed in Derrida’s approach to the archive, is directed toward the idea of a reconstruction, an idea extrapolated on further in the context of Ernst Bloch’s writings on time and utopia. Bloch’s writing, as is well noted, is infused with utopian hope. But although it is rarely discussed in the context of time-based media, his writing is helpful for thinking through the utopian potentiality of a time-based process such as montage. Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1986) is thus a useful resource for theoretically expanding upon Akomfrah’s statement, particularly ripe from the significant perspective of time.1 “The divisions between future and past thus themselves collapse,” Bloch argues in the text, “unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediated and fulfilled past in the future” (Bloch, 1986, 8–9). Bloch feels it is important that whatever form time takes, it has the immanent potential to “unbecome.” Rejecting the common sense view of time as a continuum of stages (each of which inheres in the other), the “not yet” is set out as the utopian potentiality immanent to the form time takes. An image, or a series of images, is one possible form he alludes to. In response, we can conclude that an image of the past “unbecomes” when it is combined with other images (and new sound) in time creatively. There is a kind of tension, a rift, which emerges in the form, between what is and what can be, a breach in the image itself (this is basically what we’ve just discussed in Chapter 2). Bloch, we should note with regard to the rift, is slow to specify art forms in his writings on time, but for Susan McManus, his “understanding of time as possibility reconfigures the world itself” around creative means generally. She goes on to suggest, [And] it is not enough to change how we think about the world: we must also change everything about the way we think . . . Knowledge of the world can no longer be fallaciously conceived via various epistemologies of the “given,” and becomes, instead, a creative epistemology of the possible. (McManus, 2003, 2) For McManus, Bloch’s is an approach to time that hinges on understanding the given and the possible, particularly in relation to the formulation of an epistemology. This relationship is particularly relevant to BAFC’s attempt to address the given means of representation, in addition to the possible forms representation can take. Taking images in their capacity to unbecome, the collective is really exploring the relationship between the image and its “reconstruction” in montage as it pertains to time. The utopian is the “not yet” coming out of an imaginative engagement with an already existing epistemology. And when invested in creatively, the archive comes not to stand for a particular time “past,” but a rupture

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that is immanent to the utopian. “The utopian spaces of rupture,” McManus notes, within the present and the given–alterity and critique–generate prefiguration and fuel transformation of the given—without, however, closing the spaces of alterity and critique. These four elements, then, can be seen as two utopian moments:  the disruptive and the institutional. Both are epistemologically and politically necessary, and dialectically related. The second moment, of institutionalisation must itself always be subject to the disruptive and imaginative moment. (McManus, 2003, 3) The utopian, in this sense, is a disruptive category. Its creative (and indeed) and fictive effectiveness is premised on a surplus immanent to time itself. The dialectic tension between an “institution” and its “disruption,” as identified by McManus, resonates with a view of the archive as an epistemology of the given—sometimes institutional in form—withholding potential to disrupt from within, by way of a promise. McManus cites Louis Marin’s reading of utopian practice to support her point, Utopian practice establishes itself in the distance between reality and its other: it traverses this discontinuity which is that of transgression itself, by producing the term which neither reduces nor annuls the discontinuity as do a social ideal or a political project, but which dissimulates and reveals the discontinuity: the utopian figure. (Marin in McManus, 2003, 6) McManus is interested in the utopian moment as a kind of rift. Bringing a surplus to heel as a project or an idea involves celebrating the utopian as “this” or “that,” while paradoxically aligning the transgressive with the law. However, the utopian promise activates a surplus that cannot be contained. One aim of this chapter, in the context of the new nonfiction film, is to consider the archive’s potential for such disruption, based on the creative possibilities its rendering as a record of past time seems to preclude. Taken solely as a record, we can forget the archive’s promise. But given that Bloch, however, pushes against normative views to posit utopian practice as temporally aligned to future and past, we are in a position to say that the future is not precluded from past forms such as archived film but, rather, inheres in it as future potential. “The guiding potential of the future is always present in Bloch’s work,” McManus says of Bloch’s writing on time, “understood as that potential which confronts, opens up, and disrupts the acceptance of given realities as the only realities” (McManus, 2003, 7). It is precisely this disruption that was focused on in relation to the self as modèle in the last chapter, that is now taken to task as temporality itself. In that chapter, the “as” is the formative concern. But here, similarly, the future is the fictive element immanent to the image. Nonfiction, in this sense, is being

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both of the now and the future, when the future is considered the fictive potential of images brought to life in montage.

A poet (in and) of the archive Handsworth Songs is an interesting reference point in this regard, particularly as it brings footage from so many different “time” periods together. Archived images of first generation migrants arriving on the British shores are counterpointed with those of the next generation rioting on the streets of Birmingham, montage embellished by audio that gives the viewing an affective resonance. The montage impresses the viewer in its uncanny relevance to the present moment, in which race riots of a similar nature have broken out across the United Kingdom and Europe. As if the film was made in the last decade, Mark Fisher celebrates this millenarian-like echo of a future (Fisher, 2014, 223). This peculiar relevance to the present is testament to the film’s power to affect; a consequence of the way it engages the archive material. The Last Angel of History (Akomfrah, 1996), by contrast, is an essay film, which is concerned with future time and the present in a more literal sense. It draws on the angel of history, which Walter Benjamin writes of in the early twentieth century, as a trope for exploring black artists’ concerns with a time yet to come, and works with ideas of the future more specifically.2 By the time of The Stuart Hall Project, Akomfrah had become a wellestablished filmmaker, celebrated for drawing on the archive as part of a broader rethinking of British identity. He finds a like-minded soul in Hall, as is explored in the final section of this chapter. The Stuart Hall Project is a “project” that channels the poetic affect not just in its combination of BBC material with a jazz score, but also the setting of different historical periods in audiovisual montages of time: a kind of remix. The “poetic” tallies with Bill Nichols’s instantiation of the poetic documentary as one of six modes of documentary in Introduction to Documentary ([1991] 2010), which for many is the go-to-text within documentary film studies. Nichols finds the origins of the “poetic mode” in European avant-gardist cinema, and particularly filmmakers such as Joris Ivens and Dizga Vertov. He puts forward the proposition that these filmmakers, who pioneered the use of affective-impressionistic tropes, did so for artistic and sensory ends. The poetic is a mode of documentary then that involves the creative treatment of historical footage when—as Nichols states—manipulated rhythmically and tonally. For Nichols, the imparting of information in conventional documentary production, that is, the parsing of rhetorical means of persuasion with journalistic investigation (or exposition), is of lesser importance than the tonal and rhythmic manipulation of images for sensory and aesthetic ends; when tone and rhythm take precedence over

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“factual knowledge or acts of rhetorical persuasion” (Nichols, 2010, 162). Archival images, as outlined earlier, fit Nichols’s idea of historical documents to be reshaped for poetic and artistic ends (in montage). The archive is, foremost, a record of conventional documentary-based reportage about the “given,” such as the news that, as Akomfrah demonstrates in The Stuart Hall Project, has the capacity to be used for ends that are more specifically understood as “poetic.” These distinctions are important, not least because the Akomfrah films discussed here are archival-based, but also because the rhythm and tone of montage are features present in texts produced from the beginning of the BAFC’s output, as well as seen in more recent works produced by Smoking Dogs Films (the production collective Akomfrah formed with other members of BAFC). Handsworth Songs makes reference to audio or sound culture in its title, and the film itself can be said to inculcate the rhythms and tones of migrant music, reggae, ska, or the beat-based ethnic rhythms particular to the community of Handsworth addressed in the film, translating the “songs” of these communities into “poetic” visual form. Handsworth Songs invests the audio with a cadence of tone and rhythm and, among many other things, tries to undo the hegemony of visual over audio form. The culture of “borrowed beats,” sampling and appropriated sounds, associated with the contemporary youth cultures of London and New York, mirrors the turn to appropriation and recontextualization in other artistic forms. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this undoubtedly played a part in the aesthetic decision to sample archival footage taken from news outlets and television stations (from the BBC to Yorkshire Television and Birmingham Central Library). We can see this “poetic” remix approach come to fruition in the sequence dedicated to the funeral of Cynthia Jarrett (who died suddenly and tragically when the police entered her London home during the riots. Jarrett was an innocent victim of the riots). The sequence cuts from an archival image of a black factory worker, speaking about the city of Birmingham, to the much-televised funeral hearse traveling through the city. An ambient score designed to play over the imagery of the funeral proceedings morphs into a rhythm, married to a traditional “Funeral Song” and minimalist industrialtechno sounds. Splicing “noise” and melody (with the older archival image intercut with archived images of the recent past) together is part of the film’s concern with reconfiguring dominant media images of time in remix form. The image of Jarrett’s funeral is reclaimed from media outlets that offer only one context, just as the rhythm and cadence of “sound” offer multiple contexts and intensities. With the advent of contemporary visual and sonic art practices, remix studies has become an important part of the academic debate today (even if it yet has to impact on documentary studies). In the Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2015), Martin Irvine refers to the legacy of Miles Davis

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as a precedent for much of the improvisatory methods that are found in the remix culture that has emerged from the eighties onward. Irvine’s analysis of improvised jazz offers a model for engaging with the rhythm and cadence of audiovisual montage in Handsworth Songs. “In each bar of the recorded performances,” Irvine writes, “we can hear the results of the generative recursive processes used to combine rhythms, tones, phrases, harmonization, and styles from a common vocabulary selected for contextually specific functions” (Irvine, 2015, 15). Irvine goes on to compare the set composition in the context of the tonal and rhythmic arrangements of jazz, and the improvised, stating that in improvisation, the Janus-like generative combinatorial structure provides the spaces for quotations from the future, the about-to-be, but not-yet-said, in dialog with the live conversation of performance and the larger traditions internalized by musicians. The symbolic form, activated in real-time, enables structured anticipations: projected future expressions as possibilities in the form are already in memory in the present moment. (Irvine, 2015, 28) Irvine identifies, in the tonal and rhythmic properties of improvised jazz, a temporality that is, we could say, Blochian, and a theoretical template that is useful for considering the relationship between tradition and its “future expressions” in film form. Just as we are able to differentiate between recorded, non-improvised Jazz and an improvised form, it is also possible for a film to use the archive in such a way that it is distinguishable from a poetic intervention when the latter is defined by a distillation of improvised assemblages of sound and image. There is a need to understand, Irvine notes, the “common vocabulary” that makes up the form itself in order for the future anticipations of poetic “time,” the time I am calling here the time of nonfiction, to emerge through improvised assemblages. This is also a way of saying that the common vocabulary of audiovisual montage needs to be understood first, before new structures can emerge. A new grammar in tonal, rhythmic and spatial arrangements can only emerge, Irvine notes, when the form as it is generally rendered, as it is understood traditionally, is internalized by the artist first. Numerous examples of this internalization and resistance are played out in Handsworth Songs. One such sequence, captivating in this sense, remixes television material and interviews with images taken from other art forms. The camera cuts from an archival interview with Thatcher talking about the essential “character” of Britishness, the fear that new minority cultures threaten this character, to a slowed down image of a black Rasta being chased by the riot police. As an ambient soundscape plays over, the camera cuts again to representatives of the Asian community speaking about class as a key ingredient for the unfolding tension. We then see a large-scale mural

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painting that appears to narrate the riots in painterly form, as the ambient soundscape can be heard once more and the camera cuts again to street marches. On first impression, the sequence is notable for its lack of a voiceover and the way in which its soundscape and montage are designed to affect viewers. But it is also notable for the way these archived images are combined so as to converse with older systems of representation. The montage encourages us to see the overt racism of Thatcher’s speech, given in a television interview, as linked to the stereotypes found in the mural. The montage is as much about conversing with a past defined by stereotyped images of race as it is about developing a type of filmmaking that forges the platform for “future expressions” of time to emerge, a type of filmmaking I’m exploring around the theoretical framework of the new nonfiction film in this book. Salman Rushdie, somewhat famously, criticized Handsworth Songs for actually perpetuating stereotypes. He believes that the film failed to tell the riot stories, and questions the refrain “there are no stories in the riots” used throughout. Rushdie notes, “The sad thing is that while the film-makers are trying to excavate ruptures and work out how trajectories can colour fields, they let us hear so little of the much richer language of their subjects” (Rushdie, 1987). He goes on to say, it isn’t easy for black voices to be heard, it isn’t easy to get it said that the state attacks us, that the police are militarised. It isn’t easy to fight back against media stereotypes. As a result, whenever somebody says what we all know, even if they say it clumsily and in jargon, there’s a strong desire to cheer, just because they managed to get something said, they managed to get through. (Rushdie, 1987) For Rushdie, the film’s formalism (which, I argue, is designed to etch out a grammar for a new black British identity, whose secondary aim is to address the hegemony of certain media forms) clouds out the narrative voices, and hence the rich language of those who witnessed the riots. In this sense, Rushdie’s criticism cuts right into the discourse surrounding documentary forms, particularly when experimentation is given precedence over a common vocabulary that everyone supposedly understands. This discursive debate tends to pit those for whom a framework for the documentary mediation of stories serves as a “common vocabulary”—call it “reportage”—against those for whom it is necessary to build a grammar of the future that could allow for new political reference points. Even if it involves blocking out diegetic sound in favor of an abstract ambient soundtrack, this latter approach may well have irritated a curious Rushdie, who expressed his concern for the lack of context given to the subjects of the Handsworth district. His criticism, however, is of a media product that he

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believes does little to alter the stereotypes assigned to the community, which the film addresses. Rushdie’s criticism contrasts with those whom Akomfrah would turn to as a subject of the two films discussed in the conclusion to this chapter, such as Stuart Hall, who would celebrate Handsworth Songs as a coming-intobeing of a grammar for which the standards of reportage do not and cannot apply. It is not just about telling stories with a “common vocabulary,” but about experimenting so that a grammar emerges from the already existing language. Evolving a grammar for the representation of “new” British subjectivities, as opposed to one essential British “character,” means rupturing the prescient and perhaps dominant lexicon in sound and image in a poetic capacity. Rushdie believes the BAFC to have failed in reporting the stories of Handsworth. Hall nonetheless argues, I fully agree that there is no one “black experience,” and we need to confront its real diversity without forcing it into simplistic moulds. But subjects and experience don’t appear out of thin air. The counterpoising of “experience” to “politics” is a false and dangerous dichotomy. Black Audio may have been guilty of mixing its metaphors when it spoke of “a political field coloured by trajectories of industrial decline and structural crisis.” But it seems to be struggling harder for a language in which to represent Handsworth as I know it than Salman’s lofty, disdainful, and too-complacent “Oh dear.” (Hall, 1987) The deficit between experience and political forms, and the experimental use of art and audio to augment this deficit structurally in an at-once-new grammar is, arguably, where Handsworth Songs is innovative. This is why Hall can say that experience doesn’t always counterpoise with politics, and the image doesn’t always stand in for something indexical to it. Nonetheless, it is not simply a matter of taking sides in the debate between Rushdie and Hall. Rushdie’s response provides some indication of what makes a film a documentary in his eyes. For Rushdie, the collective’s film obscures the voices of the film’s subjects, which he adjudges to be one of its flaws. The filming of the subject, in this regard, is a problem for Rushdie. But it is only a problem if we assume Akomfrah is directing a documentary film. It is precisely this point I’m concerned with regarding the nominal status of these films as nonfiction. The decision to travel to Birmingham to film the riots (and their aftermath) as they unfolded, while undertaking this same project, was political as well as poetic in intent:  “Who was to blame?” So, the project that came to materialize as Handsworth Songs began as a report on the riots, but grew into a multifaceted poetic film, deviating from, and drawing on, already established modes of documentary film. Although in its use of sound and montage it experiments with formal strategies, there is a clear engagement with the tradition of British documentary in the way voice-over is used for

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FIGURE 3.1 The Stuart Hall Project: Archival footage of Stuart Hall is integrated and remixed in a film both poetical and political at once. © Smoking Dogs Films; Courtesy Lisson Gallery

the integration of interviews, so as to illustrate the manner in which tradition is internalized while at the same time resisted. It is this engagement with a tradition of documentary film to nonetheless subvert the archival image as an image of the past that makes the film so interesting from the perspective of time. The subject of the film is also a modéle of the future, the archive as much an image of the future as the present.

Back to a future Christopher Pavsek’s The Utopia of Film:  Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge and Tamihik (2013) is one of a selected number of texts that explores cinema as utopian, while giving a certain emphasis to nonfiction or documentary. Pavsek calls cinema a “talisman of a different time from the past and a cipher of a different future . . . a bearer of unfulfilled promises and possibilities that arose in history and [it] calls for their future realization.” Cinema, he argues, is both “retrospective mythical construct” and an “actually existing form or medium,” which “embodies a utopian wish” (Pavsek, 2013, 3). Akomfrah finds a promise where Pavsek finds a wish but, like Pavsek, his concern is cinema as a myth-making medium; a medium that can alter the conditions of the given. Far from gaining such a status due to formal experimentation alone, Handsworth Songs, along with many of the films Akomfrah has directed since, has been celebrated for its innovation in content as much as form. On the utopianism involved in practices that

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embue this formal experimentation (considered as collective attempts to counteract dominant cinema), Akomfrah states, All three debates I  have described were unashamedly utopian. Each in its own unique way would try to overcome what it perceived as the limits/limitations of what we used to call “dominant cinema” either by privileging and foregrounding new forms through which “cinema” could be realized, or by attempting to reformulate new rules by which our belonging to it could be secured. To the extent that all three were structured by these utopian yearnings, I  would now prefer to also see them as “digitopic” residues, “post-analogic.” (Akomfrah, 2010, 24) Akomfrah recognizes the utopian strands in his practice (oppositional to modes of mainstream cinema) and the aim to reformulate the rules of the given so as to open up new forms of representation. In this way, the cinema is a vehicle for “utopian yearnings,” premised on activating an epistemology of the possible, a future—qua Bloch—that is already a residue of the past. Indeed, The Stuart Hall Project can be considered in this way: employing a Blochian approach to the image, a process of “unbecoming” that remixes the content of the archive to engage time in a strictly Blochian sense. Akomfrah completed two projects on Stuart Hall, founder of British Cultural Studies and esteemed public intellectual, before Hall’s death in 2014. Hall and Akomfrah both came to the United Kingdom at a relatively young age and both are intellectuals with a focused interest on the migrant condition. Akomfrah talks about growing up watching current affairs programs on the BBC, struck by Hall as one of the few black figures on television at the time. Hall is also one of the first black British intellectuals to have had a pervasive media presence, and is significant in his status as both a public intellectual of regard and well-established theorist of influence, whose influence has filtered into all areas of the humanities. “The flowering of British cultural studies [was] bolstered by the analytical rigour of Stuart Hall,” as Okwui Enwezor notes, the rediscovery of the works of the likes of C. L. R James, the emergence of thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer, the launch of Third Text by Rasheed Araeen, and the emergence of Southall Black Sisters among a host of other groups gives an indication of the artistic and intellectual climate under which Black Audio Film Collective were founded and within which it operated. (Enwezor, 2007, 118) Enwezor believes the aforementioned figures to come out of “transnational post-colonialism,” the condition that British subjects who had migrated from the former British colonies, like Hall and Akomfrah, found themselves in. Hall, who hailed from Jamaica, is integral to the formalization and impact of postcolonial theory and is, as stated in interviews, an ever-present

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influence on the young migrant Akomfrah (for whose cinematic project the issue of identity would become central). It can thus be said, pace Pavsek, that Akomfrah’s turn to Stuart Hall has something mythical about it, continuing a concern with the archive and the temporality of cinema as a medium. Just as Rivers and Russell draw on real subjects to make art that is ontologically consistent with how they view those subjects, I would suggest that Akomfrah turns to Hall as a modéle for all refugees and immigrants, not just in his ideas but also in his subjectivity, so as to draw out the fictive he regards as utopian in the archive. Here, however, the time of nonfiction is Blochian in that it is established as the fictive energy that disrupts the actual as actual, and draws out the future as the time to come. The Stuart Hall Project is a feature-length film that was produced in collaboration with the BBC, and was preceded by a three-screen, three-track, multimedia installation that draws on the same archival footage, designed for a gallery setting called The Unfinished Conversation (Akomfrah, 2012) (the latter taking its title from Hall’s theorization of identity formation in the latter stages of the feature film). The Unfinished Conversation is influenced by Hall’s take on “identity” as a conversation in a constant state of flux or becoming, and focuses on his life up until the year 1968. The Stuart Hall Project, by contrast, is a relatively unorthodox feature-length film, perhaps an art project given its title as a “project” (and Akomfrah’s theoretical pronouncements on archival intervention), which ends in the present of 2012. Although the film has been the recipient of numerous awards, Akomfrah, as Rajinder Dudrah notes, “uses a paradoxical and reflexive practice in order to place Hall in a central position, while also being mindful about the ways that Hall’s own thinking encourages us to adopt a critical position in relation to claims of sociocultural centrality” (Dudrah, 2015, 384). The soundtrack is made up of Miles Davis’s music, and the film ebbs and flows with a rhythm, giving an improvisational feel to the journey through Hall’s life. Miles Davis’s extensive back catalogue brings filmmaker and film subject into a kind of shared realm of appreciation as jazz fans.3 Like Handsworth Songs, The Stuart Hall Project can be said to channel an energy Fred Moten finds in improvisation “that exceeds the structure of their oscillation between happiness and despair, resurrection and mourning” (Moten, 2003, 198). Moten’s idea of excess is relevant in that The Stuart Hall Project is also about home and homelessness, exploring both in the context of past and future. However, The Stuart Hall Project is also a remix of archived media—“with each moment,” as Mark Fisher notes, “each crystal of televisual space-time, functioning like a sample” (Fisher, 2013, 3). The film differs from Handsworth Songs in that the near total footage is sourced from one archive. In this sense, it is a rarefication of Akomfrah’s aesthetic, remixing archival footage together (whether in the form of first person interviews or spatially montaged still photographs) into sequences, which are held together by prominent ideas as opposed to time periods. Akomfrah therefore employs an unorthodox approach to time, revealing

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the Blochian temporality of the image through the cadence of audiovisual montage. Hall’s life is presented under the rubric of the Idea, with each Idea taking the form of episodes spanning Hall’s encounters with the postcolonial to his involvement with the New Left. The film also addresses his discovery of feminism, difficulties with Thatcherism and the universalization of neoliberalism as a global force. Each Idea is introduced by an intertitle, accompanied by a Miles Davis composition. The film ends, however, with the focus on an ageing Hall, in such a way as to bring the logic of “time” that Akomfrah plays with throughout the film into full effect. As a result, the film can be said to engage Hall as a project as opposed to a subject, so that Hall appears, via the resource we call the archive, as a cipher, part of a project that, arguably at least, draws on the self as modèle criterion developed as a method particular to the new nonfiction film. It is not surprising that Akomfrah ends with footage of Hall’s appearance on a Newsnight debate. He is debating on the Kosovan refugee crisis following a NATO bombing of the region. Facing the accusation that Europe will be flooded with refugees fleeing the crisis, Hall states that “they may not have a genuine case,” before noting, “but I don’t know how on earth you could describe the people by simply looking at them . . . by looking in the faces, as bogus.” Before a reply is given, a split screen close-up follows, as Hall in voiceover references his estrangement from the present. And yet, this estrangement from the present now materializes as a secondary effect of the form, as images themselves unbecome, and we are dragged back and forth in time so that time itself is what manifests as that glimmer of a promise at once utopian. It is worth noting that the diptych Akomfrah focuses on, and which manifests as a split screen shot on film, is the 1998 portrait by black American artist Dawoud Bey, titled simply Stuart Hall. Hall’s face appears twice on a frame divided in two, splitting the cinematic screen into two halves,4 in the process imploring us to dwell upon the intersection of film and photography in terms of a self and modèle. This is a particularly affecting moment, folding institutional power in the form of the BBC upon itself, so that Hall’s face, a migrant subject, asks the audience to consider the migrant condition per se as a consequence of another project, this time drawing on an artwork that already exists in memory of Hall. The combination of sound and image in Mathison’s haunting score is also effective in underscoring the double portrait that hangs like a painting, perhaps used to remind us that we are viewing an image while at the same time emphasizing a Blochian capacity in time to reconfigure. Again, the future seems to persist in the present in the form of the fictive potential to disrupt.

The time for promises On the left side of Bey’s diptych, Hall is looking down, unable to meet the gaze of the camera, while on the right he is looking outward with a glimmer

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of optimism. The split between intellect and will, pessimism and optimism (self and modéle), unifies in the shot that follows, as the camera zooms in on Hall’s eyes before shifting outward again to a series of photographs sourced, at least it appears so, from private moments in Hall’s life. In this latter sense, Hall appears to be speaking from beyond the grave. Although the debate is about Kosovo, it could very easily be addressing the contemporary political and humanitarian crisis in post-2011 Syria, such is the universality of the moment as it reaches into our present time. It is a moment when the “project” in the film’s title is affective in suggesting this isn’t just an autobiographical film about the “past,” but a study of the image’s relevance to the present as a shared gesture. When Hall speaks about living “out of time,” the moment is a kind of testimony to a conversation with time itself; illustrating the archive’s potential to “unbecome” according to what Bloch calls a utopian practice. At the precise moment, we remember Hall’s impassioned speech— we are tempted to forget it as a point of origin—drawing our attention to the relevance of what is being said about the current constellation of crises. Given the uncertainty Hall has for the present on which he comments, this is just one reason why the film ends not in pessimism, but with daring hope. Just as Handsworth Songs brings temporalities into unison to converse with a present that is also the film’s future, a sense of time rupturing is felt at this point of The Stuart Hall Project, brought about by Mathison’s score and the starry “cosmos,” which is used as the background to remix the BBC archive of Hall speaking:  making sound and image collide in a way that is ultimately new. The full poetic effect of the moment is felt in making a future trace evident in what is constituted as “past.” We are reminded of the image’s potential to “unbecome” at the precise point that we experience time, not as a set of stages linked together but as a series of possibilities.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, I set out to explore the time of nonfiction and the potential contained in images in the context of a talk one sunny afternoon in Toronto. We can now understand this time that Akomfrah spoke about that afternoon around the capacity of the image to “unbecome” when “unbecoming” is constitutive of a creative reimagining that is immanent to montage. This involves a time that is Blochian, in that it reawakens our sense of an origin at the precise point when the origin is reconstructed, recontexualized creatively. We come to realize that the image, as archive, is not just of a shared past, but also a shared future. If there is a promise, it is a promise that alludes to the disruptive energy of the fictive. By way of conclusion then, the detour undertaken in this chapter can be considered necessary in that the aim has been to foreground the time of new nonfiction film when this film is an art based on the multivalent properties of the image. We can say in the final analysis

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that in the films discussed in this chapter, the fictional is held in suspense as the future itself but it is a canceling out that is done in favor of the present when the fictional is already recognized as present. We can now turn to another filmmaker concerned with canceling out fiction in the name of the real or whatever it is we consider the real to be when recast as a specific property of art.

Notes 1 Although I don’t discuss the film in any great length in this article, The Last Angel of History is possibly most suited for readings like this, at least on a surface level, especially from the perspective of a “digitopia,” or the inherently utopian possibility around the digital traces of past revolutionary forms. Akomfrah says of a generation of British artists born in and around 1968, “There is a sense in which the founding regime, the narrative regime that overdetermined every-thing we did, came to us as a set of digital simulacra; as traces of moments forever fixed as virtual references, but always deferred and always already there as a signal, a noise, a kind of utopian possibility. And if you look at most of the films we did, either Black Audio or Smoking Dogs, you get the sense that they are marked by this sense of the utopian as a digital referent” (Akomfrah, 2010, 27). 2 Laura U. Marks’s essay “Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in The Last Angel of History” is a good reference point in this regard. Addressing the role of “remix” in audiovisual montage in relation to futurity as such, Marks notes that “from a majoritarian point of view, the idea of remixing history sounds capricious and irresponsible; but not so for Afrofuturists. The remix manner of unfolding takes a point of view from the underside of majoritarian history and perceives the power of the remix to release energy to hitherto unimagined connections” (Marks, 2015, 129). 3 Fred Moten has made the implicit association between improvisation, freedom, and homelessness within the black radical tradition in his writing on jazz. When interviewed in the aftermath of the Ferguson riots in 2014, he made the point that improvisation is linked to the responsibility incumbent upon us, with homelessness a certain type of freedom. It is interesting to consider Moten’s ideas in the context of the archive as an origin, and the remix as a way of defining one’s essential homelessness with regard to this origin (Moten, 2015). 4 Emmanuelle Levinas’s writings on the face as the origin of the ethical are pertinent here. “The face, still a thing among things,” Levinas notes, “breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge” (Levinas, 1991, 198).

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4 “In my mind, my dreams are real”: Abbas Kiarostami and the roots of new nonfiction film

Art sees things in close-up, focusing our attention, teaching us to not cast blame so freely. Art doesn’t make judgments, it informs and teaches. The camera allows truth to circulate in places it wouldn’t normally go. ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1989), the most well-known and most perplexing of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s films, the main focus of this chapter, is just one of many of his films to sit in a curious relationship with documentary film.1 Throughout his career, his output has often been referred to as a type of film better filed under the rather salubrious category of “anomalous film.” Regarded by many as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Kiarostami is perhaps the most well-known figure to have emerged from the Iranian New Wave. He is also the Iranian filmmaker best known outside of Iran, even though he has been the subject of much criticism in Iran. Kiarostami, however, is hesitant when it comes to situating films such as Homework (Kiarostami, 1989) and Close-Up, undisputed masterpieces and two examples from his oeuvre that muddle the line between documentary and its other, within the elaborate and tendentious genre of documentary. He

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FIGURE 4.1 Taste of Cherry: Badii sources a place where he can die

has, in fact, resisted the category of documentary as a nominal classification for many of his films, even though he employs what are evidentially, and without doubt, documentary strategies in them. Having risen to prominence on winning the Palme D’or for Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997) in 1998 (although shortlisted for the prize on prior occasions), Kiarostami’s exposition of the often-tenuous line between fact and fiction in cinematic terms became, for many, a signature concern. Although he would often reject the categorization of “documentary” to a number of his films, his is a body of film work that has come sit in a curious relation to the documentary impulse or, at least, the impulse to record reality without disavowing (in the words of Elizabeth Cowie) desire to confront the Real (Cowie, 2011). There is no better indication of this at times schizophrenic documentary impulse than the ending of Taste of Cherry. Taste of Cherry is a relatively tight narrative film concerned with Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a middle-class Tehranian protagonist of whom little is known, looking to find somebody who will bury him when he kills himself. What appears straightforward is, however, far from the case: Badii’s reluctance to explain his reasons for taking his own life to others, and his failure to frame a preexisting narrative of his life, makes it difficult—if not impossible—to identify with him in any way. Badii’s “wish” to die takes the form of a terminal desire to go beyond the vestige of language, and brings to a light many concerns I want to consider in this relatively long chapter on Kiarostami’s films. This chapter is an exploration of a number of Kiarostami films in the context of the discussion of new nonfiction thus far, looking at these films as contributing to the emergence of such a form. It details, in its entirety, nonfiction as a category

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FIGURE 4.2 Taste of Cherry: Badii approaches Kiarostami in what is known as the postscript of the film, when signs of life contrast Badii’s perceived suicide

for understanding the thrust of Kiarostami’s poetics, beginning with a close reading of Close-Up, before offering a general overview of his oeuvre. Taste of Cherry is just one example of this oeuvre. The position of wanting to go beyond language, and experience the Real as that which interrupts and reorients our position in language, has a pronounced impact on the film’s concluding moments as Badii stares at the moon from the grave that he has dug for himself on the outskirts of the town. The screen then blackens, as the scenic register changes to a digital image of the same scene in daytime. A film crew is now present; Badii is “alive,” smoking, and walking around sidestepping the filming paraphernalia surrounding him. Well-known film critic and one of the first in the West to champion Kiarostami’s work, Jonathan Rosenbaum, focuses on the sudden turn to the digital image as follows: Though it invites us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, it does this is in a spirit of collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and darkness of Badii alone in his grave. By harking back to the soldiers who remind us of the happiest part of Badii’s life and a tree in full bloom that reminds us of the Turkish taxidermist’s own epiphany—though soldiers also signify the wars that made refugees of both the Kurdish and Afghan seminarian and a tree where the Turk almost hanged himself—Kiarostami is representing life in all its complexity. He reconfigures elements from the preceding eighty-odd minutes in video to clarify what in their ingredients is real and what’s concocted. (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, 2003, 30)

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The postscript begins with the sound and image of soldiers marching, evoking an earlier moment in the film when Badii spoke to the young Kurd of his happiness in the army. We then see the film crew, and Kiarostami himself come into view as the non-diegetic rendering of Louis Armstrong’s St. James Infirmary syncs with the video image. The marching soldiers are here, the most important signifier of “life,” even though, in most cases, an army represents the lurking presence of death. Kiarostami purposefully aligns the footage of marching soldiers with a cameraman wading through lush grass to awaken the belief that, as he has noted in interview, suicide can never be a revenge on life because, in its interminable forms, life will go on. If there is no certainty in knowing whether the “epilogue/postscript” is a video Kiarostami shoots of Badii waking up, having decided against killing himself, or a mediation on the signs pertaining to the “life” Badii is reminded of by his interlocutors (in the form of a documentary image) in the course of his journey, the shift to video, nonetheless, encourages a different type of engagement with the story: turning the focus away from a death hanging over a story to the multiple signs of life within it. It is then possible to see the epilogue/postscript as footage detailing the presence of the “army,” which commands attention because of the pertinent resonance it has for Iranian society (a country that has only recently arisen from the long-standing war with Iraq). In the form it takes, the army maintains a personal signification for Badii. It is the sign of a life Badii cherished as opposed to the one he wants to end. Before 1989, when Kiarostami films became reference points for scholars throughout the Western world, like his fellow countrymen, Kiarostami became fascinated by the story of Hossein Sabzian, an unemployed printer who passed himself off as Kiarostami’s contemporary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf over a period of days. Sabzian ingratiated himself with a family, the Ahankhahs, by claiming he would cast them as actors in his latest film. Having procured money from them to help with the production, he promised them stardom as a result of the film he would make with them. The truth of the imposture soon came to light, and Sabzian was arrested and tried. Before he went to court, Kiarostami set out to make a film about the events by visiting Sabzian in jail and intervening in the events as they unfolded. One of the persistent champions of the film that would materialize, Godfrey Cheshire, makes the point, Setting aside preparations for another film, the director enlisted the participation of several of the principals, including the Ahankhahs and the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He also approached Sabzian and the court’s cleric judge, and gained permission to film the trial, during which, as it turned out, Kiarostami and his cameras were not neutral observers but active participants. In addition to filming Sabzian’s subsequent release from prison—after the complaint was dropped—and his emotional

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FIGURE 4.3 Close-Up: The now infamous canister scene in Close-Up, when the canister operates as a metaphor for a story that assumes a will of its own

meeting with the man he had impersonated, Kiarostami shot earlier parts of the story by persuading Sabzian, the Ahankhahs, Farazmand, and others to play themselves in reenactments of events that had already transpired. (Cheshire, 1999) The film that resulted from Kiarostami’s interest is, however, a collaboration— between the director and Sabzian, but also with the Ahankhah family. The filmmaker and Sabzian—as subject /self—work in tandem to tell (perhaps even touch up) the story—before, during, and after the event of the trial— with the intention of making a film about suffering, the desire to be somebody else, and the morality of art. In fact, Kiarostami is quoted as saying that, unlike his other films, which were often planned meticulously in advance, Close-Up is a film that practically made itself; such was the speed of events that were set in motion when Kiarostami famously read about this unorthodox crime in Shorush magazine and then, even though the trial had yet to take place, decided he would make a film about its occurrence. Hence, as Cheshire notes, the news broke as the alleged criminal had been apprehended, was sitting in jail, and was about to stand trial, meaning he

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could, if acted upon quickly enough, make a film in and around the events as they actually transpired. As Cheshire notes, Close-Up is thus neither a documentary nor a drama but a provocative, unconventional merging of the two, a meditation on perplexities of justice, social inequity, and personal identity that also subtly interrogates the processes and purposes of cinema. The film met with a mixed, generally unappreciative reaction when it was first shown in Iran in 1990. (Cheshire, 1999) As well as attacking the verité tradition, as some have suggested, and in the process obfuscating the distinction between fact and fiction, Close-Up is a film I want to argue in what follows that, like Taste of Cherry, intensifies certain codes of representation used mainly in documentary for artistic gain. The film can be found to fulfill the criteria put in place in Chapter  1 in relation to Rivers’s and Russell’s way of working with subjectivity in an artistic context and can therefore be considered a particular manifestation of new nonfiction avant la lettre. In addition, Close-Up is said to combine recorded “footage” with coscripted and reenacted events to engage with the poetics of film around the crime as Kiarostami saw it. It is, in this sense, a film that is also a work of art, conscious of its own engagement with the poetics of documentary theory. The emphasis is on art and truth, even if truth comes out of a speculative form of collaboration between Sabzian and Kiarostami, read in relation to the criteria of new nonfiction film, or the cinema of nonfiction proposed earlier. Critics, and there are many, have attempted to find out about the exact nature of Kiarostami’s collaboration with Sabzian in relation to the trial scene in the film. A well-established mythology has since gathered around the production process for the film—that is, the making of Close-Up—with both Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf differing in their accounts of a meeting that took place between them, thought to be the genesis moment for the ensuing film. As a result, the precise nature of the collaboration that took shape from an emerging friendship between Sabzian and Kiarostami has been difficult to assuage. Scholars of Kiarostami films, such as Alberto Elena and Cheshire, have tried in their own way to unravel the “constructed” nature of certain scenes from those with a less immediate reality effect, only to find a legacy maintained, at least from the perspective of Kiarostami and Sabzian, as a myth of creation. Nonetheless, there is a view persisting even to this day that Kiarostami reworks Sabzian’s story so as to dramatically enhance his “true” self for artistic gain. Even with so many myths circulating around the film, it is worth remembering Kiarostami has never called Close-Up a documentary, nor has he claimed it is about a different Sabzian to the Sabzian he encountered in jail. And yet, there is still a problem when categorizing Close-Up as

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“docudrama,” stressing the film to be a project dramatizing real events as they happen. Why? Because filming the trial in the way he does, any such distinction between “recorded” and “constructed” footage is obfuscated. There is no proviso given out at the beginning or the end of the film to inform us that what we are about to watch is “based on true events,” or the facts as they are reported have been altered for dramatic purpose. Hence, it is problematic to categorize Close-Up as such. As Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer maintain, The docudrama represents an attempt to present factual material through the organizing aesthetics of fiction and narrative, and inevitably it utilizes certain forms of narrative patterning and visual composition that facilitate audience identification with the “characters”—even when these characters are well-known historical figures. Docudramas thus move away from the presumed objectivity of documentary and closer towards the techniques of narrative fiction. (Rhodes and Springer, 2005, 6) That Kiarostami “utilizes forms of narrative patterning and visual composition that facilitate audience identification” is substantiated by the title of the film:  Close-Up. And yet there is no doubt Kiarostami uses subjects—perhaps even selves—as opposed to “characters.” Along with a narrative structure whose temporality eschews chronology—the classical edit of the film came from a freak mixing-up of the film stock while being transported to an international film festival—is the film’s alluring visuality: drawing attention to the aesthetic that Rhodes and Springer make reference to. The film’s title is also challenging from this perspective—a reference to the close-up, which carries a whole theoretical discourse with it around the spectator’s disorientation when in close proximity to the image—as well as Kiarostami’s positioning of the spectator close to Sabzian to, as the journalist asks at the beginning, consider the kind of “man he is.” Close-Up, as mentioned, has thus been classified as “docudrama” because Sabzian performs as himself, but I would argue it’s better understood in the context of this book, as an exemplar of the new nonfiction film, particularly when such a film form is situated in the terrain of film poetics and art. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner’s edited volume of essays F Is for Phony:  Fake Documentaries and Truth’s Undoing (2006) makes little distinction between fake documentary and mockumentary. In the introduction, Close-Up is said to be a film that parodies “the development of the observational, verité, and autobiographic/diary modes” (Juhasz and Lerner, 2006, 29), before being categorized (by the authors) as a fake documentary. The authors call (as theoretically equated with the mockumentary) fake documentary “a practice whose self-conscious play with form, made apparent in its very failure, effectively challenges its own integrity and that of its originary object as well,” and state that a

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“productive fake documentary produces uncertainty and also knowingness about documentary’s codes, assumptions and processes . . . producing the possibility for the contesting of history, identity and truth” (Juhasz and Lerner, 2006, 7). There is certainly a contesting tone that can be accredited to Close-Up. But while I would agree that “the self-conscious play with form” is an evident feature of the film, I also think it is important to recognize a film that “challenges its own integrity” as a documentary report by contesting the codes of such production accordingly. Kiarostami confirms this position in interviews, a point Cheshire also makes for him. Kiarostami has also said, “We can never get close to the truth except through lying,” a prescription that can easily be misread. We might well place the emphasis on the lie, but Kiarostami places it on truth. Though truth is real, he implies, it is not a given but is created through will and the ethical sense—the intent—that links artist and viewer. In the end, Close-Up turns cinema’s mirror back on us, asking us to see that Sabzian’s escape and reconciliation are constructed of our own compassion. (Cheshire, 1999) “Intent” is explored more fully in the second part of this chapter but, suffice it to say, the discussion of intent bears heavily on a speculative mode of inquiry explored in the previous chapters. Against the production of false truths, given as the modus operandi of the fake documentary form, Kiarostami suggests the truth of Sabzian’s character is his principle concern, yet the “who” that Sabzian is implicitly unaware of. That Kiarostami is also fashioning a “picture” of Sabzian on screen is important also insofar as he is making a picture based on his relationship with him. For the moment, by way of addressing how this works, we need to recall criteria proposed for the new nonfiction film. 1 The subject, as opposed to the actor, is asked to perform as a modèle. 2 The director/artist, who is friends with the subject, speculates as to the “character” of that subject while entering into a collaborative creative process with the subject. 3 A dialectical relationship opens up between director and subject as modèle that involves the mutual recognition and appreciation of the aesthetic aims of the project. A case can be made to suggest that criterion 1 is fulfilled in the way Sabzian performs the “self as modèle” role in the film. It is worth stating, therefore, that Sabzian is, in fact, playing himself; or at least a version of himself that materializes on screen by way of a self and other dialectic: the relationship

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between Sabzian and Kiarostami. There is no “historical record” of events leading to the arrest of Sabzian—at the time the film was made— so Kiarostami’s understanding of what happened came from dialoguing with the principle actors:  Sabzian and the Ahankhah family. The “self as modèle,” as theorized already, is, in this sense, integral to a film made up of performative reconstructions of events considered ontologically consistent with what happened and who they happened to. The reenacting of events from filmic reconstructions—in the context of the new nonfiction film— derives a certain energy from the participating subjects’ recall of time. And given that Sabzian tells his story, the film he and Kiarostami then make exists in a liminal space between “ciné-portrait” and “biography,” or even a film category described in theoretical terms by Audrey Levasseur as “selfbiography.” Although certain elements of the film suggest self biography is a suitable descriptor, I locate the film as new nonfiction film in its attention to building a world: the “non” hangs beside “fiction” in a relationship that is dialectical. Fiction is being negated (not yet) by a “real” that emerges in the making of the film. In Close-Up, the time of nonfiction also takes the form of a promise to the family, that is—over the course of the film about the crime—delivered to them.

FIGURE 4.4 Close-Up: A film that offers “its own interminable challenge to the ethics of collaborative documentary filmmaking”

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For Levasseur, “self-biography” is a method of filmmaking that depends on participation between subject and filmmaker, similar to the collaboration associated with criteria 2 above. “The degree of participation by the subject is the most distinctive feature of this hybrid,” Levasseur states, “unlike biography, where the subject is present only in photographic stills, family movies, archival film footage, some excerpts from past writings, in selfbiography the subject’s most powerful instruments are his or her performing identity and present self-performance (Levasseur, 2000,179). Subject participation is crucial to self-biography as a category of documentary. The subject participates in the telling of his or her own life story to the director. But in doing so, the directorial decisions necessary for an objective portrait, considered the hallmark of such film forms, are invariably compromised. For Levasseur, a self-biography involves ceding control to the subject when filming, so that the subject coauthors—to a degree—the subsequent biography. Nonetheless, because the subject relies on the director to direct the film, a self-biography cannot—and should not—be confused with autobiography. An essential feature of this process is the “in part” component because, as Levasseur stresses, the subject’s participation doesn’t have, as a prerequisite, a positive outcome; and there have been instances where the director is active in an acting role in the film as well, as in Close-Up. Levasseur takes, nonetheless, the participation between the directors and principal subject, the performative “self” of biographical films, as formative, bringing to light—at the same time—the often complex relationship between “self” and “other,” or in this case “self” and documentarian. Close-Up may well be considered “self-biography” given that Kiarostami’s visiting of Sabzian in prison can be read as intervention in the life of the subject, the main aim of which is to contribute to a film about how he ended up in prison, which draws on Sabzian’s narration of his life during and up to this time. But as participation between “subject” and director involves reenacting events based on memory, and a script, there is a crossing—perceivably at least—from participation to collaboration that is more in line with the self as modèle criterion of new nonfiction. Close-Up offers its own interminable challenge to the ethics of collaborative documentary filmmaking. There is no doubt a fidelity to the story of Hossein Sabzian passing himself off as the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Kiarostami has confirmed that real footage is incorporated into the film (the trial). But he also poured cold water on the film being perceived solely as a documentary. The relationship between director and subject, considered as a trust we associate with friendship, might well involve coauthoring scripted content (Kiarostami confirmed that nine hours of the trial footage was filmed without the presence of the judge). Kiarostami speaks about teasing out aspects of Sabzian’s “character” that are dormant, or present in an unconscious form. Like a psychoanalyst who believes the subject is not fully aware of his or her motives, the camera zones in on postures and

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expressions in close-up, the aim of which is to elicit the characteristics of a “self” seen by an “other”: the director. The dialectic of self and other is therefore invested with considerable importance. The aim is to elicit those characteristics of a self-considered unconscious to that self at the time: The scenes of the trial were also documentary, but certain things have been changed because I wanted to be closer to my subject. There were thoughts in the interior of this character, of which he was not conscious, and it was necessary to make them come out and make him say them. (Kiarostami in Ciment, 1991, 80) It seems, in light of this comment, that any such attention to the “feel” of the subject as a character of sorts benefits from documentary techniques that can make the “interior of this character” come out as a result. Kiarostami expresses the above opinions in an interview given in France years after the film was made, and the quote is taken from a translation of Cristina Vatulescu’s excellent article on the relationship between law and art in the film. The word “character” is of course of notable interest, and for the precise reason that, in being spoken of in the same breath as documentary and subject, fictional and nonfictional categories that have quite apostate relations to the “real” are critically conflated. Kiarostami, either way, can be said to treat his self, Sabzian, as a modèle in the film, a technique involving a focus on self-realization. He stages scenes, and then edits these alongside recorded footage of the trial. The scene in which Sabzian defends his crime during the trial is perhaps one such example. It is worth putting a stress on the way Kiarostami focuses on Sabzian’s intention during the trial, in the context of his views on poverty, marital strife, and love of cinema. While the grainy footage suggests an authenticity, a realness, the turn to discussions of legal facticity and morality tests complicates this. Sabzian admits to fraud, but we also hear him claim to have acted for the sake of art and cinema: he wanted to make a film about suffering. He comes across as a martyr of sorts, for art and the poetic. To judge his moral intention, we have to assess his intent as either criminal (and personal gain) or moral in the desire to make great art from real life. The judge questions Sabzian as to whether he intended to “exploit” the Ahankhah family before being apprehended, while nonetheless stressing that because his aim is aesthetic first and foremost, there is a perceived moral integrity to the nature of his artistic aspirations. In Sabzian’s mind, the judge suggests, his dreams are real. We should note, then, that the case ends with the judge assuming Kiarostami’s moral merit argument to be true, a lenient stance similar to the one the spectator (I will argue in conclusion) is encouraged to take regarding Kiarostami’s intent in ending the film the way he does. Criteria 1 and 2—criteria that help engage the new nonfiction film in terms of subjectivity—find, I  would argue, their clearest expression in

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FIGURE 4.5 Close-Up: Just one of many profile shots of Sabzian as he stands “before the law”

these scenes. Recalling Bresson’s assertion that “an actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person, your models, once outside themselves, will not be able to get in again” (Bresson, 1996, 53), Kiarostami, with a sense of regard to filming Sabzian in close-up, adds, “It’s necessary to put the knife in the heart and not hesitate to turn it into the wound in order to make what is most profound in the human being come out. This is the only manner in which you can produce an effect, or have an influence” (Kiarostami in Goudet, 1997, 100). Taken as a knife turning exercise, an exercise that turns the knife into Sabzian’s conscious sense of self, we find that a characteristic of “self” repressed is now perceivably exposed, collapsing the idea of inner and outer. I have explored in Chapter 2 Rivers’s attempt to absorb subjects in a filming process antithetical to the kind of collaboration found in observational film to garner this effect. I have also explored the absorption of Jake in acts that take him out of himself as mirroring the practice of making the film, generating a self-reflexive mirroring effect as a result. The effect is arguably the same in Close-Up. Nearly forty minutes in duration, the trial consists of Sabzian responding to questioning from the judge, intercutting to the Ahankhah family and Sabzian’s mother in the

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crowd. Kiarostami reenacts his visit to the court judge requesting to be allowed to film, in an earlier scene, and is given permission to film the trial in addition to an already sanctioned court film crew. During the trial two cameras are present:  one an official organ of the state that strives for an objective rendering of the facts (or so we are led to believe), the other the camera of Kiarostami:  the purpose of which is to render Sabzian’s profile in close-up before the law. “Before the law” is of course a double entendre, a reference—in one sense—to Sabzian’s face as he sits before the law. It is, however, in another sense, a face-to-face encounter that begins before the law. There is an ethics that is particular to the latter. The ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (foremost postwar ethicist) concerning the face-to-face encounter with the Other—the origin of which is found literally before the law—is particularly noteworthy in this regard, and the fulfillment of criteria 3 during the filming of the trial scene. Kiarostami films Sabzian’s trial using an array of close-ups, masterfully interlinking images of the face with the moment that focuses on moral intent. Close-ups of Sabzian’s face, along with those of the Ahankhah family, help externalize the intent Sabzian talks about during the trial, which Kiarostami turns to explicitly in the scene that follows. Documentary scholar Kate Nash has taken the relationship between ethics and documentary as a point of concern in an analysis of Levinasian ethics in film. Her article explores the suitability of Levinas’s ideas to a medium of images. Levinas calls into question our desire to know the Other, reconfiguring ethics as a kind of deep reflexivity in which assumptions about the Other and the possibility of knowing are constantly challenged. Because observational documentary making is an encounter between a filmmaker, participant and viewer that risks transforming the participant into an object of knowledge, de-contextualized and re-presented within an alien context, Levinas can be read as calling for a focus on the nature of its relationships. His work calls for filmmaking practices that respect difference, a “letting be” that eschews the totalizing urge in order for truth to emerge. (Nash, 2011, 231) Nash focuses on the skepticism expressed toward images and indeed representation in Levinas’s writings, locating the difficulty in trying to counter the claims that observational documentary risks objectifying the subject pace Levinas. She goes on to suggest that Levinas’s ethics calls for “practices,” perhaps film, that respect “difference” while eschewing “the totalizing urge”; a claim that is of particular interest regarding Kiarostami’s approach in Close-Up. The trial sequence, a sequence many believe to have been coauthored by Kiarostami and Sabzian, is the sequence in which the “self as modèle” criterion is most evidently fulfilled; a model that allows the “difference” Nash talks about to be furnished when making the film.

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Before the law Most commentators on Close-Up agree that the trial scene is pivotal in generating the sense of sheer power involved in telling this remarkable and somewhat strange story. Sabzian makes the point, during the trial, that he is committed to art on moral grounds. The camera’s near fetishistic monitoring of his face in close-up when he says this is constant: he speaks of the moral impetus behind his impersonation (which effectuates the formal implementation of a Levinasian ethic). Sabzian claims he wanted to make great art, an uncanny trace of the film he is now starring in. Kiarostami’s camera shows the “ethical” foundation—the face—as it literally exists before the law. Sabzian is filmed in close-up so as to bring the viewer face-to-face, whether they want to or not, with a suspected criminal in the dock. We hear the judge deliberate on the intent Sabzian had to defraud the family. There is, nonetheless, a somewhat overwrought pathos to this, as Sabzian talks about wanting to make a film about suffering and, even, in a remarkably comic moment, referencing Tolstoy’s view of art as a moralizing force to do so. There is synchronicity in the camera’s perusing of Sabzian’s face, a judge who is seeking to penetrate beyond appearance as a way of eliciting motive (also a form of close-up analysis), and Sabzian’s diatribe on the moral imperative of art as his defense, even turning to Tolstoy by way of support. Cristina Vatulescu’s essay “ ‘The Face to Face Encounter of Art and Law’:  Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up” (2011) is a helpful resource for exploring the key areas touched on here. Vatulescu begins by addressing the way art penetrates the depth of human emotion in contrast to the law, contextualizing the film around a claim of Kiarostami that his interest in Sabzian lay in understanding “what kind of man he is.” Vatulescu takes the view that such a questioning approach runs contrary to the approach of the law, whose interest is in determining guilt or innocence, before stating, It appears significant that it is precisely when approaching Sabzian, his most saliently law-transgressing subject, that Kiarostami decides to make full use of both the self-censoring/disciplinary and self-creative/ reformatory potential of the close-up. The close-up then might actually signify affinities, rather than a clear-cut divergence between law’s and art’s approach to their subject. (Vatulescu, 2011, 188) Vatulescu also points to the mistrust Kiarostami has for the close-up and reminds us that the signature Kiarostami shot is a long shot of the close-up landscape. Vatulescu is of the opinion that a more nuanced understanding of the close-up’s capacity to penetrate appearance is assumed by Kiarostami at this point, so as to form an incendiary bridge between the aesthetic and the ethical. She draws attention to the “self-creative/reformatory potential

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FIGURE 4.6 Close-Up: The “real” and “false” Makhmalbaf eventually meet

of the close-up” in the trial scene, not because she believes Kiarostami is making a distinction between a legal and aesthetic understanding of the subject but to illustrate the properties that they share. Vatulescu sees this as a “more careful reflection on the relationship between its (the close-up’s) rendering of the subject and the prototypical image of the criminal—the mugshot” (Vatulescu, 2011, 189). The claim that close-ups are images that violate subjectivity, the foundation for Levinas’s general disdain for art’s ethical claims, can be met with a counterargument here: it is not technically the “subject” that Kiarostami is concerned with in Close-Up, but rather, as argued, the “self as modèle.” We can then say that while the subject is the preserve of the law, the police mug shot, the “self as modèle” is, in contrast, the preserve of the new nonfiction film as it materializes on screen. But such a claim needs support. One possible support would involve assuming that Sabzian and Kiarostami coauthor the film script, with the aim to collaborate together in this way to draw out the features that Kiarostami feels are integral to Sabzian’s “character” (which he himself is unaware of) on film, so as to take issue with the “who” and “what” of the subject. In light of this, I want to now argue that Kiarostami takes a Levinasian approach to the face, an approach that involves a fashioning of the “self as modèle” as

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a form that helps Kiarostami to relay his own mistrust of the close-up from the perspective of an intersubjective ethics. Levinas’s ethics nonetheless comes out of a general mistrust of images. The face, the foundation of his ethics, is said to exceed representation. Roger Burggraeve is one of a number of philosophers to have explored this stance from the perspective of violence and moral responsibility in an article discussion that extends into debates around the metaphysics of evil and images. Burggraeve notes a certain tendency among philosophers to take Levinas’s reference to the “face” in overtly literal terms, so as to downplay the really radical terms of Levinas’s ethical move. He states “that the ‘face of the other’ is not his physical countenance or appearance, but precisely the noteworthy fact that the other—not only in fact but in principle—does not coincide with his appearance, image, photograph, representation, or evocation” (Burggraeve, 1999, 29). Certain credence can be given to suggest it is precarious, violent even, to integrate a Levinasian ethic into a filmmaking aesthetic, in that there is a certain “violence” involved in procuring images of the other that would, by nature of this, “manage” or “represent” that other in a particular way. This recalls Vatulescu’s assertion, If Kiarostami’s commentary on his film trenchantly distinguishes between the law’s and the cinema’s approaches to their subjects, the actual film encourages more careful refection on the relationship between its own rendering of the subject and the prototypical image of the criminal—the mug-shot. (Vatulescu, 2011,189) Mug shots are an officiating image of the subject that serves—in its specific rendering of the face—to distinguish the individual from another. But as an image it moves in an opposite direction to a Levinasian philosophy of the subject (that rejects the “image” as an impediment to the real face-to-face encounter). Vatulescu champions the freeze-frame ending of Close-Up as counter-hegemonic in this regard; resistant to the violating tendencies of mug shot photography. However, whether the freeze-frame is offered as an “ethical” substitute for the face depends on whether an ethical encounter— based on these Levinasian principles—can be replicated in image form, given the instrumentalizing tendencies Burrgraeve refers to. The “ethical encounter”—as I see it—is not so much the encounter the spectator has with the filmic image of Sabzian in freeze-frame, although that too is important, but the method of working that evolves between director and participant as a criterion of nonfiction (as post-Bressonian film aesthetic). In this latter sense, Kiarostami’s collaboration with Sabzian (on the script) is designed to bring out the “who” that Sabzian is unaware of; a process of searching for an “otherness” that art can help register if not represent. For Burrgraeve, this is the face-to-face encounter. “The epiphany of the other is always a breaking through and throwing into confusion of that

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very epiphany, and as such the other always remains ‘enigmatic,’ intruding on me as the ‘irreducible,’ ‘separate and distinct’ ” (Burrgraeve, 1999, 30). We should note—in the context of this relationship—the latter’s curiosity (which he spoke about infrequently) concerning the type of man Sabzian is. For there is no doubt that Kiarostami thought long and hard about making a film about someone who wants to be someone else while at the same time alluding, celebrating their “enigmatic” otherness. Kiarostami may well have experienced an epiphany, the basis of a true ethical encounter in the sense that Levinas suggests, when he first went to see Sabzian in prison face-toface. For he noted, from that point on, that Close-Up as a film practically made itself. If this was indeed the case, Kiarostami can be considered one of few directors to engage a Levinasian methodology in his filmmaking practice. He would also seem to be grappling with a treatment of the subject that involves casting Sabzian as “Sabzian.” Casting the self as modéle helps sidestep the instrumentalizing tendencies Levinas warns of. It is important then, as mentioned in Chapter  2, to emphasize the “as” in the “self as modèle,” given Kiarostami’s concern with procuring Sabzian as “Sabzian” and therefore presenting him on film in this way. His encounter with the Other is, in this sense, a particular concern of a film that aspires to the status of poetry and art. Kiarostami also addresses the encounter with the other in what many believe to be his greatest film:  The Wind Will Carry Us. The Wind is a meditative exploration of a filmmaker bent on diminishing the other’s otherness through the kind of image technology capture Levinas warns of. The Wind is the story of a film crew who travel to a Kurdish village in the north of Iran to film a traditional burial rite that is still practiced but is gradually beginning to die out. The protagonist Behzad (Behzad Dorani) is called “The Engineer,” a reference to the fact throughout the film he conceals his real identity from the villagers he is observing while waiting for the elderly woman to pass away. Afraid that by revealing his real identity the villagers will come to anticipate their own “representation” on film and thereby compromise the authenticity of a wake he wants to film, Behzad casts himself off as an engineer sent by the government to conduct research. The Wind Will Carry Us is therefore a film, like Close-Up (and indeed The Sky Trembles), which mediates on documentary filmmaking “indirectly,” and in doing so explores a documentary filmmaking process that involves suspect procedures in its actualization. The story concerns a filmmaker posing as an engineer with an eye to making a documentary; the ethics of the faceto-face encounter is addressed against the backdrop of a burial ceremony that raises ethnographic questions, not least within Islamic culture, around filming others. Once again, the ethics of the filmmaker is of importance to a narrative that works its magic by way of innuendo, the offscreen, concealing the main narrative action. “There is clearly an element that is particularly

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FIGURE 4.7 The Wind Will Carry Us: Behzad travels to higher ground to make phone calls at intervals throughout the film

important in this respect,” Alberto Elena remarks, “namely, once again, the portrait of a film-maker, which is represented by the film’s protagonist” (Elena, 2006, 156). For Elena, Behzad’s is a “cold-blooded interest in using the film medium to exploit an archaic and brutal ritual” (Elena, 2006,156). Kiarostami deliberates on the ethical properties of film around methods used to objectively capture the facts of an event that can also instrumentalize those subjects on whom these facts rest. The ethical problem consists of a filmmaker, bound by the pressures of telling a “good story,” being divorced from the life that produces the story in the first place. Filmmaking is therefore prone to a kind of instrumentalization precisely because it gives merely a modicum of involvement to the “other” it seeks to represent. The face-to-face encounter between director and subject, the thematic sine qua non of Close-Up—is simply alluded to, deliberated on, in The Wind Will Carry Us. Behzad never in fact meets the woman whose death is the catalyst for the planned reportage, nor does he reveal any given reason for wanting to film. Jonathan Rosenbaum draws attention to this issue, suggesting that the film is more specifically about the way the character of Behzad relates to the people he wants to film. “The particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us consist largely of Kiarostami reflecting on his own practice as a ‘media person’ exploiting poor people: Behzad may be the closest thing in Kiarostami’s work to a critical self-portrait” (Rosenbaum, 2000). The changes in Behzad as he “waits” for the elderly woman’s death is the more prominent issue in The Wind Will Carry Us. Behzad is, for the majority of the film, difficult to like: his utilitarian approach to the village comes through in a lack of genuine interest in others, a certain arrogance

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borne of a city-bred attitude toward the countryside, and a general lack of respect for the death ritual he is sent to film. His relevant “disconnect” from those he has to interact with while staying in the village is symbolized, rather ironically, by his chunky mobile phone, which he carries from the village itself to higher ground when he needs to “communicate” with his crew. Few of these conversations elicit any real information about Behzad’s background life or character, and give few clues as to what the greater concerns of the film Kiarostami is making might be, but it is from these that a minor epiphany on the part of Behzad can be said to take place, which, in the greater scheme of things, might be said, ultimately, to engender a change in the way he approaches, not just the village, but life itself. Behzad encounters a gravedigger digging a hole, on his excursion to a particular area of higher ground. He converses with him in a somewhat superficial manner at first, before finally coming to save the man’s life when the grave temporarily collapses on him. Behzad’s intervention in getting help for the man, which involves allowing him to “connect” with the village in a way that was heretofore blocked offers something of an epiphany, offering him “a new way of looking at the world, one that is free of all impure motivations and from any utilitarian mentality, open to whatever might happen unexpectedly on the uncontrollable fringes of vision, ready to accept the enigma of ‘otherness’ ” (Elena, 2006, 159). It is precisely “the enigma of ‘otherness’ ” that the director who simply waits to capture an event in its status as spectacle remains closed to, and it is interesting that what is staged so directly in Close-Up, “the face to face encounter” is redirected, becoming a particular metaphysical inquiry into the preparation needed for such an encounter to take place in The Wind Will Carry Us. There is, then, a particular emphasis given to the responsibility needed not just to be a filmmaker, as the type of documentary Behzad is trying to make is never discussed in the film, but one whose gaze is directed toward the other in a particular—let us call it ethical—way. It might even be that Behzad experiences a kind of grace, one that reorients his standing, and allows him, like Sabzian, to “see” differently. Only when recognizing the “enigma” of the other, in what will form the mediated image, is an appropriate ethical relationship between director and subject formed, formalizing the methodology Kiarostami implements as such in his career-defining film:  Close-Up. The dialectic relationship between director and subject, which is such an important facet of a film that Kiarostami says practically made itself, is explored in a suitably different way in The Wind Will Carry Us: Behzad never actually meets the woman whose death will serve as the “event” of his film, nor does he trust the villagers enough to even reveal his real identity to them, the result of which is to undermine any friendship that might emerge not to mind collaboration. By the time she appears to have died, his interest in real life, and genuine interest in the village, has superseded his instrumental interest in capturing

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FIGURE 4.8 Close-Up: Kiarostami subverts the ethics of reporting for aesthetic gain

the woman’s death on film. Kiarostami may well be exploring the conditions that allowed him to make Close-Up, a film from a story that revealed itself to him as if falling from the sky. Now, the relationship that formed in making that film is explored in a broader context of fiction and non-fiction, and regarding the present inquiry, new nonfiction film.

The becoming reality of fiction . . . Close-Up’s closing sequence is one of the most perplexing, and at the same time affecting sequences of film in the history of cinema, in my opinion. It is perplexing from a certain perspective because it is so affecting. Here I use affective in its pejorative cognitive sense, as indicative of an emotional punch. Kiarostami—arguably—subverts a type of film inquiry modeled on “reportage” for a purpose in the conclusion of Close-Up, and one that invites analysis. The conclusion reads, as I  would like to propose in the remainder of this section on Close-Up, as a model of nonfiction, when understood to principally include strategies that employ staging to get at a speculative truth in and around a “found story,” or actual life narrative. We

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now encounter the second “S” of our inquiry, story, or to borrow from film historian Siegfried Krauceur, “found story.”2 Close-Up concludes with what appears to be a staged meeting between Makhmalbaf and Sabzian, the hero figure director who Sabzian impersonates when committing the crime for which he has just been tried. The sequence takes the form of a report involving the use of a hidden camera, the aim of which is to capture the moment when Sabzian meets Makhmalbaf. It is the moment when he is forgiven by him, and both Sabzian and Makhmalbaf then attempt to patch up the fraught relationship between Sabzian and the family who he fraudulently led to believe he was in fact Makhmalbaf. They take off on a moped across town, as the hidden camera and crew follow from the rear. By hiding the camera, however, and thus giving the impression that Sabzian is unaware of being filmed, Kiarostami can foreground the ethical issue of consent (as it pertains to documentary practice), and give a certain focus to the authenticity involved in the act of reporting. The conversation between the various crew members works to underline the fact the camera is hidden, making it appear as if Makhmalbaf is in on the act, aware of the setup orchestrated around his meeting with Sabzian. It appears (under the pretense of concern) as if Kiarsostami is hoodwinking Sabzian, orchestrating the meeting to publicize an at-once-private moment. But if he is hoodwinking Sabzian he is also—and this is what is so intriguing (so ultimately challenging and, at the same time, perplexing about the sequence)—breaking the trust that he has helped establish in the earlier course of the film. In an earlier scene, Kiarostami visited Sabzian in jail, befriended him in the same way that Sabzian befriended the family, and requested that he make a film about his ordeal. Whether Kiarostami is now, at the end, deceiving Sabzian, like Sabzian also deceived the family, into believing he isn’t being filmed when he is, is unclear. It is also unclear if Kiarostami is collaborating with Makhmalbaf, not just to dramatically enhance the film being made, but also to implement staging as an ethical art-making exercise in itself. To have a stab at clarifying these issues, we can explore the affect in both an aesthetic and cognitive sense. I will argue that the affect is generated by Kiarostami’s ethical approach, and is effected by playing on the ethics of documentary reportage at this point. We now have to disentangle ethics and aesthetics, to see how one enhances the other. For I believe the end is so emotionally charged in affective terms because Kiarostami compromises ethics per se. This is not to say he compromises all ethics, only those around documentary reportage. But this is done to amplify the properties of the art I am addressing in this book under the auspice of the new nonfiction film. The end should be read then as Kiarostami inflicting a similar violence on Sabzian that he inflicted on the family, to generate solidarity with Sabzian at the level of cinematic artistry. The affect is the emotional draw involved in such an expression of solidarity.

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FIGURE 4.9 Close-Up: Brotherhood and solidarity expressed in specifically visual terms

What really happens at this point is beyond the scope of any close reading of Close-Up. There is no way of knowing whether Sabzian is aware of being filmed. There is no way of knowing for sure if Kiarostami is sending up a reportage TV style for the sake of art. If we take that he is, we can then state that Kiarostami wants us to believe that Sabzian is duped into the meeting, given that Sabzian has just been through a lengthy court ordeal and has been mandated for ethically duping others, in order to generate empathy and solidarity, not with Sabzian per se, but with the desire he expresses to make great art. We are then in a better position to claim that Close-Up ends in this way to cultivate a sense of solidarity with Sabzian and his desire to be an artist. Alberto Elena, author of the most comprehensive monograph on Kiarostami’s films to date, focuses on the solidarity expressed in the film’s ending. “Close-Up,” he notes, is not in any way inspired by a reflexive or self-referential intention: its discourse is rather of solidarity and compassion. This is why Kiarostami, in the celebrated final sequence, rewards Sabzian with an unexpected gift: the real Makhmalbaf is waiting for him when he is released from

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prison:  to take him on his motorbike to apologize to the Ahankhah family. Kiarostami has not only played a significant role in his release and ensured that he in some way fulfills his promises to the Ahankhah family, to turn them into protagonists of a film (Close-Up instead of the The House of the Spider . . .); he also gives him the chance to meet his idol Makhmalbaf. (Elena, 2006, 89) Elena believes Kiarostami is interested—principally—in the story of Sabzian, as opposed to the principles of film; that is, he is drawn toward Sabzian’s story as a story about desire, about the poetic, as opposed to making a film that reflects on the difficulties in and around making a report on a particular crime and its aftermath. However, it would be wrong to read Close-Up as a straightforward reflection on the relationship between life and truth via reportage film without considering also the form the film takes to bear intrinsically on the story it tells. By challenging the conventions of reportage in getting at the truth, the final sequence is effective and affective as an ending. In other words, we can read the end sequence in terms of both form and content, so that one isn’t necessarily divorced from the other. Form and content are intrinsically bound together to make the significant impact that Elena identifies, the form being the documentary style behind the film Kiarostami purports to be making, the content the story that he is telling via the employment of such a style. It would appear then that Kiarostami employs the documentary report format to give the appearance he is secretly filming Sabzian meeting his hero, so that it appears as if he is willing to do exactly what Sabzian has done to the family: dupe the family into appearing in his own film. Kiarostami is, in this sense, duping Sabzian into believing Makhmalbaf’s visit is real, and their visit to the family is authentic as a moment of forgiveness and reconciliation. But he is able to do this using a documentary register: the report. The event that appears to be reported on is the meeting of Makhmalbaf and Sabzian, when they then travel to the family home, the place where Sabzian will be given the opportunity to apologize. The visit to the Ahankhah family gives the trajectory of the film its now infamous circular form, linking the opening sequence when Sabzian’s crime is uncovered (and Kiarostami famously leaves us outside in the company of a taxi driver who is left waiting while the main action, or it seems, happens inside) to the end, when Makhmalbaf and Sabzian return with flowers for the Ahankhah family. Formal glitches, or inconsistencies, are central to this:  the sound breaks down, leaving the audience to imagine what is being said between the Makhmalbafs (real and imaginary). We are therefore—somewhat crucially—left to determine the content of the conversation. For Elena, there is something evidentially giving about this sequence on the part of Kiarostami, in that the sequence is orchestrated around the realization of Sabzian’s dreams (through staged events); the very thing Sabzian tried to

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implement committing the crime of fraud is brought to fruition as a reality in itself on screen. The Ahankhah family, unknown prior to the crime, are now reluctant stars as a result. The promise Sabzian had made to them at the outset is now somewhat and—rather ironically—fulfilled. The film ends with a freeze-frame of Sabzian holding a bunch of flowers looking downward, an image that rarely fails to elicit a strong emotional response in me personally. I find myself welling up with tears every time I watch the film’s ending, when the medium shot of Sabzian holding flowers, gazing at the ground as a measure of respect for those to whom he is now offering an apology, is frozen as an image and hence frozen in time. The image, as a still and as a portrait shot, brings a significant emotional punch to bear on the conclusion of the film. But what interests me personally is how the affect takes root. To what extent is the report aestheticized around the image that is frozen at the end? At a certain level, Kiarostami appears to send up models of reportage when filming Makhmalbaf’s meeting with Sabzian. He wants to generate a level of solidarity between Sabzian, who talks about having transgressed to make great art, with all its ethical potential, and Kiarostami himself, who now stands accused of exploiting Sabzian’s predicament for his own artistic gain (and the dubious ethics of such). Assuming he is really exploiting Sabzian, we are able to view his breaking of the codes of conduct affiliated with reportage film as offset by the ethical merit that is associated with aspiring to make great art along the lines that Sabzian suggests. Kiarostami appears to override the ethical codes of conduct involved in reporting on subjects without consent for specifically aesthetic reasons. Close-Up, looked at in this way, experiments with the ethics of film for aesthetic affect. What is unethical in certain forms of documentary practice now takes the form of a higher purchase on reality. Like in the films of Ben Rivers, reality is construed as a result of cinematic world making.

Kiarostami meets Erol Morris/Makhmalbaf meets Sabzian One of the best-selling studies in documentary theory in recent years is the text by celebrated Oscar-winning filmmaker, Erol Morris. Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography is a magnificent exploration of documentary photography, historically and contextually, concerned with staging and intervention in documentary processes. Morris’s book is something of an “event” in documentary studies. It is an event in that it purposefully deconstructs the opposition between a staged photograph and one that is held up as “pure” of any photographic intervention on behalf

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of the photographer. Morris, a former private investigator, PhD candidate in philosophy, brings these areas of expertise to bear on a study that, as it progresses, helps rethink the distinction between the staged and the real. The first section of the book, Crimean War Essay (Intentions of the Photographer), consists of an essay “Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg?” (Parts, 1, 2, and 3) that takes the following paragraph from Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) as its critical point of departure, Not surprisingly, many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, [Roger] Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (despite the title, it was not across this landscape that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge) the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture—the one that is always reproduced— he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself. (Sontag, 2003, 43) Morris sets out on a journey to visit the site where the photographic “event” took place, in order to explore Sontag’s conviction that Fenton “oversaw” the scattering of the balls for the prized second shot. For Morris, Sontag’s conviction is part of a greater trend regarding the attributed “intention” of the photographer who is said to have duped viewers into believing that what is staged is actually real, and that the staged photograph represents the reality of the Crimean War. The issue of attributing an intention to the photographer is foremost for Morris in that it brings unqualified assumptions to bear on the interpretative process; knowledge claims that cannot be verified and yet are made with all the conviction of a scientist whose axioms are self-evident to his fellow scientists. Those who posited the “first version” as actually coming first affirm Sontag’s position and view Fenton as something of a charlatan, staging fiction as reality. Those who take a more measured view of Fenton’s intentions suggest that he may well have scattered the cannonballs on the basis that he was recreating the horror of a war scene he had already witnessed, and was therefore trying to capture the reality of the Crimean War as he saw it. “Much of the problem,” Morris writes, comes from the collective need to endow photographs with intentions. The minute we start to conjecture about Fenton’s reasons, his intent—his psychological state—we are walking on unhallowed ground. Can we read Fenton’s intentions from a photographic plate? . . . We may project on to these photographs (or any photograph) the photographer’s imagined

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intentions, but why is this anything more than a speculative exercise? (Morris, 2014, 20) Morris then turns to the photographs themselves, and takes what might be termed a speculative materialist position. This is a position that involves determining the order of the photographs based on physical properties. Morris’s book-length study, without having to dip extensively into the details of the meticulous analysis he offers, is a quasi-philosophical treatise on how photographic documents are understood, on the assumption that the intentions of the photographer can be known. In addition, it’s a study of how these intentions are imagined by the viewer. But rather than simply expose a fallacy and leave it at that, Morris’s study of Fenton’s iconic photographs takes the form of an investigation that must, beyond everything else, be solved. He wants to know which photograph came first without retort to a character analysis of Fenton (one that involves imagining whether Fenton intended to dupe his audience or not). Morris’s lens is heavily focused on issues particular to documentary theory and aesthetics:  intervention, nonintervention, observation, posing, and purity, yet nonetheless finds flaws in assuming any definitive context when all we have is a photograph to assess. Moreover, he takes issue with the view that a pure untouched scene is a marker of an authentic truth when reading a photograph’s content. Having tagged the photograph that contains cannonballs on the road “ON” and the photograph without cannonballs “OFF” to mark them out as different, he can then observe that there are two very separate issues at stake here—the issue of posing and the question of which came first. And yet, for most people, the two issues are inexplicably intertwined. Fenton took the first picture and then posed the second. But it doesn’t matter in theory whether OFF came before ON or vice versa, either or both could still be posed. Namely, Fenton could have intentionally posed either or both photographs independent of the order in which they were taken. One way to look at it: ON could be first and could be posed or unposed, and OFF could be first and could be posed or unposed. Is OFF true and ON false, or vice versa? Or both equally true? Is one more truthful than the other, because one is more natural than the other? Or authentic? And what is “natural”? Or “authentic”? (Morris, 2014, 58) Morris is, rather audaciously, suggesting that practically all the dominant issues in documentary theory, and its intersection with the aesthetic, are found in the inquiry he undertakes in the first chapter. And although he is eventually led to agree with Sontag’s ordering of the photographs, it is not, crucially for the same reasons that Sontag gives, an assessment of intent. For intent cannot be known simply on the basis of studying the photographs

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themselves. It can only be imagined. And this is the central point of Morris’s inquiry. “Even if Sontag is right,” he says as a final note, “namely, that Fenton moved the cannonballs to telegraph the horror of war, what’s so bad about that? Why does moralizing about ‘posing’ take precedence—moral precedence—over ‘moralizing’ about the carnage of war?” (Morris, 2014, 69–70). Morris’s essay is central to documentary theory in its current guise, considered as a means of understanding the relationship between reportage and fiction (art). Instead of addressing the photograph as a document of war tout court, about the morality of war, which it can still be defined as irrespective of whether posed or not, we end up discussing the morality of the photographer. We end up discussing Fenton’s intent. This is a problem Kiarostami’s Close-Up brings us up close to. Again, the issue of intent is pivotal to our understanding. In my opinion, Kiarostami explores the same issue as Morris in the film relating to the issue of intent— in this case, the intent of the director. Kiarostami, however, unlike Morris in his attempt to orient the discussion away from the consideration of intent, uses the pretense of a documentary crew secretly observing Sabzian to amplify the issue of intent, inviting us to moralize on Kiarostami’s intent in filming the meeting of Sabzian and Makhmalbaf by way of generating solidarity with him. In other words, Kiarostami’s intent in ending the film the way he does mirrors Sabzian’s intent in duping the family into starring in a Makhmalbaf film: he thus wants us to identify with the desire that takes the form of intent to make great art that Kiarostami and Sabzian share, which is outlined in the trial. It is important, on this note, that the trial scene serves as an anchor to Close-Up in that Sabzian is offered an opportunity to defend himself against the charge of fraud. The trial deliberates on Sabzian’s reason for undertaking the fallacy in its entirety. The judge must make a judgment that is not unlike the viewer of the final sequence, in that he must judge whether Sabzian intended to defraud for monetary gain, or whether he should be given lenience on the basis that his aesthetic aspirations are ethically motivated. The viewer of the film must also judge Kiarostami’s aspirations as ethically or aesthetically motivated—that is, motivated by a desire to tell Sabzian’s story. We can say that Kiarostami wants to capture the spirit of a story about art, even if this means transgressing ethical codes that are particular to the documentary tradition of reportage film. And doing so involves a crew to report on the meeting of Makhmalbaf and Sabzian by deceptive means. For if all of this is staged for dramatic and therefore aesthetic gain, and Sabzian is unaware that he is doing this, it appears that Kiarostami treats Sabzian the same way Sabzian treats the family, something that he has just been tried for. It appears that Kiarostami is also staging reality for aesthetic purchase. The question then is whether all of this is staged for dramatic impact. The first answer is “yes,” and comes into effect by way of Kiarostami’s

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FIGURE 4.10 Close-Up: Kiarostami makes it clear that the meeting is “reported on” for reasons that we can only speculate on

intention to deceive. It is unethical in that it involves “documenting” through deception the meeting of the real and fake Makhmalbaf. Yet it has ethical merit in getting at the actual truth of Sabzian’s story as Kiarostami interprets it. Only by appearing to break the documentary code on which consent is based, only by staging the meeting of Makhmalbaf and Sabzian— the two Makhmalbafs—as real, can Kiarostami display the solidarity he feels toward Sabzian (and the intent that the judge has accredited to Sabzian in the court scene that has preceded this sequence). Only by appearing to break the codes intrinsic to reporting, an image regime with its own truth value, can another regime come into play. Morris’s point about the fallacy of judgment concerning the moralizing interpretations of Fenton’s Crimean photographs, moralizing as in judging the character of the photographer accused of staging the photograph, is pertinent here:  we can formulate a similar view of Close-Up. Judging character hinges on speculating about the intent behind the staged act of reportage. The final sequence of Close-Up is set up to produce an affect, but one that takes root in a solidarity toward the art of cinema that Kiarostami and Sabzian share. Kiarostami appears from the outset to be an observer of the events of Sabzian’s life in the context of his crime, sympathetic and willing to collaborate to tell his story. Little

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attention is apportioned to Kiarostami’s reasons for making the film, the kind of film he is interested in making. In fact, Kiarostami maintains a curious presence, flittering in and out at various intervals throughout, without ever revealing his intent. The storytelling register, however, alters significantly in the final sequence. As opposed to capturing, or even recording reality, Kiarostami appears to be shaping it for his own ends (not unlike Rivers and his model environments). A camera crew is set up at a distance from the spot where Sabzian is detained, and the tranquility is suddenly interrupted by Makhmalbaf’s appearance on a scooter. He is communicating with Kiarostami via a hidden microphone, and both are discussing the details of the staging. For the first time, attention now is accorded to Kiarostami’s ploy in staging the meeting of real and fake Makhmalbaf, as the film implores us as spectators to consider its status as real or fake. Just as Sabzian’s “intent” is the focus of attention throughout the lengthy trial scene, with the judge a kind of conduit for a spectator who is also tasked with judging Sabzian, the pendulum swings in the sequence that follows, as the claustrophobic intensity of the trial gives way to the calm serenity of a sunny day as Sabzian appears in long shot from the point of view of a concealed van where the crew are filming. The crew manages to film Makhmalbaf’s arrival on motorcycle/scooter and his meeting with Sabzian, who is, as expected, overwhelmed with emotion. As the pair take off on the scooter to the family residence, the footage of the motorcycle ride itself a conduit for brotherhood solidarity, the sound breaks down as the crew follow from behind. There is now a cultured need for the spectator to imagine what is said, while encouraged to imagine the conversation that the famous filmmaker and his impersonator are having. The film ends, as I have already mentioned, in the place it began: at the door of the family home, when Sabzian meets the family holding a bunch of flowers in his hand.

Now, it’s nothing but flowers The faux-documentary reportage that is used to narrate Makhmalbaf’s meeting with Sabzian (the frenzy of the crew’s attempt to follow the director and his once “fake” double across the city), contrasts with the calm that is felt with the safe arrival of the two at the home of the Ahankhah family. Not only is the journey undertaken on the moped across town—both in terms of the physical journey across the city and also the journey of the film coming back to where it began—suggestive of brotherhood and solidarity (the theme of forgiveness the dominant narrative trope), but it’s also given symbolic expression in the flowers Sabzian carries in his hands. Standing outside the door of the family home, where the film began, Sabzian meets the family to give them flowers, staring at the ground, as the image freezes as such. All we are left to ponder is this “still” image of Sabzian: a kind of

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FIGURE 4.11 Close-Up: The freeze frame of Sabzian that ends the film

portrait shot that acts as a counterweight to the criminal mugshot. It is an image that encapsulates the film’s attention to the “art” of the moving image taken in the form of a record or report. The flowers are a long-standing metaphor for the aesthetic principle; a symbolic badge for the expression of forgiveness, heightened by the signification of artifice (fiction) and reality (non-fiction) at once. The flowers express an artifice plucked from the natural, allowed to circulate in symbolic networks of communication, that is, the cultural realm. Flowers are, not unlike the film itself, something of the real manipulated to reveal truth. We can therefore view the flowers Sabzian holds in his hands,3 in this precise sense, as drawing attention to the manipulation of the real in fiction, the negation of the fictional as nonfiction, and as objects that stand in, rather like a fetish object, for the film itself. Sabzian is, at this point, a conduit for the director and spectator, giving, in the form of the flowers, the film itself to those who he has defrauded but whose promise is ironically being fulfilled in the act of giving. The flowers are a stand-in for both, a promise that was betrayed and one that is now being fulfilled. Like the pharmakon that Jacques Derrida draws attention to in Platonic discourse, which is considered as poison and cure, a signifier for the melting of signifiers into a play of pure difference, the flowers are both universal and absolutely

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singular. In a text many consider Derrida’s most elaborate excursion into the history of philosophy, the essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” his explicit turn to the concept of the pharmakon, correlates—to a certain degree—with the symbolism of the flowers that Sabzian holds in his hand as the image freezes in time, the promise to give now parsed by the sense of not yet having been given to the recipient (one could suggest here that the flowers are not just for the family, but for everyone). Derrida, whose text comes back to the idea of a “promise” over and over again, and brings to mind the promise of time discussed in the last chapter, says of the pharmakon that “we will watch it infinitely promise itself and endlessly vanish through concealed doorways that shine like mirrors and open onto the labyrinth” (Derrida, 1981, 158– 159). The pharmakon is a mysterious object that promises a cure endlessly deferred so as to become, in its movement back and forward, a poison. Derrida writes, prior to the above quotation, It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the king, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance . . . . But while, in the Philehus and the Protagoras, the pharmakon, because it is painful, seems bad whereas it is beneficial, here, in the Phaedrus as in the Timaeus it is passed off as a helpful remedy whereas it is in truth harmful. Bad ambiguity is thus opposed to good ambiguity, a deceitful intention to a mere appearance. Writing’s case is grave. (Derrida, 1981, 103) The pharmakon interrupts any fixed sense in meaning while—at the same time—bringing an ambiguity to bear that enables interpretation to unfold. Sabzian’s flowers, likewise, which he is to hand over to the family, yet which the freeze-frame impedes from actually happening as part of our viewing, plays a similar role. The flowers are the defining feature of the frozen-in-time image, the portrait as not mugshot, bringing the play between essence and appearance, fiction and non-fiction, to a shuddering halt. The flowers are indicative of a nature transferred into artifice, a real that has been pruned into a style, and therefore encapsulate the film itself as suspended between real and artifice. Flowers are, however, a symbol of a distinct universal reach, used practically in every culture as an expression of care, a gesture toward reconciliation, forgiveness, and love. Not only have flowers played a significant role in Western culture as cargos of meaning, from Shakespeare to Baudelaire and Wilde, from Van Gogh to Georgia O’Keefe, but they have also been used to explore everything from sexual life, gender, and the spectrum of emotions. Wilde famously attributed Christ the first to advocate living “flower-like lives” as an ethical remit, a phrase he borrowed from Shakespeare and returned to at various intervals in his prose.

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There is a certain Christlike demeanor to Sabzian as he appears in the freeze-frame that ends Close-Up. His pose, with his head bent toward the ground, as he holds the bunch of flowers in his hands, has that vulnerability, that pathos so distinct a feature of Christ’s crucifixion. And yet, it is the flowers that seem to decontextualize and universalize the emotions beyond any specific cultural context, compounding, as Beverley Seaton has noted in The Language of Flowers:  A History (1995), the belief that “flowers are a universal language,” transcending in their symbolic power cultural specificity and parochialism. In conclusion, then, we are able to ascertain that the freezing of the image at the end of Close-Up serves as an affective trope precisely because it nestles into that space occupied by the pharmakon where fiction and non-fiction enter into a relationship of aesthetic ambiguity, and the promise, itself a gesture that demands to be fulfilled while not fulfilled just yet, remains static, still. The flowers Sabzian holds in his hands stand in, in this sense, for the film itself. They are both artifice and real, or at least stylistically manufactured emblems of reality, that Sabzian holds on to—in this case representing the film that he is a part of—but they are also representative of the film the family have been given, the film that they were promised to be taking part in, which has, ironically, come to fruition around the case against Sabzian, which Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf have helped shape into a film. So the flowers are, at the end, emblematic of the coming together emphasized by the final freeze-frame image of the film’s antihero Sabzian; a figure who, Christlike in his demeanor, has drawn certain comparisons to Dostoevsky’s idiot, and who believes, qua Tolstoy, in the intrinsic relationship between suffering and art. This relationship is one that will become more concerted as an interest of Kiarostami in the films made in the aftermath of CloseUp. Known as the “Koker trilogy,” three of these are set in the northern territory of Koker, a region of the country devastated by an earthquake soon after Kiarostami completed the first film of the trilogy:  Where Is the Friend’s Home? This was shot in an area and township that was hit by the earthquake, leaving Kiarostami unsure as to whether those who had starred in the film, including the young boy who played the lead role, had been killed. The next two films emerged out of the concerns that were raised by this traumatic attempt to determine the lines where reality and fiction meet, in a further exploration of the negation of fiction by non-fiction, or what is designated—in this book—as nonfiction.

Real traumas/traumas of the real: The Koker trilogy Kiarostami, having stumbled upon the story of Close-Up, stumbled also into making a trilogy:  Where Is the Friend’s Home? Followed by Life and

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Nothing More . . . and then, finally Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994). The second and final film dealt with the impact of the earthquake on the Koker region in northern Iran where the first film was set and shot, with the second and third addressing the way this impacted on those who were involved in the shoot. Reality and fiction, again, dance together. Laura Mulvey looks into the structure of the trilogy of films from the perspective of trauma specifically. These films are structured like a trauma, she notes, in that each film demands retrospective reappraisal of its content after watching it; each film impacts anew with regard to the trauma it invariably alludes to. Mulvey makes explicit reference to Freud’s concept of the Nachträglichkeit, which is loosely translated as an “afterward-ness” to illustrate how the effects of trauma can be registered in the form of the story itself, as opposed to represented in it. This is also a way of adjudicating the affect of trauma in fiction. Mulvey also turns to Freud’s conceptualization as a way of probing how something can be experienced without any real sense of trauma, only to take on a traumatic resonance with the passing of time: in aftermath. The chicken and egg structure applicable to “found story” and film is reversed in the Koker trilogy, in that the found film comes first and the next film in the trilogy evolves from Kiarostami exploring the ramifications of the earthquake on the actors who helped make this first film. It is also of interest that Kiarostami’s ground-breaking documentary Homework was released at much the same time that he began Where Is the Friend’s Home? because the latter, the first of the trilogy, continued the homework theme in addressing a boy’s quest to return his friend’s homework journal to prevent him from getting in trouble. Although it is an undisputed Kiarostami masterwork, there is nothing particularly traumatic about the film that resonates with us. What is traumatic, however, is the earthquake that will come to inspire the next film, Life and Nothing More . . . and the way in which, as Mulvey points out, viewing this next film shapes our relationship to the previous one. Like a trauma that gradually creeps up on us, we experience the first differently only when having viewed the second and third: only when the trauma registers with us. “While the interaction of consciousness and the unconscious is not literally applicable in this case,” Mulvey writes, there is an allegorical relevance in the concept of Nachträglichkeit; Kiarostami’s return is not only to the memory of the previous film but also to the principles with which he made it. The shock of the earthquake is also a shock to his cinema and the return initiates a narrative aesthetic of repetition and of memory and its uncertainty. Fused with the uncertainty of memory is the uncertainty of cinema itself. It was out of this encounter with the ruined site of his earlier film and the devastated survivors of the earthquake that Kiarostami’s characteristic cinematic style developed, particularly the elongated tracking shots from a moving car. (Mulvey, 1998, 21)

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The earthquake has a shattering effect on Kiarostami’s investment in cinematic realism, his method of making films as such, as Mulvey points out, and impacts on his continuing interrogation of truth-telling within the boundaries of alternate yet intersecting regimes of truth. Just as Close-Up gave the director a chance to experiment with the documentary framework within the context of a film being made about a real event to explore the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of a found story, the trilogy gives him a further platform to explore the relationship between fiction and reality in the context of storytelling per se. This time, however, there is little concern with the different platforms that filmmaking can take, little direct reference to documentary and fiction as oppositional forms, and a more subtle attempt to interrogate the means through which “life”—which we might call, tentatively, “reality”—intersects, or rather, negates fiction to emerge as something estranged from it. I have been calling this process of negation, this canceling out of the fictional by reality, nonfiction, in that the category stands for experiments, the aim of which is to preserve the essential truth relationship, and for this reason feel that the Koker trilogy serves as an important reference point when seeking to expand upon the category itself. While there is a certain playfulness to Close-Up, a certain intensity that forms around the triad of director, subject, and spectator, as explored earlier, the Koker trilogy is a more deliberately subtle yet at the same time purposeful exploration of fiction when it comes under pressure from what is termed in psychoanalysis as the Real. That is to say, the final two films are an attempt to delineate the myriad ways in which the distinction between reality and fiction is upended when film confronts the Real. Or rather, to put this a little more succinctly, the final two films of the trilogy are a purposeful exploration of the negation or combustion of fiction in the face of the Real. Jacques Lacan famously distinguished between the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, defining the final category in the triad as that which interrupts and reorients the first two. Therefore, the Real, which Lacan believes reorients common sense understandings of reality, is essentially traumatic:  it is disruptive, often horrific, always transformative. It is transformative in the sense that it shatters and reconfigures the Symbolic on which language, or at least our relationship with the world through language, depends. For Lacan, the Real is like an ever-present force that interrupts like a volcano, or possibly even an earthquake, to unhinge and transform the symbolic as that which mediates “reality,” acts as a buffer zone between perception and reality. “Reality,” Louis Sass claims in an erudite Lacanian reading of 9/11, is the experience we have of the world as a knowable object, an object of awareness and one that, as such, seems to stand before but not really to contain the person who knows it. There is something about human consciousness, or possibly even the human capacity for self-consciousness,

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that makes it easy for many of us to forget that we are in-the-world, fleshly beings—not so much in the sense of being sensual creatures but in the sense of being potential objects and even prey for other, perhaps unfathomable points of view that may be lurking out of sight. This forgetting is an illusion to which all human beings—perhaps especially those who live in privileged circumstances—are prone. (Sass, 2003, 162) Sass is, of course, considering the triad, in particular the way in which reality is dependent on the shattering potential of the Real, even when the Real is that which reminds us that reality is always just a point of view, a perspective on things. Life and Nothing More . . . marks something of a turning point for Kiarostami. Now we find Kiarostami offering a considered exploration of the story with the full effect of reality, in that the earthquake that was damaging in its impact, destroying whole families, and acting almost like a genocide on the region, is more suitably understood as a manifestation of the Real: it alters, beyond recognition, the symbolic register of much of the region. Probably the best example of this alteration, and another illustration of the way in which we continually have to return to earlier instances of the trilogy as the symbolic register changes, concerns the appearance of Hossein in the house that will become the main site of the final film in the trilogy, Through the Olive Trees. In other words, each installment of the trilogy demands that we return to an earlier installment, return to events that become, in retrospect, crucial to understanding the world as knowable object, as Sass says. The earthquake, the interminable interruption of the Real, is a reminder that what has been passed is forgotten over the course of one film, gains another layer of meaning in the next. The symbolic, layers of signification around characters and events in the film, inclusive of which is the director—no doubt, an alter ego for Kiarostami in the final two films—is radically altered with the natural catastrophe of the earthquake: the Real. Farhad Kheramand, Kiarostami’s friend, plays the “director” who is traveling with his son, Puya (Buba Bayour), to Koker, and who is seeking to establish whether the actors of his film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? have survived the earthquake. Life and Nothing More . . . has been described as “docudrama” in numerous reviews of the films, but it is my claim here that it enacts a curious negation of the fictional, qualifying as a mode of nonfiction in the sense I am proposing in this book, in that it tries to establish, register even as affect, the way in which “reality” is shaped by its encounter with the Real. This is, of course, evidence of a now signature Kiarostami feature:  the moving car whose windows serve to frame, along with the driver who is tasked with framing reality, the world as it appears to him/her. Life and Nothing More . . . establishes this “form,” a form that comes to play an important role in two later masterpieces:  Taste of Cherry and Ten

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(Kiarostami, 2002), as a showcase for the relative safety of the passing gaze, as it surveys the rubble left behind by the earthquake. But just as Sass has spoken about the anamorphic “gap” that pertains to the picture, always likely to interrupt, and a marker of the “unfathomable points of view that might be lurking out of sight,” there is a marked uneasiness, a gap that has exploded in chaos outside the window. The film then, considered as a quest that involves assessing the consequences of this chaos, is a psychophilosophical attempt to harness the energy of those who survive:  the “life” referenced in the title of the film. All of this comes into focus in the aforementioned scene, when the director visits the “home” of Mr. Rudi, and he talks about having a temporary “home” again for the purposes of the film that he is now starring in:  the “home” is in fact a house used in the previous film that is here again because of the sequel. He then mentions—in something of a faux pas—that he is in fact homeless since the earthquake and that this “home” is a temporary reprieve. Laura Mulvey has pointed to this moment as indicative of a film enacting a “self-critique” of its own lofty pretensions to capture reality without distortion, while pointing to the breakdown between fiction and reality that has taken place between “before” and “after”: the simple negation of fiction by a Real that takes the form of a shattering earthquake. Yet the scene includes a short interview with Hossein, a character who is as yet unknown to us, but whose story will be told in the next film, Through the Olives Trees. Only on viewing the second and third film in succession is the nonchronological temporality of each revealed; or rather, the narrative “story” of the second is told after the narrative action of the third. In other words, the very issue we are left deliberating on at the end of Through the Olive Trees, in one of the most celebrated long shots of twentieth century cinema, is whether Tahereh has given her hand in marriage to Hossein. As Hossein chases Tahereh, who he has wooed for the most part in the film, the silhouette of both characters gets smaller and smaller on the landscape; the camera goes further and further away from the action. It seems that Hossein has asked Tahereh to marry him and, when she replies affirmatively, he runs back toward the village with elevated glee, but there is no way of being certain; although Life and Nothing More . . . offers clues. The clue, pace Mulvey, involves a retrospective return to an earlier scene of the trilogy, in a way that runs contra to the form of trauma, when a past moment haunts the present in the form of obsessional images that cannot be easily dismissed. In this form, only by returning to an earlier “cinematic” past can some possibility of catharsis be glimpsed. Hossein is married when he appears in Life and Nothing More . . . and speaks with a brash confidence about being a newlywed. He is in the process of acting in the film that we are watching, a process that forms the basis of the next film in the trilogy. The fact that he is now married alludes to a future tense “after” the moment when he runs with gusto in the concluding scene of Through the Olives

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Trees, creating a sort of temporal loop that encourages the spectator, in order to grasp the “truth” of the trilogy, to move back and forth between the “before” and “after.” It is only in moving back and forth in this way, through a strategy that counters trauma—and operates contra the Real of the earthquake—that the power of “life” in the face of disaster, that is the central concern of the trilogy, can be truly felt. This impulse to move into the cinematic past of the trilogy is not, as such, an impulse to move from the present, but an erstwhile recognition of the fluxes of “time”; reminding us of the distinction between fiction, reality, and Real, in the Lacanian sense afforded by Mulvey, and cinema as a medium that helps consolidate these distinctions. Kiarostami talked of wanting to avoid making a strict documentary on the disaster in the region along the lines of a filmic report, and to make a film not just the apotheosis of the report but one that could aspire to capture the truth of the tragedy poetically; what it reveals about human nature generally. As Alberto Elena has pointed out with some intuitiveness, the truth that the director seems to grasp only when visiting the region is felt—almost intuitively and without complexity—by his son Puya; once again children seem more in tune with the inimitable desiring processes of life than adults. Education is, from this perspective, an attempt, at least in certain aspects, to see through the eyes of the child. As Elena says, “Faced with the subduing experience of death and suffering, Puya’s childish focus is concentrated on life. And nothing more” (Elena, 2006, 96). Elena goes on to quote Puya when he meets a woman who has lost her daughter. When the woman tries to “represent” the earthquake as the will of God, as a way of explaining its traumatic impact to Puya, Puya is quick to put the emphasis back on to the earthquake itself; a moment that reads as a kind of indirect commentary on attempts to contain the Real so as to render its trauma a symbolic act. However, pushing against the desire to invest in the tragedy a symbolic meaning, to give some cause to its occurrence, Puya shifts the perspective, celebrating its transformative properties from an angle that doesn’t begin with the punitive. He says to the victimized woman, “The earthquake is like a mad dog, who attacks whoever is nearest while people who are further away escape. But your daughter was lucky because she was going to have to start school and now she won’t have to do all that homework.” Elena notes that the naivety of the comment masks the fact that Puya, far from angrily needing to apportion some cause to the earthquake that has a symbolic reach, accepts it for what it is:  a mad dog. All the properties of the earthquake are transformative, part of life, the same properties that reconfigure the symbolic entity we call “life”: in whatever shape or form. This is why the end of Through the Olives Trees is such a signature moment in the history of cinema: it encourages a return in time cinematically, which means moving forward chronologically, to navigate between fiction and the Real in light of the earthquake. Hossein’s perseverance in wooing Tahereh is

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the perseverance that comes to triumph in the face of disaster, but its chances of success are intricately related, enhanced even by the disaster itself. That is to say, the earthquake has helped unhinge the symbolic divisions that pertain to the classes, loosening up boundaries and laying the conditions for the illiterate Hossein to marry the more well-to-do Tahereh. It is important to note that Life and Nothing More . . . and Through the Olives Trees end in long shots that reduce the protagonists to dots on the landscape, shots that are defined by the depth of field that, as André Bazin, has noted, “affects the relationships of the minds of the spectators to the image, and in consequence it influences the interpretation of the spectacle,” bringing the spectator into “a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality” (Bazin, 2005, 35). Bazin goes on to discuss the enhanced ambiguity of an image in long shot, and it is certainly the ambiguity around the end of Through the Olives Trees that lends it its iconic status. However, as Mulvey has shown, the ambiguity in question can be alleviated to some degree by the decision to return to a sequence “before” or, in the case of Through the Olive Trees, the “before” the spectator must intuit ex post facto that is really, paradoxically, “after.” Through the Olive Trees ends with marriage proposal, and although the answer of whether it is accepted or not is left open, it becomes apparent—retrospectively—that Hossein’s appearance in Life and Nothing More . . . is from a time “after” the time that ends Through the Olive Trees. This temporal incongruity, as I  have mentioned, is the cathartic reserve when, unlike a trauma sufferer haunted by an image whose meaning interrupts the symbolic register, the spectator of the trilogy is encouraged to return to the cinematic past to gather a meaning that can be considered stable, and thus assess the changes to the symbolic that have resulted from trauma. It is in returning to the cinematic “past” that some sense of catharsis can be attained in the present. This is a catharsis Kiarostami is himself subject to, when turning the camera upon himself in the second part of the trilogy in the form of an alter ego film director faced with trying to acclimatize, and become accustomed to the sublime terror of the Real. It is therefore correct to assert that Kiarostami’s aesthetic concerns are altered in the aftermath of Close-Up, whether in exploring “truth” in cinematic terms without losing the urgency and realism of the documentary form, or in turning away from the vicissitudes of a “found story” that deals with the imaginary symbolic of cinema as it impacts and transforms the real world. Instead, the process now begins with fiction, a feature-length film set in a northern Iranian town, and addresses how that film and its characters are transformed on a symbolic level by the director’s encounter with an outside, a real that changes the symbolic coordinates of life. There is a kind of aesthetic tension built into confronting the trauma of the earthquake that can be said to echo the trauma that Kiarostami traverses between fiction and documentary while he is turning to the cinematic as a way of grasping

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something specific to film when it brushes against the Real. Again, like Close-Up, cinema itself comes to the rescue. Technically, we cannot call these films, especially the last two, documentaries. Nor can we comfortably describe them as docudrama, or non-fiction as many have done. Rather, as Elena says of Through the Olive Trees, and he is supported in his claims by numerous commentaries on the film, the film is deliberately situated in terrain that can be qualified neither as fiction or documentary, a tapestry or palimpsest that skirts along the surface of each model of film in order to incite the audience into imaginative conjecture; the kind of speculative inquiry through which, I want to suggest, in the next section, the two figures on the landscape, the two quintessential “characters” of Through the Olive Trees can be interpreted as metaphors for the speculative and knowledge-based impulses attributed to fiction-based and nonfiction-based film respectively; with the marriage a marker of a potential “union.”

The marriage of fiction and non-fiction We are now positioned to view Through the Olive Trees as a story, a compendium of the fictional and non-fictional, which doubles as a commentary on the possible union or marriage of fiction and nonfiction when presented as vehicles of cinematic storytelling. The view of documentary as “discourse of sobriety” is well-established, at least among scholars of the documentary film, or at least those concerned with film that deals with the actual or real. In gender terms documentary has a pejoratively masculine identity, especially when cast against its erstwhile effeminate other: fiction. Much attention has been focused in recent years, by established scholars of documentary film such as Michael Renov and Bill Nichols, on the potential ways “desire,” or “love” as Renov calls it, can be inscribed in documentary studies, so that the discourse can benefit from the same theoretical revolution that has befitted Film Studies more generally, at least since the 70s.4 I take Renov’s call for love to mean, not just that documentary benefits from being given the same level of theoretical scrutiny—from psychoanalysis to cognitive film studies—applied to fictionbased film, but that its overtly “sober” address can be loosened by doing so. Without needing to sketch out the parameters of this debate in its full extension, it is enough to say that documentary, through its association with public address and information-based study, has assumed a spurious “public” and thereby masculine address. Belinda Smail introduces her book The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010) (a book that doesn’t as such reject the sobriety accredited to the documentary sphere, but explores the emotions that come out of the sober experience) with a direct reference to this “discourse of sobriety,” and suggests,

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Documentary’s discourse of sobriety can easily be regarded as promoting the educative and the rational, and downplaying the experiential and the subjective. This characterisation presents a hierarchy that privileges knowledge while disavowing the importance of the emotions. The discourses of sobriety, as Nichols identifies them, include “science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion, welfare” (Representing, 3)  [Nichols,  1991] and other such institutions that represent instrumental power. It is significant that discourses are aligned with another rationalist product of modernity: the public sphere. (Smail, 2010, 4–5) Assuming emotions are divorced from the aspirations of sober impulses, and the suppression of emotion is a marker of sobriety and a way of being in the world, we can then acknowledge the point made by Smail in the text about documentary as a mode of film tied to the public sphere. As such, there is a certain gendering that pertains to the long-standing gendering of private and public domains when seen to express more fundamental ontological divisions: the differences between male and female. There is no need to rehearse these arguments, or confirm them as true or false, but there is a need to draw from them when exploring Kiarostami’s weaving of forms in the trilogy. I’m interested in the story of Through the Olive Trees in the context of Hossein and Tahereh: one set as the public face of sobriety, the other, the feminine pole that has come to represent the passive seductress, or at least aligned with this. Drawing on these theoretical distinctions, or at least teasing them out, the marriage, or the potential “union” of Hossein and Tahereh can be said to analogize the potential union of fiction and documentary in the face of the traumatic earthquake. Hossein, who has an air of conviction in the film, someone who knows what he wants, “represents,” in this schema, the documentary pole—he is male, clear about his purpose:  there is little ambiguity in his conviction that he is in love and wants to marry. Tahereh, by contrast, doesn’t speak and is able to communicate only through affective gesture—as any obvious response to the advances of her male pursuer qualify as sinful—is enigmatic, mysterious, and difficult to “know” as such. She “represents” the fictional pole precisely because of her mysteriousness and affective allure. Faced with the uncertainty of her position vis-a-vis Hossein’s advances, the spectator is, like Hossein and the film director, encouraged to speculate. Some relief, some “clue” to what Tahereh feels and desires can, as argued above, be gathered from “returning” to the “after” of the previous film; when we are afforded an intermittent glimpse into the future. Hossein speaks of his happiness in having married, and we can speculate without absolute certainty that he has married the mysterious Tahereh at this point in “time.” The appearance of Hossein at the base of the ladder, which plays such a significant role in Through the Olive Trees,

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is a time image in the Blochian sense, an image that exists both in the cinematic present—a moment that adds meaning to the quest undertaken by the director amid the rubble and ruin of the earthquake—and one that acquires meaning, crystallizes as such, after Through the Olive Trees: when the potential “union” of Hossein and Tahereh, doubling as representatives of the twin poles of the cinematic—documentary and fiction—is brought into play. Of course, this “union” can never be clarified as having materialized in the sense of a conclusive end point particular to the traditions of the cinematic “love story,” whether in East or West, and so the film remains to be understood as a universal story of desire. Hossein’s and Tahereh’s desire to be together, reasoned as such by Hossein in some of the most direct interpersonal scenes in the Kiarostami oeuvre, is indicative, representative even of Kiarostami’s attempt to marry the two poles of his own cinematic endeavor:  the documentary, of which Homework is a high-water mark, and fiction, of which Where Is the Friend’s Home? is the following accompaniment, poles that are played off when confronted with the irrational trauma of the earthquake. For it is—in my reckoning— within reason to read the trilogy as an exercise in widening the possibilities of the cinematic medium, when the medium itself is concerned with such immeasurable trauma. Hossein and Tahereh are both survivors of the earthquake, but they are not victims as such. Their potential union stands for the possibilities afforded by it. Whether we call these films fiction or documentary, docudrama or nonfiction, the important point is that they are exploring the manifest responses afforded the art of cinema when trying to assess the implications of trauma on such a large scale. I have called this a “cinema of nonfiction” precisely because I see the integral issue to be that of a real confronted and held in suspense by fiction, bringing a deconstructive energy into play that manifests as an aesthetic tension in the work itself. The marriage of fiction and documentary, I have tried to illustrate in this section, takes the form of a potential marriage that has, rather paradoxically, already happened. “Time” exists in a perpetual state of unbecoming, analogous to the impact of the Real. The marriage or potential union of Hossein and Tahereh, masculine and feminine embodiment of the documentary and fictional impulse, can, as I  have argued here, be read as a subliminal expression of Kiarostami’s desire to enact a “cinema of nonfiction” to respond to life’s traumas without sensationalizing them or simply fictionalizing their impact. Only in this sense can we find the continuity between the aesthetic concerns heralded by Close-Up, which purposively subverts the ethics of filmmaking to illustrate the ethical bond between subject and filmmaker, making something in the process that doesn’t fit neatly in one category or the other, and the three films made in and around Koker. The final two films in this trilogy, which I have focused on in this section, tell the story, put simply, of life triumphing

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in the face of death. Both end in the guise of a Persian miniature, with the protagonists seen in long shot, cast by the director as silhouettes moving silently on the landscape. In Life and Nothing More . . ., the triumph of desire as a process without finality, in the face of finitude, is captured in the image of an old battered car gradually making it up a hill. The car is ushered forth by its driver, breaks down, and is then ushered forth again, proving victorious in one sense, while at the same time fixated on the task of traveling over hills we, the spectators, can only imagine to be present in this next frame. Would it be wrong here to call the hills the hard kernel of reality? That materiality which all film, in whatever form it takes, must grapple with? And then the car a metaphor for the filmmaking exercise itself, with its stutters and starts, yet “driven” somehow by that intangible force propelling onward, and in the face of death:  desire. Desire, as opposed to love, which we can sense but never know, becomes, apropos of the trilogy’s concern with tragedy, the definitive concern of Through the Olive Trees. Desire, that which manifests in language and the constant descriptions of a world as something that we can know and understand, is celebrated, above and beyond, a union between two characters we can never be sure materializes, and who, as mentioned above, take the metaphorical form of documentary and fiction.

Notes 1 This is a line from the Oasis song “Rock n Roll Star” from their debut album Definitely Maybe. The song was written before Oasis had achieved any significant level of fame and is therefore an interesting reflection on Sabzian’s desire to “make it” as such. 2 Kracauer writes “The term ‘found story’ covers all stories found in the material of actual physical reality. When you have watched for long enough the surface of a river or a lake you will detect certain patterns in the water which may have been produced by a breeze or some eddy. Found stories are in the nature of such patterns. Being discovered rather than contrived, they are inseparable from films animated by documentary intentions. Accordingly, they come closest to satisfying the demand for the story which ‘re-emerges within the womb of the non-story film’ ” (Kracauer, 1997, 245–246). 3 The title of this section is a pun on Talking Heads’ song “(Nothing but) Flowers” from their album Naked (1988). The song is generally thought to be a critique of late capitalist materialism. 4 As part of the research process for writing this book, I attended a number of Visible Evidence conferences (Delhi in 2014 and Toronto in 2015), a now global enterprise that is also conceivably the biggest international academic conference on documentary in the world. In Delhi, Michael Renov gave an introductory lecture, speaking about the lack of theorization around the twin poles of desire and love within present-day documentary studies. I left

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a little confused, largely because I had come to resent theory being tagged on to so many disciplines within the humanities and was trying to escape those avenues of academic research overburdened by theoretical focus. And yet, it is somewhat ironic that the “love” Renov speaks of might well have made its way into this book. Love might well be another phrase that is used for the kind of collaborative interaction between director and self as modèle in the new nonfiction film.

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5 After Kiarostami: Cinemas of (speculative) nonfiction

On Monday, July 4, 2016, word filtered through that Abbas Kiarostami had died in Paris at the age of seventy-six. At the time, the contours of this chapter were in the process of being sketched out. My main concern was to examine films that come after the more than significant contribution of a master. I  was thinking of Kiarostami in this regard, as a master in the traditional sense of the term. And I was wondering what trace of that mastery could be discerned in a legacy of cinematic adventure that enters a dialogue, as opposed to being simply influenced by, the master in question. What happens to film in the aftermath of an event when the event is designated by a name “Abbas Kiarostami?” The irony is not lost on me, however, when asking this, because what happens in the “aftermath” of tragedy is a question Kiarostami himself pays significant concern to, particularly in the Koker trilogy and Life, and Nothing More . . .. The quest undertaken by father and son in Life and Nothing More . . . is to locate the children who acted in Where Is the Friend’s Home in the aftermath of the earthquake that has shattered the region, taking something of a backseat (an interesting analogy considering not just the central importance the car takes in the film but also its subsequent importance in the formulation of the Kiarostami aesthetic thereafter) to the philosophically oriented issue of what happens to survivors of such trauma in more general terms? There is a “before” and “after” with every earth-shattering event, and this, arguably, is the point of concern of the trilogy as a whole. “After” is therefore a word of significant interest to scholars, not only because Kiarostami films are bound up with the question of “what comes after?” but

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FIGURE 5.1 Silence: Eoghan visits Mullaghmore mountain in Co. Clare, one of the first sites he visits in the quest to record silence

also because the cinematic event signaled by the name “Abbas Kiarostami” generates particular questions pertaining to the cinematic medium as a vehicle of the aesthetic: “Where are we after Kiarostami?” The aim for this chapter is to conjure some answers to these questions (one which would overdetermine the answer to the rest) in and around the terms of discussion that has henceforth dominated this study. I  want to assess the value of a film released in 2012 by Irish filmmaker, documentarian Pat Collins, called, somewhat allusively, Silence within the framework developed thus far. Silence has received numerous awards in Ireland, has been critically acclaimed internationally, although, as a part of an emerging experimental cinema, the film went somewhat under the critical radar. I use “explore” here because, as the title of the chapter indicates, I’m interested in evaluating the film’s status as “work”—in a Heideggerean sense—that draws its intrinsic energy from the Kiarostami canon. I want to explore the art of the new nonfiction film in the context of a coming after Kiarostami. This concern tallies with many of the investigative turns in the book thus far, and does so most specifically with regard to the treatment called—in an earlier chapter—the speculative treatment of subjectivity (specific to the cinema of nonfiction). I am interested, therefore, in Silence as a kind of “event” in the world of cinema: a film that contributes—in no small measure—to the cinema of nonfiction proposed in this book.

Cinema of trauma Pat Collins’s status as one of Ireland’s leading contemporary filmmakers was reinforced when a retrospective of his back catalogue (which also served as a celebration of his contribution to Irish film) was held at the

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Irish Film Institute in June 2012, coinciding with the release of Silence. The retrospective, titled “Poetic Truths: The Cinema of Pat Collins,” is a nod to the idea that Collins’s documentaries are intrinsically poetic in form: in line with what Bill Nichols calls the poetic mode. I first encountered Collins’s documentary work when fortunate enough to stumble across Gabriel Byrne: Stories of Home (Collins, 2008), a film chronicling a year in the life of the internationally acclaimed actor, on Irish television. I  found myself taken with the work in a manner I rarely associated with documentary as a medium. I remember texting my mother, who happened also to be watching the documentary that evening, as tears streamed down my face—such was the impact it had on me personally. It is not surprising then that the IFI would celebrate Collins’s films given his ability to penetrate the inner world of the subjects he makes films about, offering intimate portraits that suggests a treatment that is, put bluntly, poetic in its intimate subtlety. As I became more familiar with Collins’s work, his ability to probe what lies “under the skin,” so to speak, became clearer to me. All of the films in the retrospective are documentaries of a sort, and many take Irish life, whether in the form of threatened rural communities or the cultural figures that have helped shape and sustain them, as subjects. From Tim Robinson: Connemara (Collins, 2011), a wonderfully serene and elegiac portrait of the writer and artist, and a celebration of his unwavering commitment to a threatened landscape and region, to Oileán Thoraí (Collins, 2001), a film about the evacuation of one of Ireland’s most culturally rich islands off the northwest coast, the films are rooted in modern Ireland. In effect, Ireland is a cipher for concerns that are perhaps better described as universal. As noted in the press release for the retrospective, Collins’s films can be confronted as particularly astute engagements with subjects marked by a certain poetic authenticity— not quite as eccentric as those in certain Herzog films—and the Irish landscape, but also, as in the two aforementioned films, the intersection of both issues accordingly. It is worth noting that Collins codirected a documentary about Kiarostami, much of which is based on interviews with the Iranian director when he visited the Aran Islands, the setting for Robert Flaherty’s masterpiece of ethnographic filmmaking: Man of Aran. One of a handful of documentaries made about Kiarostami (and that the artist agreed to collaborate on), Kiarostami: The Art of Living (Collins and Daly, 2002)  is a critical introduction to the Iranian filmmaker for Western audiences that probes the relationship between art and life (such an important issue in the Kiarostami canon). Kiarostami’s visit to Aran (an island off the west coast of Ireland that involves significant travel to visit), where interviews were conducted, is significant also. It is significant not just because the island is the setting for one of the most important ethnographic studies in the cinema’s history, but also because it raises concerns to this day about “staging”—which amounts to fictionalizing—in documentary. In fact, it could be said that Man of Aran helped establish non-fiction filmmaking

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FIGURE 5.2 Silence: Maps are used throughout the film as a directive for what has to be done in recording silence across the island of Ireland

historically while at the same time destabilizing the foundation it helps establish. That is, the film is a landmark, in that it takes as its setting a “land” that is unique in heritage and language, while helping to problematize the role of film in the archiving of threatened ways of life. As Richard Meran Barsam has noted in Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History, While scenes like this (Meran Barsam is referring to the finale) give Man of Aran a powerful poetic realism, they do not entirely compensate for the film’s shortcomings in narrative, soundtrack and music. Flaherty’s decision to combine elements of fiction with fact by staging the shark hunt and the potato planting typifies a basic yet flawed aspect of his narrative style. As in Moana, by reviving disused customs and by ignoring all but the mythic elements of island life, Flaherty created an incomplete and perhaps invalid picture of that life. (Meran Barsam, 1992, 140) The “staging” in question is no trivial altering of the facts of island life but a romanticization of certain island customs that hadn’t been practiced for almost a hundred years before being revived by Flaherty himself. Flaherty presented Man of Aran as an ethnographic study of the island. Paul Rotha, among others, would accuse him of sentimentalizing, as opposed to documenting, the material reality of the island. Rotha asks that we “realize, at the same time, within the sphere of documentary, that his (Flaherty’s) understanding of actuality is a sentimental reaction towards the past” (Rotha, in Petrie and Kruger, 1999, 150). For Rotha, poetic sentiment trumps social analysis and truth in the film. Any other critical position would involve assessing Flaherty’s filmmaking approach to the culture of the island as one that offers a kind of resistance to instrumental modernity. Contact with nature, such an important concern of Flaherty in his films,

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is staged only when staging is an untruthful intervention, a staging that manufactures a way of life that is alien to those who live on the island. We can argue, therefore, that Flaherty takes it upon himself to revive dying island customs, before then filming the customs once being revived by him. While such an intervention would appear to invalidate an ethnographic study dependent on the ethnographer as an observer with little or no contact with the community of concern, it raises interesting questions about what it means to film reality as such or, to put it another way, what it means to be an independent observer at all, without contact as such. Issues around staging, fictional intervention that deviates from the material conditions of a community as they exist when a filmmaker makes initial contact regarding, specifically, what Rotha calls actuality film, has been given fresh impetus in recent years with the publication of Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by celebrated Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris’s text is a brilliant deconstruction of the staging/reality opposition that has so infused debates about canonical photographs from twentieth-century life, most notably Roger Fenton’s Shadow on the Valley of Death—the now iconic image of the Crimean War that stands as a landmark of war photography—and its preoccupation with the evaluation of intentionality that plagues this form of analysis. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the ethical preoccupation with intention around staging is a central concern of Kiarostami, particularly in Close-Up. It is, no doubt, a reason Kiarostami felt such an affinity with Flaherty, and why he took up the offer to visit Aran where he was interviewed in Ireland. Collins and Daly’s film about this visit is subtitled, it is worth noting, “The Art of Living,” conflating “art” and “life” like many of Kiarostami’s and Flaherty’s films. The subtitle is also a recognition of the Foucauldian concern with cultivating life so that it becomes a work of art or, put another way, the making of life, and nothing more, the subject of artistic production.1 It is also worth noting that Kiarostami visited Ireland in 2001, when the country was in the throes of an unprecedented economic boom, and the state was changing radically in the face of financial investment never before seen in the country. Much of Collins’s output as a documentary filmmaker around this time can be viewed as an attempt to gauge the temperature of the country, and to track the “losses” as well as the “gains.” There is no better example of this than the incredible homage to one of Ireland’s most threatened island communities off the coast of Donegal, Oileán Thoraí. This is a film that, in documenting the threats to such a culturally vibrant way of life, forms part of a tradition of films about islands on the periphery of Europe from Flaherty to Bergman (who ventured into documentary to champion the way of life of his beloved Fårö). Oileán Thoraí illustrates that which is unique to Collins’s work as a whole: the use of film, a modern technology in itself, to grasp modes of being whose very authenticity, often

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defined by their closeness to the land, is threatened by modernity itself: the twentieth-century movement that saw the birth of documentary. Tim Robinson:  Connemara is a portrait of an English writer and artist who has dedicated his life to a protected region on the western seaboard, and who, in addition to writing a series of encyclopedic studies of Connemara as a region, has been making maps of the region from surveying its minute corners on foot. Robinson’s maps are personal etchings of the landscape, marked by an authenticity built on his own wanderings in and personal connections to the land. When these are coupled with less information-based documentaries (that eschew voice-over, interviews, or dialogue per se) such as Pilgrim and Fathom (directed by Collins’s partner Sharon Whooley as part of the Harvest Films Productions), a body of work emerges through which the possibilities unique to film as a medium for preserving the relationship between land, place, and memory emerge. Fathom in particular is a short film that integrates archival footage with live action and, like many of the more mainstream documentaries directed by Collins since the turn of the century, has a clear aesthetic sensibility. Fathom is a work that harks back in time using archival footage in something of a post-romantic capacity. It is important not to overlook Collins’s concern, not unlike Kiarostami who speaks about the importance of Iran and the Iranian landscape to his filmmaking—in some facet or other—with the idea of Ireland: what it means “to be” in an age of such rapid sociocultural change. We should therefore note, from the outset, that Collins is one of Ireland’s few filmmakers to respond to both the economic boom and recession. On a scale of human suffering it would be difficult to compare the earthquake in Iran with the downturn that impacted upon the Irish economy in and around 2008 but the recession itself nonetheless took the form of a national trauma, with ghost estates littered all around the country and the near collapse of the banking system. In addition, emigration was forced upon young people again for the first time in decades. The concept of “home,” intensified during the upturn and amplified by the housing boom swirling out of control, became, once again, an issue of contention. The Freudian distinction between “house” and “home,” on which the unheimlich (uncanny) rests, is nowhere more evident than in the abandoned housing estates across the Irish landscape, their eerie presence a marker of the sudden end to capitalist investment. Given that the Irish obsession with “houses” is rooted in having to leave home, a symptom of colonization, it is perhaps an effect of the boom that dearly held ideas of home were disrupted in a larger socioeconomic context. Something similar can be said to happen with regard to Iran and the earthquake that so affected Kiarostami. The earthquake occurred in the aftermath of Kiarostami directing a film whose plot concerns a young child searching for a friend’s home so he can return his schoolbooks. The earthquake caused mass destruction of property, whole townships, and its death tolls ripped through families in a way that made little or no

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distinction in social class. Kiarostami talks about the impact this had on him, and how the trauma of the event was something he wanted to confront using the cinematic apparently; his feeling that documentary could merely skim along the surface of the event in its capacity to rearrange the symbolic edifice on which “reality” finds its bearing. In other words, Kiarostami, faced with the interminable “shock” of the earthquake, turned to cinema as a method of exploration for the symptoms that accrue in the aftermath of shock: the aftershock as such, when the real consequences of the event are processed in symbolic terms. It was at this time, during which Ireland was coming to terms with the shock of the recession, many people in a state of aftershock having lost their newly acquired homes, that Collins made his first feature-length film, Silence.

Trauma and speculative nonfiction The narrative premise to Silence is a relatively simple one: Eoghan, a Donegal native, living in Berlin, is offered the opportunity to travel back to Ireland to undertake a sound recording commission based on capturing natural sound free of man’s interruption. The task involves traveling to specifically designated sites where field recording can be undertaken without human interference. This affords Eoghan the opportunity to visit some of Ireland’s most celebrated landmarks, from Mullaghmore in the Burren region of Co. Clare to Inis Boffin off the west coast of Co. Galway, and finally home to Tory, in a cathartic reengagement with his own past. The film ends with Eoghan visiting an uninhabited, derelict house on the outskirts of the village of Tory, the suggestion being that he was part of a community who were forced to flee the island when rehoused on the mainland, as the past echoes in the present, and an intrinsic “loss” of which we can only surmise is felt. In the final scene, Eoghan retreats to an upstairs bedroom, looks out the window into the land, and then returns to sit on the bed alone. The window, set out as a frame within the frame (not just in this scene but throughout), has symbolic purpose, as if to equate the very idea of framing with the search for knowledge. In an earlier article on Silence that took the “frame” as metaphor for knowledge accumulation designed to contain trauma, and “framing” as a filmic strategy that contains characters by giving them context, I proposed that the most suitable way of approaching the film is to read it as an allegory on the impact of recession on Ireland; Eoghan’s struggle being an allegory for Ireland’s struggle to make peace with its own contradictions. This article, in hindsight at least, now appears a little naïve, uneasy in the base of a conviction that the film should be interpreted as a reworking of the famous distinction made by Ludwig Wittgenstein between what can be expressed in propositions and what can be shown (his famous picture

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theory). Wittgenstein wrote to Bertrand Russell in the summer of 1918 to clarify his position with regard to this concept. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions— i.e. by language—(and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy. (Wittgenstein, 1978, 71) Much has been written about this position in the intervening years, but it is the ethical implications of silence that Wittgenstein confronts, and silence as an ethical position that concerned me when writing this article. Wittgenstein writes in the preface to the Tractatus, The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. (Wittgenstein, 1974, 3) It is the second part of the sentence that forms the basis of the infamous conclusion to the text “whereof which we cannot speak, therefore one must remain silent” (Wittgenstein, 1974, 189) on which, in the article mentioned above, I observed the following, While certainly a teasing way to end a major philosophical work, a body of criticism has taken the proposition to be a tautology, a nonsensical end to an at times nonsensical text. Others, alternatively, have noted a dismissal of philosophy’s capacity to solve anything of note. Yet, while some are skeptical of the true worth of Wittgenstein’s claims in ethical terms, there are those who find in the proposition something of a definitively ethical nature. Staying silent on what must not be spoken of, is, for these critics, a distinctly ethical stance. (Waldron, 2014, 207) By focusing in on Wittgenstein’s position vis-a-vis “silence” in the Tractatus, I was really attempting to relay the affinity between the position he holds with the moral position Eoghan perceivably holds in Silence:  Eoghan is confronting a trauma associated with the island, with having to flee his home as a consequence of “modernity.” But I  also claim that the final image of the film implies that Eoghan accepts what he cannot talk about, while the image positions the spectator so as to register the affect of this. There is a double movement relating to what is happening through him— prompting us to sense and feel the distinction between the shown and the said—and what is happening in the film: Eoghan’s journey home. But this journey back is affecting not because it involves an explanation as such, or a theory, or anything of that sort. On the contrary, it affects in making

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FIGURE 5.3 The Wind Will Carry Us: Behzad takes a number of photographs of the village women before he leaves, signifying the change that has occurred in him

us privy to the countless explanations of “silence” over the duration of the film, none of which seems to accord with Eoghan’s experience of it during his travels. Instead, the journey home involves a registering of the affect of trauma physically: an acceptance that certain things can be intimately felt but cannot—at the same time—be expressed in language. The Wind Will Carry Us affords us a similar state of acceptance. There is a degree of subtlety, irony even in how the film edges us toward the ethical visa-vis a film dealing with the instrumentalizing gaze of film. Behzad’s frenzy in trying to capture the traditional funeral rites on camera subsides when he acclimatizes to the rhythm of life around him, and his focus is oriented away from the elderly woman’s imminent death. Only when he “wakes up” is his attention shifted away from the instrumental to the poetic. Eoghan’s focus, similarly, is oriented away from the intrumentalizing gaze that attempts to capture nature (characterized by the field recordings he makes along Ireland’s landmarks). This sense of moving “away” takes the form of an ethical “silence”; a stance taken by Eoghan in relation to nature. It is a way of dealing with the world in its modern instantiation. Silence, considered as the absence of human intervention or sound, is to be understood now as the ethical position regarding the evacuation of home. Therefore, it is not that Eoghan becomes more knowledgeable returning home, but rather—au contraire—his silence illustrates his understanding of knowledge limits. Kiarostami’s text Lessons with Kiarostami (2015) is a series of “lessons” given by the director over the years taking the form of master classes. It is one of a few texts where the director deliberates on his feelings toward the documentary/fiction distinction. “A documentary,” Kiarostami insists,

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as I understand the word, is a film made by someone who doesn’t intrude a single inch into what he is witness to. He merely records. A  true documentary doesn’t exist because reality isn’t a sufficient foundation on which to construct an entire film. Filmmaking always involves some element of reinvention. (Kiarostami 2015, 6) He then claims, complicating the matter, that Life and Nothing More . . . is both a documentary and a work of fiction at the same time. I have called the “element of reinvention” characterized as Kiarostamiesque thus far, the “speculative treatment of subjectivity” earlier in the book; a position that takes its cue from a position of skepticism directed at the observational tradition of documentary film. This observation is based on the assumption made by Kiarostami that filmmaking, by definition, intervenes in the world it purports to record. He implies the claim to “record reality” without intervention is an exercise in cynicism. The cinema of nonfiction I  have proposed as a category of aesthetic understanding in this book can be seen as a response to such cynicism, taking as its calling card friendship (call it solidarity even) with the film subject, who is then involved in the creative act of making the film. This particular ploy has been uncovered in a large percentage of the films discussed in the book, from Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea, Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May, (to a degree) John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project (I make the somewhat contentious claim that the title emphasis on “project” is a concern with future temporality that gives the film its aesthetic quality, and that the film should be experienced as an art project concerning the future) and of course—in a classic instantiation of what I call “nonfiction”—Close-Up. Silence—made along the lines of a coauthoring similar in its execution to these aforementioned works—can be said to come “after Kiarostami” in that it draws on certain stylistic features that have become—almost by nature of their singularity—characteristic features of Kiarostami films:  a male protagonist played by a nonprofessional actor, long extended journeys by car into the surrounding landscape, a quest that reduces in importance in the face of a trauma of the Real. In other words, the quest is a veneer and a mechanism that must, by nature of exposition, lift. The male protagonist, or film subject—depending on how the film is received—is Eoghan, played by Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, who is also a cowriter of the script along with Collins and Sharon Whooley. Mac Giolla Bhríde is an Irish language poet who comes from Gweedore in Co. Donegal, the county “Eoghan” returns to at the end of Silence, and the place his native tongue is spoken for the first time in the film. He is also a trained engineer, like “Eoghan” the sound recordist who he plays in the film. And to complicate things even further, Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde has worked previously with Collins, most notably on the documentary about the island of Tory, Oileán Thoraí, which

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documents the pressures on island life, and which serves as the destination, the “home” that Eoghan is lured back to in the course of his visit. Those familiar with Mac Giolla Bhríde’s (as a writer in the Irish language who hails from Donegal) previous work with Collins will be aware that he is playing the role of “Eoghan.” Mac Giolla Bhríde, however, also coauthored the script. Here, the pressure of “real life,” the subject of biography, the subsidiaries of documentary film that portray or divulge the subject as subject, the portrait film, the cine-portrait, is brought to bear on this role. Like Jake in Two Years at Sea, Eoghan is effectively “Eoghan.” The pressing issue, however much we try to suspend our knowledge of this, of “is this real?” is perhaps less relevant to a more pertinent reworking of the same question to ask, “How real is this?” The latter reworked question is more in keeping with Kiarostami’s view of intervention as a principle of all filmmaking. So, when we ask whether Eoghan is playing himself, or whether—alternatively—he is performing the role of “Eoghan,” we should be mindful that this isn’t an either or discussion. A more appropriate question, more consistent with the assertion that the “cinema of nonfiction” involves the speculative treatment of subjectivity in this book, and that cannot be contained under the umbrella of “fiction” or “non-fiction,” is, to what extent is the real negated by fiction? And why is it so important that aspects of the “real” are held on to when casting Eoghan as “Eoghan?” Thomas Waugh subtitles his collected essays on documentary film The Right to Play Oneself with Looking Back on Documentary Film (2011), and takes the “right to play oneself”—with its discursive attribution of rights to the realm of performance—as something particular to the “documentary universe;”  a term Waugh himself returns to in his introduction. Not only is the expression “to perform as oneself” philosophical qua ontological when invested in the performative gesture, but it’s implicit association with documentary relegates a whole canon of films—like many of those discussed in this book—to a critical wilderness, not quite documentary, but not quite fiction; not quite docudrama, but not quite drama either. Stella Bruzzi goes so far as to suggest that documentaries are best understood as performative modes generally, when being is posited as a performative mode as such. To play oneself, in this sense, is no different to playing another person. “The pact between documentary, reality and spectator,” Bruzzi asserts, “is far more straightforward than . . . theorists make out:  . . . a documentary will never be reality nor will it erase or invalidate that reality by being representational” (Bruzzi, 2000, 4). Filmmakers who assume the real is understood as performative are already working against the cynicism of an industry that promotes documentary as an unqualified access to the real. In the same text, then, Bruzzi heralds new documentary forms. “Conversely,” she notes, “the new performative documentaries herald a different notion of documentary ‘truth’ that acknowledges the construction and artificiality of even the non-fiction film” (Bruzzi, 2000, 154).

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A recurring line of inquiry in this book has been to consider the straightforwardness of any considered pact between documentary, reality, and spectator, thus exploring the mode of performative enactments undertaken by artists and filmmakers who challenge the distinctions between documentary, fiction, and non-fiction. Chapter 1 focuses on “new nonfiction” as a speculative category helpful for considering cinematic productions that involve the cultivation of a pact between subject and director based on the imagination:  conjecturing as to what the subject would or might do that arises from the director’s knowledge of the subject in question. A criterion for the production of such films was considered to be friendship or collaborative engagement that intentionally went beyond, possibly even transgressed the principles attached to observational film. I made reference to the emergence of a movement in continental philosophy known as “speculative realism” that gathered traction around the same time that many of the films under discussion—particularly those of Rivers and Russell—were produced. Whether or not this turn offers a credible alternative to dominant discourses in Film Studies, it has ignited interest in new arenas of film. I want to argue in the remainder of this chapter that Silence can be viewed as another instantiation of a “speculative nonfiction” that employs real people in model environments that aren’t—in essence—fictional, but rather concrete realizations of speculative projection; of what would, or possibly even could, materialize under certain conditions or under certain model conditions. Speculative nonfiction involves a way of working with subjects that can be deemed collaborative, and speculative, but speculative in that it is based on a kind of pact between director and subject that involves the construction of model environments, as opposed to film sets. Just as Jake and Ben Rivers enter into a pact, around which the speculative understanding of the subject as modèle is set out in post-Bressonian terms, making the subject a cipher, a blank page, the casting of Eoghan as “Eoghan” is of a similar design. The environment he drives through, not unlike those “drivers” that populate Kiarostami films, dotting the landscape in long shot, is anything but a film set. “Eoghan’s” mechanical demeanor throughout this, automaton-like at times, can be understood as cultivating the “mechanical in itself” criterion of speculative nonfiction as established earlier. This is to say, the expression particular to conventional theater—the hallmark for Bresson of the professional acting role—is rejected in favor of a machine-like nonprofessional who moves through space in a relative and salubrious silence, a modèle paradoxically modeled on himself/herself. Eoghan is “Eoghan,” a sound engineer attempting to record sound free of man-made interruption. His goal is to break the correlation between subject and object so that “sound” is simply sound. In other words, only when sound is free of human intervention, recorded as the “in itself” of nature, can the actual recorded output be classified as silence. Yet this task involves

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FIGURE 5.4 Silence: The time images that play a significant role in the film

intervention:  Eoghan must be “in nature” when recording its nuances as such. The correlation between subject (Eoghan) and object (silence) so central to Silence is based around a quest, as abstract and philosophical as this may be, to record silence. But while the first half of the film involves the attempt to set up field recordings that involve “removing” the presence of the recorder from the production process, a project that appears to comment indirectly on the filmmaker who tries to observe reality without intervening in the reality she observes, the second half evolves out of a conversation that Eoghan has with the novelist Michael Harding, who he meets by chance when recording in the wilds of Connemara. Harding says to Eoghan that his job requires removing himself from the environment, so that nature—the in itself of the earth—can reveal itself accordingly. He emphasizes to Eoghan that the recording cannot be produced without his presence. In other words, his project is marked by a deceit.

In search of the in itself The quest to record a sound that is free of human presence is therefore unethical in that it materializes vis-a-vis the very intervention it claims to put aside:  the human. To a certain degree, the “story” that Silence tells, the quest that underpins the narrative, comments on the limitations of documentary’s claim to access a “real” that simply awaits capture by a camera that must not, on principle, intrude, indirectly. Eoghan’s meeting with Harding, when he is invited back to the writer’s home and they converse on silence as an elusive phenomenon, brings this into focus. The tone of the film changes significantly after the conversation. Eoghan appears from this moment on, that is, following the discussion of silence entered into with

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Harding, as more relaxed in himself and his environment. The narrative emphasis also changes, with the lure home to Tory, a destination that isn’t really signposted before this, now a key focus of the film. Considered as a speculative moment consistent with the turn outlined in Chapter 1, it helps foreground a not-so-obvious concern of the film with the real; or that which is independent of thought. It is speculative also in that it involves Eoghan mulling over Harding’s analysis: that the material world is an in itself prior to and independent of the subject who tries to shape it into an object of knowledge. It also brings to the fore a similar metaphysical problem to that set out by Quentin Meillassoux in the influential After Finitude (2010). The philosopher notes that every materialism that would be speculative, and hence for which absolute reality is an entity without thought, must assert both that thought is not necessary (something can be independently of thought), and that thought can think what there must be when there is no thought. (Meillassoux, 2010, 36) It is not my concern here to rehearse the arguments and debates that have given birth to speculative realism/materialism. However, I  do want to consider certain parallels between a movement committed to breaking free of the “correlationism” that posits the impeachable relation between thinking and being—that neither thought or being can exist independent of one another—and a film that can be nominally defined as “nonfiction,” both of which are committed to reasserting the “in itself” as a legitimate concern. The mechanistic “in itself,” as sketched out in Chapter 1, a principle of a post-Bressonian modèle or subject who plays themselves in accordance with the conceptualization of the modèle as a nonprofessional automaton drained of all overt expression (as pioneered by Bresson), is the “in itself” particular to nonfiction. Silence’s self as modèle takes the form of a modèle tasked with recording sound (the object) free of a man-made presence (subject); even when the very act of “recording” silence demands Eoghan’s presence in the environment he then purports to record.2 We find here an indirect commentary on film; or indeed the limitations of film when trying to access the real. One way of interpreting the story integral to Silence is that Eoghan is tasked with recording a “pure” document, against the view that “purity,” the “in itself,” is contaminated by the attempt to objectify it. One could say—pace Meillassoux—that Eoghan is searching for a lost “in itself”; an object that is uncontaminated by any subjective impression of it. A contradiction arises, however, when assuming this to be the case, if this is a suitable word for describing what happens. The speculative materialist light bulb goes off at the precise point in the film when it is intimated something can be independent of thought. Or, in the context of Eoghan’s quest to record silence, it is intimated that there is

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silence—the in itself—but our only way of describing this very thing is— paradoxically—in language. Silence brings concerns with the “in itself” center stage as it concludes; the journey back to Ireland taking an unexpected turn when Eoghan— unannounced and unexpected—returns to the derelict house he once called home on Tory. Silence shares a narrative concern with Kiarostami films (yet comes, crucially, as stated at the beginning, “after Kiarostami”), in that the lack of dialogue around Eoghan’s intentions serves as a filmic trope that helps inculcate a certain enigma; the fact that nothing is signposted as such. In that he spends most of his time traveling to well-known sites, landmarks, wide-open spaces (another feature that evokes the aesthetic decisions taken by Kiarostami when filming the Iranian landscape), the only conversations he has are with those—like Harding—he encounters along the way. His concerted efforts to record the imperceptible, the silence that pertains to a nature that exists free of man, the “in itself” of the material world, is subject to the correlation of language and reality, which is the language of the subject. And yet, Eoghan begins speaking his native Gaelic as he enters the Gaeltacht region of Donegal en route to Tory. There is a dramatic lift in his spirits (rendered discreetly by Collins through the body language of his subject) as he meets a recently graduated schoolboy, and speaks in the Irish language for the first time in the film. The subtext to this pivotal moment is that Eoghan is able to converse for the first time in the language that is natural to him. Eoghan is then shown taking the ferry to Tory, to confront what appears, in both the context of the film and Eoghan’s quest, as an unresolved— perhaps even traumatic—past. Haunting images of the window in the “home” Eoghan returns to on Tory are structurally inserted as “time images”; crystalized images of “past” and “future” at once. The window image, “physical” in this regard, interrupts the action as a suspected image of the “home” Eoghan returns to at the end, like a film reel that is destined to move in a certain direction no matter what. These images are echoes of past and future, illustrating the time of nonfiction as Blochian. Not unlike the way Akomfrah draws out the pregnant future in the archive, Collins plays on the investment of a future anticipation in these images. A crucial allegorical feature of the story contained in these images is that Eoghan travels to Tory, as his preoccupation with recording silence, his search for the “in itself,” is set aside in favor of reacquainting with an island that is, crucially, a kind of microcosmic image for the island of Ireland. He visits a sea stack on the outskirts of a village, and is filmed standing—like the infamous wanderer of a Casper Friederich painting—above the cliff top. These engagements with the immense physicality of the landscape, tactile immersion in the material environment, set the tone for the visit to the enclosed space of the family home, which brings the film to a somewhat cathartic close.

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A documentary fallacy Eoghan wanders upstairs in the final sequence, looking out the window of the upstairs bedroom, gazing upon an old derelict ruin adjacent to the house. He then turns away from the window, the same window we have seen throughout the film as represented in the time images discussed above. The impulse to frame, considered as the instrumentalization of the “in itself” that is encapsulated in the quest to record silence, is thus aligned to the journey home to Tory and its significance for the story as a whole. Eoghan’s attempt to “record” is an instance of the documentary fallacy Kiarostami points to as the lie film puts out when it purports to record “reality” free of context, free of subjective import. The quest in Silence thus doubles as a reflexive commentary on the limitations of the documentary as a film form specifically. Silence therefore unearths a philosophical subtext as part of the narrative quest: the search for the real in—as opposed to—of itself reflexively evokes the problematics of film form in relation to the real. This is an implicit subtext that has led critics of the film to question what kind of film it is. Documentary or fiction? Or both? We should note that time images of a present-to-come, the home “Eoghan” will visit, suggest “Eoghan” is destined to return here. Yet these are also images—which in their very texture as such—draw attention to the editing, and the “future to come” as an already “past” moment. The image, although filmed in the past, materializes in the present, and is—in terms of the timeframe it represents—an index for the “home” that Eoghan returns to at the end. Hence an arc unfolds from this: a sense of the inevitable. We are again confronted with the time of nonfiction in its Blochian guise, as the image of a future is also the image of the past, and the image is the source of its own reinvention. That Eoghan will return like a pigeon flown from its coup and finally come home, is leveraged by the structural position of time images indicative of a complex temporality:  when an end is a beginning. The time images suggest there is no alternative to this return. But the emphasis on destiny, which takes the form of a character returning from estrangement in foreign lands, home, who rediscovers his native language, could very easily be seen to evoke a conservative “blood and soil” ideology that is overt and indeed ethically problematic in its nationalistic tone. And given the trends in European and US politics today, it would be wrong to dismiss this view completely. But rather than focus on “blood and soil” in this way, I  want to conclude this chapter by contextualizing the quest for the “in itself” in relation to a “fiction”/“non-fiction” debate that can be understood as an implicit exploration of the “earth”/“world” distinction in Martin Heidegger’s writing. This distinction, which I  consider characteristic of Kiarostami films, finds a new platform of expression here. On this note, the

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FIGURE 5.5 Silence: Eoghan returns to the Tory Island, which we are led to assume—although it is never stated as fact in the film—he was made evacuate as a teenager

distinction between earth and world is helpful for negotiating the cinema of nonfiction as an art form particular to film in the aftermath of Kiarostami.

The earth won’t listen They will never be able to understand what painting is. They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer—some furrows in a ploughed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky—are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worthwhile to devote one’s life to expressing the poetry hidden in them VINCENT VAN GOGH Martin Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art (1972) is an important contribution to philosophical aesthetics (although it is a concerted effort to think an alternative to aesthetics), and an integral influence—at least in my opinion—on the turn toward the “in itself,” indicative of speculative materialism. Heidegger makes the distinction between “earth” and “world,” central to his philosophical outlook throughout his later years with recourse to van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (1886), a painting that has unearthed much critical commentary since its first exposure over half a century ago. Heidegger’s “difficult” interpretation of the painting, which he uses to transcend aesthetics, has itself generated a significant body of aesthetic criticism, and has become—somewhat ironically—a benchmark of modern aesthetic theory. For Heidegger, to experience “art” in any meaningful capacity is to push against what is considered “natural,” when what is “natural” is synonymous with “the familiarity of a long-established custom

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which has forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose” (Heidegger, 1972, 24). In addition, the subjectivism that he rails against, which “enframes” the natural world as objects to be manipulated and instrumentalized as “things” is set in contrast to the primordial experience of the “earth,” that glimmer of a beyond that artworks, when grappled with accordingly, can allow us to grasp. The “earth” is considered a primordial ground that never allows itself to be instrumentalized in the form of “objects,” or as equipment, as Heidegger calls it in the essay. It is the “nothing” apropos of a background, shielding the shoes at the center of the canvas in Heidegger’s reading of van Gogh’s painting. “Nothing” is, in this sense, the undefined space out of which the possibility of who the shoes belong to or where they came from is conjured in ghostly images, traces of what could be. Heidegger then goes on to identify this “nothing-ness” in more rudimentary terms as the “earth,” a decision explained by Iain D. Thomson in a recently published account of this essay. In 1935, however, he [Heidegger] seems to have grown dissatisfied with his broadly mis-understood “nothing noths” terminology, for he now seeks to redescribe and carefully elaborate the mysterious phenomenon he had called the “noth-ing” in terms of the “essentially self-secluding earth,” the recalcitrant nature of which becomes palpable in its resistance to our best efforts to bring the phenomenon fully into the light of our intelligible worlds. (Thomson, 2011, 90) Art reawakens the senses, an orientation that brings the subject back to the primordial “strife” between what Heidegger calls the abundant “earth” and the intelligible world of language; the yearning to make sense of things that is indicative and indeed the essence of great art. “The world,” Heidegger says in terms that are typically poetic, is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated . . . The workbeing of the work consists in the fighting of the battle between world and earth. (Heidegger, 1972, 350–356) Certain works of art, when they encourage us to move beyond aesthetic preoccupations with valuation, enable the experiencing subject to sense the abundance of which Heidegger speaks, when language brushes up against what Thomson calls a “phenomenological abundance that we can never fully grasp or finally master” (Thomson, 2011, 93). For Heidegger, van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (given the painting’s subtle inference to working the

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FIGURE 5.6 Silence: The frame that indicates the desire “to frame,” to understand, pertaining to Eoghan’s quest in the film

earth), imbibes the sense of curiosity pertaining to the correlation “earth” and “world”:  a curiosity precisely because, while the earth sustains the world, it can never be turned into a meaningful object. We cannot know the “earth,” “in itself,” make it an object that is part of our intelligible world, precisely because the earth sustains our striving to know in the first place. Such striving, understood as a “relation” as opposed to a subjectivism that equates “art” with objects of pleasure and knowledge, Heidegger associates with poeisis: the poetry of art. Heidegger’s probing of the distinction between “earth” and “world” helps to orient our attention back to Silence as a film that we can say enacts a kind of journey that not only encapsulates the “destiny of an historical people” that Heidegger describes—but does so through the portrayal of a self (as modèle) destined to return home and, in doing so, encounter the earth outside the act of recording that until this point has dominated concerns. The earth, in this sense, is a synonym for a silence that can only be heard when the impulse to instrumentalize nature, and thus being, is passed over. It is acceptance of the essential strife between “earth” and “world” that keeps them forever in battle, as Heidegger says. But Silence is a remarkable film because it shows the attempts to instrumentalize nature as a precursor to the acceptance of “silence” as an “earth” out of which the first note of every song comes, as Michael Harding says in the film. That Eoghan must return home is reinforced by Collins’s casting of Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde as the modèle who also happens to come from this part of Donegal. Hence, it is not unlike an experience he might have. In addition, the “time images” discussed reinforce the sense of traveling a path that must be traveled; a path that is visualized in the many maps used to signpost Eoghan’s travels in Ireland. Maps are visual metaphors for Eoghan’s attempt to make earth intelligible as world.

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Eoghan, in this sense—and this is what makes Silence such a remarkably reflexive film—is a modèle for a spectator tasked with distinguishing between an intelligible world of objects, and “silence” as that which grounds the strife between earth and world. It is therefore not surprising that Eoghan stops recording when he visits Tory. Having scaled some of the island’s most impressive landmarks by foot, he returns to what is evidentially his “home.” The film ends with Eoghan peering out a window that doubles as a screen within the frame of the cinema screen. The final shot is another example— indeed a contribution to—a long-standing history of visual culture that takes the form of paintings and photographs depicting a figure peering through a window, often, and as is the case here, upon a ruin of sorts. An obvious reference here is Alberti (who famously defined the painted image as a window on the world).3 However, it would be wrong—at least in my opinion—to view the ending of Silence as an attempt to reinvigorate Alberti’s insight, this time in terms of the cinematic image. It is more appropriate to interpret it with recourse to the “earth”/“world” distinction as formulated by Heidegger when considering the world as containing but never fully containing “silence.” “Framing,” Kim Dovey argues in Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form “implies both the construction of a world and a way of seeing ourselves in it—at once a picture and a mirror. In each of these senses, the design of built form is the practice of ‘framing’ the places of everyday life. A frame is also a ‘context’ we relegate to the taken-for-granted” (Dovey, 2008, 1). Just as the desire to frame is made, over the course of Silence, with visual reference to pictures, picture frames, mirrors, and, of course, windows, it is the “broken” frame that signifies the inseparability of “earth” and “world,” or—equally—the sustenance that our construction of “world” draws from the limitless “earth.” One could go so far as to say that “earth” is that unbounded reservoir of meaning that continually reminds us of the transience, abstracted nature of frames; that framing can never offer us a final context, an end point to our inquiry. It would therefore be incorrect to call Silence a film about Ireland alone. It is better to approach Silence as a film about the relationship between “earth” and “world.” Kiarostami brought this relationship between “earth” and “world” into focus in The Wind Will Carry Us. Behzad, who has been forced to travel to “higher ground” to get a suitable signal for his mobile phone, befriends a grave digger who he later saves from suffocation, as the grave collapses over him. A  series of meetings transpire in response to this event, most notably Behzad’s meeting with the village doctor, and in a kind of reversal of the blocking out of sound that characterizes the moped ride in CloseUp between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf, they converse about the lady he has been sent to obverse while traveling through the luscious landscape. The conversation takes in everything from the difficulties to the distinction

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between “life” and “death,” but it hinges on, or comes in the aftermath of, a direct contact with the “earth.” Behzad, who has been preoccupied with the filming of the funeral rites, documenting the rituals of the villagers he has been sent to observe, appears, at the epochal point of intervening to save the man from death, to recognize that what has almost consumed him in death, call it the “earth,” is that what has also saved him. The moral here is that in the strident attempt to document the ritual of death, the observational methods of which demands a minimum of intervention in the “reality” Behzad is sent to observe, Behzad’s interest in life is reawakened. As a result, he decides—in the pivotal moment of the film—to drive away at the point of the woman’s death, a decision that indicates a newfound respect for the woman’s life that materializes in the aftermath of the man being saved and the discussion with the doctor. Before he does this, however, he points his camera lens in the direction of the village women who are gathering as part of the scarification process he has waited upon, and takes a series of shots of those in good enough health to initiate the ritual. The photos appear in a different register to those that would serve to instrumentalize the traditions of the villagers to satisfy the curiosity of a modern urban elite whose only presence is the producer Behzad converses with. They appear to be more like personal memos for reminding Behzad of “life” going on in the face of death. The photographing of the village women reminding us, as many critics of the film have stated, that Behzad is—first and foremost—a filmmaker, sits in counterpoint to the ladened symbolism that characterizes the final “act” of the film. After Behzad turns away in his jeep from the gathering women, he drives out from the village interior. In the next shot, we see him throwing water over the window of the jeep—no doubt a metaphor for cleansing the gaze of the audience as much as Behzad’s desire to frame the village in a series of pure images—before picking a large human thighbone he had kept as a keepsake from his earlier adventures, and throwing it into a stream of water. The film ends with the bone floating aimlessly downstream, at once a symbol of a death, the preoccupation of which the village doctor has warned Behzad against, and its immersion in the power of water—“earth”—to replenish that which has died. Irrespective of whether Behzad has changed utterly, the throwing of the bone can also be seen as an indication that he has given up on framing the event. Silence comes after Kiarostami—pace Heidegger—in its emphasis on the translation of “earth” into an object of the “world.” Just as Eoghan sets out to “record” silence, and hence instrumentalize nature as a resource, he seems to recognize the inveterate futility of such an exercise as the journey closes. Behzad’s project has a similar premise: he must objectify a ritual of the world so that others can appreciate its authenticity. His project depends on objectifying a ritual appreciated for a reason: its authenticity. But he also comes to apprehend the futility of this exercise.

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Many of the films that I have explored under the umbrella term of “new nonfiction” in this book are also—on the surface at least—concerned with the complexity involved in subjects. Eoghan, like Behzad, or even Jake in Two Years at Sea, or the Pansa brothers in Let Each One Go Where He May are speculative variations of themselves, performers performing the “role” of themselves in a land that appears alien in form, even threatening, and a land in which the human subject seems ill at ease. They appear to be driven, in an age when speculation on the environment and the apocalypse is becoming increasingly popular, by a need to make sense of the “earth” beneath its facile representation in the form of a mere landscape or “world.” This chapter is written in the aftermath of Kiarostami’s filmmaking, building on concerns with fiction and documentary (and therefore nonfiction) in a master’s films. This focus is characterized by certain selfconsciousness: that the film addresses its own perplexing ambiguity as part of its aesthetic. The question of “is this ‘real’?” is more readily understood as a question of how we think “reality” outside the usual parameters of representation, whether in the form of film, media images, or even language. It is not that these filmmakers are simply borrowing a lexicon and taking inspiration from speculative philosophy as a fashionable reference point, but that their interests in probing “reality” as something less than a resource to be accessed at will goes hand in hand with a concerted effort to speculate on the “nature” of the subjects they work with. Silence is a particularly interesting reference point in this regard. It is interesting not just because Eoghan says very little, but also because as “Eoghan” he returns to a place he seems to have resisted returning to—only at this incendiary point—to accept the “earth” beneath him as something more than a resource to mine at will (the act of recording “silence” is of course the activity that best represents this in the film).

Notes 1 I am making reference here to the turn in Foucault’s later writings toward “technologies of the self,” when he undertook extended study around practices of the self during the Hellenistic period. The art of the self that he found in this research was distinctly different to practices of the self associated with JudeoChristian practices. This period of research contributes to the final volume in the History of Sexuality series (Foucault, 1986). 2 Levi R. Bryant, writing in The Meillassoux Dictionary (2015) gives us some insight into the debates about correlationism in the context of Meillassoux’s challenge to the concept. “Correlationism,” he says, “is thus not the thesis that we must relate to something in order to know it, but rather that what we know of anything is true only for us. In this regard, correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know

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things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. For example, for the correlationist there is no answer to the question of whether carbon atoms exist apart from us and whether they decay at such and such a rate because we only ever know appearances. This is Meillassoux’s support for scientific realism. For the correlationist we are never able to get out of the correlation between thought and being to determine whether or not carbon itself has these properties or whether it is thought that bestows these properties, which is sometimes the view of scientific functionalism. Meillassoux calls this unsurpassable relation the correlationist circle” (Bryant, in Gratton and Ennis, 2015). 3 Anna Friedberg’s writings on framing as it takes shape against the background of centuries of artistic production, before making its way into the lexicon of film production and later computer technologies, is formative in this regard. As Friedberg notes, “The cinematic moving image is produced by a series of ‘frames’ travelling at a precise speed through an aperture of projected light. The film frame reminds us of Alberti’s axioms for perspectival representation. But while photographic perspective conforms to the conventions of depth of field and framing, and hence Bazin’s teleological viewpoint, ‘the cinematic movement of objects within the frame to its edges, and off-frame, suggests its radical contradiction’ ” (Friedberg, 2006, 83).

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6 Nonfiction, the cognitive turn, and Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (1993)

The discipline of Film Studies, until the 1990s at least, was dominated by criticism derived from structuralism and psychoanalysis, journals such as Screen and Film Quarterly evolving what is known today as Film Studies in its earliest incarnation. The English-speaking world of Film Studies, rather ironically, drew much of its critical energy from philosophical developments in France and Germany, while shutting its eyes to what was happening in the philosophy departments of the English-speaking world itself, a tradition of philosophy more commonly known as the analytic tradition.1 As a student in the 1990s, I came to understand Film Studies as a new discipline, and that paralleled the emergence of “theory,” a somewhat contingent bricolage of film analysis methods that emerged out of disciplines such as “sociology,” “politics,” “linguistics,” “English literature,” and “psychology.” Documentary, however, such a major part of film, seemed to exist in a parallel universe again, its practitioners and scholars suspicious of the application of theory to the gritty real-world claims of the documentary. There’s no point talking master-signifiers when knee-deep in a film about the housing projects of south Chicago. Documentary theorist and cofounder of Visible Evidence (the biggest worldwide conference given over to documentary studies), Michael Renov, made the rather contentious claim during his keynote address in Delhi in December 2014 that documentary scholars need to find the “love” in documentary. He gave a measure of this view when advocating a “theory” revolution similar to what took place in Film Studies in the 1970s, and even referenced—specifically and somewhat surprisingly—psychoanalysis by way of support. I can’t deny being somewhat shocked at the time, given that my own turn to documentary theory came out of an opposing impulse,

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a kind of weariness with the dominant theoretical models being used in Film Studies, but also more crucially a conviction that documentary was somewhat immune to this problem. There was also an element of shock involved in that I felt the discipline of Film Studies had entered something of a productive crisis in the years after its integration into conventional academic life, for a number of reasons that might be considered crucial to what I want to explore in this chapter. First, scholars such as Gregory Currie and Carl Platinga of the analytic tradition helped pioneer cognitive film studies, in a way that had already channeled Renov’s concerns from the perspective of belief. The difference is, they are not doing this via what I believed to be the jaded approaches taken from structuralism and psychoanalysis Renov advocated in his keynote. Currie’s classic text Image and Mind (1995) addresses the twin pillars of belief and imagining around the reception of fiction and non-fiction. These concerns are taken up in a number of essays on the documentary, to which I’ll turn in this chapter. Second, the very act of filming real life, considered the preserve of documentary film, became such a pervasive feature of creative disciplines across the board that the branches of fiction and “non-fiction” that characterized Film Studies entered into something of a crisis. The question of what this film is about, whether as semiotic content or unconscious underpinning, is upstaged by a question central to Currie’s discussion: What kind of film is this? Or to put it another way, to what extent does my belief in what I’m experiencing perceptually determine how I engage with this film: whether as an artifact or a body of knowledge based on fact? Currie’s “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs” (1999) extends the study of photography into moving image with reference to his earlier and more extensive book-length study, Image and Mind. The article draws on two concepts that he uses to orchestrate a further analysis of the document as it pertains to these twin registers of study: the trace and the testimony. “To understand the contract between trace and testimony, compare a painting and photograph,” Currie suggests. The painter may make a likeness of her subject so vivid and detailed that one could take it as a photograph. But photography is not just a device to make paintings by cheaper and quicker means: a photograph is a trace of its subject while a painting is a testimony of it. (Currie, 1999, 286) Currie makes particular use of the distinction between trace and testimony when accounting for images that claim to offer documentary evidence and those that offer testimony, referencing narrative as a determining feature of both. But he goes on to discuss the way in which belief structures the reception of an image as either a trace or a testimony; a distinction central to understanding fiction and non-fiction. For Currie, photographs that include traces are belief-independent,

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The photographer and cinematographer who sets out to record the scene in front of him will record what is there; the painter with the same intent will paint what he thinks is there . . . Paintings and drawings fall into a different category of representations on account of them being in the first instance records of what someone thought the facts of the matter were. (Currie, 1999, 286–287) Currie makes the distinction between visual artifact (perhaps distinguished as a work of art, or perhaps even a subjective creative response to a model of sorts—a model here can be considered a real-world object) and a record with accorded epistemic value used, for example, in a court as purposeful evidence for a crime. The emphasis is given to knowledge that is counterintuitive in form, not dependent on the subject’s belief. Records have epistemic value in that they counter our need to believe in what is seen, and are therefore different to testimonies, which merely appeal to a conviction to believe on the basis that certain things happened or didn’t actually happen. However, this doesn’t mean photographs can’t ever mislead, and are never used precisely for this purpose. It is rather that, as Currie suggests, the photograph is a trace. And certain modes of photographic production leave traces that classify, when aligned to a narrative that fits the prerogative given for their use, as documents. Currie provides an interesting analysis of photographic representation considered as a trace, when used to support the crucial distinction he then makes between images contributing meaning to a narrative and images obtaining meaning from a narrative. In the first instance, the narrative makes explicit the link between the indexical and the story told. In the second instance the narrative, on the basis of conceptual content, shapes the meaning of traces contained in the film image. In other words, the trace that is so important to documentary images is invested with fictional content in and through the means of narrative construction. In this second instance, we are able to understand why a feature film starring Tom Cruise, for example, is not mistaken as a documentary about Tom Cruise, given that the image contains the trace of the subject. The important point to underline is that belief, such a cornerstone of the cognitive turn, plays a significant role in Currie’s distinction between documentary, of which non-fiction is often seen as a complementary category, and images that obtain meaning via narrative construction to qualify as fiction. Currie draws on developments in cognitive science that dwell on perception and belief in what the image represents. “Perceptions and beliefs are representational states,” Currie notes, before stating later in the same paragraph, On this view to credit someone with a belief is to credit them with the concepts necessary for a description of how that belief represents the

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world. But someone can have a perceptual experience that represents the world as a certain way, yet lack the concepts necessary to say in what way the world is thus represented. Thus we can say that the contents of belief are conceptual, while the contents of perceptions are nonconceptual. (Currie, 1999, 290) Currie’s is a rudimentary distinction. He nonetheless makes provision for a narrative that is considered intentional to a photographic image, which cannot be considered to have conceptual content without the addition of said narrative (Currie, 1999, 290). For Currie, a photograph can have content but this same content cannot be conceptual unless contained by some additional and intentional narrative construction. The issue of concern, which shadows the article, and becomes the main point of concern in Noël Carroll’s response to Currie in The Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism is narrative (Carroll, 2000). This is somewhat ironic given that Currie is a well-known contributor to the development of narrative theory in Film Studies, as is Carroll. Both have written extensively on narrative’s role in film production and reception, while both have addressed the distinction between the inordinately fictional narrative that engenders a certain suspension of belief regarding the pro-filmic trace, and a narrative that has rhetorical effect by contributing to the trace Currie associates with the documentary image. In the previous section I purported to explore the significance of narrative as the “S” of “story” or, in the case of Kiarostami’s films, the “found story” as a means for conceptually engaging the new nonfiction film. I was particularly interested in the speculative condition of this activity and the way it pertains to a performing subject that evolved out of a working relationship with the film director, and involves a story about that subject that would appear true to that subject’s ontological makeup. The criteria evolved over the course of Currie’s Visible Traces, as Carroll acknowledges, would perhaps tend to exclude this type of film from the very outset, even if the encased narrative trajectory, because it involves a subject playing himself or herself, complicates any such distinction between trace and testimony (so important to Currie’s argument). The speculative in “speculative nonfiction” consists paradoxically of a kind of story about a subject considered ontologically consistent with that subject. The question I gather Currie would ask is whether this materializes as trace or testimony, or whether it involves the production of both types of images in its makeup. For Carroll, however, Currie’s turn to narrative as a means of upholding the distinction between documentary and nondocumentary seems to preclude any distinction between narrative and non-narrative documentary, idealizing a documentary such as a surveillance tape of a robbery as an example of documentary purity. Carroll, in response to this, points to the long-standing tradition of avant-garde film that works entirely with the pro-filmic, and defines itself as non-narrative.

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It is a fascinating debate that requires more sustained analysis. But it may well be that Currie goes down a down blind alley when he suggests that non-narrative films made up entirely of trace impressions, but which explore the rhythm and cadence of the film image in a reflexive capacity, such as Serene Velocity (Gehr, 1970), fail to make the cut for documentary film modules. This is contentious, given, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, the importance of filmmakers like Akomfrah to the evolution of documentary studies outside its constricted parameters of indexical relationality. Carroll seems unaware of the poetic mode that evolved from the kind of reflexive experimentation he describes as simply mistaken classifications in his text. He does, however, point to films such as Chris Marker’s groundbreaking San Soleil (Marker, 1983), a film that seems to prophecy the subversive use of narrative around the “trace” that characterizes so many art world initiatives of recent years, as a way of questioning the production of knowledge and the way it circulates in relation to the reception of images. Currie’s use of the term “asserted narrative” is taken to task, as some kind of mystic causality that runs counter to the narrative voice-over for the film itself. Irrespective of which proposition is right or wrong, or what role narrative plays in documentary production, I  think it is important to emphasize the contentious relationship between narrative and images that might be described as traces. For, one of the significant reasons for researching this present volume has been to explore the phenomenology of reception around films that draw on the style of documentary for reasons that might be considered artistic, if not necessarily aesthetic, in motivation: that is, to open up and even subvert documentary as the domain of the trace from within. Hence nonfiction is thought to designate a kind of opening to something other but nonetheless in dialogue with the documentary as both trace and testimony, equivalent to saying “no” to “fiction” when fiction is considered the impulse to invent something entirely new. The “new” here is of course new but it is not necessarily unreal, or imaginary in the way we generally like to think of the fiction form. By way of teasing out these distinctions further, and drawing from Currie’s analysis in the process, I now want to channel the discussion into the work of Chantal Akerman.

Bordering on fiction The Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is often pigeonholed under the umbrella of feminist artist, but in such a way as to detract from the more than significant contribution she has made to advances in twentieth-century cinema in general: in both its fictional and non-fictional forms. Akerman’s oeuvre is at the cross section of many movements and genres, not least French New Wave cinema, neorealism, minimalism, and structuralist film. Her oeuvre, in its totality, is unquestionably concerned with the trace and

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the testimony as formulated by Currie. As Ivone Margulies has pointed out, Akerman’s attention to the form of film has rarely been at the expense of content and, like Bresson, her films are perhaps best understood as attempts to intensify as distinct from reject codes unique to cinematic expression (Margulies, 1996, 11). The difference between film and theater is a significant bone of contention for Bresson. It is a cornerstone of much of the innovative approaches taken in his films to actors and narrative.2 Akerman can be considered just as innovative in her approach. Writing about Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxells (Akerman, 1975), Margulies makes the salient point, “As a result of the indexical relations between a photographic record and reality, real-time representation foregrounds the particularizing nature of the cinematic event” (Margulies, 1996, 66). She goes on to add, Throughout the film we are constantly reminded of other, more conventional ways of telling the same story. Akerman’s parti pris is original: her twisting of narrative takes place through the selection and amplification of devices usually associated with conventional Hollywood narratives. She hyperbolizes perspective, linear chronology, ellipsis, and the naturalistic conventions of having single actors perform single characters. Insisting on, indeed amplifying narrative elements, Akerman defines a homogenous texture that subverts the codes of cinematic transparency from within. (Margulies, 1996, 67) Jeanne Dielman is a powerful work, I  would suggest, not because it apes a Bressonian method in its style, but because it builds on Bresson’s legacy by heightening, as opposed to rejecting, certain narrative elements that are considered unique to the culture of cinematic expression; codes, that is, known in the vernacular as the close-up, the offscreen, diegetic or nondiegetic sound, and so on. It is also a vital cornerstone of cinematic history in that it conflates a distinction that is—now more than ever—consolidated on the basis of blurred boundaries: fiction and non-fiction. Jeanne Dielman is unique in the way the ritualistic activities of the singular housewife are filmed, and the day-to-day tribulations of domestic life, making it difficult to ascertain, given the emphasis on real-time duration and the quotidian, whether the film is an observational documentary on suburban life or a fictional portrait that has no direct or intrinsic correlation with the actual. It is, in this sense, a marker of Akerman’s contribution to the debates about the documentary’s capacity to access a “reality” on which the photographic index depends. The sense that “nothing happens” in the title of Margulies study of Akerman, in contemporary suburban life, seems more adequately aligned to the fly on the wall approach to domestic ethnographic study. Indeed, as

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FIGURE 6.1 D’Est: The almost hallucinogenic intensity of Akerman’s images

Margulies notes, Jeanne Dielman’s innovation lies not simply in making the drab invisibility of everyday suburban life visible in “filler” moments, but also by frustrating identification with a character—or possibly a subject— in real time. In addition, Akerman’s camerawork, which involves framing the character of Jeanne using perspectival line more readily associated with Renaissance painting, enhances the feeling that we are peering in—without an invite—on a private domestic space. In 1992, having finished my Irish Leaving Cert examination, I was fortunate enough to gain employment on the rebuild of an old communist farm on the outskirts of Brandenburg in the former DDR, when old DDR structures were still operative. The fall of the Berlin Wall had been a momentous event a few years earlier. However, much of the public infrastructure in the former republic needed to be upgraded to meet EU requirements. Russian soldiers, who had been stationed, still roamed the streets, their presence a trace of what was, and the countryside littered with old trabants and farm equipment seemed suspended in time:  the 1950s. One felt as if they were traveling through space in a time somehow delayed, slowed down like a film reel that would find—at some point—its proper rhythm. But there was also the feeling that one was experiencing something outside mediation: traveling in the gap between living history and the mediatization of life in the former

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Eastern Bloc. To put it another way, I was traveling in the space that was somehow untouched by the information age, of places somehow suspended in time, and people unfazed by the world of mass consumerism. There was, of course, a romantic impulse in my associating the experience of traveling through Eastern Europe with the exotic allure of the foreign, premised—or so I think—on the fact that all would change utterly within years; and this was a people untainted by the ferocity of late capitalist expansion. It was an uncanny sensation that evolved out of the feeling that one was immersed in a time bubble that had rates of change wholly different to the West. Akerman’s D’Est (Akerman, 1993) captures the “sense” of the East as I  experienced it that summer traveling. Although one of the late Belgian filmmaker’s lesser known works, and part of a larger multimedia installation with the full title “Bordering on Fiction:  Chantal Akerman’s D’Est” first exhibited at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis (before traveling extensively thereafter), the installation consists of three chambers of which the standalone film is just one significant part.3 The second chamber holds eight triptych screens (or monitors that were still known in the 1990s), showing twenty-four sequences of the film, while the third chamber exhibits a single video monitor image of Akerman reading the Second Commandment in Hebrew and English, along with a selection of her own writings on the project. Alisa Lebow calls the text indispensable for viewing the stand-alone film, even though it—at times—reads like a riddle that has to be solved (Lebow, 2003, 42). Reading the film from the perspective of Akerman’s Jewish heritage, and the film as a journey into the place where her parents were evacuated from, Lebow offers a most fascinating account of what makes for such evocative and haunting viewing. Like Griselda Pollock, who explores the film’s power to affect, Lebow emphasizes the stand-alone film as part of a “project” understood as an art installation, and therefore presented as a total work of art. This is important, not least because Akerman’s career trajectory, like those of her contemporaries, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, among other quasi-New Wave filmmakers, has transitioned toward the darkened spaces of galleries such as the Walker Museum. The Tate Modern in London has also recently held a retrospective of her work, which offers further confirmation of her significance in the art world. My own interest is in the stand-alone film D’Est but, like Lebow, I don’t want to divorce its significance from the installation that it originally formed part of. My reasons for not wanting to do this, however, are somewhat different, in that I read the title “Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est” as an intriguing supplement to the film. Given the importance of the subtitle, we can approach the film component of the installation from the perspective of belief and sense, which is the final S theme for this concluding section of the book. In addition, the film is particularly useful as a reference in the debates discussed at the outset of this chapter, in relation to the concepts of trace and testimony. “Bordering on Fiction” is intriguing, not least because the

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film is devoid of narrative, and also because the film’s status as document, possibly even a documentary, is premised on the clear unadulterated “trace” of the East as it revealed itself to Akerman when traveling from Germany to Russia (while standing as testimony to the East as Akerman experienced it). The film is remarkably faithful to the memory I also have of that time. Yet, at the same time, the film is about memory, when memory is overdetermined by another’s experience of trauma. Trauma is, of course, central to Akerman’s journey through an Eastern Europe from which her parents were evacuated during the Holocaust, in the knowledge her own Jewish identity is inextricably bound up with the “East” as it has become known, even though she was born and grew up in Belgium. Akerman is like a “wandering Jew” traveling through a landscape from which the trace of her own heritage underlies every encounter. In fact, I would contend, and this is what I want to explore further here, that Akerman’s film is so powerfully evocative, important even, not because it rejects the trace as the domain of documentary production, but because, au contraire, it heightens the intensity of the “trace” to such a degree that the image borders on fiction. That is, although the film is so invariably concerned with the actual, the real, it is something other to the actual—the stories that act in Lebow’s account as a post-memory—that appear to permeate every frame, so that the film can be viewed in another way: as a film that negates the stories that shape our relationship with the memorial forms to constitute a catharsis in memory. Only by confronting the East like this can the trauma of the past be lessened. It is perhaps for this reason Akerman ends the text that accompanies the third and final chamber of the installation with the haunting words “There are still faces that offer themselves, occasionally effacing a feeling of loss, of a world poised on the edge of an abyss.” The stories in question, as Lebow indicates, are specific to a Jewish history that infiltrates Akerman’s filmmaking at practically every turn. Yet Akerman, as an individual, is aloof, if not displaced, from the stories considered integral to the intergenerational bond that informs a Jewish culture always, not just post-Holocaust, in transit. “Stories and events,” Lebow notes, “are (re)invoked generation after generation, forming the central tropes of the Jewish people. The stories are told and retold, usually in abbreviated form, in ways meant to have direct implications on how to live in the present context” (Lebow, 2003, 44). In traveling to the East, exposing her camera to the everyday lives, homogenous landscapes of the post-Soviet Bloc, Akerman herself is exposed to a land overwritten with the stories of the past. If there is a quest involved in traveling from Germany to Russia, all within a calendar year, as the weather descends into severe ice and snow, it is in response to stories that hover somewhere between truth and fiction. These stories are the fabric of selfhood. Akerman journeys from the East. And yet she is also, as Lebow points out, “from the East”; even if the stories relayed to her of this place are all she has to hold on to.

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D’Est, almost two hours in length, consists mainly of long durational shots, often of people hovering at train stations or set-piece events taken inside, constitutive of everyday life shot at some remove, and without any information given as to the reason for the shift from one sequence to another. Some of the footage, which takes the form of a trace of the East suspended in a liminal state between communism and what comes after, is intensified, so that the form of the image resonates with content:  both are somehow caught suspended in the liminal. It is as if the stories that have informed Akerman’s understanding of the East, the place that she comes from yet knows only indirectly, are “unconsciously” motivating her decision to film certain scenes, as if she is trying to find the trace of a place she originates from yet has had no connection with. On one level, the film appears to fulfill the criteria Currie has put in place for the documentary film, in that all the footage of Eastern Europe filmed as it reveals itself to Akerman unfolds as she travels through. There are no archival images of a time when Jews fled indiscriminately from this place, no commentary to direct the spectator in any way. Instead there are just images of the East, shot and edited with immense beauty, but also with an intensity that seems to push the viewer toward what Margulies call the “extra-sensory.” This is because of a lack of information. This lack in the form of direct narrative concerning the content of the image is offset with excessive form: long durational shots. The distinction between communal and sense memory Jill Bennett makes is formative in this regard, formulated with regard to the affect and trauma. Bennett’s writings are particularly pertinent for discussing a body of work such as Akerman’s, given the residual impact of Holocaust trauma on the personal journey of her films. Bennett explores the manner in which artworks register, or transact, as opposed to simply communicate a message (Bennett, 2005). Central to this is the affect; art works register an affect with the spectator. The affect is felt on the body by way of “sensation,” so as to engender thought. “If trauma enters the representational arena as an expression of personal experience,” Bennett notes, “it is always vulnerable to appropriation, to reduction, and to mimicry.” She then goes on to ask, “Is it possible, then, to conceive of the art of trauma and conflict as something other than the deposit of primary experience (which remains ‘owned’ and unshareable even once it is communicated)?” (Bennett, 2005, 6). Bennett’s Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (2005) is a probing book-length response to this question. Her investigation, however, turns especially on the concept of sense memory, which takes effect through means other than representation, a point that is developed further by Finn Daniels-Yeomans in his excellent article on sleep furiously (DanielsYeomans, 2017). Taking up Bennett’s idea of sense memory as the corporeal repository of the affect, as opposed to a common memory that takes the form of a “social or popularly understood discursive framework” (Bennett,

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2005, 25), Bennett takes sensation to be a formative catalyst in the art works that engender, Daniels-Yeomans notes, critical inquiry (Daniels-Yeomans, 2017). As a result, the affective transaction compels the spectator to make sense, to bring sense memory into common memory. Daniels-Yeomans and Bennett theorize art’s capacity to transact, as opposed to represent trauma. And both of these analyses take the encountered sign developed by Gilles Deleuze (1989) to potentiate this affective transaction. My aim, however, when exploring the sense that is particular to new nonfiction film in this section, is to explore the transactive, Akerman’s relaying of trauma via a process—an aesthetic process to be more precise, in relation to Bennett’s theoretical framework—that takes the form of an observation of Eastern life that has no direct emotional engagement with the place. The journey East is complicated by the fact that the trauma of the Holocaust associated with this part of the world has not been experienced directly by the artist. Akerman is doubly isolated in that she has never lived in the East, nor has she experienced the trauma that led to her parents fleeing this part of the world. I assume, however, that the “trace” so specific to Currie’s understanding of documentary is over prevalent, exists in excess as a code, and is accentuated to such a degree that it almost blurs. Akerman may want to avoid trying to source the “past” in the present—a present that is not part of any official epistemological source—and thus manipulate the world she encounters, but the documentary trace seems already overburdened by this past. The hordes of people gathered in public, captured in sublime tracking shots, have a structured formality suspended between places, reminding us of the hordes of people summoned to their death—whether as part of the Holocaust or the pogroms—across this landscape. There is a sense of being stranded, neither here nor there, indicative of Akerman herself:  reared in the West but from the East, displaced from a homeland as she passes through it. The film she is directing can be said to channel only to subvert the spirit of the document from within. The indexical is, in its material presentness, a trace of that which has left no trace: the film is haunted by the lack of real traces for the trauma that was perpetuated in this place. For Margulies, Akerman practices “an aesthetics of homogeneity” (Margulies, 1996, 11), her films favoring a more restrained internal critique of cinema in common with Bresson’s approach to the modèle. It is important then to state that Akerman’s approach to filmmaking is not necessarily one that tries to resist through direct polemic confrontation, manufacture a different documentary image to the one Currie believes is defined by the indexical “trace.” Nor is it a particular attempt to inform through direct address—a voice-over or intertitle—designed to communicate a sentiment toward the world. Rather, the aim is to intensify the pro-filmic “trace” so that the trauma that exists as sense memory is felt. For it is important to note that Akerman’s “memory” of the Holocaust has not been passed on to her via direct communication with her mother, in common memory.

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FIGURE 6.2 D’Est: Akerman’s camera is drawn toward the crowds that populate the post-Soviet city

Like a lot of children of survivors, she came to “know” of the Holocaust’s traumatic imprint through silence; an implicit understanding of what isn’t said but felt. “Instead of,” as Margulies notes, “using language in a patently connotative way, objective literature, literal art, and Akerman’s minimal and hyperrealist cinema all insist on amplifying what is implicit in any indexical language:  it’s rendering of a first, “immediate” meaning—its referent” (Margulies, 1996, 72). Akerman’s filming of the anonymous faces and places of Eastern Europe, faces marked by the unknown, the end of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent landscape, lacks any clear distinction of what Eastern state is filmed, bringing out—qua Margulies—an all-pervasive index, the film a record of the East as one homogenous entity. Akerman, like an ethnographer silently and unobtrusively distanced from her subjects, appears to simply film, observe in accordance with the long duration of her shots. But it is precisely the form and duration of these shots, “the unsettling effect of excess description,” as Margulies calls it, which “approaches an abstract concreteness that unbalances referentiality. There is a sort of metamorphosis: the sharpness of the depiction borders on the hallucinatory” (Margulies, 1996, 72). Margulies comments, rather surprisingly, on Jeanne Dielman, but her critique is part of

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a broader analysis of “an aesthetics of homogeneity” attributed to Akerman’s style as a filmmaker/artist, which makes it suitably applicable to a film that approaches the subject matter in much the same way. The emphasis given to metamorphosis, however, should not be mistaken for dramatic change. There is a kind of sharpening of the senses around the referent, unsettling in that nothing about what we see suggests the senses are meant to be sharpened in the way they are. But by engaging the senses in this way, so that the referent subtly changes or metamorphoses, patterns and colors emerge and begin to unfold to an almost hallucinatory degree. As a result, an apparently straightforward image of a group of workers traveling by foot over snow, shot from a number of perspectives, summon ghosts and echoes of the past, both in film and outside, so that the referent—snow, land, and so on—is like an echo chamber. The aforementioned sequence is a good example of this, in that it begins with a frontal shot of workers carrying bags in their hands while walking along an unknown and dusty road. As is typical of the film in general, no information is provided to suggest these figures, subjects, characters, or modèles are workers at all. We can only sense that this is the case. The next shot, taken from a side angle, appears at first to capture the same group as they now move along the same road surrounded by snowcovered ground. This group, however, on close inspection, is not the same as the last, a difference noticeable in the bags they are carrying. A low-angle reverse shot from a side angle films the same group moving across a snow terrain before, in the next shot, they are filmed walking from left to right into the frame (the camera initially positioned on an empty snow-covered terrain). The shot that follows is one—if not the most—visually arresting of the film: a long shot of a group walking into the winter horizon flanked by two overarching trees that appear to blend together like an impressionistic painting.4 A  silence, or at least silence considered as a lack of dialogue and non-diegetic sound, marks out the sequence as eerie in tone, with the figures now taking silhouette form against a green-on-white color scheme. Positioned to peer at the group, one can sense an evacuation, forced transit, with the object of the destination unknown. The image, as Margulies has noted of Akerman’s work in general, has this hallucinatory effect, as the first group morphs into the second, and the rhythm changes and the setting mutates from the countryside to that of urban environment in an instant. The sequence that follows this is—again—one of most stunning tracking shots over the duration of the film. The camera moves—almost hauntingly— from left to right across a suburban space, as another group of strangers, seemingly different to those who have come before and not unlike the one we have just seen, walk along a similarly snow cleared road. The camera now moves with the people, revealing the open space and crowds making their way into the hub of the post-Soviet city. Assuming that there is no indicative “meaning” to these images, even those haunting in their evident simplicity—in that they herald the last

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movement of a society on the brink, the last vestiges of the homogeneity that has marked the Eastern Bloc—we are still left with the implacable realization that the “trace” is an index of Eastern Europe in its exposure to the West, and an echo—in its actual state—of a repressed silent history that affects in transaction: the stories Akerman has alluded to, but which she felt could only surface unintentionally. It is not that Akerman is intentionally trying to mold a view of the East to fit some past description, shape the images into fictional reconstructions of stories she has heard, but referents manifest unconsciously in the decisions made at the level of form:  the footage of anonymous groups who, as soon as we think we know who they are, metamorphose into another. We cannot know where these people are going. It is as these images should be felt, not because she is drawn to the anonymous, nor because there is something extravagant in the ordinary, but because, on some level, the anonymous masses purged on this same landscape is an object of her transactive mourning. Akerman must, as is her ethical duty, refrain from imposing “fiction” on reality, and yet it is the actual life she films that bears the imprint of this. By calling the installation “Bordering on Fiction,” Akerman is challenging, like many of the filmmakers discussed in the context of nonfiction in this book, the precondition that documentary filmmakers observe without their interests impacting on what they film and observe. Margulies is right therefore to approach the film as a work that appears to channel an ethnographic methodology, only to reveal—perhaps by default—its aesthetic aspirations: that is, the way the image can brush up to border on fiction. The scene is of nighttime, or at least evening, the country appears to be the former Soviet Union, and the film is about two-thirds of the way through. Again, the camera pans from right to left, along a group of people who appear to be waiting on a train. The faces are again—as if they could be nothing else—anonymous, but their singularity protrudes against a uniform dress marked to an almost hallucinatory degree with little dabs of color:  red, purple, green, dabs of paint used for affective purposes. Akerman’s camera may well be drawn to the homogenous crowds that wait in lines, queuing for food or trams, but she cannot fail to pick up on that which singularizes the subjects of her gaze. The effect, however, is that of searching, as if seeking out that trace that will make tangible her own connection to this place, bring the stories she has concocted to make sense of her own past as the child of Holocaust survivors to some form of realization. Hence the camera inspects the singularity of those caught in crowds, suspended in time, evoking those, like her maternal grandmother, who were transported to the death camps. But because there is a prevalent silence around the details of what happened, all that can be discerned in these people, and the images Akerman is drawn to in the film are those that come from her own post-traumatic imaginings:  imaginings that, by

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their very nature, can be qualified as ghostly fictions. “People of my parents’ generation told themselves: we are going to spare them the story of what happened to us,” Akerman has said about her relationship with her parents. “Because they did not transmit their histories, I searched for a false memory, a kind of imaginary, reconstructed memory rather than the truth.” Akerman indicates, in this moment, the ethical instantiation of the other’s guilt—her need to understand trauma carried through its survivors in the form of a silence—but also the need to imagine: there is a dual impulse to imagine this plight while trying to objectify the world from where it originated. There is an impulse to simply record the East as she bears witness to it while allowing her own experience to draw her toward certain implacable features of it: faces. “Akerman’s work as a whole can now be read retrospectively as a long journey home,” Pollock writes in one of her many exceptional articles on Akerman’s legacy in contemporary screen studies, Namely as a journey towards the trauma that is finally claimed and transformed—trans-formed by a process of filmmaking that hovers undecidedly between fiction and history through the creative devices that Janet Bergstrom named “invented memories,” and Alisa Lebow identified as “transitive autobiography.” (Pollock, 2010, 3) It is vital, in this sense, to acknowledge—as Pollock does—the skill that Akerman brings to this particular endeavor. Not only is D’Est fascinating in its ethical endeavor taken as a journey into a land her persecuted ancestors hailed from, but its merit lies in the aesthetic treatment of those people who are filmed in similar gatherings to those that preceded—at least in Akerman’s false memory, or imaginary constructions of the events that defined a trauma transmitted indirectly to her—the evacuation of innocent Jews. Of course, we can never know for definite if these images are in fact projected traces of the false memories Akerman has of this landscape and its people, evoking memories that are as much invented as a response to the gaping silence that underwrites the events that are known to her but not in their precise detail, stories gleaned from popular culture and Holocaust literature that act as a narrative resource that nonetheless border on fiction. And yet, what stands out more than anything now, and Lebow makes this point succinctly in her analysis, is the faces of the unnamed. It is as if the face itself stands in for the nameless: the faceless masses that were transported to their death in this very place. Mention of the face as the point of contact in intersubjective relations, before we even think of a subject, brings up the legacy of Levinas’s preontological contribution to ethics. Levinas is particularly relevant to Akerman’s approach to her subject matter in that the ethical is said to precede, come before, the political. Like Akerman, Levinas, who spent time as a prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War, had

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FIGURE 6.3 D’Est: The performance that seems to act as a pivot for the film in its entirety

relatives killed in the Holocaust. His ethics evolves fundamentally from a phenomenology of the Other’s face, and puts forward the preposition that the face comes before or beyond any ontology. “The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility,” Levinas has said in interview with Richard Kearney. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de moi) but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. (Levinas in Kearney, 1995, 189) Akerman’s shots of faces are, by and large, transitory in nature: very few dwell on the face of the subjects she films for long. And yet, the filming provides Akerman with the opportunity to move freely along a terrain Westerners were so long denied access to, and to encounter the subjects of the East “face to face.” There is a kind of wonder in this in itself, in that the difference and singularity of each can stand out without prescribed

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information in dialogue or voice-over. These are understood as ethical encounters that substitute for the lost encounter with the anonymous masses exterminated in the pogroms and the genocide of the Holocaust. In addition, Akerman’s camera’s movement in tracing the contours of the face is an act of responsibility that comes before politics. For D’Est is not an overtly political film. “In my films,” Akerman has stated, a quote that has become synonymous with her method as an artist, “I follow an opposite trajectory to that of the makers of political films. They have a skeleton, an idea and then they put on flesh: I have in the first place the flesh, the skeleton appears later” (Akerman in Schwartz, 2008). “The flesh,” of course, stands for the face of those she films. “The skeleton,” on the other hand, is a reference to the fact that she wants to be an observational documentarian, at a distance (we never see or hear her talk with her film subjects) but her “primal scene,” as she calls it—in the notes that constitute the third chamber of the installation—materializes nonetheless. Images of evacuation, a trauma sensed indirectly from childhood, begin to appear everywhere for her. It is interesting that in her notes Akerman remembers looking at the final edit of D’Est and saying “That’s what it was:  that again.” “That,” in this case, as Griselda Pollock has pointed out with such critical acumen, is the “intergenerational transmission of trauma” (Pollock, 2010, 9). For Pollock, this transmission is mediated through images of the masses that point to—without declaring as such—the impact of a loss surrounding the absent and indeed murdered generation. There is no common memory in Bennett’s sense of the term: memory takes the form of a sensing.

The displaced m(Other) Pollock sees Akerman’s oeuvre as part of a tradition of Holocaust survival literature and psychoanalytic and feminist theory that helps confront trauma as a by-product of another’s experience; trauma as an indirect experience. The missing generation referred to here is that of Akerman’s grandmother, who left behind a diary that would become her granddaughter’s only tangible means of reference to her family history. D’Est is, in this sense, a film of which the constitutive point involves searching for the lost “m/other” among masses the faces that stand in for the anonymous faces of the dead, those who didn’t leave a body in the Holocaust. I want to argue in what’s left of this chapter that the end can be read, pace Levinas, to be a cathartic response to the loss of Akerman’s grandmother who is “from the East.” D’Est concludes the journey East with a slow pan of crowds waiting on a train, filtered in blue to characterize a sense of being alone in a crowd, before breaking to a low-angle shot of a stage and a woman preparing to perform solo on the cello. The crowd applaud her arrival. When she sits, the

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dark tones of her dress aligned to the dark tones of the cello allow her face to stand out. The woman plays a haunting piece, finishing to applause. She then receives roses from a woman not unlike Akerman, before receiving the same from a group of men. It is a relatively simple scene that has, nonetheless, an inordinate symbolic relevance both for those familiar with the narrative of Akerman’s family history and for the opening of the East in the wake of communism. Taking the view that Akerman is indeed searching for the trace of those near to her that she was denied knowing in the flesh in making the film, notably her grandmother who she came to “know” primarily through a diary that was given to her by her mother in 1984, the “performance” can be viewed in a somewhat different light. We are now invited to think of the performance as a crescendo of sorts: the “mother” who performs a stand-in for the grandmother whose life was taken. The sudden “cut” from anonymous crowds that evoke the ghosts of those once summoned to their death, to a woman about to and then performing, transfigures the sequence of events into something “other,” something more intimate and personal. “The absence and the unimaginable but always to be imagined end of the parents of the mother are both marked,” Pollock notes, “and compensated for, by fetishising relics that function as both substitutive memorials of the missing and markers of their horrible absenting: an identity photograph in one case and a notebook-diary in the other” (Pollock, 2010, 9). Pollock is deliberating on the maternal grandmother’s diary as passed on to Akerman from her mother. But we can go a step further when deliberating on the performance at the end of D’Est as a depiction, one that involves inciting the spectator to bring the Akerman family narrative to bear on a film that makes no direct reference to this narrative. Can we think of the scene not as a tapping into memory that is common and spoken about but that which remains unspoken—that is, the product of sense? Just as the scene marks a turning point in the film, with the first real emphasis on a performance as opposed to the ethnographic tone of the journey until now, it also anchors the journey, giving to the journey East a sort of intimate symbolic resonance. A reason to dwell on this truly Levinasian sequence, not just for the lowangle camera positions or the way the face is allowed to stand out against the background, is the delivery of roses—a symbol of love—at the end. We are never allowed to see those who are applauding, only a succession of audience members who approach from offscreen to hand the performer roses, until the woman is unable to carry any more. Irrespective of whether we should approach the performer—in psychoanalytic terms—as the displaced traumatic “object,” and the sequence a fantasy of what could have been had the m(other) lived, the scene’s evident power to affect lies in the open nature of an image that invites us to surmise on it in this way. The grandmother who died alone might well be the woman who appears here playing for an audience, given a different set of historical circumstances to

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FIGURE 6.4 D’Est: Flowers are a universal gesture typical of both East and West

those that materialized. Going back to Currie’s definition of the documentary image as trace, a footprint in the snow being the particular metaphor he uses in his essay, and Akerman’s way of intensifying the cinematic code, even subverting it from within, we are then able to come to some conclusion as to what is meant by bordering on fiction. The performance ends and the woman’s identity, like all the other subjects filmed by Akerman throughout this somewhat austere journey, is still unknown. Just when we think the film will end on the joyous note of a successful solo performance, it cuts to another of the film’s signature shot: a long durational tracking shot taken across an urban city space.

Metal repairs Having watched this ending multiple times, I  now feel like a detective searching for a clue to my conviction, that takes the form of a belief, that the cello performance is a kind of passage a l’act, symbolic rupture that changes the perceptual dynamics of what is from the East. I  intuit that  nothing changes dramatically, only a slightly more upbeat approach to the swathes of people that populate the streets of Moscow. But the everyday is still the

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everyday, and given the symbolic importance of the performance we have just seen, which—for perhaps the first time—celebrates a cultural heritage that is shared by both East and West, what comes after, the sequence that follows this perceivably epiphanic and therefore cathartic moment is slightly upbeat. The camera moves slowly from left to right—the now signature tracking shot of a city street with people walking in different directions—interrupting our gaze with the sudden, unexpected, apparently unintended; the exotic now erupts within the humdrum or the perceivably banal: a series of lights are now noticeable among shops and industry signs far from Western in appearance. A  sign for “metal repairs” stands out in the background, as an upbeat Russian pop song is heard to interrupt the diegetic noise that comes from the city. At first the shop sign appears like any other sign, random in its appearance. But it is difficult not to overlook its position as a sort of message, intended by the director to reacquaint a diligent spectator with the signifier “repair” as that which mediates the personal in a public space. And although this reading is simply conjecture on my behalf—and an interpretation that takes this form (or any form) can never be proven scientifically—the slight upbeat mood that is felt as the song syncs with the camera shot appears to suggest a certain intent by the director, irrespective of whether it is perceived as intending to suggest this or that. If there is any real noticeable difference with the earlier tracking shots, it is perhaps—precisely—in this marginally more upbeat mood that it begins to surface. It is worth considering whether Akerman focuses intentionally on this sign, to invest the recording of the street with a modicum of artistic intent. That is, that the “sign” is used to incite the cognitive faculty around personal as opposed to public knowledge. But, as I mentioned above, we can never know for certain if Akerman means this. There is the trace as we call it, the shop itself photographed in such a way as to bring out its features as evidence of an historical moment:  when communism had collapsed and society existed—for a few years at most—suspended in time. But should we ignore the sign, with its subtle emphasis on “repair,” at this point, we must hold the view the sign is independent of our belief; that it is not “intended” by Akerman to designate anything in particular, other than another Eastern street. However, taking the alternative view, making the assumption that cognitive methods of analysis can help cultivate a reading of the photographic trace that is not independent of belief, we are tasked with making sense of the film, precisely from the opposite point of view:  what we come to believe when constructing/discovering meaning, depending on our point of view. The debate around the either/or has raged hard for years between meaning that is discovered by a diligent spectator and a meaning constructed by a spectator with a set of presuppositions, as Chapter 2 has, to some extent, dipped into already. From the perspective of this debate, the cognitive turn

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FIGURE 6.5 D’Est: The sign that translates as “metal repairs” at the end

that has come to influence the discipline has not, to any great extent, escaped our attention. Carl Platinga’s overview of Cognitive Film Studies (since its original inception in the 1980s), turns on the point that “cognitive theory today is primarily interested in how spectators make sense of and respond to films, together with the textual structures and techniques that give rise to spectatorial activity and response” (Platinga, 2002, 23). He goes on to consider this area of scholarly activity to involve the analysis of film interpretation and narrative, two of the main considerations of this chapter. But making the assumption regarding Platinga’s analysis that the sign translated as “metal repairs” is meant to affect, it is the spectator who must gage the intent that brings the affect into being as an aesthetic moment. The spectator’s formulatization of what is intended is a way of engaging with the image beyond literal or indexical meaning. If there is no way of “representing” trauma, no way of knowing if we move beyond it, there is a way of sensing and then believing that we have moved beyond it. Flowers stand for reconciliation and forgiveness at the end of Close-Up, to affect a spectator moved by the coming together of the two Makhmalbafs. The flowers at the end of D’Est, the roses that are given to the performer, affect through a similar transaction of sensation. To respond emotionally,

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to be affected by a performance intended—perceivably at least—to have a personal resonance for a filmmaker who has remained somewhat aloof from what is filmed, and then to view a “sign” indexical to the street being filmed in the sequence after that says “repair” as recognition of this, is to sense a link that is intended. This involves believing something is in the object that is not necessarily of the object: a trace of something, a reminder, an image. It brings to mind the distinction Currie makes between the intended causal effect of fiction and the photographic record, with both held in suspension in this scene. The image affects in the way I have described only when the faculty of the imagination is brought to bear as a sensing, and the image is no longer simply considered a transparent reproduction of an antecedent “real,” but an object that bears the imprint of fiction. “From” and “of” the East is the most common translation of D’Est, with the etymology much discussed by commentators. However, I would argue that the performance scene, in that it collapses what is “of the East” and “of the West” into one singular moment, is intended to repair via the affect in ways other than the purely personal. Repair here involves a kind of healing, or suturing of difference that allows us to return to the street— in the sequence that follows—without the same predilection as before. There is no “East” and “West” any more—at least in the sense that they are separated by unassailable differences and a history that cannot be shared— only Europe. It is one of the few scenes in the film when a “performance” is given such attention, and the fact that it takes place as the film comes to its conclusion suggests, at least in my viewing, that there is something of the performative in all scenes of the film. No matter how much we seek to maintain objectivity by reducing the camera to a recording device whose content is unimpaired, untouched by the intervention of the artist, the subject of the gaze will appear to perform in some capacity. And in terms of the reception of the scene, the fact that the performance is “in public,” is important, as the spectator is encouraged to return to a street image afterward with a different perspective on this moment. Now, the East is cast as an extension of the greater more expansive project of Europe and all it stands for. (The woman who performs in the aforementioned scene is/was the cello teacher of Akerman’s then partner, Sonia Wieder Atherton. The woman’s name is Natalia Shakhovskaia and apparently Akerman was very impressed by the tradition of handing bouquets to the performer following a successful performance. It is interesting, however, to further contextualize the moment as cinematically linked to Kiarostami’s use of flowers at the end of Close-Up, while thinking of Akerman’s casting of Shakhovskaia in the role of self as modèle. Hence, in another sense, the emphasis on “repair,” forgiveness, is something that might appear a direct narrative component of Close-Up—an element of Story—but which is more evidentially sensed as a process of transaction in Akerman’s less abrasive cinematic endeavor.)

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In conclusion, this chapter explored a film that appears to take the form of a documentary in the conventional sense of the term, but which is actually engaged in more forthright considerations of film as a kind of bordering. Akerman’s D’Est differs in degree from the films discussed thus far, films that engage the self as modèle as a very obvious feature of the form, but this doesn’t stop us using the new nonfiction film as an umbrella concept for categorizing this and other films like it. Subject and story are concerns of D’Est, but sense, that other categorical property is foreground. Akerman, I would argue, is aware of the limitations and borders that distinguish one form of filmmaking from another, but it is precisely in the margins that she situates her practice. In the next chapter, I want to explore the margins further, and the way being in the margins contributes to the evaluation of new nonfiction in this book.

Notes 1 Perhaps the one major exception here is Stanley Cavell. Cavell’s writings on film can appear a little dated now, given the limitations that were in play regarding the study of film when Cavell began his pioneering investigations. Nonetheless, this work is significant and important to the history of a then burgeoning field of Film Studies (Cavell, 1980). 2 The general contention in the many and recent studies of the Bresson oeuvre is that Bresson’s principal concern is to distinguish film as an art from theater, a form it shares many properties with, none more so than the actor. However, Jacques Rancière has argued that Bresson’s concern is not with film’s status as an oppositional art form but rather an art form that comes after literature, when theater is a form of literature. He makes the point in his essay “Mouchette and the Paradoxes of the Language of Images” that “the real problem is not the contrast between the cinematograph and ‘filmed theatre’ but the relationship between the cinematograph and literature. Cinema did not arise against theatre, it arose after literature” (Rancière, 2014, 43). 3 Some context for D’Est: Bordering on Fiction: it premiered in 1995 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before being shown at the Walker Art Gallery Minneapolis. It would later tour to Société des Expositions des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Galerie Nationale du Jew de Paume, Paris, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and the UVAM Centre des Carme in Valencia, Spain. There was a publication produced by the Walker Art Centre to accompany the original exhibition, edited by Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins, titled Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (1995) that included contributions from Michael Tarantino and Catherine David. 4 An interesting comparison can be made with the camera work of News from Home (Akerman, 1977), another of Akerman’s signature works. Kenneth White has offered an intriguing analysis of the importance of the city grid as an aesthetic property of the film, while drawing our attention to some of the ways Akerman inscribes herself as a quasi-presence in the cityscape (White, 2010,

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373). In addition, Anne Eakin Moss develops this point, identifying certain aesthetic features of News from Home that are of a style with camera work and methodologies of Akerman’s D’Est. “In her eleventh shot, at about ten minutes into the film,” Eakin Moss writes, “Akerman frames a group of people sitting in front of a building from across the street. They look at the camera and gesture as cars pass in between. In the next shot, she has moved the camera to their side of the street, but she aims the camera down the sidewalk, perpendicular to the previous shot. Only one of the figures from the original remains in view” (Eakins Moss, in Papazian and Eades, 2016, 176–177). This focus on the individual and crowd, and on the singling out of the face, is also a signature feature of D’Est that I focus on as giving the film a particular capacity to haunt.

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7 The poetic mode, depiction, and nonfiction: Sense-value and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously

Documentary as a method of filmmaking has intrigued film theorists since the genre’s inception in the 1920s. Debates about documentary as an antiaesthetic form—qua Grierson—or definitively creative—qua Grierson also— are well-rehearsed. We are all too conscious of the way social commentary is opposed to the intrinsically poeticized form of documenting. Few would claim that documentary is threatened by the poetic, or vice versa. But, even so, direct commentary rarely coexists with poetic documentary; or rather, direct commentary is often distinguished by its non-aesthetic claims. In the last few decades, a range of cultural loci—from art photography, digital film, and the art installation—have embraced documentary methodologies.1 As a result, documentary has become a catchword for art based in the real. It is somewhat ironic however that this, the digital age—when the indexical is no longer the triumphant domain of the photographic image— has seen artists and filmmakers alike celebrate documentary as a readily transparent term. As discussed earlier, from Flaherty on, the very concept of documentary has been fraught with controversy. This is due (no doubt) to the act of mediation, mediating reality as depending on activating beliefs about what is real. The phrase “to document” carries assumptions about the real (its intrinsic forms) in its variable modes of actualization. So when a theoretical or generic classification is given to documentary-infused films we have come to understand in this book as new nonfiction, the “poetic” is the most generally used prefix; that is, documentary taken to mean access

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FIGURE 7.1 sleep furiously: The opening shot from the film is of a bell ringer, arguably ringing the bell for the town’s impending doom

to or the mediation of “reality” (in all its complexity). Bill Nichols offers a most prescient definition of the poetic mode, The poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution. This mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of factual knowledge or acts of rhetorical persuasion. (Nichols, 2010, 162) Depictions based on the manipulation of indexical photographic material, and which activate in the spectator an affective response, can—indeed— generate something other than “factual knowledge,” Nichols posits (Nichols, 2010, 162). For, as a venture in aesthetics, depiction brings a more refined understanding of the poetic mode (as theorized by Nichols), giving a certain prioritization to the affect over fact-based propositions. Depiction, perceived aesthetically, can help define the artistic embellishment of the real, giving to the object of documentary scrutiny intrinsic aesthetic value. Definitions are, of course, important. It could well be that the purpose of depicting is to activate a response concerning the status of the pictorial. So, resisting the impulse to deliver verifiable fact-based knowledge, associated by Nichols with conventional modes of documentary, the “expressive quality” found in depiction, engenders an alternative means of address (Nichols, 2010, 162).

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It is this alternative means I now want to focus on to end this study of the new nonfiction film. Offering a degree of clarity to such an alternative means, regarding Gideon Koppel’s (2008) internationally acclaimed documentary sleep furiously, is just one of the critical aims of this chapter. Another aim is to consider depiction (as a rather complex mode of self-inscription) as a suitable answer to a question put forward by Michael Renov “What modes of self- inscription have been employed by (nonfiction) filmmakers?” (Renov, 2004, xvi). Renov’s question attains an added degree of complexity, both ethically and aesthetically, when taking the view that the director is inscribed—without declaring this directly— in their film. This is an issue to be, I propose, elicited by sleep furiously that overlaps with Akerman. The film’s mode of inscription (the director inscribed through his family name) has a revelatory impact when taken to task or explored through a depiction-based lens. Not unlike Akerman’s D’Est, with its complex weaving of memory and haunting in the post-Holocaust narrative, sleep furiously teases out the senses of the viewer on numerous levels. In his introduction to a text rarely considered a Film Studies reference point, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary (2011), Jonathan Webber underlines the importance depiction plays in mediating processes (as) applicable to the aesthetic realm. “Sartre’s theory,” Webber claims, “is that depiction results from a combination of resemblance and the response it elicits in the viewer” (Webber in Sartre, 2011, xvi). For Webber, aesthetic experience is suffused with beliefs and affectations . . . our experiences of paintings and photographs can in principle be suffused with the belief and affectations normally associated with what they depict, or with things relevantly similar to what they depict. (Webber in Sartre, 2011, xvi) In addition, Webber is of the belief theories of depiction deliberate on resemblances, yet often isolate the importance affect has to their formation. Webber underlines the critical role that affect plays in Sartre’s theory of depiction. “Depiction . . . for Sartre,” he maintains, is “a matter of animating an analogon, or representative matter, on the basis of an affective response. In portraits, the analogon is constructed for the viewer” (Webber in Sartre, 2011, xvii). The “analogon” (a sister word to “analogous”) is animated when a spectator responds—in an affective capacity—to artistic intent. A portrait, for example, of a woman—whether photographic or painterly in form—becomes that of a mother when the analogon is animated to a sufficiently affective degree. Even the index, as “existential bond between the sign and (its) object” (Doane, 2002, 92)  (otherwise considered as the shown), integral to the photographic, assumes a speculative dimension for the viewer in depiction (the perceived). It is precisely this intersection of speculation and belief around images that I  have just explored in D’Est, I believe tallies with the reading of sleep furiously I am offering here.

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Michael Tully, in his review, praises the “openness” of sleep furiously, “Refusing to acknowledge just how personal this film is to Koppel he enables it to become that much more personal for each individual viewer” (Tully, 2011). It is near impossible to prove what is (or is not) acknowledged by Koppel in the film, but the aesthetic experience, looked at through a Sartrean lens, requires, along the line of Kiarostami’s concerns in CloseUp, the spectator to respond to perceived intent. The spectator begins to believe something is shown; “shown” being the intent of the artist/director to incite belief. Sartre elaborates further on what he means to incite belief in this way in the section titled “The object of the image does not obey the principle of individuation,” by noting that a depiction resides around “a certain coefficient of generality” (Sartre, 2011, 90). Essentially, the spectator is considered the “imaging consciousness,” who comes to believe, for Sartre, that the artist intended to depict what is perceived as such. The depicted is a coefficient. In the case of a picture of a woman like the cello player in D’Est, the woman is a considered coefficient for the generality of “grandmother.” In the case of a “burning” landscape, the land is the coefficient of “hell.” A generality pertains to the coefficient Sartre associates with the depicted when it affects us; a mother is associated with love or desire; hell, with fear and horror. Sartre finds, essentially, and of particular importance here, a link between the object as perceived by the spectator and a generality borne of the coefficient. Ben Blumon adds to the Sartrean position from a similarly aesthetic position, Depiction is, like language, aimed at the production of various effects. Maps are depictions aimed at producing beliefs in audiences about the terrain. Lego instructions are depictions which are intended to induce audiences to arrange Lego in a certain way, rather than to get audiences to believe that the Lego is arranged in that way. (Blumon, 2009, 146) Photographs, as Blumon suggests and, by extension, cinematography, can induce affective responses, stylistic elements as transformed through the activation of belief in the spectator. “Transforming is what art does,” Susan Sontag notes, yet “photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticised if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art” (Sontag, 2004, 76–77). In this instance Sontag’s concern is war photography: the aestheticization of war. That photos can depict something other to what “is,” problematizes, for Sontag, any strict epistemic status as evidence. And the implication here is that documentary records are not always records; they are depictions when suitably aestheticized as such. They activate belief (which cannot necessarily be justified as true). Depiction, when giving due diligence to Sartre’s take on it, is an activation of belief in relation to what is “seen”; even when the “seen” lacks epistemic justification.

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Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (Herzog, 1992), a film that explores the aftermath of the Gulf War, has—given its attention to the image as such—led to Herzog being accused of aestheticizing the burning oilfields of Kuwait. The film is a case in point, having polarized audiences on its release, many finding the manipulation of the event to immorally aestheticize the war. If Herzog’s photography and commentary on the burning oilfields manipulated the calamity of the war itself, his film (qua cinematography) can be said to conform, in the context of Blumon’s and Sartre’s criteria, to the status of aesthetic object. In addition to employing Bosch and Goya in his defense; both of whom are artists who depict the brutal horror of war, Goya’s the most sustained depiction of war in the history of art,2 Herzog reverts to the aesthetic. But that he reverts to the aesthetic is telling. It points to the nature of his project: the burning fields can/should be perceived as something “more” than burning fields. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (2012) is a text that gives credence to this view (while also drawing on Sontag), “Demonstrative explanation . . . attributes agency to the depicted surfaces (describing what they do) so that the reflexive verb ‘to disguise itself’ becomes another way of asserting the subjectivity (even the sentience) of landscape” (Ames, 2012, 72). For the author of Ferocious Reality, Eric Ames, the Herzog image is a portal into the sentient and “disguised”; Herzog a director who “documents” and depicts. Herzog is, however, a maverick of sorts. More apparently “straightforward” documentarists—such as Erol Morris—have taken issue with those quantifiable forms attributed to the documented image, in the process seeking to expose the redundancy of a term considered in its vernacular usage. By way of amplifying subjective quirks,3 complicating the truth of his subjects, something is aesthetically enhanced, depicted, by Morris in them.4 In contrast to the apparent realism he is said to challenge, Morris is—arguably—encouraging the spectator, exposed to this quirky physicality, to generate an “image” of the subject that runs contrary to the story they tell. The depiction is formed by a subjective—in part—creative response by the spectator to the perceived directorial intent. As Blumon adds, “Depictions are representational because they are perpetrated with the intention of inducing effects in audiences by means of recognition of such intentions” (Blumon, 2009, 147). In this sense, the subjective—the subject making the film, Morris, and the spectator as subject to the film—bears intrinsically on the perceived content. Truth is complicated by this.5 This chapter, taking the subject making the film/subject to the film rubric (the spectator and director) as given, investigates the subject matter of Gideon Koppel’s award-winning documentary sleep furiously along the lines of the last chapter’s engagement with cognition and sense, arguing that the poetic mode as a definitive concept is widened by Koppel to include the kind of affective responses particular to the new nonfiction film as theorized

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in this book (Nichols, 2010, 162). Furthermore, this process fits into the wider discussions of this book. A  key reference point for this discussion is the scene in sleep furiously when winter ends (summer has arrived)— winter an art historical metaphor for death—the screen blackens and an intertitle text appears. A sentence appears and then disappears. “It is only when I sense the end of things,” it reveals, “that I find the courage to speak, the courage but not the words.” The intertitle is short and abrupt. But we can return to it in the final section of this chapter to consider its status as a crucial intervention and indeed commentary on the differing strands of the film. I deliberate on these strands as engaging the aesthetics of documentary and the wider concerns of the film with the sensuous registering of an affect; with sense the final S category. Furthermore, “sensing” (a verb given crucial emphasis in the intertitle text), as opposed to knowledge formation, is explored as a way of (making but also) engaging (with) sleep furiously. From the spectator’s perspective, to sense is to perceive directorial intent, the affective responses to the perceived meaning behind stylistic elements. Sartre’s understanding of depiction offers a useful methodology—semiological and cognitive approaches converging around what Robert Sinnerbrink calls “affective and perceptual experience” (Sinnerbrink, 2011, 67)—for explicating the relationship between director and spectator in relation to affective responses to perceived directorial intent. However, before this method can be employed as an exegetical tool, it is worth restating that at no point has sleep furiously been received as anything other than documentary. It has not been called an art object, an experimental film, or an example of the poetic mode, which, in heralding the use of depiction, is best understood as new nonfiction. Critics championed the quirky inventiveness of the film6 and deemed it, rightly or wrongly, a return to the origins of documentary. The famous description of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality,” is, of course, an interesting reference point here, precisely because for a short period at least, it was considered as much a creative as didactic practice. The creative treatment of the actual in sleep furiously demands attention because Koppel manages to tread carefully in the margins:  along a line that divides aesthetic objects from those prescribing verifiable knowledge. It is for this reason that the film operates at the interstice of fiction and documentary, and is best categorized as new nonfiction, which I hope to make clear in this analysis. sleep furiously is set in the village Trefeurig over a year; concentrating on practices that shape life in the village. Moving through the seasons, the practices that sustain the villagers’ livelihood take center stage, from farming to late night bonfires, a school closing to a tea group of retired pensioners, set against the often sublime, perhaps even luminous, mountainous landscape. Each sequence contains a minor narrative arc, a mini-narrative within the trajectory of film. There are, in addition, contributions from teachers of traditional Welsh song to farmers and quietly sleeping babies,

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all given an equal measure of expression. For John Banville, “It is Koppel’s remarkable achievement to present the community of Trefeurig in such a straightforward manner, without heroics of spurious, piled on ‘emotion’ ” before elaborating “the result is a film immediate in its human moments and yet austere to the point of abstraction in what is communicated ‘beyond the screen’ ” (Banville, 2009). This, in some ways beatific statement encapsulates the film’s diverse strands “beyond the screen,” an intimation of the centrality of depiction to the film. On the one hand, the villagers are presented with a minimal level of accompanying information, appearing to simply do what they do. On the other hand, what they do lacks any overt negativity; there is little emphasis on the kind of small town deprivation that would give balance to a real-life documentary. Little or no emphasis is given to the hardships and squalor, drug addiction and violence, the unemployment and disenfranchised youths that populate small British towns on the seaboard. There is something vaguely unsettling about the perceived “authenticity” of these people, their apparent immunity to the cynicism of modern life.7 In addition, Koppel offers the viewer continued reminders that the film is mediation. The first of these reminders is the montage of colored images opening the film. Like a quickly succeeding screensaver—from (monochrome) pink to orange—the all-encompassing chroma of the film screen announces itself as such. The flashing screen follows the opening shot of a bell ringer descending the roads (the bell ringing in the new or the old), a reminder to the spectator that the building blocks of the film are color, the tools of the visual artist working in 2D form. A close-up of Pip’s hands passing clay to attending schoolchildren follows, the camera working in close-up on the molding of clay, hinting, all the while, that the director, as artist, is molding reality. Inside the classroom, the closure of which politicizes the community over the course of the calendar year—nodding subtly to Philibert’s Être et Avoir (Philibert, 2002)—a quiet prevails. Pip is a subject—representing a generation—giving the narrative political direction. But she is also, arguably, more than a subject. In other words, there is something unstated about Pip as self that emerges over the course of the film as a modèle; something the film positions us to sense or ultimately, make sense of in terms of the self as modèle. Indeed, it could be said, qua Banville, that to document (to represent subjects like Pip)—while cognizant of problems in trying to objectively document—mark Koppel’s endeavors out as singular. It is not unwarranted therefore to suggest that observational methods are used by Koppel with a modicum of success8—the molding of clay, the sheep trial, and the scene with John visiting the pensioners. But to question the directorial touches that impinge on the objectivity sought is equally warranted. John, the Library Van driver, a subject who also effectively plays himself in the film, in addition to Pip, is remarkably comfortable in Koppel’s presence, such

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FIGURE 7.2 sleep furiously: Pip and her dog as used in this promotional image for the film

that the criterion of distance, necessary for the observational documentary, appears to be met, but in a curiously stylized manner. Questions like “Is it real?” or “How real is it?” play in the viewers mind. So many scenes confirm this questioning of form—a farmer is practicing for an upcoming sheep trial; the farmer’s repeated failure to entice the sheep into the pen assuming a willhe-won’t-he thriller-like dimension. It is as if Koppel has filmed rural “life as it is” uninterrupted, while eliciting suspicion that all has been enhanced; out of which a sense of tension materializes in the cinema image. Two more scenes are worth noting. In the first, which has engendered a lot of critical attention, the camera lingers on Pip standing alone at the washing line. Little evidence of mediation is given; the scene is filmed with a modicum of transparency. Nonetheless, what appears, at first remove, as a window onto Pip’s world, is undercut with unusual composition (the low camera angle jars with the type of establishing shots used to convey “objectivity” in conventional documentary forms). The soundtrack cuts in, as the low angle is followed by a pan of the landscape, encouraging the spectator to speculate on Pip’s relationship with the surrounding land. In a later scene, Pip recalls to a neighbor an owl she befriended who had died and whom she later sent to a taxidermist. Filmed in conventional medium shot, the scene is a nod to the suspicion, emphasized by the unusual

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camera angles that follow, that even those scenes that appear as most real to the viewer are infused with artifice. Pip is advised, when she asks how she might “stuff” the bird for affect, to freeze and post it to a London specialist. She then reflects on the stuffed owl she receives, diminished of life. Pip’s reflection on a fabricated “owl” is a clue that artifice is integral to the filmic aestheticization of everyday life. Thus, a prevalent concern of Koppel (perhaps all documentary) that comes to light is not just “reality”—the bird as a bird—but the relationship between artifice and reality. As a result, the criteria I  evolved earlier when theorizing new nonfiction as a speculative mode are, to varying degrees, met.

To document . . . (or) . . . to depict The subtle depictions Ames finds in Herzog’s “documented” planes—“inner landscapes”—finds an echo in that which is “disguised” and therefore requires speculation to “get” at in sleep furiously. Like an owl doubling as an aesthetic object, the film itself suggests the real is aesthetically enhanced. We now need to see why. Depiction, at least in a Sartrean sense, is an “affective”9 response to the perceived intention behind the artwork. An affective response, for Sartre, to the picturing process (in this case of the film) is based on imagination. It is good to begin, when seeking to assess the role depiction plays in sleep furiously, with a subject who, perceivably at least, forms part of the real and aesthetically enhanced traits of the film: Pip. In a sequence that marks a certain fissure in the mode of the film delivery, Pip (in long shot) is seen walking her dog from an elevated position, her profile diminished against the trees, to an unknown destination. For the first time, she is shown walking in the landscape (alone). Although it is never clarified factually whether Pip is a relative of Koppel, we get an increasing sense—certainly from this point on—that Pip is “other” to what her characteristics have implied until now. Pip’s movements (as she reaches her destination) in the scene are suggestive for a number of reasons. The first derives from a shot of Pip picking a flower from the grass, followed by a reverse shot walking toward a grave in the lower left-hand side of the frame, the close-up of the grave an intimation of Pip’s activities as those of someone close to the deceased. A  close-up follows of Pip fixing the grave, with the inscription reading “Heinz Koppel, 29.1.1919–1.12.1980.” The second concerns the camera lingering on the inscription itself. The image is grainy in 35mm. Its exact inscription can, however, be identified against the grainy image that is difficult to decode (the grainy image has a blurred appearance so it obfuscates the finer details of the grave inscription). There is little dialogue in this scene and, like the film in general, there is no voice-over used to impart information. Yet if the analagon is animated,

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and to a somewhat revelatory degree, it is precisely because it suggests the subject is someone close to the deceased. There is a triangular relationship between the woman who visits, the grave, and that which is said to lie beyond the screen. Graveside visits are family affairs, graves needing upkeep, so Pip, the visitor, is likely to be a family member. The analagon, a consequence of the grave inscription, and the “analogous” implication it brings to the spectatorial experience, implies that she is also a Koppel. The scene consists of two things: an inscribed gravestone and a subject who visits. Many responses to this scene are possible. One, however, considered to be affective and speculatory, is that Pip is to be perceived, that is, sensed, as Koppel’s mother—both the subject of the film and the director’s mother.10 Sensing involves believing without justification that a belief is true. “If appearances are unstable in the human eye, their representation in art,” Leo Steinberg once said, “is not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation” (Steinberg, 1972). sleep furiously reveals/depicts through the positioning of the index, as affect. As a result we can surmise. We surmise that the grave is focused on to enhance the status of the subject who looks upon it as a depiction. In this sense, “depictions,” Blumon notes, “are representations because they are perpetrated with the intention of inducing an effect in their audience by means of recognition of intention” (Blumon, 2009, 143). Lacking a voice-over or any direct delivery of information that would declare intent—and given the difficulty adjudicating “intent” as fact—regarding Pip’s status, we must, as a spectator, sense this intent, and in such a way as to personalize the filmic content (belief is considered personal in that it lacks verifiable justification) for ourselves. The director, Koppel, like Akerman in D’Est, keeps a distance, remains outside the frame at all times. He never declares his connection to the village.11 It is inferred, nonetheless, that the spectator who responds to the grave inscription, will—potentially—recognize Pip, in the sense that Blumon and Sartre speak of, as Koppel’s mother (or an analogous figure). Only with the by-proxy involvement of Koppel’s family in the film is the grave inscription elicited as affect, altering the mood and dramatic tone of the film. In addition, the inscription elicits an affect. As it is never declared that Pip (the self) is the mother (modèle), the belief crucially incited at this point, personalizes the aesthetic experience of the film. Because Pip’s status is never verified as fact, and never delivered as such, the affect resides in the spectator investing belief in this, without the required justification to verify this belief as knowledge (and hence truth). We now see sleep furiously differently: as a film about a mother (and by inference Koppel himself). The grave doesn’t tell us Pip is Koppel’s mother. The grave cultivates in the spectator a belief that she is. An affective response, as Robert Zaponc asserts, isn’t the same as a cognitive encoding of truth; it doesn’t help us verify a truth as objective—it comes prior to a cognitive processing in this way (Zaponc, 1980). An affective response involves sensing,

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without verification that what is sensed can qualify as verifiable knowledge. Just like the performance in D’Est, the spectator is positioned to imagine events that are not clearly stated. Like the performance scene positioned as central to D’Est, and the sense that it is pivotal to our understanding of a catharsis of some sorts, it is important that Pip revisits the grave later, as shown in the repeated overhead longshot of her. Pip is still a village subject: she makes the same visit in winter, the rituals of a village pensioner. Yet this later visit, considered in the context of the grave inscription (shown) earlier in close-up, positions the spectator so as to sense a “beyond” to the indexical image of Pip as subject. Pip’s story can now be considered the story of a mother only in this affective and speculative capacity (the coefficient of generality, for Sartrean depiction, personalizes the response).12 Second, it is really an anomaly to speak of “the” story of sleep furiously when it is obvious the narrative strategies particular to mainstream documentary are not the ones drawn on by Koppel. No voice-over informs of why Pip is the focus of the film. There is no one story as such. The fact that no one speaks of her as Koppel’s mother is characteristic of the mode of address particular to the post-Bressonian category of self as modèle set forward as a criterion of the new nonfiction film. Pip is, in this sense, a modèle, like Jake in Two Years at Sea. She is sensed as m/other figure without being verified as such epistemologically. She is both self—subject— and modèle at once. In a scene that takes shape as sleep furiously concludes, a farmer separates a lamb from its mother, nurturing independence in the newly born. It is a subtle invocation (an interesting analogy for the lamb and the director of the film) of a filmmaker who wants to respect and nurture the independence of the life he shows. In the world of sleep furiously, to paraphrase Stanley Cavell (1980), the lamb is an animal that requires the same care as Pip. And because Pip’s relationship with the director is never clarified directly, the “mood, tone and affect” (Nichols, 2010, 162) of the film, qualities particular to the poetic mode, incite, I would argue, a particular type of response in the viewer. As a result, the affect is the integral feature of this response. This is certainly the way Sartre set things out in The Imaginary. When turning to the precise role affectivity plays in the process of depiction, he notes, An imitation is already a studied model, reduced to recipes, to schema. It is with these technical recipes that consciousness slips into an imaged intuition . . . but these elements of intuition are not enough to realise the “expressive nature” of which I  spoke. Here a new factor appears: affectivity. (Sartre, 2011, 27–28) As Sartre points out, depiction, not just in imitation, depends upon a subsidiary affective response. For Sartre, depiction is activated with the

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synthesis of intent and affect, so that a curious kind of communication (bond) comes into effect between, on the one hand, the artist and the other, the spectator. While I  have inferred that Pip can be perceived as other to her subject position when the spectator responds in an affective capacity, this inference is made on the basis that the mode of the film consists of “documented” subjects, and depictions, inciting affective responses to these subjects. Nothing is demarcated in depiction; the response is always a synthesis of affect and intent. Tully’s review, cited earlier, is a pertinent means of gauging such a response. For example, in one scene, Pips hangs laundry outside and speaks to her dog as she weakly calls for her puppy to return. At that moment, I was overcome with emotion, recalling the memory of visiting my own adorable little granny in Ireland, who lived in similar rugged terrain. Too much explicating by Koppel wouldn’t have given me the space to connect with the film in this intimate manner. (Tully, 2011) Tully believes Pip is Koppel’s mother, as if it is a fact. And this view is supported when he says “to his credit this (Pip being his mother) is never addressed in the film” (Tully, 2011). His response is affective, the content personalized, espousing Sartre’s “coefficient of generality,” when recalling visits to his own grandmother, as if he has emotionally identified with Koppel filming his mother even though never stated. It is noteworthy that a piano-based piece by electro artist the Aphex Twin (2001) is used in the scene mentioned by Tully. Taken from the eclectic album Drukqs, the artist Richard D.  James (whose alias is Aphex Twin) uses telephone messages from his mother in the album’s composition. The album, drawing from a near solipsistic “language” for the titles of the compositions, is also a highly emotive work about James’s personal life. If the same is to be said of sleep furiously, even if Koppel never openly states this, the point is that Tully, from Sartre’s perspective, responds to his perception of the director’s intent with affection, personalizing the content as a result.

To speak or not to speak: The double entendre It’s only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak, the courage but not the words. KOPPEL These concerns are elaborated on, given a curious twist of focus, in the intertitle. The intertitle interrupts the flow of the film and marks the moment

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at which the photographic representation of winter has properly ended (summer is in full bloom). The text’s ambiguity brings forward multiple readings; such is its intrinsic poetic depth. In one sense, the intertitle is a response—the explicit subtext—to Pip, a lament by the director in the form of homage. Sensing an end, Koppel summons the “courage” to break cover. The filming, in close proximity to a family member, is interrupted. Koppel wants to speak about this but cannot. To assume that the mother figure is alluded to in the intertitle, and to recognize this as central to the aesthetics of depiction, means we can then take the intertitle to indicate the two planes of the film: affective and objective. For Sartre, who sets out to explore the difference pertaining to such alternating planes in The Imaginary, Desire is a blind effort to possess on the representative plane what is already given to me on the affective plane: through the affective synthesis, it aims at a beyond that it senses without being able to know (connâitre); it is directed at the affective “something” that is now given to it and apprehends it as representative of the desired thing. (Sartre, 2011, 71) “Something” given on the affective plane can, Sartre maintains, be sensed without being known. To sense Koppel’s “intent,” to perceive Pip as the director’s mother (and perhaps the people she interacts with), differs in kind from being told who Pip is. For the spectator senses without being given a safety net to turn sense into cognition. Sense-perception involves a truth that has not taken legitimate knowledge form; truth in a personal as distinct from public form. Koppel, in this sense, imbibes the mother figure to take the form of depiction in a “beyond” of the sublimating process involved in filming. The intertitle reads—from this perspective—as a lament to a mother from her loving son. Koppel’s artistry, in making a family portrait of sorts, is like the portrait of a mother that Roland Barthes famously dissects in the text Camera Lucida (2000) operating in a reverse manner. Far from lamenting a mother who has already passed away, like Barthes does, the intertitle responds to the realization that the mother has been depicted in sublimated form and encourages others to sense the director’s lament. The film preserves, against this, the object of desire, showing, rather than speaking, of what will come to pass. This interpretation of the intertitle hinges on a proposed understanding of the aesthetics, the sense-value, of Pip as mother. Another interpretation concerns the rendering of her life as fact, otherwise considered the documentary strand. Pip, in this second sense, is a villager. Just like John and the farming community, a real life (in this case Pip) is given something nearing documentary status. For when the factual takes precedence, and Pip is a member of the community, the intertitle indicates modes of sense perception aligned to the director, swayed emotionally by filming. Koppel

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has sensed the village he documents is in decline, like many rural strongholds. He senses that, far from progress, the documented villagers are being made to change in the name of a strange alienating process. Yet to maintain some level of objectivity, transparency about this life, he cannot turn sense into judgement. He cannot intervene anymore, without, at the same time, taking a stance, undermining his film’s artistic aims in fashioning a picture of this life. On the other hand, he cannot talk about the film as being about his mother without compromising the aesthetic qualities of a film we can speculate he wants us to sense. It is, on this note, worth recalling the montage of “objects” shown rather than spoken that are being auctioned from the farm in the sequence that comes after the intertitle. For if Koppel resists judging the very thing these objects represent, it is because the spectator is now encouraged to judge for themselves. To judge would require a certain level of instruction, bearing heavily on any claim Koppel’s film would have to being both art and report, a kind of art that says no to fiction at the precise point it incorporates fiction into its structure.

The art of the document Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most, must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life LORD BYRON (1986), Manfred. And the more I  see—the more I  know, The more I  know—the less I understand PAUL WELLER, The Changing Man. The landscape returns as the credits end. At the center of the frame is a tree, a symbol of the durability of the world. The tree is also a classical symbol, for some symbolizing knowledge, for others a wisdom that has yet to take the form of knowledge. If to “sense” is not—necessarily—to know, and facts are not the only tools for disseminating, knowledge is not the sole means for understanding. If this were so, Trefeurig, and the “end” that Koppel senses, would be “known” without debate. Instead, like the sentence from which the film takes its inspiration,13 “colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” the “sense” process does not rely on an index alone. Rather something makes “sense” without being evidentially true. Making sense does not necessarily mean an object of inquiry is semantically true, that what the spectator (or indeed the director) “senses” of “Trefeurig” is Trefeurig alone. This would be to find, in sleep furiously, a window onto the world, and would miss something crucial. sleep furiously makes sense, not simply by rendering its object knowable but also in rendering a strand “beyond” factual knowledge

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alone (contained in the film). Because the depicted coexists with the document, the knowledge accorded the first is complemented by the sense perception accorded the second. In the new nonfiction film, these strands come together, engendering knowledge and sense-value at once. It is my argument in this book that the new nonfiction film, as a category in itself, is the most appropriate conceptual means for understanding this coming together. The reason for this is that sleep furiously is, by and large, engaged with documentarian poetics as a way of treating the real, a poetics that is defined by claims to represent the real world that distinguishes documentary from fictional film. It is only fictional in the sense that Akerman’s D’Est borders on fiction. It is a type of film that works as much at the level of sense and affect, a process prior to cognition, as it does at the level of cognition itself.

Notes 1 Gail Pearce and Cathal MacLaughlin make this point succinctly in their edited volume Truth or Dare: Art or Documentary (2007), “We noticed how increasingly the boundaries between artists using moving image to explore ‘documentary’ themes, and documentary makers experimenting with structure, form and content, as well as exhibition possibilities had brought some filmmakers from both disciplines closer together” (Pearce and MacLaughlin, 2007, 9). 2 Herzog makes the point “The stylization of the horror in Lessons of Darkness means that the images penetrate deeper than the CNN footage ever could, something that bothered audiences in Germany a great deal . . . They accused me of ‘aestheticizing’ the horror and hated the film so much that when I walked down the aisle I was spat at. They said the film was dangerously authoritarian, so I decided to be authoritarian at my very best. I stood before them and said, ‘Mr Dante did the same in his inferno and Mr Goya did it in his paintings, and Brueghel and Bosch too’ ” (Cronin, 2002, 245). 3 With reference to the Robert McNamara interviews in The Fog of War (Morris, 2003), Thomas Austin interestingly asserts “The Fog of War finds cracks and fissures in McNamara’s performance, revealing his evasions, opening up critical distance, and creating space for an indirect commentary on his conduct, then and now” (Austin, 2012, 31). 4 “Morris seems to want to bring us the point at which our apprehension of the real world reaches the pitch of paranoia,” Terence Raftery states in an article, which also underlines the “excess of artiness” in Morris’s films (Raftery, 1988). 5 The best example is The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988), a film that, although it led to the release of Randal Dale Adams, the subject of the film’s investigative emphasis, generates uncertainty around the very notion of absolute truth, the physical gestures of the most important witnesses being crucial to this. 6 Koppel was on leave from his position as an academic, specializing in the teaching of documentary practice, when he made sleep furiously. He has an academic background teaching documentary film.

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7 Foregrounding the medium—interrupting the action with self-conscious filmic interludes—Koppel invokes Rudolph Arnheim’s early protestation that film is “distinguished from the tools of the sculptor . . . In order that the film artist may create a work of art it is important that he consciously stress the peculiarities of his medium” (Arnheim, 2006). 8 In “A Sketchbook for a Library Van” (Koppel, 2005), which is presented as an extra in the DVD release, Koppel takes a completely different approach to the documentary form, encouraging his potential subjects to speak about themselves and tell stories, all the while set against the white walls of a studio. Completely decontextualized, they are oddly removed, lacking a definitive connection to the place that becomes the backdrop to the film proper. 9 Both affect and effect are used interchangeably in discussions of depiction. Effect is used in Anglo-American contexts, while affect tends to dominate the Francophone. 10 One is reminded here of Herzog’s argument, set out in the “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Filmmaking,” that there are deeper truths to those celebrated in cinéma vérité. Herzog states “I fight against cinéma vérité because it reaches only the most banal level of understanding of everything around us. I know that by making a clear distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ in my films, I am able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth most films do not even notice” (Cronin, 2002, 240). 11 The Koppels are German Jews who fled Germany during the Nazi years. Koppel has spoken about their conscious effort to keep their children from identifying with their struggle as persecuted Jews. It is interesting, however, in the context of their ethnicity and religion, that the grave is situated outside the village, away from other graves. 12 In a simplistic gendering of the documentary and depiction opposition, the robust factuality of documentary assumes a masculine dimension while depiction a suitably feminine one. Yet Koppel, by emphasizing her story against the background of a relatively objectifying view of Trefeurig, undermines the structuralist nature of this opposition. 13 In Syntactic Structures (1957), the American linguist Noam Chomsky famously used the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to illustrate how a sentence can be grammatically true, make sense, while semantically false. Could not the same be said of sleep furiously, that it makes sense even if it depicts as well as documents?

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Cinema will save us The decline of art-house cinemas across Europe (and I assume the United States as well) in the last twenty years has—thankfully—coincided with a turn toward the cinematic set in other platforms and venues:  artists showing films that are designed as installations for gallery venues while filmmakers who intended their films to be made for cinemas showing their work in galleries. Another positive side effect of cinema’s homogenization into multiplexes conglomerates, indeed corporate venues, has been the accelerated cross-pollination of the once singular pursuits of artist and filmmaker, forcing theorists to reconsider the “cinematic” as a critical concept. I put the emphasis here on “accelerated” simply because after the Second World War, as David Campany attests, “a stubborn resistance to the pace of spectacle and money-driven modernization seemed the only creative option and it came to characterize the landmarks of art and film in the later decades of the last century” (Campany, 2007, 10). Campany’s interest in “slow cinema” as a counterhegemonic activity that defines such cross-pollination—particular to the work of filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Bélla Tarr, and Robert Bresson as much as artists like Bill Viola, Mark Lewis, Sam Taylor-Johnson—differs, however to my own in this book, in that I set out to explore—not always with a clear goal in mind—the work of a set of filmmakers and artists whose aspiration is “cinematic” in form, when the cinematic concerns the construction of worlds that aren’t necessarily “this” world—yet are attached at the hip to this world, versed in the indexical qualities of the photographic image as pro-filmic trace. A secondary concern, and a concern more apparent from the outset, is the tenuous relationship between fiction, reality, and truth as it pertains to a select number of filmmakers and artists whose work grapples with the documentary form, yet—crucially—is critically engaged with the poetics of the documentary film for cinematic purposes. What

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is meant by “cinematic” here is the construction of worlds that appear mimetically the same as the world as it is objectively known, in a film—at its core—ambivalent about making claims about objectivity. This ambivalence is more apparent when the construction of worlds is seen as an exercise in form, cinematic in the sense of being a construction as distinct from “record” of reality, and when—in film—reality is both a social construct and an object “in itself.” Two British films that have been quiet successes in their own right, and have helped reignite interest in theorizing documentary-based practice as an exploratory and experimental category of film, are central to the base research of the present volume: Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea and Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously. Both films are landscape-driven, filmed in 16mm, and both focus on relative outsiders living in rural Britain as “subjects” or “characters” depending on how we, the viewers, approach the films. We can never be sure whether Jake or Pip—and it is worth reiterating that Jake is never referred to as Jake in the film—are subjects of the pro-filmic, or “characters” who are versions of themselves in a film both scripted and fictional. Jake’s process of making “things” from already existing things gives us some insight into his “character,” forming—in some sense—at least, a portrait of a man based on what he surrounds himself with. Rivers has spoken adamantly about his films as portrait-like studies of subjects based on the “things” that “characterize” them, noting, With a lot of my films over the years I’ve been interested in spaces and objects as a way to build a portrait of a person, an understanding of who they might be without that straightforward telling. So that’s the strategy for Two Years at Sea, to give the audience these clues to a past. There’s still plenty of room to decide who the person in that photograph is, or where an object or a piece of music comes from. So, the Indian music in the film is significant to Jake’s life, there’s a reason why it’s there; it’s music he bought when he was working as a merchant seaman and going to markets. (Rivers in Hattrick, 2012) Rivers also talks passionately about his interest in constructing spaces, or even worlds, that aren’t—in the classically fictional sense of a film set— fictional, when the margin between documentary and fiction is used as a creative platform for making films. To say that objects and spaces can “characterize” in the traditional sense of the word is—at least with regard to Two Years at Sea—to energize Jake’s status as subject. This energizing process has been theorized over the course of this book with recourse to the writings on cinema of legendary French filmmaker Robert Bresson around, most emphatically, the modèle as particular to cinematic production. Practically all of the films under discussion in this book can now retrospectively be said to engage the modèle concept, around—most crucially—the conflation of

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subject and character, energizing, as I point out, both character and subject from within. The self as modèle is an ongoing concern of this book. It is a concern in the sense that the attempt throughout is to consider—while excavating— the category of nonfiction as a way of understanding development across moving image, cinema, and moving image art; tackling on point films that engage the poetics and theory of documentary for cinematic ends. The pivotal discovery in this regard has been the application of the modèle (as mentioned above) concept to “subjects” who are also designated “characters”; not only conflating subject and character but, in the process of doing so, unearthing a cinematic oeuvre that doesn’t sit easily as fiction or documentary. This discovery, as mentioned in the introduction, took root while viewing Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously, when I  was struck by the realization that there were two concurrent strategies at play in the film: one the documentation of Trefeurig as a village threatened by the impact of globalization, the second a personal depiction of the artists’ qua filmmaker’s mother. One could say, without any sort of contradiction, that it is precisely the lack of contradiction on this point that I set out to explore. New nonfiction film, as I  have described it in this book, resides in the margin between fiction and documentary, and invests the margin with an aesthetic value of its own. It might even be said that the new nonfiction film aestheticizes the margins between documentary and art practice to the extent that its contradictions are overridden. These are necessary margins related to the cinematic aspirations of the artists in question, and in particular a cinematic that involves a certain fictional imprint. Gideon Koppel has, on this note, never suggested sleep furiously to be viewed as anything other than a work of cinema (while at the same time stating that the film draws its energy from a tradition of documentary that goes back to Vertov and the avantgarde). He doesn’t deny the film can be perceived as a documentary. But he talks openly about staging certain scenes cinematically, and writing scenes based on childhood memory in recognition of a documentary tradition that has naturalized such practices while trying to repress their existence as part of the form. Like all forms of repression, sickness manifests as a result. New nonfiction film facilitates a recovery. So when we claim, as I have done in this study, that sleep furiously is concerned—above all else—with depiction, we are talking about aesthetic endeavor that uses film to engage sensibilities, which differs fundamentally from a strictly documentary project. How? sleep furiously engages a sensibility that approximates the maxim that what is seen must be known. It therefore encourages a curiosity about what is seen, all the while allowing us to think about the film as a “project” on a public and personal level at the same time: Pip’s public life as subject and her personal life as mother. The rift between the reality of Trefeurig as it appears on screen before the camera, and the personal life of Koppel, who stands behind the camera (and never reveals himself as the son of Pip), bears a

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certain similarity to the rift between the self and the self as modèle, the latter of which compels us to acknowledge the self as real while invested with the mechanistic qualities of a modèle. In both cases the margin is allowed to move center stage, while the center moves indirectly to the margin. Just as Derrida writes about practicing a kind of philosophy that exists in the margins, nonfiction can be considered as a kind of filmmaking that also celebrates the margins. That the Koppels, which sleep furiously is indirectly about, had to evacuate Germany during the Holocaust before coming to Britain is also interesting in this regard:  having to actually reside in the margins is a predicament common to the Jewish experience. Akerman’s D’Est is an interesting counterpoint for the same reason, not least because the installation in which it was presented is subtitled “bordering on fiction.” It’s also a film that doesn’t openly parade personal content but allows it to work according to a logic of innuendo, feeling, and perhaps most importantly, affect. Like the overriding issue of Pip as m(Other) in sleep furiously, which, I  argue, reveals itself to a certain cognoscenti who have begun to sense the subterranean family narrative, D’Est delivers in a similarly subterranean and henceforth affective capacity. From its opening passages to its end, we are faced with a certain haunting and absence:  that of a culture and people whose only presence takes the form of an interminable absence. Akerman had dreamed of adapting the Nobel laureate and great chronicler of Jewish culture Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novels The Manor (1993a) and The Estate (1993b) and although she never managed to do so, it is the absence of that vibrant Eastern Jewish culture, which the great writer so meticulously chronicled, that is etched in the faces of random subjects her camera tracks across space and time (Hoberman, 2015). These are all modèles in the truest sense of the word, in that they engage the imagination, test the faculty of the imagination to process a real bordering on fiction. The work also borders on fiction in that its aesthetic merit consists in engaging us to think of an “absence”: to think of what is not present when faced with what is, and to be momentarily on the margins. John Akomfrah titled his solo exhibition in October 2012 at Carroll/ Fletcher gallery in London “Hauntologies,” perhaps in a direct nod to Jacques Derrida’s text Spectres of Marx and the term’s importance to British philosopher and critic, Mark Fisher, who penned the liner notes for the subsequent DVD release of The Stuart Hall Project. Akomfrah makes the case in an interview from the exhibition catalogue, The idea of Hauntologies comes from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In this text he was gripped by the idea of ghosting, of how the other invades and structures the self. I find it especially resonant because it alludes to questions of mourning and memory, to subjectivity as a scene of being possessed by the past and what he also called spectrality: the way in which the past haunts the present. It is not that the term absolutely

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fits what we are trying to do here, but it gives you an indication of the ideas and processes I’m hoping will come out of the show. Derrida has been a very important thinker for me for years, a silent partner; with this title I  publicly acknowledge him as an ally in my work. (Akomfrah in Rodriquez Muños, 2012) Derrida’s text has influenced artists and filmmakers largely because it draws out a compelling theory of spectrality from a materialist philosophy. Not only is the text the first clear exposition of what Derrida called hauntology but it is also the first where Derrida addresses the influence of Marx on deconstruction. As Akomfrah notes, the text is particularly helpful for considering the way that repressed memories can haunt in spectral form. I  attempted to flesh out a poetics of the utopic, which is perhaps also a hauntology in the context of the “subject” in Akomfrah’s films, by paying particular attention to The Stuart Hall Project in Chapter 3. I approached Akomfrah’s use of archive as a way of inciting the spectator’s faculty of imagination, and nonfiction as a suitable concept to account for this process. I can now see that this part of the book had something of the same emphasis on spectrality that would come to fruition when addressing Chantal Akerman’s D’Est later. It is not that these films aren’t actually concerned with the image as a document of time, or that the actual must be subservient to the virtual, but that both divulge an aesthetics of the image that centers on virtual and actual properties as a temporal multiplicity. Both are intricately concerned with the qualities of the cinematic image in its multiple temporal forms. Hence, and as a result, these are films that proposition us to consider the “specter” irrespective of its form as a this or that. One could even say that nonfiction is a suitable category for those films that draw attention to their own capacity to interrupt conventional understandings of time. Time is not, as explored in Chapter 3, immune to hegemony. Since the archive is (more often than not) a standing reserve that preserves something that might be lost, its status as a “ready-made” found object to be given a new political context, ripe for reshaping and recontextualization in the form of montage is—in ways—repressed. The footage shot and used by Akerman for D’Est is particularly interesting in this regard and from a documentary perspective. The footage itself archives a world imprinted with the homogeneity of a now communist past, haunted by the traumas of that past. Akerman, on the surface at least, is unable to alter what she sees around her, can do little to intervene in the world she travels through. And yet, because a similar typology of images are relayed over and over again in the film, it feels as if that which is there but unconscious is making itself manifest in the image, albeit haunting the present as a result. Like those overtures to the past that play out in sleep furiously through the gravestone, the strange, sometimes weird, symbiosis between the objective— the evocation of a world as it truly exists—and the subjective, fiction used

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as a means of accommodating oneself to this world—impacts in the form of haunting. As a result, the subjective manifests as affect, the effect of a filmmaking method that is intent on appearing to take a position of relative objectivity to the subject matter. To identify a struggle between an artist who is trying to “paint a picture” of a particular place and time—prone to shaping “reality” to a particular agenda—and a filmmaker who must adapt to the demands of commerce and industry, is to identify a philosophical problem underpinning this book as a project: the rift between art and epistemology. The expression “paint a picture” is noteworthy. Used in a vernacular context, the phrase means to describe a scene to somebody to develop a knowledge base. However, to paint a picture is, ultimately, to make an impression, in the knowledge that it is not, necessarily, a transparent “object” or document of that event. In other words, painting a picture is done in the understanding that depictions are dependent on subjective beliefs as much as verifiable epistemology. And yet, given the often mulitfarious relationship between fiction and non-fiction, art and documentary discussed at length in this book, it is possible to say that our’s is an age where artists are implored to “justify” their output on the basis of epistemological, as opposed to aesthetic criteria of value. As James Elkins notes, artists are encouraged more and more to self-reflect, to become more aware of what they are doing philosophically as opposed to a strict art-historical context1 (Elkins, 2009). Research has become the de facto term of contention. Is art making a form of research? Or alternatively, space from which to critique the demands of the knowledge economy? What is the relationship between aesthetic and epistemic constructions of knowledge? And how should art be received in a knowledge society? The new nonfiction film explored in this book is concerned with these questions. sleep furiously addresses these in its own way, conflating Koppel’s role as a filmmaker concerned with the declining traditions of rural and village life in rural Britain, with the diligent son painting a picture of an aging woman who also happens to be his own mother. It is interesting, in this regard, that the “sketch book” (with all its reference to the preparatory work of the artist) that accompanied the DVD release of the film was originally part of a funding application that made no reference to the personal agenda. As a result, the sketchbook’s inclusion in the release begs the question as to whether Koppel was conscious of making a film about his mother, or whether—when pitching his project to funding bodies—he felt he had to conceal the real nature of the project. The same is true of Akerman’s D’Est. The struggle to objectify an East that forms part of a publicly funded “project” about its changes is conflated with an unconscious attraction to the East that results from experiences that are personal and traumatic. It might be concluded that both projects gesture toward the conditions of a knowledge economy that demands measurable and tangible results, by their very nature “public” in orientation. The struggle to produce knowledge

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that has tangible end-results when resisting the impulse to engage the personal vestiges of memory comes to light—I would argue—as a struggle to conceal what cannot but emerge. In other words, the fact that one is making “art” at once personal and intimate, that takes the form of a depiction, may only come through as a kind of secondary affect of a work just as easily perceived as knowledge-based research, in this case as a documentary feature. Certainly, D’Est can be approached in this way. Akerman seems to be exploring the limit point of the documentary form, situating her endeavor in the rift between document and depiction. Koppel, who also positions his work in this way, has spoken of sleep furiously as a film that harks back to the avant-garde for inspiration that can also fulfill certain criteria for what a poetic documentary should be. Assuming that both are better understood as “nonfiction” films, we are better able to address the struggle that materializes in both as a positive feature of each film. That struggle is constituted as an attempt to convey the problems globalization poses to Trefeurig as a condition of the village’s continued existence in sleep furiously, in lieu of the artistic impulse to engage the senses around the filming process; conflating fact and fiction. The same can be said of D’Est: the film is as much about the conditions of Eastern Europe in the face of globalization and the collapse of communism as it is about the impulse to engage the senses in depiction. All we have is the ghosts of memory that haunt the present as traces of a past that, because it cannot be taken in the form of public knowledge, is known only as fiction, or at least something that borders on it. sleep furiously and D’Est are both films that adopt a strategy of subterfuge that is not necessarily the result of conscious decisions taken by the artists to destabilize what Alisa Lebow has referred as the “ill-fated quest for objectivity, so long the quixotic dream of documentary” (Lebow, 2003, xiii). It is, rather, the “struggle,” as pointed out above, between the need to apportion the project tangible and “public,” a conduit for verifiable knowledge taking the form of an objective position, and that which is driven by the personal often unannounced-unconsciously subjective probing of the artist. The struggle therefore involves maneuvering between a knowledge economy of funding applications and statements of intent, and an art practice that is driven by the intuitive and nonlinguistic affect, so that the artist can only come to see what is driving the project after the work in question has been produced, in the aftermath. This is certainly true of Akerman’s reflections on D’Est after the film was made.

The three S’s In this book’s introduction, I proposed the three S categories to undertake a study of the new nonfiction film. This endeavored to distinguish nonfiction

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from documentary via the study of subjectivity, story, and sense. It is now possible to conclude. I  had initially thought of these categories as modes of entry for a study of nodal clusters; the S’s themselves as rhizomatic in their connection. My point is that all the films explored under the umbrella category of “the new nonfiction film” can be approached from the perspective of all three individual S’s, considered to engage with—without being contained by—documentary as a filmic endeavor. Taking Two Years at Sea and Close-Up as examples (films that contest the category of subject in relation to the “distance” particular to observational film), “new nonfiction film” is broached less as a genre than a cluster of relations. What we find then is a rhizomatic overlapping of properties that is akin to the cross-fertilizing of forms in a pop music format.2 Taken as a cluster, in this way, “the new nonfiction film” emerges as a refined sensibility, an intense cinematic rhythm that comes out of skepticism toward forms of documentary seen to engender hegemonic relationships between director and subject, knowledge and sense, story and reality, and finally, time and space. Kiarostami is a key reference point throughout the study, not simply because he is a filmmaker who gives a headache to those seeking to make a basic distinction between fiction and non-fiction but also because he is a filmmaker whose films illustrate the “rift” between “earth” and “world” that Heidegger writes about in the specific context of the work of art. Drawing on the “rift”—theorized by Heidegger—to consider the publicness of “worldliness” in relation to the excess of the earth (when the world is all that can be verifiably known, and the “earth” as that which exceeds its many forms), we are positioned to uncover the S-ential features of Kiarostami films that tendentiously bleed into all those others discussed. Heidegger distinguishes the work of art from the mere equipmentality of equipment, so as to recognize a “world” thought here as the “real,” nourished by that which exceeds it as earth. This fundamental, perhaps even primordial relation (which is not to be confused with an opposition that works by casting one side against the other) is what the work of art in its Heideggerian “essence” awakens our senses to. It is not a “meaning” that we will ineluctably grasp, and in grasping unlock as a hidden “clue,” but rather an understanding of the essence of “art” as that which encourages sense-making in and of itself. The pendulum shifts to and fro, from the “world” as it reveals itself to us, to the “earth” as the sensuous real of the nonhuman world, held together as matter-form. It is now, more than ever, vital to orient ourselves to such a primordial relation so as to advocate the truth Heidegger finds in the sometimessimple act of sense-making. Hubert L.  Dreyfus considers art in this Heideggerian sense as a “model of” and a “model for” reality (Dreyfus, 2004, 408). It is this “strife” that carries through the form of “the new nonfiction film” as I  have tentatively described it in this book. Having set out to explore a cluster of films that engaged the traditions of inquiry

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more readily associated with non-fiction and “documentary” film, film concerned with the “model of” and “model for” relation that Dreyfus identifies as pertaining to Heidegger’s philosophy of art, I  was in fact concerned with—in a broader sense—the relationship between fiction and reality. This book is therefore a starting point, as opposed to a set of conclusions. It begins a conversation that brings the “strife” in question into the foreground of what we call the cinematic arts. When I  say “Cinema Will Save Us,” I’m making reference to the fact that it is cinema, above all, which has benefited from this strife. It has benefited in the sense that categories once taken as given, obvious, and clear, have been shaken up. To shake the tree of knowledge is to bear fruit from this. It is precisely from shaking the tree in this way that a whole new discussion can take root.

A final note . . . By calling this study—in something of a final gesture—a conversation, we are in a better place to position the book in an environment that has seen film circulate in so many competing arenas, so many platforms, and once clear demarcations of genre and form melt into air. We are living in an age when art has been burdened with a call to justify itself. Epistemological mandates and statements have become the de facto norm: a justification that requires some sort of theoretical premise or raison d’etre. New nonfiction is a response to the strategies that are now clearly embedded in the greater neoliberal economy as its cultural wing. Documentary, a realm most soberly aligned to knowledge production, fits the neoliberal call for the arts to justify itself well, and is therefore a kind of film production that is ripe for analysis by artists, or at least those trying to navigate a way through a world increasingly defined by profit margins and cultural gain. Is it possible that knowledge, in this world, becomes wholly estranged from Truth, and the truth of art is pushed further into the margins? This book began on the margins and ends on the margins, but the hope is not—as a final note—that the margins become centralized, but rather that they become so invigorated they alter the center. And in whatever way we perceive the center, we can hope that categories of knowledge, truth, fiction, and non-fiction are energized anew.

Notes 1 I refer here to the website Elkins set up between the first and second edition of his edited collection Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (2009). The collection explores, among many things, the relationship

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between studio work and knowledge accumulation, deliberating on important questions in relation to the increased circulation of documentary imagery in different contemporary art forms. 2 Rhizomatic is a term associated, principally, with the philosophical investigations undertaken by the collaboration of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The emergence, in recent years, of so many different challenges to the documentary form, largely undertaken by those who define themselves principally as artists, makes it more precedent—as I’ve maintained in this book—to think documentary non-fiction and fiction not solely as oppositions, but as forms that involve methods that coalesce and overlap in ways that demand critical unpacking, ultimately rhizomatic in form.

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FILMOGRAPHY

The Act of Killing (2014) Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, Norway/Denmark/UK: Final Cut for Real. Atlantis (2014) Dir. Ben Russell, Greece/France/Malta: Ben Russell Productions.The Bridge (1928) Dir. Joris Ivens, Netherlands: Capi-Holland. Close-Up (1989) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran: Kanoon. 20,000 Days on Earth (2014) Dir. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollock, UK: Corniche Pictures/British Film Institute (BFI)/Film Four/JW Films/Pulse Films. D’Est (1993) Dir. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France: Lieurac Productions.Être et Avoir (2002) Dir. Nicholas Philibert, France: Maïa Films. Fathom (2012) Dir. Sharon Whooley and Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara (2003) Dir. Erol Morris, USA: SenArt Films. Gabriel Byrne: Stories of Home (2008) Dir. Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. Handsworth Songs (1986) Dir. John Akomfrah, UK: Black Audio Film Collective. Homework (1989) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran: The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & Young Adults. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxells (1975) Dir. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France: Paradise Films. Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2002) Dir. Fergus Daly and Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. The Last Angel of History (1996) Dir. John Akomfrah, UK/Germany: Black Audio Film Collective/Channel Four Television. Lessons of Darkness (1992) Dir. Werner Herzog, France/Uk/Germany: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. Let Each One Go Where He May (2009) Dir. Ben Russell, USA/Suriname: Ben Russell Productions. Life and Nothing More . . . (1992) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran: Kanoon. Man of Aran (1934) Dir. Robert Flaherty, UK: Gainsborough Pictures. Mimosas (2015) Dir. Oliver Laxe, Spain/Romania/France: Zeitun Films. News from Home (1977) Dir. Chantal Akerman, France/Belgium/West Germany: Paradise Films. Oileán Thoraí (2001) Dir. Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. Pilgrim (2008) Dir. Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. Regen/Rain (1928) Dir. Joris Ivens, Netherlands: Capi-Holland. Sans Soleil (1983) Dir. Chris Marker, France: Argos Films. Serene Velocity (1970) Dir. Ernie Gehr, USA: Ernie Gehr Films. Shoah (1985) Dir. Calude Lanzmann, France/UK: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)/Les Films Aleph.

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Silence (2012) Dir. Pat Collins. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Not Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) Dir. Ben Rivers, UK: Artangel. sleep furiously (2008) Dir. Gideon Koppel, UK: Van Film. Slow Action (2010) Dir. Ben Rivers, UK: Animate Projects Ltd. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) Dir. Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, France/ Estonia/Germany: Must Kasï/Rouge International. The Stuart Hall Project (2012) Dir. John Akomfrah, UK: Smoking Dogs Films. Taste of Cherry (1997) Dir. Abbas Kiaorstami, Iran/France: Abbas Kiarostami Productions. Ten (2002) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France: Abbas Kiarostami Productions. The Thin Blue Line (1988) Dir. Erol Morris, USA: Third Floor Productions. Through the Olive Trees (1994) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France: Abbas Kiarostami Productions. Tim Robinson: Connemara (2011) Dir. Pat Collins, Ireland: Harvest Films. Trypps series (2006–2012) Dir. Ben Russell, USA: Ben Russell Productions Two Years at Sea (2011) Dir. Ben Rivers, UK: Ben Rivers Productions. Under the Skin (2013) Dir. Jonathan Glazer, UK/USA/Switzerland/Poland: FilmFour/British Film Insitute (BFI). The Unfinished Conversation (2012) Dir. John Akomfrah, UK: Smoking Dogs Films. We Are All Captains (2010) Dir. Oliver Laxe, Spain/Zeitun Films. Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran: Kanoon. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France: Abbas Kiarostami Productions.

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REFERENCES

Akomfrah, John. 2010. “Digitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora.” Journal of Media Practice, 1.1: 21–30. Ames, Eric. 2012. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aphex Twin. 2001. Drukqs. London: Warp Records. Arendt, Hannah. 1971. The Life of the Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arnheim, Rudolph. 2006. Film as Art. Berkely, CA: University of California Press. Arthur, Paul. 2002. “No Longer Absolute: Portraiture in American AvantGarde and Documentary Films of the Sixties.” In Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies, 93–118. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Austin, Thomas. 2012. “The Mists of Time: Control, Chaos and Irreversibility in The Fog of War.” Studies in Documentary Film, 6.1: 29–42. Banville, John. 2009. “The Hills Are Alive.” Sight and Sound, 44–45. Barnouw, Erik. 1993. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Barsam, Richard Meran. 1992. Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History (revised and expanded edition), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage. Bazin, André. 2005. What is Cinema? Vol. 2 (2nd ed.), trans. and selected by Hugh Gray. London: University of California Press. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Visions: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bey, Dawoud. 1998. Stuart Hall. London: National Portrait Gallery. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, Vols. 1 & 2, trans. Neville Place, Stephen Place, and Paul Knight. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Blumon, Ben. 2009. “Defining Depiction.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49.2: 134–157. Bowles, Paul. 1998. “A Distant Episode.” In A Distant Episode: Selected Stories. Ontario: Penguin Canada. Bresson, Robert. 1996. Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York: Quartet Books. Bruzzi, Stella 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

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