The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema 1501312642, 9781501312649

Citation preview

The Global Auteur

The Global Auteur The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema Edited by Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Seung-hoon Jeong, Jeremi Szaniawski and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jeong, Seung-hoon, editor. | Szaniawski, Jeremi, editor. Title: The global auteur : the politics of authorship in 21st century cinema / edited by Seung-hoon Jeong, Jeremi Szaniawski. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015045540 (print) | LCCN 2015048286 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501312625 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501312649 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501312656 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Auteur theory (Motion pictures) | Motion pictures--Production and direction. | Motion pictures--21st century--History and criticism. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.A837 G55 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.A837 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045540 ISBN: HB: 9781501312625 ePub: 9781501312656 ePDF: 9781501312649 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover images: © SINE OLIVIA PILIPINAS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  viii List of illustrations  ix List of contributors  xiii



Introduction  1 Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski

1 The global author: Control, creative constraints, and performative self-contradiction  21 Thomas Elsaesser

2 Abderrahmane Sissako: On the politics of African auteurs  43 Rachel Gabara

3 Godard’s stereoscopic essay: Thinking in and with Adieu au langage  61 Rick Warner

4 Michael Winterbottom: A self-effacing auteur?  79 William Brown

5 Provocation and perversity: Lars von Trier’s cinematic anti-philosophy  95 Robert Sinnerbrink

6 From political engagement to politics of abjection in Polish auteur cinema: The case of Wojtek Smarzowski  115 Izabela Kalinowska

vi Contents

7 Of intruders (and guests): The films of Michael Haneke and Aleksey Balabanov  133 Jeremi Szaniawski

8 Suffocating kinesis: The late films of Aleksey Gherman  149 Fredric Jameson

9 Contemporary Romanian auteurs: Politics, irony, and reflexivity  159 Dominique Nasta

10 Fatih Akin’s moral geometry  179 Dudley Andrew

11 Richard Linklater’s post-nostalgia and the temporal logic of neoliberalism  199 Dan Hassler-Forest

12 “Black in white”: Language, world-making, and the American contract in the cinema of Quentin Tarantino  217 John Pitseys

13 Battle with history: Carlos Reygadas and the cinema of being  235 Michael Cramer

14 The art of encounter and (self-)fabulation: Eduardo Coutinho’s cinema of bodies and words  253 Consuelo Lins (trans. Leslie Damasceno)

15 Shareable cinema: The politics of Abbas Kiarostami  271 Nico Baumbach

Contents

vii

16 Migration and contemporary Indian cinema: A consideration of Anurag Kashyap and la politique des auteurs in the times of globalization  287 Kaushik Bhaumik

17 Space and time in the land of the end of history  303 Marco Grosoli

18 Revisiting Jia Zhangke: Individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy in contemporary Chinese independent cinema  323 Victor Fan

19 Kurosawa Kiyoshi, dis/continuity, and the ghostly ethics of meaning and auteurship  343 Aaron Gerow

20 A generational spectrum of global Korean auteurs: Political matrix and ethical potential  361 Seung-hoon Jeong Index of names  379 Index of terms  387

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank all the people who have made The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema possible: First and foremost, our thanks go to the eighteen contributors, for their remarkable scholarly contributions and the precise work they put into their chapters, from the initial abstracts to the careful perusal of their proofs. We would also like to express our gratitude to all colleagues who provided kind support or recognition, not least our peer-reviewers, for writing very positive feedback to our proposal, or generous endorsement blurbs, kick-starting the project in an auspicious manner. At Bloomsbury, we salute the work of all involved in making the book a reality, from editors to typesetters to graphic designers, in particular: Katie Gallof, Mary Al-Sayed, and Michelle Chen, for their guidance, but also generosity, patience and good humor; Sue Cope, for copy-editing the manuscript in an outstandingly precise and thorough manner; and Kim Storry and her team, for the preparation of the proofs. We would also like to single out Caroline Mahon, for her indefatigable editorial assistance and moral support (aferim!). Jeremi Szaniawski would like to thank Meg Russett and Nicole Grégoire for their kind hospitality. Finally, we wish to thank all the people who, through their work and ideas, inspired us to put this collection together, from its inception to the latest stages of production, as well as all who will contribute to its success. The editors

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 3.1 As Marie picks up Levinas’s book, the businessman coasts through the background. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.68 Figure 3.2 A chair juts out where planes converge and characters cross paths in the 3D image. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.69 Figure 3.3 Roxy in the forest, detecting what a narrator calls “the revolutionary force of signs.” Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.73 Figure 3.4 Spectatorship curiously evoked as a matter of coupling in the film’s last minutes. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.76 Figure 5.1 She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe) making love while their child falls to his death. Source: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) © Zentropa Entertainments, Slot Machine, Memfis Film, Trollhättan Film AB, Lucky Red.97 Figure 5.2 Kirsten Dunst in a shot referencing Millais’ Ophelia. Source: Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) © Nordisk Film, Les films du losange, Entertainment One, Magnolia Pictures, Concorde Filmverleih.104 Figure 5.3 Charlotte Gainsbourg after the harrowing abortion scene (only available in the director’s cut). Source: Nymphomaniac (Vol. II) (Lars von Trier, 2013) © Zentropa Entertainments, Heimatfilm, Film i Väst, Slot Machine, Caviar Films, Concorde Filmverleih, Artificial Eye, Les Films du Losange, Caviar.110

x

List of illustrations

Figure 6.1 Irony and martial law in Poland, 1981. Source: Chris Niedenthal’s Apocalypse Now © Chris Niedenthal.126 Figure 6.2 The wintry set of the fateful re-enactment on the crime scene in The Dark House, during the period of martial law. Source: The Dark House (Wojtek Smarzowski, 2009) © Film It, Polish Film Institute, SPI International.127 Figure 9.1 Next Stop: Paradise. Source: Next Stop: Paradise (Lucian Pintilie, 1998) © Canal+, Cinematográfica Filmex S.A., MK2 Productions.163 Figure 9.2 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Source: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) © Mandragora. US Distributor: Tartan.168 Figure 9.3 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Source: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007) © Mobra Films, Centrul National al Cinematografiei (CNC), Saga Film. US Distributor: IFC Films.170 Figure 9.4 Susanna and the Elders, Tintoretto, c. 1555.© Wikipedia (cf. p170) Source: Susanna and the Elders Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Susanna_and_the_Elders_%28Tintoretto%29

170

Figure 9.5 Beyond the Hills. Source: Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012) © Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma, Mandragora Movies. Worldwide distributor: Wild Bunch.171 Figure 9.6 Beyond the Hills. Source: Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012) © Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma, Mandragora Movies. Worldwide distributor: Wild Bunch.172 Figure 10.1 Idil Üner and the saz band: a Turkish (rather than Greek) chorus. Source: Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004) © Arte, Bavaria Film International, Corazón International, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Panfilm, Wüste Film.183



List of illustrations

xi

Figure 10.2 Nejat contemplates “the other side” on a beach in T rabzon. Source: The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) © Anka Film, Dorje Film.192 Figure 10.3 Lotte and Ayten. Source: The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) © Anka Film, Dorje Film.193 Figure 12.1 “Attendez la crème” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) as embodiment of language. Source: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) © Universal Pictures, The Weinstein Company, A Band Apart, A Zehnte Babelsberg Film GmbH Production, Visiona Romantica, Inc.222 Figure 12.2 Negotiations at the dinner table. Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.227 Figure 12.3 Negotiations at the dinner table. Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.227 Figure 12.4 A triumphant Django has his horse perform a Spanish walk. Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.231 Figure 13.1 Painting as art of alienation. Source: Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) © Tartan Video USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Hubert Bals Fund, Solaris Film, Istituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE).242 Figure 13.2 The camera (and the soul) remain grounded. Source: Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) © Tartan Video USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Hubert Bals Fund, Solaris Film, Istituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE).244 Figure 13.3 The failure of sex as self-transcendence and cross-class reconciliation. Source: Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas, 2005) © Tartan Video

xii

List of illustrations

USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Tarantula, Arte France Cinema, Universidad de Guadalajara, ZDF/Arte.246 Figure 13.4 A corpse-eye view of nature. Source: Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012) © Strand Releasing, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Le Pacte, Arte France Cinéma, Fondo para la Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad, The Match Factory, Ticoman, Topkapi Films.249 Figure 14.1 Eduardo Coutinho on the set of Babilônia 2000. Source: Photograph © Zeca Guimarães.255 Figure 14.2 Maria Pia in Edifício Master. Source: Eduardo Coutinho, 2002 © Videofilmes.262 Figure 14.3 Fátima, interviewed by Coutinho, ahead of singing a Janis Joplin hit in Babilônia 2000. Source: Photograph © Zeca Guimarães.266 Figure 17.1 A clearing. Source: Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, 2011) © Sine Olivia.307 Figure 17.2 Spying on one another. Source: From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014) © Sine Olivia Philipinas.317 Figure 18.1 The camera relays the passers-by’s gaze at Xiaowu to the spectators. Source: Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.333 Figure 18.2 Xiaowu brings Jin a gift, only to be rejected. Source: Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.334 Figure 18.3 Xiaowu’s voice is carried by the steam out to the “world.” Source: Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.336

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Editors Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. He has worked on theoretical issues in diverse modes, areas, and periods of cinema. His current research explores global cinema in attempts to retheorize the ideas of community, network, abjection, and catastrophe. Jeong received Korea’s Cine21 Film Criticism Award (2003) and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award (2012). He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (Routledge, 2013) and co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature in Korean (Moonji, 2013). Jeremi Szaniawski currently teaches at the École Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle in Brussels. He is the editor of Directory of World Cinema: Belgium and the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (both 2014), as well as the translator, into French, of Thomas Elsaesser’s and Malte Hagener’s Cinema and the Senses (Le cinéma et les sens, 2011) and Alexander Sokurov’s V tsentre okeana (Au coeur de l’océan, 2015). His current research interests include female filmmakers, contemporary Polish cinema, as well as an updating of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of/through cinema to the twenty-first century. Szaniawski is also an independent, award-winning filmmaker.

Contributors Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. Biographer of André Bazin (new edition 2013), he extends Bazin’s thought in What Cinema Is! (2011) and in the edited volume, Opening Bazin (2012). Committed to aesthetics and hermeneutics and history, he published Film in the Aura of Art in 1984, then turned to French film and culture which resulted in Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005). He co-edited The Companion to François

xiv

List of contributors

Truffaut (2013). For these publications, he was named Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Nico Baumbach is an assistant professor of Film Studies at Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. His research and teaching focus on critical theory, film theory, documentary, and the intersection of aesthetic and political philosophy. He is currently working on two books: a study of cinema and politics in the work of contemporary Continental philosophers Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek; and a monograph titled The Anonymous Image. Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is co-editor of Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (2009). Recent publications include a guest-edited Marg Special Issue on the 100 Years of Bombay Cinema and the co-edited Project Cinema/City (2015). William Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (2013), and the co-author, with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, of Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010). He is the co-editor, with David Martin-Jones, of Deleuze and Film (2012). He is also a filmmaker. Michael Cramer is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. His areas of interest include world cinema, the relationship between cinema and television, documentary and nonfiction cinema, and the politics of aesthetics. His publications include “Roberto Rossellini’s History Lessons” (New Left Review, November/December 2012), and “Television and the Auteur in the 1950s” in the edited volume Opening Bazin (2011). His book Utopian Television: Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard Beyond Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) examines the ways that European filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s used television to imagine an audiovisual art that would transcend the cinema and redefine the cultural function of the moving image. Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam and since 2013 Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has authored, edited and co-edited some twenty volumes on early cinema, film theory, German and European cinema, Hollywood, new media, and installation art. Amongst his recent books are: Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2010, with Malte Hagener), The Persistence of Hollywood (2012), and German Cinema— Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (2013).



List of contributors

xv

Victor Fan is Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London and Film Consultant of the Chinese Visual Festival (London). He was Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, Toronto. His articles have been published in World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, Film History: An International Journal, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the anthology A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and film magazine 24 Images: Cinéma. His book Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory was published in 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press. Rachel Gabara is Associate Professor of French at the University of Georgia, where she teaches French and Francophone African and Caribbean literature and film. She is the author of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (2006) and recent chapters on African film in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (2010), and Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (2007). She is currently working on a book-length study of post-independence African documentary film in relation to the history of French colonial cinema in West and Central Africa, tentatively entitled “Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film.” Aaron Gerow is Professor of Film Studies and East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University. He has published widely on a variety of topics concerning Japanese film and popular culture. His books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925 (2010); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008); and Kitano Takeshi (2007). He also co-authored Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (2009). Marco Grosoli is Assistant Lecturer at the University of Kent. He is the author of the first Italian-language monograph on Hungarian director Béla Tarr (2015), and has co-edited two collections of essays: one on Guy Debord’s cinema, and one on motion/performance capture technologies. He is currently working on two books on two crucial periods of the politique des auteurs (from 1948 to 1953 and 1954 to 1960). Dan Hassler-Forest is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Cultural Theory at Utrecht University. His research interests include critical theory, genre fiction, transmedia franchising, fan studies, fantastic, worldbuilding, and zombies. He is the author of several books, including Capitalist Superheroes (2012), The Politics of Adaptation (2015), and Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics (2016), and is the co-editor of a book

xvi

List of contributors

series on media convergence and participatory culture from Amsterdam University Press. Fredric Jameson is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is the author of over twenty-five books, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and most recently The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015). His many awards include the Holberg Prize Award (2008) as well as the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement (2012). Izabela Kalinowska is Associate Professor of Comparative Slavic studies at SUNY (State University of New York) Stony Brook. Following the completion of Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (2004), her interests shifted toward Polish and Russian cinemas, where she has examined issues relating to the constructions of gender, national identity, ways of speaking about the past, as well as the interactions and exchanges between the two national cinemas. Her current projects branch out in two directions. She is currently completing a manuscript on Polish cinema of the 1980s, while pursuing her preoccupation with orientalism, this time within the realm of Soviet-era and post-Soviet cinema. Consuelo Lins is Professor at the Escola de Comunicação da UFRJ (School of Communications, Federal University in Rio de Janeiro), where she completed her M.A. Lins is the author of O documentário de Eduardo Coutinho; televisão, cinema e vídeo (2004) and co-author, with Cláudia Mesquita, of Filmar o real, sobre o documentário brasileiro contemporâneo (Zahar, 2008). Also a documentary filmmaker, she has directed Lectures (2005), Leituras Cariocas (2009), Babás (2010), amongst other films. She worked as a interview researcher for two of Eduardo Coutinho’s films: Babilônia 2000 and Edifício Master. Dominique Nasta is Professor of Film Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Series Editor for the “Rethinking Cinema Collection” (Peter Lang). She is the author of Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle (2013) and of Meaning in Film (1992) and has co-edited New Perspectives in Sound Studies (2004) and Revisiting Film Melodrama (2014). She has published widely on Eastern European cinemas, the aesthetics of silent melodramas, emotions and music in films, and Michelangelo Antonioni. John Pitseys received a Ph.D. in Philosophy through the Hoover Chair of Social and Economic Ethics at the Catholic University of Louvain-La-Neuve



List of contributors

xvii

(UCL), Belgium. He is currently working as a researcher at the Centre de recherche et d’information socio-politiques (CRISP), Brussels, and as a guest lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain. Robert Sinnerbrink is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011), Understanding Hegelianism (2007), numerous articles on philosophy of film, film aesthetics, and Continental philosophy. He is also a member of the editorial board of the online journal Film-Philosophy. Rick Warner is Assistant Professor of Film and Kenan Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is co-editor with Colin MacCabe of True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011) and the author of several published essays on film aesthetics. He is completing a book manuscript on cinematic uses of the essay form.

Introduction Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski

The auteur, then … No longer the hegemonic audiovisual spectacle it once was, cinema has had to face many changes and challenges in the twenty-first century (not least its entanglement with capitalist globalization and post-medium digitization) in order to retain its value as a commercial form of entertainment. Yet as an art form, a status it still partly retains, it has also had to respond to a world full of new phenomena, all the while undergoing a set of deep transitions and crises. With this as our background, we look back on a motif and concern perennial since the early days of cinema: the auteur. It has evolved through the decades, has been put to rest by some schools, only to staunchly re-emerge time and again. The goal of the present volume is to propose the latest reassessment of the film auteur as “global” auteur because, if auteurism has validity in this global age, it may express itself in the way film directors, old and new, capture the zeitgeist in a multilayered and faceted world, overtly or covertly. The work of these cinematic auteurs, even unconsciously, signals various positions that film art takes regarding reality. We see here a twenty-first century version of la politique des auteurs—not a certain policy or politics of auteurs anymore so much as “the political” immanent to cinematic authorship. Our collection thus includes a variety of chapters by established and emerging scholars alike, which shed a timely light on the current situation, identifying some of the most important cinematic voices of the last fifteen years, recognizing recurrent trends and motifs, and defining what constitutes the newness of auteurism in this young twenty-first century. Before moving on with our proposed redefinition of the concept, let us briefly reframe some crucial phases along with overlooked points in auteur theory from a standpoint that helps reach and enrich our discussion on

2

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

“why the auteur (and why now)?”1 Indeed this question was the starting point of a score of dynamic polemics. As is well known, the 1950s Cahiers du cinéma critics initiated the political positioning of filmmakers’ authenticity as equivalent to artists’ authorship in other media. Their passionate spokesman François Truffaut glorified cinematic auteurs while condemning mere metteurs-en-scène, i.e. “stagers” who conventionally transposed literature onto the screen (Truffaut 1976). He criticized the same old names in the French tradition of “Quality” not simply for producing filmed literature without filmic originality, but rather for simplistically compromising great French literary works in order to serve the political doctrine of their day, as when Raymond Radiguet’s pre-war novel The Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps, 1923) was turned into an anti-war film by Claude Autant-Lara (1947). Such political distortion indicated the political elements immanent in the field in which auteurism pursued its aesthetic program. Another noteworthy point is that the cinéma de papa didn’t even faithfully “stage” adaptations, due to its chronic omission of “unfilmable” literary scenes. Against this reductive case, Truffaut advocated a transformative approach, such as in Robert Bresson’s adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne, 1951) handling the unfilmable through voice-over narration unfolding on a spiritual, blank screen; with the caméra-stylo, coined by Alexander Astruc, the cinematic auteur could (re)write the original by fully delivering its verbal power while exceeding its non-visual limitation. This is why literature was “that obscure object of desire” for cinema, at once a counter-model to avoid and yet an ideal model to emulate. The authenticity of literary originals was not to be politically co-opted or visually truncated, but to be cinematically absorbed and elevated over all the limitations of literature. In this sense, the dichotomy of “auteur vs. metteur-en-scène” may not directly involve the schematic belief whereby the former’s greatness lies in theme and content while the latter’s function remains the formal, stylistic adaptation of a pre-existing text into cinematic codes. Rather, the point was whether or not the transcendent potential of cinematic materiality was excavated in all its aspects. When successful, this experiment established an original outcome of theme-form chemistry whose governing principle is nested as much in narrative structure as in mise-en-scène. The next phase of auteurism, “auteur-structuralism,” emerged in the heyday of linguistic and anthropological structuralism, negotiating the individualism of authorship with the collectivity of myth (Nowell-Smith 1974). This systematic approach illuminated the inherent coherence of the author’s textual corpus, but subsequently begged the question of its contextual parameters, leaving behind the quasi-mythical figure of the auteur. Prior to this phase, André Bazin had already defended “impure cinema” as naturally hosting hybrids, which required technological, sociological, historical approaches and captured “the genius of the system” as

Introduction

3

the essence of Hollywood that could not be overshadowed by “the geniuses of the system” (Ford, Hawks, Welles, Hitchcock …), whom his Cahiers disciples worshiped (Andrew 1992). Bazin’s politique des auteurs was also a critique des auteurs, a wise man’s warning against the fetishistic “cult of personality” that was rooted in the existentialist attachment of the early Cahiers to Sartrean authenticity (Bazin 1985). Some elitist aura surrounded the Americanization of auteurism as well; the famous feud between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael was about the theoretical criteria of film authorship, but both shared the critic’s obsession with the comparative ranking of directors (Stam 2000). Subsequent backlashes against individual structuralist auteurism took various shapes and forms, which could be seen as branching out in three directions. First, broad attention was paid to “production conditions.” The geniuses of the system were viewed less as idiosyncratic directors than as functional producers who orchestrated scriptwriting, casting, editing, etc. in control and equilibrium, while struggling to negotiate with contradictory forces—actors, crew, and staff—whose contribution to filmmaking should not be overlooked (Schatz 2010). In short, a collectivist claim of varied human agents for the copyright of authorship challenged the romantic myth of personalized auteurism. Secondly, “constructivist contexts” were brought in to analyze the ways film texts are preconditioned by nonhuman agents such as genre, language, psyche, and sociopolitical culture. This trend became dominant along with the establishment of institutional film studies in academia and methodological film theory. The triangular frame of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism set up the common view of subjectivity as inherently split and complexly constructed, paving the way for feminism and postcolonialism, cultural studies and identity politics in contextualizing films and auteurs. Thirdly, contrary to these two outward directions, there was another, inward one, which highlighted “deconstructive intertexts.” Poststructuralism and postmodernism destabilized the belief in the author’s original vision while addressing the text as an indeterminate zone of contradictory meanings, a polyvocal texture of (un)conscious influences, or a rhizomatic hypertext of endless references. The copyright of authorship was, in theory, replaced by the “copyleft” of its pastiche and remix on a cultural database or hybrid network for rearranging high and low culture, old and new media, local and global variations in fusion. This third tendency in particular implied the theoretical possibility of a shift of paradigm in auteurism. Michel Foucault viewed the “author function” as dissolving into anonymous discourse while “thickening” a text with duration, from its past and into an unknown future. For this reason, it could work as a “catalyst” with the potential to initiate a complex reaction among various elements (Wollen 1972). By pronouncing “the death of the author,” Roland Barthes defined the author as the byproduct of writing, its ephemeral textual effect. But this process also implies that writing happens

4

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

at the moment of reading, allowing the author to be thus reconfigured by the reader, opening receptive positions in a trans-subjective fashion (Barthes 1977). Likewise, a film would work as an enunciative, performative écriture through which the auteur as well as the viewer are simultaneously under (de)construction. Authorship would then perform its “postmortem” agency by increasing spectatorship in a shifting discursive configuration, at the crossroads of historically accumulated films and the ways in which they are received. In short, the death of the auteur signaled the birth of the spectator, with the next phase of auteurism emerging on the side of the audience. This spectatorial turn, however, might not have wiped out the earlier models. Certainly auteurism has lost its semi-religious myth of independent creativity, but this does not attest to its real death. Declarations of such passing are most often of a rhetorical nature rather than founded in facts, and the cinema’s “hall of fame” has been shining with ever more directors-as-stars. Without changing its whole nature, auteurism may have survived as a sort of “palimpsest” bearing the traces of past characteristics (existential romanticism, individual structuralism, collective constructivism, poststructural postmodernism, …), while maintaining aesthetic and political modernism as its core evaluative taste (Naremore 2004). In doing so, auteurism has also been completely institutionalized in film archives, mass media, festival circuits, academic curriculum, and even commercial theaters, to the extent that paradoxically it no longer triggers noteworthy polemics “because it has won” (Stam 2000). But conversely, all these signs of triumphant auteurism indicate the hidden bargaining power of the film audience; fans, critics, programmers, and professors revere, judge, select, and teach this or that auteur, whose name value plays a key role in entering the arena of film reception. The auteur is now a critical concept indispensable for distribution and marketing purposes, i.e. social interactions in a political economy beyond textual interpretation. Hollywood auteurs are strategic commercial agents endorsed by mass audience, like “brand names” that guide and stimulate their consumption. Rather than being rooted in the notion of fixed identity or autonomous authority, today’s auteur takes a multifaceted, modulable “agency” for organizing various modes of communication with its audience in the global market of film culture (Corrigan 1991). More importantly for us, it might be possible to sense the shift of authorship from auteurs to audience in contemporary film theory. The audience in this case means scholars who weave auteurs into a systematic web of critical ideas. In a precursory mode, cognitive formalism approached the auteur as the one who expresses a personal vision and thus offers an “interpretative cue” (Bordwell 2002); phenomenology of embodiment, after psychoanalytic apparatus theory, entirely moved the theoretical focus from the camera-director relation to the screen-spectator relation (Sobchack 1992). Gilles Deleuze brought an ontological turn to film theory

Introduction

5

by arranging numerous auteurs in a Bergsonian-Peircean system of signimages and treating their names as markers for mapping “philosophemes” immanent to the screen (Deleuze 1986, 1989). Since then, the past two decades have seen “the Deleuzian century” come to film studies, first in the strict application of his vocabulary to theory and analysis, and then in the broad sense of what his legacy represents, i.e. film as/with/through philosophy. Jacques Rancière reframed many of the auteurs Deleuze discussed in his own aesthetic schema; Slavoj Žižek psychoanalyzed auteurs from Alfred Hitchcock to Krzysztof Kieślowski in an updated Lacanian structure; Jean-Luc Nancy meditated on Abbas Kiarostami and inspired Claire Denis’ filmmaking … Influenced by such cinephilic philosophers’ works, “film philosophy” emerged within film studies. Here, auteurs often appear as the agents who carry philosophical concepts or even philosophers in their own right, whose works in turn crucially frame our thinking and writing about them. This is where film scholars sometimes play the role of meta-level auteurs by juggling both multiple cinematic and philosophical auteurs, while their individual authorship is blended into a set of debatable, negotiable, reconfigurable parameters for film thinking. This double spectatorial turn of authorship to agency, in film culture (industry/institution) on the one hand and in film studies (theory/philosophy) on the other, is the current phase that we attempt to update and reformulate in terms of the “political” immanent to auteurs and their cinematic engagement with the world. Here, the auteur as agent launches a mininetwork that is not meant to determine an original or ultimate meaning, but to subject itself to sociohistorical ideologies, cultural voices, technological conditions through which meaning is motivated, rationalized, mediated, or reconstructed between an auteur and an audience. Consequently, today’s authorship is no less powerful as agency than before, orchestrating various forces while continuing to play an overall formative role. It has the important merit of being “real” as speaking subject and “differential” on films (Naremore 2004). In short, this agency is a key currency that still applies everywhere in the global “matrix” of film discourses, be it commercial or academic, in relation to its real-world surroundings—that of globalization.

… and “now, auteur?” We now return to our initial questions. Why the auteur? And why now? Because its agency is a causative force to activate an engagement that subjectively concretizes a certain universality of this global matrix of film discourse. It can capture, embody, and typify a “concrete universality” of today’s world (cinema), sometimes even unbeknownst to auteurs

6

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

themselves. Cinema is now the most vulnerably attentive, yet active respondent to global capitalism and digital convergence, but unlike other media, it also generates (sufficient attention to) auteurs who can sustain critically meaningful or artistically transformative stances. This potential enables us to better understand the immanent plane of political positions and ideologies around cinema, which might not be effectively accessible when only looking at films under other, apparently more trendy rubrics such as art cinema, film festivals, transnational media, etc. How do these institutional platforms operate? Thomas Elsaesser’s comprehensive chapter opening this book testifies to the ongoing, updated importance of the auteur in answering this question, by theorizing the new mode of auteurist agency defined as “performative self-contradiction” in creative constraints, somewhat resonating with emergent studies on cinema’s industrial allegories. By extension, with regard to specific auteurs, William Brown addresses Michael Winterbottom as a “self-effacing auteur,” who resists being pigeonholed in a given genre or style, and whose eclectic collaborations pave the way for a new terrain between cinema and non-cinema, including the use of “impure” digital technologies (today, the new norm). Following Fatih Akin’s trajectory from his early shorts to his latest epic, Dudley Andrew highlights the aesthetic channeling of the director’s double identity split between Germany and Turkey, culture and blood, into a global Mobius strip of “moral geometry.” Consuelo Lins investigates Eduardo Coutinho, a vibrant auteur of Brazilian documentary cinema whose “(self-)fabulation” rejuvenated the medium at the twilight of his life with minimalistic means, giving back the cinema not so much its “body” as its voice. Discussing Anurag Kashyap, an influential voice in contemporary Indian cinema, Khaushik Bhaumik offers a political view on both his film and business world in terms of “migration,” which permeates the times of globalization. Victor Fan reveals how Jia Zhangke’s auteurism challenges the notions of autonomy, subjectivity, and individuality that characterize Chinese “independent cinema,” while opening a deindividuated, desubjectivized biopolitical zone of precarious (or “naked”) life. And focusing on Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Aaron Gerow explores the discursive context in which the Japanese director’s elusive auteurism resists the critic’s paranoia of interpretation, opening up onto multiple ambiguities on the threshold of “dis/ continuity,” and playing with “ghostly” meaning. Above this individual level of auteurism renewing cultural politics in filmmaking, there is a collective level where the generation-as-auteur in particular presents and inspires political thinking, even beyond film culture. In fact, this has been a salient feature from the inception of auteurism on: the Young Turks of the French New Wave, by denouncing “Dad’s cinema” as dead cinema, visibly accounted, for the first time in film history, for the power of a generation of auteurs. Their cinephilic experience of film

Introduction

7

viewing and writing led to quasi-Oedipal patricidal filmmaking, while exhibiting diverse manifestations of a new, “breathless” spirit. The generational frame thus works like a collective platform of singular authorship: the generation generates the genius. It opens a middle ground between individual and social forces, where different auteurs share a context of sociopolitical events, technological innovations, and cultural sensibilities. “Sharing,” i.e. neither simply absorbing/transcending those conditions in self-organizing uniqueness, nor being totally shaped/constrained by them as otherness that organizes the self, may have led to the formation of their auteuristic self-awareness. The generation is an interface for this experience, as in the cases of postwar generation Italian neorealists, Baby Boom New American Film directors, “fifth generation” Chinese cinema auteurs, etc. Likewise, the various New Waves that swept Germany, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, and so on, would not have occurred without a bold young generation’s broad, political self-positioning and engagement in their country via international influences. It should be noted that generational auteurism does not overlook individual differences. The oft-encountered (and unavoidable) tension between centripetal collectivity and centrifugal individuality causes less antagonistic opposition than various other articulations of a generational spirit. The singularities of these “collective auteurs” are spontaneously formed through different aesthetic attitudes, political inclinations, or personal characters in response to shared experience. So we can draw a cinematic map of aesthetic and political subtleties that “color” the generation. But despite this pluralist value, the collective auteur is more than the sum of different auteurs, developing its own history through, yet beyond, that of its members. Methodologically, their mapping can be not just a synchronic arrangement of various auteuristic positions, but also a diachronic narrati­ vization of their agendas and motifs, pathologies and impasses, failures and potentials in the dialectic process of raising questions and seeking answers from the critic’s perspective. While objectively arranging multiple auteurs, the generational approach subjectively engages in making them a collective auteur—a critical creature. In this manner, Seung-hoon Jeong projects globally-known South Korean auteurs through the prism of the so-called “386 generation,” mapping a political matrix of allegorical violence and, from its double bind, drawing some ethical potential of “abject agency” to perform alternative modes of life and community. Dominique Nasta also maps contemporary Romanian auteurs who share the political legacy of communism as a sort of generational memory, while rethinking it through the minimalist aesthetics of “irony and reflexivity.” Though focusing on one particular director—Wojtek Smarzowski—in her study of auteurism in Poland, Izabela Kalinowska similarly engages with “politics of abjection,” deeply informed by the traumatic events that marked the 1980s, under the impetus of a decadent totalitarian regime. Poland’s experience clearly

8

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

resonates here with similar traumatic events in Korea and Romania, each informing their own generation of auteurs. The new, multifaceted phase of film authorship we are witnessing today, in relation to the current world and film academia, merits an even wider range of case studies. These map out political implications in which major contemporary film auteurs (make us) reflect on twenty-first century issues, including in highly philosophical ways or in terms of aestheticized space and style. They then reframe the heritage of cinematic auteurism beyond mere aesthetic and formal mannerism and philosophically reinvigorate the political position of cinema. For example, Dan Hassler-Forest reviews Richard Linklater’s independent films in terms of socioeconomic allegories, exploring how his portrayals of daily life in American (youth) culture tacitly resist postmodern nostalgia and challenge capitalism’s purported timelessness, all the while reflecting neoliberalism’s “war on time.” John Pitseys’ chapter on Quentin Tarantino is another historical elucidation of American auteurism in which the “American contract” rooted in slavery is cinematically retraced with its self-contradictory biopolitical base of lawlessness and violence. Regarding European auteurs, Robert Sinnerbrink reframes Lars von Trier’s auteurism as a cinematic “anti-philosophy” that provokes, perverts, and satirizes the classical category of philosophy, playing on its mannerist application, particularly in his latest Depression or Trauma Trilogy. Not altogether differently, Nico Baumbach’s analysis of Abbas Kiarostami suggests various ways in which what he calls the Iranian auteur’s “shareable cinema” can be readdressed through a web of philosophical discourses on film theory and aesthetics along with their political implications. Let us now point out three major layers that this book implies. First, it addresses some of the most sophisticated voices of current world cinema in terms of elements which reshape our lives, such as the two sides of globalization: ever more globalized communities inevitably generate ever more globalized threats, including to themselves. At the same time, individual, collective, even human identities, along with traditional values, familiar, local, cultural, or religious, undergo various changes. The task at hand is not simply to read cinematic representations of such agendas, but to offer an indepth discussion through cinema by testing and retheorizing diverse interdisciplinary discourses on, and suggesting critiques or alternatives to, these ideas. Our contributors thus attempt a dialogical interplay between discourse and cinema, analyzing films partly as a springboard for critical engagement in debates on biopower and violence, capitalism and revolution, technology and catastrophe, etc. … extending to further inquiries on what polis can mean broadly when politics, rightist or leftist, loses or fails in utopian projects, and what political or fundamentally ethical community can be imagined in ways of redefining utopia. Secondly, this volume highlights, in an age whose complexity has rendered straightforwardly political cinema obsolete or trite, films that

Introduction

9

are allegorical in varying degrees or seem to have little to do with realworld concerns at first glance. This yields a cognitive mapping of the political matrix that could reveal an unconscious ideology or paradigm and its cinematically virtualized reality through an aesthetic imaginary, as well as its political potential or deadlock when confronted with actual reality. Consequently, we ask how art relates to the world, what art can or should do in/outside, for/against the world. Art film seems ever less capable of answering this question and proposing alternatives (especially when compared to its politically charged past, as well as to the ever more dominating mainstream industries and new media culture), all the while being more urgently pressed to answer it in its critical and emancipatory capacity. In this sense, the book illuminates how cinema aesthetically philosophizes politics, or how its aesthetics make us think of politics philosophically. The growing scholarship in film (and) philosophy serves as the rich resource for this task. Many chapters thus perform philosophical experiments with films so that, as a whole, the book may insinuate a matrix of philosophical concepts and ideas as both the basis and confinement of current film scholars’ thinking systems. Thirdly, by extension, and with the legacy of Deleuze in mind, we suggest that today’s auteurs are philosophical thinkers who are also politically attuned observers and apt craftsmen or artists. Rather than unique individuals whose voice and filmography build an autonomous corpus, they could be viewed as an entry point into the matrix of philosophemes (especially aesthetic, biopolitical, and ethical) that are rendered in their thematic or stylistic motifs. There, their specificities may be (re)context­ ualized along with other auteurs in synchronic linkage more than in terms of their own diachronic lineage to past auteurs. Our contributors creatively traverse the corpora of multiple directors even when focusing on a single auteur, when such contextualization highlights their matrix rather than serves as a tool to judge their discrete output. This auteurism, hardly obsessed with aesthetic evaluation or with building a hierarchical canon, brings different layers of and approaches to the matrix of auteurs, in order to cinematically rethink pressing world issues together. Through the course of twenty chapters, a constellation of views and ideas emerges, amounting to all the overarching points mentioned above. In this framework, the scope of The Global Auteur goes beyond the traditional realm of art film, ranging from Hollywood to European to Asian auteurs and more. These films have been more or less widely circulated at least since 2000, impressively charged with remarkable signs and symptoms of the phenomena that the book seeks to explore. Although many of them can be aligned with the Second Cinema tradition of art film, their authorship grows beyond the boundaries of fine craftsmanship or art pour l’art, and constitutes a genuine philosophical and political matrix which exceeds the works of individuals. We have, therefore, strategically distributed the

10

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

representativeness of our contributors’ auteurs of choice according not only to their significance, but also to geographic consideration. Unsurprisingly given the topic, the lion’s share goes to Europe and Asia.2

Of certain tendencies in global cinema (a plea for the auteur in the twenty-first century) Let us now note a few other key features of today’s auteur cinema. Indisputably one of the most important phenomena in the art cinema of the last twenty years (and oftentimes enabled by digital technologies) is the technique of the long take: the reader will find it illustrated in the films, noted for their epic length, of Philippino director Lav Diaz, discussed here by Marco Grosoli. Productively using Heideggerian quotes in Diaz’s corpus, Grosoli argues that the extreme running time in his films cancels out time itself in favor of space, yet in an anti-postmodern gesture, calling upon Fredric Jameson in the process. Reaching for the corpus of another director noted for his use of the long take, Jameson himself shows how the vectorial quality in Aleksey Gherman’s films (in its unrelenting left-toright movement, i.e. its “suffocating kinesis”), as well as its highly textural and sensorial depictions of refuse and other abject situations, resists being reduced to the principle of aestheticization, and the “reign of beauty” it underpins. In so doing, Gherman’s cinema also resists postmodernism’s insidious regime of commodification. One could argue also that the cinema of the long take features interesting echoes of Deleuze’s legacy. Several of our contributors make use of some of his most relevant and illuminating concepts, and propose to look at several major recent films as a renegotiating the “time-image,” the idiom Deleuze coined and identified as the major philosophical import of cinema in the post-World War II era. What is suggested instead is a new type of “spaceand-time image.” Other contemporary practitioners of the long take in whose works we witness the predominance of spatiality over temporality include celebrated figures such as Tsai Ming-Liang, Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Although not reviewed at length in the book, another director of global prominence and who merits attention at this juncture is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who embodies at least three major tendencies of contemporary auteur cinema. First, as the figures mentioned above, he is a practitioner of the long take. In addition to this, like several other directors reprised in the book, Ceylan keeps referencing major auteurs of the Second Cinema/ modernity, from Andrey Tarkovsky to Bresson, in a way that can at once be regarded as postmodern pastiche and some attempt to regain the depth of these prestigious predecessors. It is indeed a testament of our times

Introduction

11

that pastiching great auteurs of the past is no longer regarded as a playful gesture only (as was eminently the case with the postmodern film movement that spans from the late 1960s to the 1990s, from Jean-Luc Godard and Brian De Palma to Jim Jarmusch and Tarantino), but also as a marker of some significance, moral or otherwise. For this reason, Ceylan’s reverent nods seem a symptom of global capitalism rather than a resistance to it. His is a beautifully engineered, informed, and intellectually rich cinema, but penetrated by a spirit of “humanism” which we note but hesitate to commend, all the more because a similar phenomenon is at work in a more transparently post-humanistic and “global” auteur, Carlos Reygadas. In his chapter, Michael Cramer examines how Reygadas’ attempts at creating a dehistoricized, phenomenologically immediate cinema of presence are blocked by historical realities, while his narratives both comment upon and seek to overcome this tension in an attempt to “bargain” for the continued existence of art cinema to which, like Ceylan’s, his films have been compared. What the films of Ceylan and Reygadas, replete with references to the same canonical figures, teach us, is that while there is no shortage of important or supremely talented auteurs in our contemporary cinematic landscape, the cultural zeitgeist and environment of the last fifteen years has hardly been conducive to a rekindling of the success of the modernist masters of the 1960s. The yearning caused by this state of things is easy to understand based on just the most cursory comparison of that period with the early twenty-first century. And while the thinkers and ideologues of Third Cinema decried auteurism and Second Cinema as conservative and bourgeois, today, by the proverbial shift of the pendulum, such a “conserva­tive” approach might resonate with an unexpected community spirit. Could cinema, then, however implausible and even paradoxical the proposition, still foster community in an age of neoliberalism? The latter crushes and reshapes unfavorably not only social movements, the Humanities, but also humans and their environment themselves, positing the domination of sovereignty over bare life, as attested to in the studies here by Bhaumik, Fan, and Jeong. Yet the attempts to channel the great spirit of cinematic humanism—Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Dreyer, and others—by their postmodern “equivalents” seems to have become an act of failed utopianism: cinema is doing fine commercially, but has lost something essential—its body (celluloid)—and so it reaches out for its former soul, as it were. The third major tendency embodied by Ceylan, and in our view the most interesting one in his case, truly justifying his significance beyond mere cultural and festival politics, stems directly from the transition from film to digital. Experimenting with the way light, movement, and textures are registered by digital cameras, Ceylan has created beautiful photographic compositions for his films, which straddle analog/celluloid

12

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

modes of representation and cinematography, and propose a new type of digital indexicality and realism for the twenty-first century. In this sense, the Turkish director also emphasizes the transfer from time to space, or its intermediateness, as the digital image seems to have much more in common with liquid textures than celluloid. The flow of digital imagery, now ubiquitous on the millions of devices used for telecommunication, is only contained with great difficulty by cinema as a medium that tries to survive the demise of its favored support for a century—35mm. The onset of digital cinema has hitherto procured only a few interesting and truly compelling innovations, remaining all too often at the level of gimmick. And yet the uninterrupted flow of data proposed by digital lends itself eminently to a new cinematic sublime, encountered so far mostly in films resorting to the faux long-take technique (in truth digitally stitched), sometimes producing a film seemingly captured in one serpentine camera movement. We find this false long take in the efforts of “Hollywood Mexican” filmmakers (Alfonso Cuarón—Children of Men [2006], Gravity [2013] and Alejandro González Iñárritu—Birdman [2014], The Revenant [2015]), or in the often reviled films of Gaspar Noé. The Argentina-born Frenchman has inherited not only an obsession with Stanley Kubrick (unrelentingly referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] throughout his oeuvre), but also used the technology to recreate a phenomenology of narcotics through his cinema, from alcohol (I Stand Alone [Seul contre tous, 1999]), cocaine and amphetamines (Irreversible [Irréversible, 2002]), DMT and other hallucinogenic drugs (Enter the Void, 2009), and cannabis and opium (in the touchingly humorous Love [2015], which resorts to 3D to interestingly soften deep focus). What Noé does is symptomatic of the many contemporary auteurs referencing their cinematic idols, not least Jonathan Glazer and Paul Thomas Anderson with Kubrick. Yet instead of trying to “match the brain” of his idol, Noé turns out to be surprisingly clever in embracing sensations over cognitive skills. Indeed, he takes the Kubrickian heritage of the “screen as brain” (Deleuze 1989) and remaps it as a reptilian brain, or nervous system-cinema, proposing one of the most cogent “images” in the twenty-first century, thereby reducing the philosophical sublime of Kubrick’s oeuvre to the quintessentially superficial sublime of the digital imagery. Under its texture, however, lies the truly sublime, namely the frightening primacy and hypothetical infinity of numbers and binary codes, whose essential, brutal simplicity undermines the potential richness of its endless ramifications, being in this the exact opposite of analog cinema. Considering as we do that the phenomenological (and, in the future, material too, as has been decried by countless film archivists around the world) loss entailed by the shift to digital capture and projection is incommensurable, we are of the opinion that the effort by studios and distributors, as opposed to the grand pomp surrounding the shift to sound

Introduction

13

and color technologies, to pretend that nothing has changed is fraught and complicit with the logic of corporate capitalism (and somewhat analogous to the gradual and surreptitious attrition of democracy in the West). In this sense, although the nostalgic and fetishistic gesture of auteurs such as Tarantino or Christopher Nolan to keep on using and screening celluloid might come across as charming, it is inescapably bound to fail (at best, celluloid film will occupy the same position in our culture as do vinyl records and polaroid cameras). Compelling efforts to use intermediality and experiment in a novel way with digital cinema can be found in the works of the late Godard, surely the only director in the world to have managed to remain philosophically and politically relevant over six decades.3 Godard’s latest (and hopefully not last) Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2015) is reviewed here by Rick Warner for its political and philosophical momentous implications as for its innovative use of 3D, reflecting on the medium’s (and human) history, capitalism, and death. The Swiss dandy, the marginal, “autistic man” (as he has referred to himself in an interview) has always been a global and central figure of auteur cinema, yet one operating from a specific niche, at once global (working with various established producers and necessarily co-opted through channels of film distribution, festivals, etc.) and local (producing independently and from the fringe). Steadfastly denouncing the workings and ills of contemporary capitalism, embracing at once an Internationalist stance and a very French Republican approach to critical discourse—turning cinema into an essay, at once deep philosophical and satirical—Godard’s biting critique and pessimism may be more relevant today than ever before. In an age where global organisms in the service or promotion of corporate capitalism increasingly reduce the sovereignty and autonomy of smaller nations, where the concept of nation-state is increasingly derided or decried (promoting at once delocalization and regionalist reflexes), film nations are nonetheless still a hot currency. Whereas the United States, France, Sweden, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan dominated the art-film festival circuit in the 1950s and 1960s, today it is auteurs hailing from China, Taiwan, Korea, India, Iran, Turkey, or Belgium and Romania, who reap the benefits of the national figure in the global age, and of the various mutations and migrations of cultural policies and financing infrastructures of art cinema. Conversely, some cinemas work on a local basis, and some auteurs do not travel beyond the boundaries of their national market, even in the frame of cinemas which otherwise experience a globalist expansion.4 On this note, another example worthy of investigation which we regret not being able to include would be Portugal, from Manoel de Oliveira’s flamboyant final decade to the very contrasted works of Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes; or Greece, after Theo Angelopoulos, in the experiments of Athina Rachel Tsangari or Yorgos Lanthimos.

14

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Invigorating though they may be, national art cinemas such as the ones delineated above are unfortunately rapidly co-opted and sapped of their vitality by the way in which festival circuits (their main “clients/ promoters”) have evolved over the years. Naturally festivals are influenced by their sponsors and the personalities of their directors, and a proper history of the politics of major film festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, etc.) would be interesting in charting a shift from leftist to more conservative allegiances through the years. Nonetheless, the rule of thumb today seems to be crude marketability, which has become the almost exclusive measure of a work’s success, so that more and more, auteur or Second Cinema has fallen prey to formulaic reflexes. As a consequence, while in the past young filmmakers were inspired by and successful on the basis of an originality and power of vision drawn from models who were almost systematically commercially non-viable, yet relayed in festivals, art-house theaters, etc. (Carl Theodor Dreyer and Bresson being cases in point), today’s popular cinema tastes are shaped by the most recent box office hits, and it seems difficult to fathom something of the Sirk/Fassbinder nexus emerging today, or even for a filmmaker presenting a truly innovative view to be able, without the proper connections, to conduct a successful career in film. It seems quite clear that cinema will require drastic and revolutionary movements, both aesthetically and politically, if it is to survive as a major medium. Nonetheless, we must mitigate our pessimism: on the one hand, cinema is undergoing a profound technological and political/philosophical transition, a context in which a lot is lost but a lot can be also gained. On the other hand, not all is grim in its current landscape. Asian cinema has produced a wealth of new idioms, stimulating and sometimes auspiciously crossing-over into the West. Female auteurs the world over are often successfully reinjecting major innovations into the medium, not least through the combination of documentary and fiction, with invigorating cases including the late Chantal Akerman and Valérie Massadian (though it should be noted that any artistic tendency is always at risk of becoming cliché or kitsch, as in the films of Byambasuren Davaa). New shooting-starlike auteurs may also be born and vanish just as rapidly through channels of self-promotion and distribution (Youtube, Vimeo, etc.). In this maelstrom of data and names, the struggle not only to produce but to exist as an auteur has either been scandalously facilitated by indulgent nepotism (from Sophia Coppola and Jason Schwartzman to Léa Seydoux and Mélanie Laurent, from Vincent Cassel to Jeremy Renner) or rendered incrementally difficult, nigh impossible. Digital technology entails that producing a feature film has become somewhat cheaper, but there is a flip side to this coin: even the wealth of small- and medium-size festivals sprouting around the world cannot absorb the mass of films currently vying for attention, in an age when almost literally everyone has access to a camera, and can thus potentially become an “auteur.”

Introduction

15

In view of the above, the recognized auteurs reviewed through the pages of this book are no doubt privileged, even pampered figures, but they can also be regarded as enjoying a far less cushy status: that of actors of a thankless yet truly heroic age of a medium at once exhausted and in deep transformation. Since the early 2000s, filmmakers have had to take on a very substantial challenge: on the technological level, they are confronted with the digitization of filming, editing, post-production, and projection/ distribution. On the financial level, cinema, like every other form of entertainment, is undergoing the maximization algorithms of corporate capitalism, the complexity of which is reflected only negatively, in asinine scripts, product-placement, and shift from the juvenilization of culture and audiences (a 1980s phenomenon) to the infantilizing of culture and coterminous re-education of audiences in the twenty-first century (from as early as the cradle, courtesy of new tablet and touch-screen technologies). The sway of global capitalism, alongside the countless ills it has brought upon culture, is also more insidiously killing the wunderkammer effect of cinema as a “cabinet of curiosities,” as surely as it is turning the wunderkammer’s other heir, museums, into luna-parks including the now inevitable haptic technologies and even “selfie-spots.” It is not surprising, in this context, that the new home of cinemaplexes has become the global shopping mall, and the home of many auteurs including Akerman, Godard, and Kiarostami, the art gallery—a milieu with different, but often equally fraught implications and pitfalls. Conversely, some gallery artists have made successful incursions into recent cinema, particularly Steve McQueen. But to the surrealist and pop provocations of Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Warhol, McQueen has opposed an explicitly political cinema, in the most traditional and vernacular meaning of the word (Hunger [2008], Shame [2011], Twelve Years a Slave [2013]), as beautiful and thematically contemporaneous (political prisoners, sex addiction, racism) as it seems either completely out of touch, or uncomfortably tight with twenty-first century realpolitik. In this latter case, one would see the dangerous flirting of art cinema with the garish “causes” industry and “human-rightism,” i.e. the commodification of human suffering and social injustices. In an age where the divide between left and right is increasingly flaunted and washed out in favor of global corporate and militaristic interests, overtly “political” cinema may seem an almost laughable concept. To be sure, there are auteurs, such as Jafar Panahi, who practice a cinema that is still political, well into the very flesh of its makers—but they are the exception to the rule. We still want to insist that cinema continues to have a social and political role, marginal and decreasing though it may be. Our collection features several examples of auteurs, celebrated both as global in the conventional and even commercial sense of the term, who attempt to return, sometimes through indirect ways, politics to cinema. For instance, Rachel Gabara reviews Abderrahmane Sissako’s films and explores how

16

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

African cinema both embraced and rejected the politique des auteurs, setting it up to resist the inevitable cohesion into an oeuvre, following Bazin’s question, “Auteur, yes, but what of?” This constitutes a political, if discreet, gesture in its own right. Several other chapters in the book show that the power of cinema to stir our political fiber is not extinguished altogether, and that, paradoxically, the medium that is most closely related to global capitalism is also the one that can occasionally bite the hand that feeds it. Perhaps it is at a time of least explicit political meaningfulness and “power” that cinema might become the most profoundly political, and not only just in its unconscious, as Jeremi Szaniawski argues in his chapter on Michael Haneke and Aleksey Balabanov, and their take on the intruder, meant to obliquely illuminate and educate their audience, and resonating deeply with our current geopolitical situation. If cinema is to overcome the third and most important crisis of its relatively short but plentiful existence, then our 2000–15 period will be remembered as one in which, by virtue of their non-renouncing creativity (of not defaulting to the sirens of television and easily consumed, indeed “binge watched” TV shows), many of the auteurs tackled here will have become (unwittingly perhaps) resistors in their own right. In hindsight, the relatively minor innovations witnessed in the films of Haneke or Von Trier, Balabanov or Gherman, Jia or Diaz, or even Tarantino and Linklater will appear as crucial in having maintained a continuity, a human chain within the history of cinema. Such efforts of creative resistance can be operated on the most discreet, tentative, or speculative and relativistic level, far from the grand “end of the world” narratives that have mushroomed in Hollywood and European cinema of late (and which, as Jameson deftly argues in these pages, “far from warning of apocalypse, [have] rather … transformed it into an object of consumption and satisfaction”). Yet for all the aestheticized efforts to cosmetize or even camouflage the truth, the shift, technological and societal, is here indeed. This may explain the emergence, almost as a category in its own right, of cinematic “thought experiments” in contemporary cinema (Elsaesser 2015). For a variety of reasons it suggests cinema’s confrontation, perhaps for the second time in its history (after World War II and neorealism), with a new need to thoroughly reassess reality, trying to decipher, understand, and make sense of the conundrum presented to mankind in the age of corporate capitalism. In the process, the role of the auteur is not only fraught, thankless, and in the shadow of its glorious predecessors: it may be more crucial and relevant than ever. If we can agree that each generation of historically important auteurs came of age about fifteen to twenty years following a major technological shift, then our group of “transitional auteurs” (2000–15) is deserving of particular attention. They keep on producing relevant films at a time when

Introduction

17

cinema is renegotiating its very nature in major ways. Their films no longer occupy the same place in the collective imaginary as did those of the great masters of the silent period (D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, etc.) and the great modern auteurs (Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Ozu Yasujiro, Federico Fellini, Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Godard, etc.), nor even the “easy riders and raging bulls” of the New Hollywood (Martin Scorsese, De Palma, etc.), or the indie/postmodern generation championed by Sundance/Miramax (Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, Jarmusch, Tarantino, etc.).5 This is because, returning to where we began, cinema is not only undergoing a transitional phase, but has de facto lost its place as the major medium of its time. With realism if not humility, its makers have taken a new turn where authorship has been “constellated”: from the vernacular modernism of auteurs to those who still hold fast to an idea of film as art which at once harks back to the past and tries to look into the future. Should this book have a legacy, it will be that the filmmakers under scrutiny herein will appear as significant a generation from now as they do today. Even if their influence might not be as substantial as that of their glorious predecessors, perhaps their role in keeping film as art (however fraught the concept) alive, is one of the most relevant, and paradoxically progressive ones they could have taken upon themselves, in an otherwise dishearteningly co-opted global environment.

Notes 1

For a comprehensive history of the concept, see, among others, Caughie 1981, Bazin 1985, Grant 2008.

2

We must note the obvious: that today’s global range of auteurs prevented us from effectively addressing all noteworthy names, including many South and North Americans, non-art film auteurs, and major female and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) auteurs. These two latter groups, in particular, have been around since the dawn of cinema, though they are only now (still insufficiently) acquiring global visibility: the late Chantal Akerman, Lucrecia Martel, Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Kathryn Bigelow; or Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-wai, Gus Van Sant, Xavier Dolan, Todd Haynes, etc. If we must play devil’s advocate, the reason for leaving them out might have to do with the fact that their booming is relatively easy to identify and correlate with significant (if still insufficient) progress in the West with regard to female and LGBT rights, going hand in hand with well-organized non-government organizations and lobbies representing these groups. It is thus a logical, transparent phenomenon, which comes with its auteurs and representatives in every field from politics and activism to entertainment and high arts.

18

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

3

A fellow great French auteur we wish to acknowledge here is, of course, Alain Resnais. While Godard evolved from a pointed and sharp but juvenile and “romantic” cinema to the radical political cinema of the later years, we observe in Resnais the exact chiasmic opposite process: from the serious, almost ponderous and mature films of the 1960s to Wild Grass (Les herbes folles, 2009) and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu, 2012), films which seem to have been made by a young man. The same can be said of another great master who made some of his most remarkable films in the last fifteen years: Manoel de Oliveira. Enjoying a renaissance in his eighties, Oliveira brought back Portuguese cinema, not without the precious help and networks of France-based producer Paulo Branco, onto the world stage.

4

Kalinowska hints at this divide in her chapter, pitting two national auteurs (Andrzej Wajda and Smarzowski) against a transnational and/or global auteur such as Oscar-winner Paweł Pawlikowski.

5

Once counter-cultural outsiders who took over the system, or successfully operated from its fringes, most successful auteurs of New Hollywood and the “indie” generation have become established figures of the culture industry. Representatives of a status quo, they capitalize on their status of auteur as brand name, and the prestige associated with the moments that saw them emerge on the global stage.

Works cited Andrew, Dudley. 1992. “The Unauthorized Auteur Today,” in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Aba Preacher Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies, 77–85. New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–8. New York: Hill and Wang. Bazin, André. 1985. “On the Politique des Auteurs,” in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, 248–59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David. 2002. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Catherine Fowler (ed.), The European Cinema Reader, 94–102. London and New York: Routledge. Corrigan, Timothy. 1991. A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2015. “Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment,” Theory & Event 18 (2). Available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v018/18.2.elsaesser.html (accessed August 30, 2015).

Introduction

19

Grant, Barry Keith. 2008. Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Naremore, James. 2004. “Authorship,” in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), A Companion to Film Theory, 9–24. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1974. Luchino Visconti. New York: Viking Adult. Schatz, Thomas. 2010. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stam, Robert. 2000. “Introduction,” in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology, 1–6. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Truffaut, François. 1976. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods: Vol. I, 3rd ed., 224–36. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wollen, Peter. 1972. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

1 The global author: Control, creative constraints, and performative self-contradiction Thomas Elsaesser

The author: Impossible and indispensable There are many reasons why the concept of the auteur, as it applies to the film director, should not be carried over into the twenty-first century. First of all, because it has always been a contested notion, serving sometimes highly polemical and partisan agendas under unique historical circumstances (e.g. first in post-war Europe, then in 1970s Hollywood). Secondly, while it was strategically useful when helping film and cinema studies gain a foothold in the academy by modeling itself on literary studies and art history, this objective had been (over-)achieved by the mid-1980s, by which time the historical conditions of the original auteur theory (i.e. validating Hollywood’s popular art by employing high-culture criteria) also no longer applied. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, film-, media-, and cultural-studies programs were eagerly inaugurated everywhere in higher education, in order to come to the rescue of humanities departments and to provide training for the ever-expanding “creative” media industries. Cultural studies in particular had little need of the individual author, having shifted attention from creation and production to reception and spectatorship: works of art as well as of popular culture (which meant art cinema and the mainstream) were assumed to be social texts carrying ideologically encoded messages, and thus had larger systems, e.g. capitalism

22

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

or patriarchy, as their “authors.” Such deconstructions (and “deaths”) of the author were theoretically supported by no less authoritative authors than Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, who in turn provided models of analysis that supported close readings of specific texts without resorting to self-expression, intentionality, or individual moral and legal accountability.1 No doubt, there are even more pertinent philosophical reasons why authorship is such a vexing problem for a popular and collaborative art such as the cinema, and why it should be dropped from the list of important topics, quite apart from the industrial and capitalist context in which filmmaking has invariably taken place.2 None of these critiques are new nor have they been laid to rest,3 yet precisely because even art cinema has become thoroughly pervaded by market considerations, the author debate deserves another look. Given that the film director as author, and the author as auteur have survived even the most well-founded set of counter-arguments, one can only conclude that being philosophically problematic and conceptually vague merely reinforces the author’s indispensability, both as a reality and as a concept. In fact, more than ever, (film) authorship is taken for granted, filling an evident gap by fulfilling its “author-function” (Foucault), which at its most basic rests on the assumption that the work (the film) in question possesses a degree of coherence and purposiveness, which convention and the need for meaning like to attribute to a nameable instance and an origin—the author.4 This author-function was initially more important to film critics and scholars than to the directors themselves (many Hollywood veteran directors were baffled and amused, before they became flattered and intrigued by the French politique des auteurs). Responding to such disconnect between person and function, authorship was redefined as implicit and inferred, rather than expressive and embodied. The author, famously, became an “effect of the text,” a “necessary fiction,” a projection and over-identification by the enthusiastic cinephile, requiring one to carefully (and ontologically) separate John Ford from “John Ford”—the latter the sum of the narrative structures and stylistic effects that the critic was able to assemble around a body of work “signed” by a given director. Yet in subsequent decades, as the director as auteur increasingly became a fixture of the popular media’s general personality cult, the author began doing duty not only as the (imaginary or real) anchor for presumed, perceived, or projected coherence, but was actively deployed as a brand name and marketing tool, for the commercial film industry as well as in the realm of independent and art cinema.

Questions of access and control Adding the word “global” to “author” reflects this shift of register which raises the stakes, and acknowledges that “global” applies to both



The global author

23

Hollywood’s global reach and coverage, and to world cinema and transnational cinema—terms that have all but replaced the labels “art cinema” and “independent cinema” (where the author as both function and person survived the longest without being either contested critically or seen as tainted by commercialism). Globalizing auteurism is therefore the inevitable consequence of art cinema now being part of the market, and of the urgent need to re-situate the old debates in an enlarged context. Concerning the latter, however, I follow the lead of those writers who have narrowed the question of authorship in cinema down to the issue of control: V. F. Perkins claims … that the “director’s authority is a matter not of total creation but of sufficient control” … Bordwell and Thompson suggest that “usually it is through the director’s control of the shooting and assembly phases that the film’s form and style crystallize.” … [Paisley] Livingston, who has argued that some studio films are singly authored, points to the “high degree of control” and “huge measure of authority” that some directors have … (Meskin 2008, 22) Control, of course, can be exercised in many different ways: organizational, financial, political, artistic, and intellectual, and many of these types of control are indeed involved in the making, marketing, distributing, and “owning” of a film. Not all of these forms of control need to fall to the same physical individual, or indeed any individual, given the abstract nature of some of the controlling forces and functions at work. I have elsewhere argued that contemporary Hollywood should be understood within such an extended, “reflexive,” authorial dynamic of providing “access for all” at the same time as “keeping control.” Which is to say, Hollywood sets out to make films that are formally and intellectually accessible to as wide as possible a range of audiences, diverse in language, race, religion, region, and nationality, all the while trying to control not only legal ownership and property rights and the platforms of distribution and exhibition, but also steering the scope of interpretations and forms of (fan-)appropriation thanks to a combination of (textual) structured ambiguity and (paratextual) feedback loops.5 By way of example, I examined the authorial persona of the director James Cameron and the narrative structure of his most successful film, Avatar (2009), arguing that both instantiate a convergence of these basically antagonistic forces of “access” and “control,” under the intensified conditions of a global market and an increasingly polarized political world (dis)order.6 One consequence to draw from this situation is that the author in the global context is both a construct and a person(ality). Being a locus of agency (control) as well as a focal point of projection (access), he/she is positioned at the intersection of a theoretical impossibility and a practical

24

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

indispensability. A figure of contradiction as well as a construct, the global author exists within antagonistic forces, whose effects need not work against each other, but can be harnessed so as to re-energize rather than block the different levels of circulation in play. It aligns authorship with other aspects of globalization, where multiple variables are simultaneously interacting with each other, where traditional categories of linear causeand-effect chains have opened up to recursive network effects, and where our idea of autonomy, i.e. single source, rational agency is complicated by models of distributed agency, contingency, and mutual interdependence. These “rhizomatic” tendencies are reinforced by electronic communication and the internet, whose architecture is the very site of simultaneous, multidirectional, reciprocal, recursive, and looped interactions. Similarly “distributed,” antagonistic and yet interdependent forces are typical of today’s cinema as a whole, thriving as it does between ostensibly incompatible identities of big-screen spectacle, digital video disk, and download file, with viewers effortlessly switching between online viewing and visits to the local multiplex, and with the culture at large treating “the cinema” as part of the urban fabric and “the cinematic” as part of our collective memory and imaginary. In these contexts and definitions the author does not seem to be crucial to the system, being only one of the pieces of information and markers of recognition by which audiences identify a film as worthy of their attention. More significant and symptomatic is the author’s place in that other network which competes with and complements global Hollywood: the film festival network. Its nodes are no longer merely in Europe (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam) but extend to North America (Toronto, New York, Sundance, Telluride), Africa (Ouagadougou), Latin America (Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo), and Asia (Busan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai). As has been evident for some time, it is at these festivals that the auteur is the only universally recognized currency, yet this currency is stamped and certified at very few of the world’s many festivals, with Cannes (and France) still the decisive place for authenticating internationally recognized auteurs. The idea that auteurs are constructs of the festivals merely underscores and makes more historically specific the point made earlier about the problematic status of cinematic authorship, insofar as the discursive construct auteur is now doubled by an institutional construct under the control of the film festival system. In another sense, however, calling respected directors of great films “constructs” is both counter-intuitive and demeaning, yet it can also become subversively productive, if it opens up a number of otherwise unrecognized contradictions, which filmmakers themselves have recognized as challenges and (sometimes welcome) opportunities—having to do with autonomy and forms of agency that turn the question of control inside out. This is what I intend to illustrate by introducing two distinct but complementary notions—that of creative



The global author

25

constraint and of performative self-contradiction, which together outline potentially productive counter-strategies from within the system, rather than continuing to pursue (increasingly ineffective) oppositional stances from without. On the face of it, the extraordinary dependency of most of the world’s non-Hollywood filmmakers on festivals for validation, recognition, and cultural capital makes a mockery of the term “independence.” Yet it is a reminder that the festivals’ increase in power does not sit easily on them either, since it contradicts the very purpose of the festivals, namely to celebrate film as art and to acknowledge the filmmaker as artist and auteur—all notions supposedly synonymous with autonomy. In other words, a dynamic of reciprocal dependencies is implicit in this relationship between auteur and festival, chief among these being that the festival, in order to fulfill its mission, has to encourage and even constrain the filmmaker to behave as if he/she was indeed a free agent and an autonomous artist, dedicated solely to expressing a uniquely personal vision, and thus to disavow the very pressures the festival has to impose. One such pressure, for instance, comes from the increasingly conflicted force field of schedules and dates, hierarchies, competition, and selection mechanisms into which the festival network places both the filmmakers and the festivals. With festivals being both portals and gatekeepers, both windows of attention and platforms for dissemination, a filmmaker has to plan and produce his/ her film to fit the timetable of the respective festival, i.e. effectively making his/her film to measure, to order, and to schedule. In the case of established auteurs, the dilemma is aggravated by having to weigh loyalty against opportunity, when accepting a festival invitation: “What if I commit to Berlin in February and a month later, I hear that Cannes wants to show my film in May?” Festivals are in competition with each other over exclusive premieres, forcing filmmakers into yet another form of dependence.

Double occupancy, self-exoticism and “serving two masters” Yet these examples may only scratch the surface of the kinds of controls and contradictory demands the global author is exposed to: festivals pride themselves on their internationalism, of transcending the boundaries of national cinema by providing an open forum for the world’s films and filmmakers. But this openness can be a trap: it is an open invitation to self-conscious ethnicity and re-tribalization, it quickly shows its affinity or even collusion with cultural tourism, with fusion-food-world-musicethnic-cuisine Third Worldism in the capitals of the first world, and more generally, with a post-colonial and subaltern sign-economy, covering over

26

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and effacing the new economy of downsizing, outsourcing, and the relentless search for cheap labor on the part of multi-national companies. Because the cinema (as part of the creative industries) is not exempt from these pressures, but cannot avow them openly, there is a tendency of films within the festival circuit—whether from Asia, Africa, or Europe—to respond and to comply, by gestures that amount to a kind of “self-­exoticizing” or “auto-­orientalism”: that is, a tendency to present to the world (of the festivals) a picture of the self, a narrative of one’s nation or community, that reproduces or anticipates what one believes the other expects to see. It is the old trap of the colonial ethnographer, of the eager multi-culturalist who welcomes the stranger and is open to otherness, but preferably on one’s own terms and within one’s own comfort zone. In order to highlight these asymmetrical, but reciprocal dependencies, I proposed the term “double occupancy.” It was meant to draw attention, first of all, to some of the fallacies implicit in identity politics: rather than diversity or multi-culturalism, [double occupancy wants to] signal our discursive as well as geopolitical territories as always already occupied. It can convey right away a concrete [history of occupation, colonialism and globalization] as well as the need to reflect the reality of competing claims in the identity-wars, while also keeping alive the political and philosophical associations that the term may carry. (Elsaesser 2008, 50) Secondly, the term was meant to allude to and include contemporary theories of the subject: in Lacanian psychoanalysis it is language that speaks us, rather than the other way round; for Foucault, religion and social institutions inscribe themselves as discursive regimes and micro-politics on our bodies and senses. [Double occupancy] also calls to mind Jacques Derrida’s practice of putting certain words “under erasure,” in order to indicate the provisional nature of a text’s authority, and the capacity of textual space to let us see both itself and its opposite. (Elsaesser 2008, 50, 52) I shall come back to the philosophical implications at the end, but first want to refocus the political aspects, as they apply specifically to the global auteur, whose double occupancy is perhaps best characterized as the state of constitutively serving at least two masters. These masters can be a government exerting censorship, versus the master embodied by the international film festival whose director expects dissidence and resistance from the filmmaker (think China, think Iran); one master can be public service television which in Europe acts as the major producer and



The global author

27

exhibitor, versus the other master, the big screen as endorsement of the director as auteur (an accolade not available on television). Yet the split can also be on the side of audience address: trying to satisfy a domestic critical establishment, while hoping to seduce an international audience that expects exoticism either in the form of gritty realism or picturesque squalor (international successes such as City of God (2002) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008) provide the relevant examples). For instance, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008) and Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza, 2013) may not at first glance have much in common, but both carefully balance biting criticism of contemporary Italy with a seductive allure of “crime and violence” in the former, and “glamor and decadence” in the latter. Each film is also very conscious of its national cinematic lineage (neo-realism, spaghetti Western, and Pasolini in one case, Fellini and Antonioni in the other). It is a heritage that the films performatively enact, which is one reason why European cinema in the age of globalization should be called “post-nationalist,” in the sense of “performing nationalism.” Also servants of two masters—another meaning of the term “double occupancy”—are auteurs such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, when they make films outside their home country, while still “representing” it, by associating its national stereotypes. This double occupancy can also be proven negatively, when directors throw in their lot with one master only, as in the case of Kim Ki-duk or Cristian Mungiu, who have more or less given up on their domestic Korean or Romanian audiences and now make films mainly for the Cannes and Venice festivals, after having been ignored or vilified in their own country. In the same vein, the Russian director Alexander Sokurov would be another telling case of a film auteur “serving two masters.” Targeted by film censorship during the Soviet period (all the while producing films that were almost systematically shelved), he became heralded as one of the major figures representing his national cinema, as it was being showcased abroad, at the time of Perestroika in the mid-1980s. But with film funds dwindling during the late Soviet period and through the 1990s, Sokurov had to utilize Western European subsidy infrastructures and production funds in order to continue to make films, while still identified with (sometimes clichéd) Russianness, even in cases where his films dealt with non-Russian topics and even when shot in foreign languages, such as German or Japanese. Benefiting from finance obtained through both local and foreign (mostly German, but also French) production companies, the director famously reached out to Vladimir Putin himself when trying to find additional money for his Faust (2011), or, more confidentially, obtained funding from the Wolff-Metternich estate for his latest film, Francofonia (2015), which lo and behold, portrays Count Wolff-Metternich in a rather positive light. A sign of his own awareness of his dependency on a variety of non-commercial,

28

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

“art cinema” funds and investors is Sokurov’s consistent habitus of rebellious insubordination in interviews, “performing” the radical free spirit and independent auteur, both on and off film sets. It seems to have served him well on the festival circuit: after being lionized (or “leopardized”) at Locarno in the late 1980s, he was later “upgraded” to Cannes award-winner (with Moloch [1999]) and the prestigious off-festival screening, both in 35mm and digital, of Russian Ark (2002). He later sternly criticized the festival for its commercialism, including in major interviews and in his book V Tsentre Okeana (2012), and has since found a new home at the Venice film festival (where he took the Golden Lion, to everyone’s astonishment, for Faust).7 A third kind of double occupancy or multi-servicing can be noted when filmmakers turn gallery artists, which has been the case with directors like Harun Farocki, Wim Wenders, or Chantal Akermann from an earlier generation, and more recently, applies to Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah, but also to Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, and Kiarostami from Iran. The reverse is also becoming more common, when established contemporary artists undertake major film productions, as in the case of Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls [2000], The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [2007]), Steve McQueen (Hunger [2008], Shame [2011], Twelve Years a Slave [2013]), and Sam Taylor-Wood as Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy [2009], 50 Shades of Grey [2015]). Such transitions from the gallery to Hollywood are still relatively rare.8 Most film directors continue to lend their talents to the festival circuit as their lifeline for cultural capital and recognition. In this respect, European auteurs are not exempt from being part of the globalization of creative labor more generally, which positions them in proximity to the creative precariat of the art world, unless they are able to craft and maintain a suitable self-image that can support the festival brand. Cannes is very jealous of “its” directors, and so are Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Toronto. One way to account for the paradoxes of such “enabling dependency” or “master-slave dialectic” that binds the auteur to the festival and vice versa, is to also invoke—besides the second-order performed nationalism just mentioned—a sort of second-order performed auteurism, where films are not the self-expression of a uniquely gifted individual or the expression of the moral conscience of a nation(al cinema), but rather the products of “specialists” working within conditions of possibility—the festival circuit— that are also limiting conditions and structural constraints. The much invoked but still under-defined “typical festival film” may be a case in point.9 If I am right in suggesting that certain non-Hollywood films are made with festivals rather than audiences in mind, then this would go some way to explain why not only European but also Asian directors (e.g.



The global author

29

Wong Kar-wai or Hou) tend at some point to make films in and for France, using iconic French actors. Juliette Binoche is typical in this respect, having provided Frenchness and festival credibility to directors as diverse as not only Kieślowski, Haneke, Kiarostami, Hou, but also Anthony Minghella and David Cronenberg. While these auteurs are transnational filmmakers who have sometimes been co-opted as additional creative labor into the ranks of French film art, European directors such as the Dardenne Brothers, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and Wenders have become Cannes favorites (or even “mascots”) also helping to confirm France’s strategic role as a regional power with global reach in matters cinema, banking on Paris and the French language as a luxury brand. A counter-tendency should also be noted: in the past, French filmmakers were careful not to dilute this Frenchness into a transnationalism over which they might lose control, yet France is now also producing films, stars, and a number of directors that successfully establish themselves as internationals, with Binoche playing a Swiss-German with perfect English in The Clouds of Sils Maria (2015), Marion Cotillard playing Edith Piaf for the global market in La Vie en rose (La Môme, 2007) and directors such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie [Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, 2001]), Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist [2011]), and, above all, Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita [The Woman Nikita, 1990]), The Professional [Léon, 1994]), The Fifth Element [1997], Lucy [2014]) “exporting” Frenchness into Anglophone films, not always to the liking of their critics back home.10

Creative constraints The moves by filmmakers in the face of the pressures of globalized authorship, which I identified above as auto-exoticism, becoming a festival talent for hire, or outsourcing oneself to Holly­wood, are by and large “adaptive” strategies. They implicitly accept the conditions of the market in cultural capital, reputation, and recognition, and acknowledge the asymmetrical power relations that auteurs find themselves in vis-à-vis the global film business, film festivals, their international audiences, and national governments or funding bodies. Yet there may also be other ways of confronting the “antagonistic mutualities” which keep the system going (i.e. arrangements that on the surface are antagonistic, but hide mutual benefits, or conversely, situations that appear mutually beneficial but hide hidden conflicts), and not necessarily by the kind of outright challenge, sabotage, or refusal that Jean-Luc Godard has made his forte.11 Control from an external source, whether individual or institutional, is usually experienced as a constraint—constraint on one’s freedom: of expression, of action, of movement. If we follows Lawrence Lessig, four

30

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

sorts of constraints both “regulate behavior in the real world” and are the levers for bringing about change: the law, the market, social norms, and what he calls “architecture”: the technological infrastructure which has increasingly replaced “nature” as the regulating and constraining force in human lives.12 Much the same constraints operate in an activity like filmmaking, except that the schema takes no account of the areas of freedom and autonomy we call “art.” In one sense, it would be the appeal to the autonomy of art that acts as the counter-force, but as already pointed out, it is the very notion of the unfettered freedom of the imagination and the claim of being in control which defines the auteur and sustains the authorial myth within the system rather being an effective defense against the system by resisting its constraints or destabilizing its mechanisms. Whichever way one looks at it, effective counter-strategies or subversion have to come from within rather than without, and they do so in the form of additional constraints: these, however, must be freely chosen rather than submitted to under protest, or adopted by way of compromise. The name for such a freely chosen constraint is creative constraint, a term I borrow, for the present context, from the sociologist Jon Elster, but naming a practice with a longer history, usually in the context of addressing a contradiction, without pretending to resolve it. The purpose of imposing a constraint on oneself is to master a situation, by first making it worse: to aggravate it, turn it against oneself, and to internalize it, as a way of regaining some form of agency and control.

The auteur as Ulysses In Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Pre-commitment and Constraints (2000) where he develops the idea of creativity and constraint most fully, Elster initially distinguished between essential and incidental constraints. Essential constraints are chosen for the sake of expected benefits, while incidental constraints may turn out to have benefits but are not chosen for the sake of these benefits: “When the constraints are imposed from the outside, [the artist] may or may not benefit. If he does, we are dealing with incidental constraint … Sometimes, an incidental constraint may turn into an essential one, if the artist chooses to abide by the constraint even when it is no longer mandatory” (176). In the chapter on the arts, entitled “Less Is More” Elster also introduces the idea of local maximization, by which he means that such constraints can be a trade-off between the fullness of possibilities (e.g. daydreaming) and the parsimony of means (e.g. conceptual art), but that they can also have economic benefits, insofar as constraints create scarcity, which in turn maximizes value.13 An example of external constraints leading to local maximization, discussed by Elster, would be the



The global author

31

Hays Code, often said to have been a boon for sexual innuendo in classical Hollywood movies, e.g. in films like Casablanca (1942).14 More generally, the Code was a training ground for the kind of structured ambiguity mentioned earlier, but Elster’s argument regarding the Hays Code also engages with the well-known but not uncontroversial notion that (political) censorship is beneficial to literature and the arts, because it forces writers to become more oblique, more allusive, and indirect in their means of expression, and therefore more subtle and profound. The part of Elster’s theory relevant to the present argument is his claim that artists “self-bind” themselves (hence the reference to Ulysses in the title of his book, tying himself to the mast, in order to resist the Sirens’ song) not only by accepting imposed (hard) constraints, and learning how to turn them into chosen (soft) constraints (Elster cites the Lubitsch touch, which works by innuendo and inference). Artists also self-bind themselves by a third type, the invented constraint, the most often-cited example being Georges Perec’s novel La disparition, written without the vowel “e,” which thereby disappears.15 Artists may invent constraints in the face of unlimited time and means (“For a movie director, an unlimited budget may be disastrous. For a TV producer, having too much time may undermine creativity” [Elster 2000, 210–11]) which is to say, faced with a situation where there is not sufficient pressure present in their primary environment (i.e. when there is too much “freedom,” and when “everything goes”). But a filmmaker may also invent constraints when a new technology comes along that allows for so many options that the very notion of a mistake disappears, because it can always be put right afterwards, or as Elster puts it “the artist deliberately increases the cost of making mistakes, in the hope that fewer mistakes will ensue” (2000, 196). In other words, when the problem of expression through form (as opposed to self-expression) has not been redefined clearly enough. To translate the condition of not sufficient pressure present in the environment into the terms of “independent” filmmaking, one could argue as follows: the fact that European filmmakers receive much, if not all the funding for their films from non-commercial sources, and mostly via the taxpayer, effectively deprives them (or liberates them) of the constraint of the box office. How to compensate for this in the environment of the festival? As indicated, even national representativeness that once acted as both incentive and constraint for directors like Bergman or Fellini, Bresson or Chabrol, Antonioni or Bertolucci began to wane in the 1990s, making some form of self-binding artistically, but perhaps also politically necessary in order to mark the shift from national cinema to global. Fassbinder, beginning in the 1980s, deliberately chose “commercial” producers (a major constraint for an auteur), because they gave him access to international distribution, but also because they allowed an escape from the bureaucratic constraints of the governmental film funding system. Given

32

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

that at the time the national audiences preferred American films by more than three to one over films made by their own directors, one can see why a filmmaker might want to raise the bar for him/herself in order to be in touch with some kind of generic (i.e. external) constraint coming from the popular medium or the melodramatic story material: Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979) or Lili Marleen (1981) may have owed their existence partly to the director not sensing sufficient constraints present in the art-cinema of his day. The second reason cited by Elster why creative constraints are necessary— when a new technology turns artistic skill into automated effect and an abundance of stylistic options oblige the filmmaker to redefine what the relationship is between expression and form—would take us to the situation with which I started: the fact that the art cinema is now part of the market, under conditions of globalization and that digital tools and platforms have made self-expression the very opposite of autonomy. The binaries that once divides Hollywood from the rest have been replaced by asymmetrical and heteronomous forces whose effects I tried to describe with “double occupancy” and “antagonistic mutuality.” This creates not a level playing field, but an uneven and spiky one, with porous boundaries between Hollywood and independent cinema, independent cinema and festival films, and between festival films and artists’ cinema. Modifying Elster’s terminology in order to make it applicable to the state of cinema authorship, I draw a distinction between external constraints and creative constraints, with the external constraints being the ones named by Lessig as enabling humans to engage with their lived environment and to effect change, and creative constraints being the ones that renegotiate a different kind of autonomy and freedom. To these distinctions one should add the further difference between the classic auteur (of Hollywood cinema) and the romantic auteur, the latter more relevant to the European auteur, but also to be found on the margins of the studio system, and championed by the French nouvelle vague as auteurs maudits. These apparent outsiders or misfits (Orson Welles, a notorious “enemy of promise,” Nicholas Ray, or Sam Fuller) were regarded as rebels against the system—if necessary at the cost of failure—and their authorship would indeed have been celebrated by defining it as that of the creative exception, giving expression to his/her vision, his beliefs or inner demons through the medium that he has chosen, or that has chosen him. By contrast, an example of the classic auteur would be the already mentioned John Ford, who famously introduced himself by saying “My name is John Ford, I make Westerns.” His identity and self-image was that of a craftsperson and professional, not an artist with a personal vision: the same goes for Alfred Hitchcock (at least before he was interviewed by François Truffaut and turned into a “great artist” and “master of pure cinema”). A classic auteur welcomes the external constraints of genre (the



The global author

33

Western or the thriller), can cope with the pressures of the studio-system (interference by the producer; the stipulations of the Hays Code), and accept the verdict of the box office (“You’re only as good as your last film’s gross”). It may seem as if the classical auteur merely accommodates him/ herself to the system, but in the examples given (and one would want to add directors like Howard Hawks or Clint Eastwood), the external constraints become inner resources, leading to the kind of mise-en-scène, staging, dialogue, or generating suspense that made these directors into auteurs in the first place. As with meter and rhyme in poetry or the formal constraints of the sonnet or the sonata, “genre” in classical Hollywood could become an incentive for invention. European auteurs from the 1960s to 1980s faced a different set of constraints: they were often regarded as representative of their particular “national cinema” and even their nation: think of Bergman as the archetypal gloomy Swede, or the New German Cinema, whose directors—especially Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Werner Herzog, or Wenders—had to be romantics, rebels, dissenters, or outsiders: e.g. they had to be both cliché Germans and critics of Germany. Fassbinder, for instance, became the representative anti-representative of Germany in the 1980s by making of himself the epitome of the “ugly” German: no one in Germany recognized themselves in him, nor did he want to be a representative of anyone, and yet these very contradictions were the condition of a director’s international representa­ tiveness in post-war West Germany until “unification.” Berating their government for not facing up to the country’s horrible past, Fassbinder and his fellow New German Cinema directors were seen, mainly abroad, as representatives of a “better” Germany. However, the more critical they were, the more credible they became as representa­ tives—an irony that did not escape the West German government and its cultural institutions, which subsidized and sponsored such dissidence because they realized the benefits for the country’s international image.16 It confirms the well-known dilemma of dissent­ing art, insofar as it can be co-opted or recuperated by the system—a mechanism also observable in an auteur’s relation to the film festival system, which needs his/her dissidence and values transgression as proof of its own integrity and authenticity.

Creative constraints and the author-function: Beyond self-expression and genre Now that filmmaking has become as popular, inexpensive, and the results as easy to diffuse as is the case with digital tools, equipment, and platforms, self-expression can no longer count as a reliable touchstone of a work’s meaning and value. When YouTube is the very name of

34

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

self-expression-as-self-exhibition (“broadcast yourself”) and the selfie of the sovereign Me rules social media, the author-function must also change. Rather than a guarantor of authenticity, or the last autonomous subject in an alienated and reified world, the con­temporary filmmaker is an auteur only to the extent that he/she accepts the inherent anachronism of the label, as and when conferred by international film festivals. Thanks to Cannes and other A-festivals, European auteurs—like their Asian counterparts—are part of a star-system of world cinema, assuming they possess the requisite attention value in the marketplace of reputations. Under conditions of overproduction, and lacking agreed standards of value, the auteur as quality brand secures a stable horizon of expectation, with the director’s image functioning like a “genre,” a notion often consolidated via “trilogies,” as in the case of Bergman (the Faith Trilogy), Antonioni (the Alienation Trilogy), Polanski (the Apartment Trilogy), Fassbinder (the BRD Trilogy), and Haneke’s so-called Glaciation Trilogy. For a long time, roughly from Rossellini in the late 1940s to Jean Luc Godard in the early 1980s, the European director could still assume the mantle of the modernist artist, responsible only to his work and answerable only to his own inclinations. Shielded from the full force of the market either by patronage (i.e. commercial producers like Pierre Braunberger or Carlo Ponti who liked the prestige that came with investing in art cinema) or taxpayers’ subsidy, their autonomy was a given, and, indeed, it was what made the auteurs valuable for the complex cultural politics of the country or nation (“cultural nationalism”) whose critical conscience they were called upon to embody. No such protection or mission for the next generation: Haneke, von Trier, Aki Kaurismäki, or indeed, for their American counterparts: David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson. They are obliged either to craft a self-image—the rebel, the cinephile, the eccentric, the slacker, the whimsical geek—and manage this image like a commercial brand, or they have to invent for themselves forms of resistance or paranoia, when the system no longer generates the friction conducive to creativity that a hostile society or an offended public used to provide. Since the 1990s, one of the key figures of European auteur cinema in the global context has been Lars von Trier. A credible representative of his country (he put Denmark back on the map as not only a filmmaking country but as an internationally important and intriguing one), he is also wholly non-representative of a national cinema, insofar as his films are mostly in English and only rarely set in Denmark. His early ones camouflaged themselves as German films: Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), Europa (1991), while the later ones were either Scottish (Breaking the Waves [1996]) or, more often, American (Dancer in the Dark [2000], Dogville [2003], Manderlay [2005], Antichrist [2009]). He, too, established his personal genre identity via trilogies (first the Europa Trilogy, then the



The global author

35

Golden Heart Trilogy), but these designations were invoked by von Trier ironically because the practice had become a cliché. Following Fassbinder, von Trier courted negative epithets such as “enfant terrible,” “controlling,” and “chaotic,” but he too deployed them knowingly and strategically. Energizing the Nordic filmmaking infrastructure, he built up state-of-theart studio capacity in Sweden’s “Trollhättan” with structural funds from the European Union for distressed manufacturing regions. He also, for a period, provided the international independent filmmaking community with a legitimating discourse, the Dogme manifesto. To this day it is not clear whether Dogme is a pastiche of a manifesto or was to be taken at face value. What is certain, however, is that the Dogme members’ “vow of chastity” is an outstanding example of a set of creative constraints put in place in order to stimulate talent and competition.17 Unlike Bergman who cast a long shadow on Swedish cinema, for much of the time stifling new talent, von Trier encapsulates the transition from the idea of the auteur-artist to that of the auteur as entrepreneur, as brand name, as well as facilitator and enabler. Von Trier was also one of the first to practice an explicit poetics of creative constraints, giving them the name of “obstructions” or “mindgames.” So far, he has defined and redefined these obstructions several times: 1) the Dogme rules (as applied in The Idiots [Idioterne, 1998]); 2) The Five Obstructions (De fem benspænd, 2003), signed by Jørgen Leth, his former mentor, the film is effectively von Trier’s meta-film about his own creative method; 3) directing by remote control a television feature called D-Day, about the last day of the previous millennium (2000); 4) using a computerized camera and so-called “Lookeys” in The Boss of It All (Direktøren for det hele, 2006); and 5) making a close adaptation of The Hammer of Witches, the Malleus Malificarum—an anti-women tract of the Inquisition, i.e. about Christianity at its most fundamentalist and paranoid, in Antichrist.18 Elsewhere I have tried to demonstrate how von Trier’s poetics of creative constraints fits into a broader overall strategy of re-establishing rules by first breaking them, and to show how the principle of arbitrary rules as creative constraints is fully on display also in Nyphomaniac (2013).19 They are present in the competition of how many men Joe and her friend can have sex with on a single train journey, and the Little Flock’s vow to have sex but no boyfriends also counts as a creative constraint. Constraints are once more foregrounded in the way Joe’s narrative is triggered by the objects (and evolves from the cues) she notices in Seligman’s room. Taken together these instances of breaking social norms by setting up arbitrary rules are so prominent in Nymphomaniac as to qualify it as a meta-film, where von Trier explores his own formal and narrative preoccupations, at least as much as exorcizing his personal demons or “therapizing” his traumas. Besides von Trier’s self-imposed obstructions, one could cite Wes Anderson’s highly stylized, hyper-symmetrical visual compositions as similarly motivated creative constraints.

36

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Performative self-contradiction This brings me to the second move by which some European auteurs try to counter the system from within, rather than accommodating themselves to their servitude of double occupancy, accepting it covertly and with ironic knowingness, or denouncing the golden cage of contemporary auteurism by refusing to inhabit it. Approximating what philosophers call “performative self-contradiction,” this alternative strategy has emerged among filmmakers whose aim it is to carve out a kind of negative autonomy specifically under the capitalist conditions of the creative industries. Besides Fassbinder, who was my first prototype of performative self-contradiction, I have identified it in the film work and self-presentation of Haneke, one of the most militant—and seemingly unreconstructed—defenders of the film auteur as autonomous artist.20 Here I want to extend the concept more broadly by showing that, far from being a logical error (to be avoided in rational argument), it can become a risky but efficient tactic when trying to stand one’s ground in situations where one’s mutual entanglement with an adversary allows the latter to absorb and recuperate all forms of protest and critique. Just as the move toward self-imposed rules or creative constraints becomes necessary when the problem has not been defined clearly enough, so performative self-contradiction is part of the same set of counterintuitive, dynamic, but also potentially destructive strategies, all designed to regain or retain agency and control under complex, contradictory, or in other ways adverse conditions. It adds a further, more aggressive or provocative layer, by exacerbating the hidden contradictions and exposing the ideological blind spots of the outwardly so mutually beneficial symbiosis between film directors and film festivals: even as one dissents and resists, one is part of a market (of promotion and self-promotion) and its written and unwritten rules. What is a performative self-contradiction? Briefly put, one enacts a performative self-contradiction when one makes a claim that contradicts the validity of the means that are used to make it, i.e. which contradicts your performance of the claim. One of the best-known examples goes back to the logical or semantic paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Epimenides, who famously claimed “all Cretans are liars,” while being himself a Cretan. In other words, in a performative self-contradiction, there is a conflict between one’s presuppositions and one’s conclusions. One affirms something, knowing that there are no grounds that could validate it, but doing so tries to put the addressee or adversary in a cognitive double bind, thus retroactively creating a space for oneself (where there is none) by putting oneself as the enunciator under erasure, i.e. negatively securing an enunciative presence. It is thus a strategy that tries to control forces you cannot control, to find a way out of moral or metaphysical deadlocks,



The global author

37

without merely “destabilizing” the categories or binary options, but aggravating their inherent contradictions. As it happens, von Trier is one of those directors most acutely aware of this dilemma. A master of the performative self-contradiction, he had adopted it as his preferred counter-strategy, seen in action most provocatively in his public appearances at film festivals. A poster ahead of his appearance at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2014 to promote Nymphomaniac showed him with duct tape plastered over his mouth, signaling the fact that he had been “silenced” by the Cannes Festival, and was now “vowing silence” after the disastrous press conference for Melancholia in May 2011. Yet the very gesture is so eloquent that it contradicts the assertion that he has been silenced. The same goes for his “Persona Non Grata, Official Selection” t-shirt display at the photo-call also in Berlin.21 There, von Trier was wearing his rejection and ejection from Cannes as a badge of honor, turning himself into a spectacle of abjection: his way of asserting autonomy as an artist within the untranscendable horizon of commodification and the discourse of advertising and branding. Using the Cannes logo (a festival proud of being only about “art”) as the enunciator (and “brand”) of the utterance adorning his chest, von Trier entangles Cannes in a simple self-contradiction (Cannes makes “art” its commercial “brand”), which allows him to carve out for himself a performatively self-contradictory space between “Persona Non Grata” and “Official Selection,” and to show himself at his most independent when being taken hostage (or “hosted”), by the very institution to which he owes his reputation and fame.

From double occupancy to performative self-contradiction: The philosophical turn This last conundrum returns me to the philosophical context in which performative self-contradiction can function as a further stage and possible response to the global auteur’s state of double occupancy, as discussed above. Performative self-contradiction came to prominence in the late 1980s, when Jürgen Habermas leveled a thoroughgoing critique against, among others, Jacques Derrida, feeling compelled to defend the “unfinished project of modernity” that began with the Enlightenment, against post-Nietzschean, Heidegger-inspired anti-humanism and deconstruction. In his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Habermas tries to prove that postmodern philosophers—he has in mind especially Derrida, Foucault, and Bataille—are taking apart Enlightenment reason and post-Kantian philosophy of the subject, while unwittingly relying on the philosophical concepts they are critiquing. He even includes Adorno:

38

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Adorno’s “negative dialectics” and Derrida’s “deconstruction” can be seen as different answers to the same problem. The totalizing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subjectcentered reason can only be convicted of being authoritarian when having recourse to its own tools. The tools of thought, which … are imbued with the “metaphysics of presence” (Derrida), are nevertheless the only available means for uncovering their insufficiency.22 (1987, 185) In other words, according to Habermas, Derrida remains trapped within the theoretical framework against which he is writing, so that his performative self-contradiction consists in sawing off the branch on which he is himself sitting. Clearly, for Habermas, this is a serious shortcoming, one that he would expect a philosopher to avoid. Yet, as many commentators have pointed out, Habermas may be mis­ understanding the very project of deconstruction, which is not to critique or dismantle reason from a position outside, but to offer an immanent critique, a form of argument that acknowledges this trap, this necessary self-binding of philosophy. To go a step further: what from the point of view of logic or analytical philosophy might seem a grievous error, may turn out, from a rhetorical or poetological perspective, to offer another way of reading, another way of looking and thus a space of freedom, of movement that loosens the shackles even if it does not remove them. As Seyla Benhabib puts it: It is not difficult to show that any theory which denies … the possibility of distinguishing between [truth] and sheer manipulative rhetoric would be involved in a “performative self-contradiction.” This may not be terribly difficult, but it does not settle the issue either. For, from Nietzsche’s aphorisms, to Heidegger’s poetics, to Adorno’s stylistic configurations, and to Derrida’s deconstructions, we have examples of thinkers who accept this performative self-contradiction, and who selfconsciously draw the consequences from it by seeking a new way of writing and communicating. (1998, 488) This, then, would be the stake: if for the many reasons I have indicated, the global auteur is only an auteur as long as he/she is inside and part of the system, then the self-binding creative constraints, exacerbated to the point of performative self-contradiction, become, unavoidably, the only possible enunciative position, and thus the only form of authenticity and autonomy. While the hidden antagonisms, the unforeseeable contingencies, and the asymmetrical power dynamics that make creative constraints necessary seem to speak of the auteur’s dependency and weakness both vis-à-vis



The global author

39

the market (of reputation and revenue), and vis-à-vis the auteur’s chief benefactor (the film festival circuit), in actual fact, any acts of performative self-contradiction would signal a more properly philosophical turn or gesture. It would begin to grant filmmakers as auteurs the place and value that film philosophy has long tried to bestow on their films, namely of putting forward philosophical positions in their own right. We seem to have come full circle: the anachronism or obsolescence of the auteur as a representative of art against commerce and commodification, with which I started, now turns out—under conditions of globalization and the film festival circuit—to be the very precondition for a paradoxical kind of autonomy and agency that has the potential to help to reinvent the cinema, not as an art form, nor as a life form, but as a form of philosophy: the politique des auteurs has never seemed more urgent, and never seemed more timely.

Notes 1

Roland Barthes, S/Z An Essay (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970); Michel Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 6–21.

2

There is no shortage of essays problematizing the notion of the author or auteur. Among the best-known collections are John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1981) Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Film and Authorship (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003) David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds), Authorship and Film (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

3

For a philosophical discussion of the cases for and against film authorship, see Aaron Meskin, “Authorship,” in Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (New York: Routledge, 2008), 12–27.

4 For Meskin most of the authorship debates revolve around “evaluation, interpretation, and stylistic attribution.” Meskin 2008, 18–19. 5

Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2013), 319–40.

6

Thomas Elsaesser (2011), “James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for all,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9 (3): 247–64.

7

I owe much of this information and the quotation to a personal communication from Jeremi Szaniawski. For more information about Sokurov, see, among others, his book The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014).

8

See Melis Behlil, Home Away from Home: Global Directors of New Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016).

40

9

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

See Cindy H. Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (New York: Rutgers, 2011), 145–8.

10 Luc Besson has fared especially badly in this respect, with critics deriding his international success: “Besson thinks he can buy himself the title of auteur, but all he attains is a parvenu’s vulgarity.” Cited in Jamie Wolf, “Le Cinéma du Blockbuster,” New York Times, May 20, 2007. Available online: http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/movies/20wolf.html (accessed July 31, 2015). 11 Jean Luc Godard’s battles with Cannes date back to 1968, when along with other filmmakers of the nouvelle vague, he forced the festival to shut down. In 2014, when his thirty-ninth film, Adieu au Langage, won the Jury Prize at the festival, he refused to attend the press conference sending a video letter instead. Available online: http://www.indiewire.com/article/watch-jean-lucgodard-explains-why-he-is-not-at-cannes (accessed July 31, 2015). 12 Lawrence Lessig, “The Laws of Cyberspace” (Draft 3, 1998), 2–3. Available online: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/lessig/laws_cyberspace.pdf (accessed July 31, 2015). 13 Elster defines maximization as follows: “The process of artistic creation is guided by the aim of maximizing aesthetic value under constraints,” and adds in as footnote: “(1) The idea of a maximum implies that in a good work of art, ‘nothing can be added and nothing subtracted’ without loss of aesthetic value. The idea of a good work of art as embodying both fullness and parsimony seems naturally captured by the idea of a maximum. (2) By arguing that artists aim at producing a local maximum rather than ‘the’ best work they can make, I believe I can make sense of several properties of works of art and their creation, (a) Many artists experiment with small variations before they decide on the final version, (b) The notion of a ‘minor masterpiece’ has a natural interpretation in this framework, (c) The notion of a ‘flawed masterpiece’ also receives a natural interpretation” (Elster 2000, 200). 14 See Richard Maltby, “A brief romantic interlude: Dick and Jane go to 3½ seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” in Post-Theory— Reconstructing Film Studies, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (eds) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 434–59 and Slavoj Žižek’s commentary, “Shostakovich in Casablanca,” Lacanian Ink, 2007. Available online: www.lacan.com/zizcasablanca.htm (accessed July 31, 2015). 15 See Elster 2000, 196. 16 Artists in West Germany had to be sages, the conscience of the nation, the upholders of values, but also the rebels against conventions, the avant-garde artists and international icons. Many were perceived as the nation’s moral compass as well as modern masters: Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, or they were public intellectuals: Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller. Today, as even these artists’ and writers’ subsequent reputations prove, things have become more complicated, and nowhere more so than for filmmakers. 17 For a discussion of constraints in reference to the Dogme movement and



The global author

41

manifesto (citing Jon Elster), see Mette Hjørt, “Dogme 95,” in Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009), 487. 18 See Bodil M. Thomsen, “Antichrist—chaos reigns: the event of violence and the haptic image in Lars von Trier’s film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 1 (2009): n.p. 19 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Black sun and a bright planet: Lars v Trier’s Melancholia,” Theory & Event 18 (2) (2015): n.p. 20 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative Self-contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 53–74. 21 “For the world premiere of the director’s cut of Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1 von Trier maintained his vow to refrain from all public statements, and did not attend the press conference. But he had a message, nevertheless. At the photo call preceding the Nymphomaniac panel, the helmer sported a t-shirt emblazoned with the Cannes Film Festival logo followed by the words ‘Persona Non Grata, Official Selection.’ The sartorial choice was a nod to 2011 when von Trier was dubbed a persona non grata by Cannes for Nazi-flavored comments he made at a press conference for Melancholia” (Nancy Tartaglione, Deadline Hollywood. Available online: http://deadline. com/2014/02/berlin-lars-von-trier-sports-persona-non-grata-t-shirt-shialabeouf-abruptly-exits-nymphomaniac-press-conference-680154 [accessed July 31, 2015]). 22 Translation modified.

Works cited Benhabib, Seyla. 1998. “A Rejoinder to J. F. Lyotard,” in Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (eds), Postmodernism: Disciplinary Texts. New York: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2008. “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place,” in T. Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory, New York: Routledge. Elster, Jon. 2000. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Pre-commitment and Constraints. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meskin, Aaron. 2008. “Authorship,” in Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (eds), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. New York: Routledge.

2 Abderrahmane Sissako: On the politics of African auteurs Rachel Gabara

Abderrahmane Sissako is in many ways the epitome of the film director as auteur as the term is commonly used in both academic and cinephilic circles. One of few African filmmakers whose films have circulated widely on the international festival circuit, Sissako’s career has from its beginnings been linked to the Cannes Film Festival. His film school graduation project, The Game (Le Jeu), was selected for the 1991 Semaine de la Critique, and October (1993) and Heremakono: Waiting for Happiness (2002) were shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the festival. Life on Earth (La Vie sur Terre, 1998) was featured in the Director’s Fortnight, and Bamako (2006) was presented out of competition. Timbuktu, Sissako’s most recent film and his first to be screened in official competition, had its world premiere at Cannes in 2014.1 Timbuktu won seven César awards in France the same year and was a finalist for the Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film in the United States. Sissako was then named the 2015 President of the Cannes Cinéfondation and Short Films Jury, following in the footsteps of Martin Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, and Abbas Kiarostami. A prolific filmmaker of consistent quality, Sissako is thoughtful and articulate when discussing his work. Trained at the renowned State Institute of Cinema (VGIK) in the Soviet Union, he has a wide-ranging knowledge of global film history. As a result of Sissako’s prominence at the most prestigious festivals, many of his films have been shown at smaller festivals and local art cinemas and are available for purchase on DVD. Yet once we remove Sissako from this festival context, he fits less easily into the auteur mold. Born in Mauritania, Abderrahmane Sissako spent

44

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

most of his childhood in Mali, returned to Mauritania for the end of high school, then left again at the age of nineteen to spend a total of twelve years in Russia. Sissako was next based in France for twenty years and now once again calls Mauritania home. When asked about filmmakers who have influenced his work, Sissako has responded with a tentative embrace of European and North American art cinema; “I have liked some films. I am less attached to filmmakers. But I would say off the top of my head maybe … Antonioni, Visconti, Fassbinder, a film of Bergman, another of Cassavetes … Tarkovsky” (Appiah 2003, 38). Resisting before giving in to the cult of auteurs, Sissako is very aware of the limits of a canon that he learned later than did his film school classmates. Growing up in Mali, he would occasionally see a movie, but “did not grow up in a universe of cinema.” Once he arrived at the VGIK, Sissako remembers, “The cinephilia that I had not discovered in Africa, I ended up having an academic obligation to acquire” (Valens 2006, 18).2 As a student there, he watched three films a day over the course of five years, discovering all of the grands auteurs of European cinema but not a single African film (Anon. 1995, 9). In what follows, I will discuss Sissako’s major films, all shot in Africa despite his three decades in Europe, in the context of the African cinema’s uneasy relationship with auteurist filmmaking. We know the story well; the French filmmakers, critics, and cinephiles at Cahiers du Cinéma began writing about cinematic authorship in the mid-1950s as they rediscovered and reread Hollywood films. In the wake of Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo, François Truffaut famously rejected a certain French tradition, clearing the decks for Cahiers to praise directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as masters of the medium. Yet while in English we tend to speak of auteur theory, the Cahiers critics invoked not a theory but a politique des auteurs, a policy or program of authorship that was also a politics of authorship.3 André Bazin formalized in print the early internal debate about these politics, writing in “On the politique des auteurs” (1985) that he disagreed with his younger colleagues about the relationship between directors and their films. According to Bazin, “the work transcends the director,” and he stressed that any film, and especially a Hollywood film, is the product of a tradition and an industry, irreducible to an individual genius (249, 251–2). Bazin reminds us of the complex politics of intersecting traditions and industries inherent in any consideration of film authorship in an age of global cinema. A part of the story that we know less well involves a film often cited as the first made by a sub-Saharan African director, a film created at the same time and in the same place as the politique des auteurs. Paulin Vieyra, pioneering Senegalese filmmaker and critic, attended the French Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in the early 1950s. He formed the Groupe Africain du Cinéma with several friends and shot Africa on the Seine (Afrique sur Seine) in the streets of Paris in 1955. Vieyra was



Abderrahmane Sissako

45

closely connected to the journal Présence Africaine, founded by Alioune Diop in 1947, which commissioned Alain Resnais and Chris Marker to make Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi), completed in 1953 and then banned by the French government. Vieyra, Resnais, and René Vautier, director of Afrique 50, an earlier banned anticolonial documentary, had overlapped at the IDHEC. Vieyra was in communication with Resnais, Marker, and Vautier, as well as with famed ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose Comité du Film Ethnographique funded Afrique sur Seine. Cahiers embraced Rouch’s work, reviewed Statues, solicited comments and lists of favorite films from Resnais, and was at a minimum aware of Vautier via Georges Sadoul, but there is no evidence of any contact between Truffaut, Bazin et al., and Vieyra. Cahiers never wrote about Afrique sur Seine, and Vieyra never wrote about Cahiers. All French-speaking filmmakers and/or critics, they shared the same Left Bank space but seem to have inhabited separate cinematic worlds. While Vieyra was beginning his filmic career in Paris, on the other side of the Atlantic the New Latin American Cinema was coming into its own. By the end of the 1960s, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino had declared that their anticolonial Third Cinema represented “the decolonization of culture” (1997, 37), distinguishing it from a dominant and capitalist First Cinema and a Second Cinema that was outmoded, intellectual, and apolitical. Julio García Espinosa proclaimed that European cinema had offered a first but ultimately inadequate alternative to bourgeois Hollywood; “Europe can no longer respond in a traditional manner but at the same time finds it equally difficult to respond in a manner that is radically new” (1997, 78). In the years following the independences of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Vieyra and other African filmmakers similarly worked to decolonize culture, to reclaim the cinema and their cinematic image from their former colonizers. In 1973, a group of Latin American and African filmmakers maintained that their goal was a critical and transformative realism, the production of films “which bring about the disalienation of the colonized peoples” (Bakari and Cham 1996, 20). A year later, the collective statement published after a conference on the “role of the African filmmaker in awakening a consciousness of black civilization” asserted that film content should reflect African “social realities” and answer the questions: “Who are we? … How do we live? … Where are we?” (Anon. 1974, 10, 12). Bill Nichols noted as early as 1976 that “many argue that the debate about auteur criticism is passé” (221). The auteur went on, however, to become an integral aspect of the new critical category of art cinema in the late 1970s, according to David Bordwell made up of films whose author, and not star, studio, or genre, served as “the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension” (1999, 719). Despite its original connection for Cahiers to Hollywood, the term auteur came to signify a most-often European art cinema director with a style or set of themes that

46

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

could be read across his entire oeuvre.4 For Nichols, the way forward for auteur criticism was to be found in links with genre studies, structuralist analysis, and other schools of film critique. Forty years later, however, there have been no sustained attempts to create such a link with postcolonial film studies. The politics of authorship has extended, of course, to decisions made by European and North American festival organizers and critics about which directors qualify to be auteurs, and only a very few filmmakers from the global south have been chosen. Scholarly discussions of auteur theory for decades dealt almost exclusively with European and North American films. And postcolonial filmmakers associated with or inspired by the Third Cinema movement did not want to produce art films or be auteurs. Early African filmmakers and critics, like their Latin American colleagues, specifically rejected auteur cinema; the 1975 Algiers Charter on African Cinema declared that “the stereotyped image of the solitary and marginal creator which is widespread in Western capitalist society must be rejected by African filmmakers, who must, on the contrary, see themselves as creative artisans at the service of their people” (25). Since the 1970s, definitions and descriptions of African cinema have relied on an opposition between individualistic Western art films and communitarian, political, and social realist African films. Mahama Traoré, Senegalese filmmaker and co-founder of the FESPACO pan-African film festival in Burkina Faso, referred to auteur cinema as he described his transition to an authentically African political cinema; “My first films still depended on the idea of cinema that was instilled in me in Europe: that of auteur cinema. A very individualistic idea. From now on, my cinema is deliberately integrated into a political process. It is no longer Mahama Traoré who is explaining himself in my films, but also the group of which I am a part” (Hennebelle 1975, 91–2). The term African auteur would seem to be an oxymoron. However, there is at least one exception upon which both European and African critics have agreed—Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, often called the father of African cinema. If Afrique sur Seine was the first film by a sub-Saharan African director, Sembene’s 1963 Borom Sarret is generally considered to be the first film shot by a sub-Saharan African director in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the course of his career, Sembene created both new content and style for a cinema rooted in African oral traditions. Several of his films were screened at Cannes, although never in competition, beginning with Black Girl (La Noire de…, 1966) in the Critics’ Week section, and Sembene served on the 1967 Feature Films Jury. Vieyra’s 1972 book about Sembene’s first decade of filmmaking contains three parts: “The Man,” “The Oeuvre,” and “The Auteur.” Critical works about Sembene in the years since have overwhelmingly considered him as an auteur filmmaker, assessing his many films as a unified oeuvre that constitutes a major contribution to both African and World Cinemas.5



Abderrahmane Sissako

47

Sembene described the African filmmaker as a griot, or oral storyteller and historian, and David Murphy and Patrick Williams invoke his work and build on Robert Stam’s contrast between the individualist, French camérastylo and the communal griot in order to propose the term griauteur as “an appropriate figure for contemporary African filmic practice” (2007, 8–9). This solution to the dilemma of African film authorship knits together opposing terms into a single neologism. But if the griot is, in the words of Sembene specialist Françoise Pfaff, “the chronicler of his people’s history” (1995, 126), then a griauteur would remain in the camp of the collective. Aboubakar Sanogo has identified an auteurist approach within early African cinema that includes the work of Sembene, Souleymane Cissé, Haile Gerima, and Djibril Diop Mambéty, a “socially relevant, pedagogic, and avant-gardist project” whose filmic products circulate mainly via film festivals (2009, 227). But this auteurist trend has been seen as destructive to the development of African film audiences and industries. Mweze Ngangura, a filmmaker from Congo born five years after Mambéty and ten after Cissé, has throughout his career insisted on the importance of entertainment cinema, arguing that “the infatuation with ‘a cinema of authors’… has only succeeded in alienating the African audience from its own cinema” (1996, 60–1) And scholars Teresa Hoefert de Turégano (2005, 73) and Melissa Thackway (2014, 19 n.1) assert that auteur-based, early African cinema was made possible by French funding, which then inhibited the creation of infrastructures for film production and exhibition in Africa. Ngangura’s opposition between Europeanized auteurism and a more authentically African entertainment cinema reappears in critical discussions of contemporary African filmmaking. Manthia Diawara contrasts art et essai films made by Africans living in Europe and designed for non-African audiences to a “new popular African cinema” that includes Nollywood (2010, 138). In the past twenty years, the production in Nigeria and Ghana of video films distributed on videocassette, video CD, and the internet has increased exponentially. Like the products of early Hollywood and unlike auteur cinema, the stars of Nollywood are actors and actresses, not directors, and the films are perishable—shot in a few days and not intended to be masterpieces or build an oeuvre.6 So can a contemporary African auteurist practice exist without being contaminated by European film style, festival preferences, and funding? Sanogo in a more recent essay lists Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and Nadia El Fani as examples of a new generation of African auteurs, of a “clear-sighted and globally ambitious auteurist tradition” (Sanogo 2015, 149). Filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who is based in France but films in his native Chad, has declared himself an auteur while noting the tendency within African cinema to reject auteurism; “Our cinema is not fond of singular auteurs. Those who have lifted their heads above water are accused of conniving with the West, of being traitors to their

48

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

cause, and of no longer being real Africans” (Barlet 2011, 138). And Imunga Ivanga, from Gabon, proclaims that African filmmakers have just as much of a right to be auteurs as did the New Wave directors who contributed to and were celebrated in the pages of Cahiers; “Filmmakers from the so-called South are auteurs who define themselves in the same terms as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol, all participants in the New Wave. They don’t deny the heat that runs through their films, but it is neither essential nor at the crux of the debate” (2005, 176). African filmmakers who work either in Europe or in genres and styles considered to be European have been condemned for not being African enough by critics who see too much success in Europe as their proof. World Cinema, in this model, is a collection of national and continental cinemas rather than a space within which filmmakers draw on a range of global influences and inspirations. Let us return, then, to Abderrahmane Sissako, whose films trouble the conventional oppositions of a Second Cinema of the “I” and a Third Cinema of the “we,” of art cinema and political cinema, and of fiction and documentary. They force us to rethink the perhaps tired notion of the auteur, which in its exhaustion has so rarely made the effort to leave Europe. But before analyzing Sissako’s work in some detail, I would like to return to the final words of Bazin’s essay; “Auteur, yes, but what of?” (1985, 258). Bazin wanted to redirect our critical focus, distracted by directors and their oeuvres, back to individual films. The question “what of?” encourages us to read Sissako’s films not as the unified expression of a filmmaker’s genius, but instead for a diversity of styles, stories, and concerns. This approach will also allow us to explore shifts within Sissako’s engagement with the question of film authorship in both African and global contexts. Rostov-Luanda (1997) was Sissako’s first feature-length film and his first to be shot on the African continent.7 The film records Sissako’s return to the village of his birth, which then almost immediately becomes a new point of departure, the place from which he will leave for Luanda, Angola, in search of a friend, Afonso Baribanga, an Angolan with whom he studied Russian in Rostov-on-the-Don before starting film school. We are introduced to Sissako’s project not by an omniscient authorial voice-over, but by the voice of his cousin, whom we see speaking to Sissako and his childhood nurse Touélé. He begins in Hassaniya, a Mauritanian dialect of Arabic, and then switches to French: I haven’t seen Abderrahmane since he was a child. He was born in Kiffa. His mother’s house is there. The house of his uncle Mohammed is there. There are some who leave for France to study and who never return home, who never even think about returning home. What Abderrahmane has done is an act of honor. To say outright “I’m returning to Kiffa to see my parents and the house where I was born.”



Abderrahmane Sissako

49

Sissako must first go home in order to continue his travels and make a film which is both an act of honor and an “adventure,” one that draws him toward someone else, someone whose life story intersected with and parallels his own in important ways. Sissako’s own voice picks up the voice-over several minutes later as he leaves Kiffa with Touélé; traveling shots shift almost seamlessly from the sands of the desert rushing by outside the window of a car to a snowy Russian landscape outside a train window. Over an Angolan cityscape, Sissako’s narration becomes suddenly historical: “In 1975, Angola became independent. For me, this hard-won liberty announced a communal hope for my continent. It was in 1980, in the U.S.S.R., that I became friends with Afonso Baribanga. Seventeen years later, I wish to find him again. Seventeen years of war for Angola.” Landscapes of Mauritania, Russia, and Angola glide past in quick succession, linked by Sissako’s life story, which is linked to that of Afonso Baribanga. Both of their lives are connected to the fate of Angola as a place of symbolic hope for Africa, a hope cruelly dashed by decades of post-independence civil war. Traveling across the country, Sissako conducts a series of interviews in Portuguese and Creole with the aid of a translator, except for the rare occasions when direct communication is possible in French or in Russian. After each conversation, Sissako shows the person with whom he has been speaking a photograph, one of the very few pieces of documentary evidence from the past that appear in the film, and asks if they recognize Afonso Baribanga. His search for the long-lost friend in the photograph becomes inseparable from the images he finds along the way, and Sissako tells us that his memory of Baribanga is becoming blurred; “Not that I’m forgetting him, but his features are now drawing new faces, to whom my search leads me. Thus is drawn the portrait of a friend.” Sissako learns that Baribanga now lives in what had been East Germany, and his journey therefore continues and concludes in the landscape of a fourth country. A brief image of Baribanga on his balcony, however, is all we see of him, and we never get his side of his story. Sissako’s multivocal and multilingual adventure story has been about his own process of finding his old friend by discovering the history of his friend’s people. Of filmmaking, Sissako has said, “When you do this job, you have a deep desire to say things and I think that the best way to do so is to talk about oneself or around oneself. It’s the best way to approach the Other” (Barlet 1998). Describing autobiography and biography as inseparable processes, he asserts an individual voice in connection with multiple African communities. In Rostov-Luanda, talking about and around himself enables Sissako’s approach to Baribanga, Angola, and colonial and postcolonial African history. Rostov-Luanda ends with a very brief scene set in Europe, and Life on Earth (1998) begins with one; amid the overflowing shelves of a Super

50

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Monoprix in Paris, we see Sissako riding up an escalator carrying an enormous, stuffed polar bear. These images are replaced by images of Sissako’s father in Sokolo, Mali, reading a letter in French whose words we hear in the filmmaker’s voice: Dear father, You will be a little surprised, and perhaps even worried, to receive a letter from me. I hurry therefore to tell you that all is well, and I hope the same is true for you. Contrary to the message I sent you through Jiddou, an important change means that I will soon be with you, in Sokolo. The desire to film Sokolo, the desire also to leave, as Aimé Césaire said. Even more so since we will soon be in the year 2000 and nothing, most likely, will have changed for the better, as you know better than I. Is what I learn far from you worth what I forget about us? As we see Sissako arrive at his father’s compound, we hear him quoting Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; “And arriving, I would say to myself: ‘And above all, my body as well as my soul, hold back from crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle … because a man who screams is not a dancing bear’” (Césaire 1983, 22). Sissako and Césaire, exiles returning home in different ways, together warn us that the documentary filmmaker can be a type of tourist, watching others’ lives from behind the camera instead of participating. In this second filmic homecoming, to a home town in which he was not born but spent part of his childhood, Sissako’s attention is focused on what he may have lost as a result of his time in Europe. Although he had already appeared on screen in Rostov-Luanda, here Sissako refuses to be a spectator in his native land; a character instead of an interviewer, he minimizes his narrative voice-overs in order to play a role in the drama of Sokolo on the eve and first day of the new millennium. We see him with his father, speaking with others in the village, trying to place a phone call from the post office, and flirting with a young woman as they ride bicycles through the streets of the town. For Sissako, in Life on Earth “filming myself was a way to appropriate the camera differently, to say ‘I am an actor in this life and I expose myself. As I am filming you, I will be filmed in turn … I am one of you despite everything’” (Speciale 1998, 29). This everything includes his exile and resulting difference, the fact that he left Sokolo and no longer shares the fate of its residents, but does not prevent him from declaring his allegiance and sense of belonging. I have described Life on Earth, like Rostov-Luanda, as a documentary film, yet the film was released two years before the arrival of the new millenium that it ostensibly depicts. Sissako has not recorded New Year’s Eve in Sokolo, although all of the actors in this fiction are playing themselves; the credits at the end of the film identify Sissako, his father,



Abderrahmane Sissako

51

Mohamed Sissako, his uncle, and so on. We see the men of Sokolo listening to Radio France International reporting on New Year’s Eve activities all over the world, counting down the last hours of 1999 to a 2000 that is at the time of filming still two years away. Sissako destabilizes the boundaries between fiction and documentary, breaking the basic rules of documentary realism in this documentary fiction, or fictional documentary, in order to situate himself as he makes a point. Although he lives in Europe, Sissako films himself in Sokolo at this crucial moment in the future, in an Africa that exists both in opposition to and intimately connected to the Europe on the radio. The residents of Sokolo listen to at least two radio stations, RFI and the very local Radio Colon, which in the film features a reading from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Again using Césaire’s words, Sissako reminds us of the particular tragedy of Africa’s first contacts with Europe, one legacy of which will be the two continents’ incommensurate New Year’s Eves. Life on Earth, which was commissioned by the Franco-German television network ARTE as the sole African film in a series about the new millennium, was originally intended to be entirely fictional, but Sissako felt that this would constitute an “abdication of responsibility, an escape to avoid reality,” (Anon. 1998, 2) the reality of the relationship between African history and the African present. Sissako’s Bamako (2006) was released almost a decade after Life on Earth. His most overtly political film, Bamako stages a trial in which ordinary Africans sue the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, detailing the crimes and damages caused by international interference in African affairs in an era of so-called globalization. African governments are also accused of what amounts to depraved indifference to their own citizens. Taking advantage of the double meaning of the French word “la cour,” which means both courtyard and court, Bamako takes place in the interior courtyard of a house in Bamako, Mali. Like Sissako’s earlier films, Bamako presents an African perspective on postcolonial and neocolonial realities. This time, however, our protagonist seems to be collective, a representative group of Africans set in opposition to Europe and North America, and Sissako himself seems to be absent from the screen. Despite its apparent straightforwardness, however, Bamako is formally innovative and quite intricate. Sissako filmed the trial scenes in digital video, using four cameras. A camera is almost always visible in the frame, reminding us that the trial is a staged performance. At the same time as he employs this reflexive strategy, Sissako incorporates personal elements as well as documentary strategies into the film. The film was shot in the courtyard of Sissako’s recently-deceased father’s house in Bamako, another home in which Sissako lived as a child. Professional lawyers and judges act in the trial scenes as do real witnesses, from Aminata Traoré, writer and former minister of culture, to a farmer and griot from southern Mali. All use their own names and participated in the scripting of their testimony

52

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and dialogue. In addition to the trial, the film contains lengthy scenes of the everyday lives of the people (some real, some fictional) who live around the courtyard. These unresolved subplots, filmed in 16mm, pull the film away from its political focus and toward art cinema. Of the story of Chaka, who commits suicide as his marriage dissolves and his wife prepares to return home to Senegal, Sissako said: [Bamako] is without a doubt my most direct film with respect to its topic. This is something I don’t like, it’s not my nature. I was therefore careful to think of a counterpoint at every moment. These counterpoints had to be understood by Africans as well as others. One can be in Africa and be solitary, as everyone is. Chaka is a man who is very alone, even if he lives in a courtyard filled with people. Even if the strength of this continent is its capacity to share what little it has with everyone. In this collective life, man can also be alone. (Hurst and Barlet 2006) Rejecting easy oppositions between Europe and Africa, between solitary individualism and warm collectivity, Sissako also points to the indistinct boundaries of filmic genre. The reflexive effect produced by the many visible cameras in Bamako is further complicated by the insertion of a film within the film, a Western called “Death in Timbuktu” that is shown on television to residents of the courtyard. This mini-Western plays both with and against the themes of the trial. A group of black and white cowboys arrive in what must be Timbuktu, to the northeast of Bamako, and start to shoot at local citizens at random. One of the black cowboys laughs at the carnage he has wrought, while another lurks mysteriously, watching the others. Sissako cast his film-world friends as the cowboys, including American actor Danny Glover, who also produced Bamako, Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, French actor and filmmaker (and friend of Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Henri Roger, Congolese actor and filmmaker Zéka Laplaine, and a certain “Dramane Bassaro.” Dramane is a nickname for Abderrahmane, one Sissako had already used in Rostov-Luanda and Life on Earth, Bassaro is Sissako’s uncle’s family name, and the face we can just barely see under this cowboy hat is that of Abderrahmane Sissako. From filmmaker as interviewer in Rostov-Luanda to filmmaker as character in Life on Earth, Sissako is now filmmaker as character in a film within a film. At the end of this five-minute sequence, a title credit is followed by “Directed By,” but no director’s name appears. For Sissako, this absence, like the choice not to join an omniscient voice-over to an on-screen presence in his earlier films, was a moment of resisting the pull of the auteur model; “I did not want to put my name, since I am already the director and the screenwriter” (in Hurst and Barlet 2006). The credits for “Death in Timbuktu” are in English, although the



Abderrahmane Sissako

53

characters speak in a mixture of French and English. The Hollywood domination that inspired the rebellions of both the Second and Third Cinemas meant that American Westerns flooded the African market for decades, and many African filmmakers, including Sissako, remember watching them as children along with innumerable Kung Fu films and Hindi musicals. Sissako nods to a canonical First Cinema genre in a markedly non-Hollywood way, reminding us of the Wild West atmosphere of our globalized world. One of the witnesses in the trial responds to a French lawyer’s praise of globalization by noting that the world might be open for white people but is not for black people. Another witness is a young man who was sent back to Mali after crossing the Sahara desert to Algeria in the hope of then reaching Europe by boat. But the fact that both white and black cowboys are shooting at the citizens of Timbuktu again complicates any simple opposition between Europe and Africa and reminds us of the complicity of some Africans in the crimes against their own people. And the fact that the actors playing the murderous cowboys form an international collection of actors and directors forces us to consider the different ways in which Africa has been shot (the pun works only in English) on film, with little regard for the individual and collective suffering of the continent’s inhabitants. Tsitsi Jaji understands “Death in Timbuktu” to be “an auteur’s signature, flagging Sissako’s long-running engagement with the Spaghetti Western,” and reads the trope of the Western in all of Sissako’s films then to propose the term “cassava Western” as a generic category within African cinema (2014, 156). Akin Adesokan has also analyzed Sissako’s oeuvre for overarching themes and consistent aesthetics, arguing that “Sissako has been concerned in his films to fashion a narrative style that bears the signature of a distinctive artistic temperament; this means that certain recurrent patterns are discernible in his work” (2010, 146). And thus far, although I have noted strategies employed by Sissako to avoid being cast in the role of auteur, I have read three of his films in chronological order, discussing themes and strategies that link them. In a discussion of the politique des auteurs published in Cahiers in 1965, Jean-Louis Comolli pointed out (Comolli et al. 1986, 198–9) that there had been a slippage between the idea of the auteur and the thematics of a filmmaker’s oeuvre. Since every auteur had a thematic or style, the critic who discovered a unifying thematic or style in the work of a filmmaker could call him/her an auteur. This slippage was the point of the exercise for Peter Wollen, who argued for auteur criticism as a method of reading and not the assertion of an actual authorial figure. Wollen concluded, following Roland Barthes’ resurrection of the dead author as scriptor, that both an auteur film and the director as auteur are produced after the fact as a result of the structural analysis of a filmic text (Wollen 1972, 104–5). Creating auteurs is a scholarly industry, not just the job of festival organizers and curators, and a typical study of the work of a single filmmaker traces the coherent and progressive development of an oeuvre over time.

54

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

The three films I have discussed share a certain documentary quality and feature Sissako himself as an organizing principle, but I have skipped a film in my chronological order, one that will allow me to interrupt a nascent pattern. In between Life on Earth and Bamako, Sissako released his first unequivocally fictional feature film, Heremakono: Waiting for Happiness (En attendant le bonheur, 2002). The film depicts a collection of characters who inhabit a coastal town, many of whom are there only to leave, to undertake a clandestine and dangerous sea voyage to Europe. The film was shot in Nouadhibou, Mauritania, although the specific location is never identified within the narrative, allowing it to resonate with stories of emigration from points all along the northern and upper western coasts of Africa. Heremakono is a lyrical and not overtly reflexive film, with none of the explanatory voice-overs of Rostov-Luanda and Life on Earth nor the political speeches and mise-en-abyme of Bamako. When asked if he would describe Heremakono as poetic, Sissako responded in the affirmative but denied any opposition between the poetic and the political; “poetry for me is a way to communicate better with the other, to say things that are important, things that are politically important, because when one lives in a country, on a continent where making a film is a very very rare act … one can only be political … Poetry is a revolutionary act” (Scarlet 2007). One of the political choices Sissako made for this film is that none of Heremakono’s characters emigrate; their happiness, if found, will not be found in Europe. Maata, the elderly fisherman turned electrician who long ago refused to leave, dies on the beach. His younger friend Makan decides not to leave for Spain but to return home to his village, which is named Heremakono. Makan’s friend Michael, whom we see getting his photograph taken in front of a painted backdrop featuring the Eiffel Tower, seems to have left, but after two weeks his dead body washes up on the beach. The young apprentice Khatra, alone after Maata’s death, tries to leave but is forcibly removed from an overcrowded train. And at the end of the film, the adolescent Abdallah packs a suitcase and says goodbye to his mother, but his new, European-style shoes make it impossible for him to climb up the dunes. The only character who has successfully emigrated from his home country has come from to Africa from China; he is also waiting, and we watch him sing a Chinese song about a man in jail who asks “When will I be able to return home again?” As critics have noted, there are similarities between Sissako and Abdallah, who is about the age at which Sissako first left Africa and, like Sissako, speaks Bambara but not Hassaniya.8 Yet Abdallah, waiting to embark upon the journey that will take him into exile, wears only European clothing whereas Sissako, staging his return after twenty years of exile in Life on Earth, wears African clothing while in Sokolo. Sissako shows Abdallah’s vision to be limited; he rarely ventures out from the room he shares with his mother, instead observing his neighbors through a low window that



Abderrahmane Sissako

55

frames their legs and feet as if on a television screen. During a meeting with potential wives, the young women mock him, in both French and Hassaniya, for his inability to master even the few words in Hassaniya that he has learned from Khatra. Abdallah does not join in the large family celebration toward the end of the film, at which a girl of Khatra’s age performs the traditional songs we have seen her learning from an older female singer and musician, or griotte. In a moment of hope for his African identity and for Africa, however, if one that also highlights the solitude that can be felt in the midst of a community, Abdallah puts down the book he is reading, gets up, and dances alone to the music. A single sequence of Heremakono was shot in Europe, a flashback showing a trip taken by Nana, a prostitute who is Abdallah’s neighbor, to inform the white, French father of her young daughter that the girl had died. Sissako shot these scenes with super-8 film, which gives them a dreamlike quality. He did so not only to highlight the personal pain associated with Nana’s memories, but also to make a statement about how we perceive travel from Africa to Europe; “I wanted to say that the trip to Europe can also be a voyage of love, not only an economic one. It can also be a voyage of sharing; it is time to consider immigration as an enrichment and as a fundamental freedom inscribed in all of the world’s constitutions” (Barlet 2003). In a film that deals with one of Africa’s most pressing problems, the exodus of its youth, Sissako stresses the risks of the journey and the richness of home. But he also urges Europe, which considers the influx of African youth to be a pressing problem, to see this instead as an opportunity for individual and cultural exchange. Perhaps because of this message, combined with a focus on the oral tradition and a lack of Second Cinema reflexivity, Heremakono is the only of Sissako’s films to have won the Etalon de Yennenga, grand prize at FESPACO, the biennial African film festival cofounded by Mahama Traoré. In Sissako’s most recent film, Timbuktu (2014), death once again comes to Timbuktu, but without the reflexive irony of Bamako. Timbuktu, where he had shot “Death in Timbuktu,” had become too dangerous, so Sissako filmed in Mauritania, with the support of the Mauritanian government. Timbuktu, like Heremakono, is a fiction based on contemporary African realities; Sissako said of it that “a filmmaker has to be a witness to his times and that is the role I wanted to play with this film” (Guillén 2015, 42). The film was inspired by a specific and terrible story, that of a young couple stoned to death by Ansar Dine fighters in Aguelhok, Mali in 2012, for the crime of having had two children together without being married. Sissako originally planned to make a documentary, but changed his mind for two reasons. Firstly, “free speech was impossible in Timbuktu,” making reliable interviews with anyone but the Ansar Dine jihadis also impossible, and furthermore, “I wondered how to show the stoning of the couple. I had even considered using animation, so as not to have to film it, to create

56

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

distance” (Anon. 2015). Seemingly contradictory goals, bearing witness and distancing, come together in a film in which Sissako tells the encounter of a Tuareg family, Kidane, his wife Satima, and their daughter Toya, with Islamist militants from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Fiction is no longer for Sissako the “abdication of responsibility” it would have been in Life on Earth, but a way to approach the truth while respecting the dead. The city of Timbuktu has long been a symbol of scholarly and openminded Islam. Sissako’s Timbuktu is a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic space, and its mix of the traditional and the very modern is demonstrated by the fact that Kidane’s most precious cow is named “G.P.S.” In Timbuktu, the city also shows itself to be a place of resistance, from the woman who sells fish in the market and refuses to wear the gloves mandated by the religious police to the group of young people who risk their lives to play forbidden music to those who, challenging a ban on soccer, play a riveting match without a ball. A mentally ill Haitian dancer attempts to block the jihadis’ progress through town, in a global political alliance that evokes Mali’s francophone colonial past, another era of resistance against repressive outsiders. And although many of their friends and neighbors have fled, Kidane and Satima refuse to leave, first fearing and eventually knowing that this decision will prove fatal. Timbuktu is as directly political an intervention as Bamako, a powerful taking of sides in a war that threatens African religious and cultural traditions and freedoms. Ironically, perhaps, the major controversy around Timbuktu resulted not from the film’s politics but rather the extrafilmic political decisions made by Sissako, who at the time became an unofficial cultural advisor to Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. French journalist Nicolas Beau virulently criticized Sissako for this affiliation, accusing him not just of having a working relationship with a president who stifles political opposition but also of ostensibly making a film about Ansar Dine in order not to make a film about slavery in Mauritania.9 This most recent of Sissako’s homecomings has in some ways been a painful one, negating nativist assumptions about a return to the source. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Catherine Grant was pessimistic about the effects of globalization on Latin American cinema, arguing that even directors of “culturally nationalist popular cinema” seek to be “co-opted by the commerce of auteurism” (2000, 105) in order to gain international funding, distribution, and critical attention. Despite Nollywood, this is still for the most part the case for African cinema. Yet taken as a whole, the popularity of Abderrahmane Sissako’s work is evidence that African auteurs can successfully assert African realities on a global cinematic stage. Rather than insist on a griauteur, on the separateness of African styles, themes, and traditions, Sissako assumes that the stories he tells can be geographically and historically specific as well as widely interesting and appealing. And despite Grant’s pessimism,



Abderrahmane Sissako

57

Sissako’s individual films comment in different ways on the inequities and crimes of globalization, from Rostov-Luanda’s portrait of postindependence Angola and Life on Earth’s New Year’s Eve in Sokolo to Bamako’s trial, Heremakono’s deferred emigrations, and Timbuktu’s devastated Timbuktu. We cannot follow Bazin’s advice to read Sissako’s films as distinct products of a tradition and an industry; trained abroad and working from two continents, his films are all multiply co-produced, none created from within a single tradition or industry. And although sub-Saharan Africa now has its own film traditions, aside from South Africa it has no industry to speak of. Rather than deem Abderrahmane Sissako either a global or an African auteur, we can perhaps heed his words and become “less attached to filmmakers” and more attached to films. Sissako’s films, along with those of Haroun, Ivanga, and others, call for a critique that will put the tradition of Vieyra and Sembene in contact with that of Cahiers du Cinéma without allowing one to be defined by the other. Only then can we answer Ivanga’s call (2005) to focus on something other than the Saharan heat of African cinema, on the very different authorial personae of Rostov-Luanda, Life on Earth, and Bamako, on the transformation from personal and political documentary in Rostov-Luanda to political fiction in Bamako to poetic fiction in Heremakono, on the shift from the reflexivity of Bamako to the emotional engagement of Timbuktu.

Notes 1

For more details on the role of the Cannes Film Festival, and film festivals more generally, in the promotion of a certain vision of African cinema, see Lindiwe Dovey, Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

2

All translations from the French are my own.

3

Jim Hillier traced this slippage to Andrew Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” but also, earlier and in French, to Luc Moullet. See “Introduction,” in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 15 n.24.

4

Peter Wollen (1972, 78) notes that there were two schools of auteur critics, those who focused on thematics and those for whom style or mise en scène was crucial.

5

See, for example, Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); David Murphy, Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000); Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

58

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

6

For more on Nollywood, see the “Close-Up: Nollywood” dossier in Black Camera 5 (2) (2014). See also Noah Tsika, Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

7

Sissako’s student film, Le Jeu (1989), was shot in Turkmenistan, which doubled for Mauritania in a story about children who play at war in the midst of war. October (1993) was both set and shot near Moscow and tells the story of an African student’s relationship with a Russian woman.

8

See, for example, Allison Murray Levine, “‘Provoking Situations’: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Documentary Fiction,” Journal of African Cinemas 3 (1) (2011): 97.

9

See Beau’s website, mondafrique.com (accessed August 31, 2015).

Works cited Adesokan, Akin. 2010. “Abderrahmane Sissako and the Poetics of Engaged Expatriation,” Screen 51 (2): 143–60. Anon. 1973. “Resolutions of the Third World Film-Makers’ Meeting, Algiers, Algeria, 1973,” in Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (eds), African Experiences of Cinema, 17–24. London: British Film Institute. Anon. 1974. “Séminaire sur ‘le rôle du Cinéaste africain dans l’éveil d’une conscience de civilisation noire’,” Présence Africaine 90: 3–203. Anon. 1975. “The Algiers Charter on African Cinema, 1975,” in Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (eds), African Experiences of Cinema, 25–6. London: British Film Institute. Anon. 1995. “Rostov-Luanda,” Le film africain 22: 8–9. Anon. 1998. “Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako,” Le film africain 28 (May): 2–3. Anon. 2015. “Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako,” Timbuktu Press Kit. Available online: http://www.le-pacte.com/france/prochainement/detail/ timbuktu (accessed October 3, 2015). Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2003. “‘A Screenplay is not a Guarantee’: Abderrahmane Sissako with Kwame Anthony Appiah,” Through African Eyes: Dialogues with the Directors, 35–42. New York: African Film Festival. Barlet, Olivier. 1998 “A propos de la Vie sur terre: Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako,” Africultures 10. Available online: http://www.africultures.com/php/ index.php?nav=article&no=469 (accessed October 2, 2006). Barlet, Olivier. 2003. “Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako à propos de Heremakono,” Africultures. Available online: http://www.africultures.com/ php/?nav=article&no=2351 (accessed March 7, 2008). Barlet, Olivier. 2011. “‘This Is the Last FESPACO I’ll Be Coming To’: An Interview with Mahamat-Saleh Haroun,” Black Camera 3 (1): 134–40. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.3.1.134 (accessed October 2, 2006).



Abderrahmane Sissako

59

Bazin, André. 1985. “On the politique des auteurs,” in Jim Hillier(ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1950s, 248–59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David. 1999. “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 5th ed., 716–24. New York: Oxford University Press. Césaire, Aimé. 1983. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine. Comolli, Jean-Louis, Jean-André Fieschi, Gérard Guégan, Michel Mardore, Claude Ollier and André Téchiné. 1986. “Twenty Years On: A Discussion about American Cinema and the politique des auteurs,” in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma, The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood, 196–209. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diawara, Manthia. 2010. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. Munich: Prestel. Espinosa, Julio García. 1997 “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in Michael Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, 71–82. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Grant, Catherine. 2000. “www.auteur.com?,” Screen 41 (1) (Spring): 101–8. Guillén, Michael. 2015. “Hidden Certainties and Active Doubts: An Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako,” Cineaste (Spring): 42–5. Hennebelle, Guy. 1975. “Entretien avec Mahama Traoré: ‘Je suis pour le cinéma politique, contre un cinéma commercial, contre un cinéma d’auteurs,” L’Afrique littéraire et artistique 35: 91–9. Hurst, Heike and Olivier Barlet. 2006. “‘Ce tribunal, ils y croyaient!’: Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako,” Africultures. Available online: http://www. africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=4428 (accessed June 6, 2006). Ivanga, Imunga. 2005. “Au Sud, des cinémas,” in Catherine Ruelle (ed.), Afriques 50, singularités d’un cinéma pluriel, 175–6. Paris: L’Harmattan. Jaji, Tsitsi. 2014. “Cassava Westerns: Ways of Watching Abderrahmane Sissako,” Black Camera 6 (1): 154–77. Murphy, David and Patrick Williams. 2007. “Introduction: Representing Postcolonial African Cinema,” in Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors, 1–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ngangura, Mweze. 1996. “African Cinema—Militancy or Entertainment?,” in Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham (eds), African Experiences of Cinema, 60–4. London: British Film Institute. Nichols, Bill. 1976. “Auteur Criticism,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, 221–3. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pfaff, Françoise. 1995. “Sembene, A Griot of Modern Times,” in Michael Martin (ed.), Cinemas of the Black Diaspora, 118–28. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Sanogo, Aboubakar. 2009. “Regarding Cinephilia and Africa,” Framework 50 (1–2): 226–8. Sanogo, Aboubakar. 2015. “Certain Tendancies in Contemporary Auteurist Film Practice in Africa,” Cinema Journal 54 (2): 140–9. Scarlet, Peter. 2007. “Interview with Abderrahmane Sissako,” Waiting for Happiness. DVD, New Yorker Films. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. 1997. “Towards a Third Cinema,” in

60

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Michael Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, 35–58. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Speciale, Alessandra. 1998. “Abderrahmane Sissako: Pour l’amour du hasard, il faut partir,” Ecrans d’Afrique 23: 23–32. Thackway, Melissa. 2014. “Exile and the ‘Burden of Representation’: Trends in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Francophone African Filmmaking,” Black Camera 5 (2): 5–20. Turégano, Teresa Hoefert de. 2005. “Sub-Saharan African Cinemas: The French Connection,” Modern & Contemporary France 13 (1): 71–83. Valens, Grégory. 2006. “Entretien avec Abderrahmane Sissako,” Positif 548: 17–21. Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou. 1972. Sembène Ousmane, cinéaste. Paris: Présence Africaine. Wollen, Peter. 1972. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

3 Godard’s stereoscopic essay: Thinking in and with Adieu au langage Rick Warner

The auteur as essayist Speaking to a sold-out audience at the US premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2014) at the New York Film Festival, Amy Taubin credited the legendary eighty-three-year-old director with having made “the first film to think in 3D.” If her estimation chimes in with the mostly enthusiastic critical response that has greeted Godard’s stereoscopic feature since its Jury Prize-winning debut at the Cannes International Film Festival, it also accords with recent directions in cinema scholarship that have reintroduced the figure of the auteur, not as a genius creator alone responsible for everything of value in the work, but more as an audiovisual thinker, an enunciatory force that uses the instruments of the medium to conduct a searching and philosophical investigation. In Taubin’s comment one hears an echo of Gilles Deleuze’s unabashedly auteurist position that “great directors” should be associated “not merely with painters, architects and musicians” but with “thinkers” (1986, x, xiv). Deleuze’s statement itself paraphrases one of the arguments that launched the very notion of the auteur filmmaker in post-World War II Europe, Alexandre Astruc’s manifesto on the “camera pen.” In an oft-quoted passage, Astruc argues that because of favorable aesthetic and technological advances, the cinema can provide the “Descartes of today” with the most capable means of expression (2009 [1948], 32–3).

62

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Godard is not exactly a modern-day Descartes—he has often contested the cogito by espousing a rivenness of the self and by suggesting that “the ‘I’ in ‘I think’ is not the same as the ‘I’ in ‘I am’”1—but he looms rather large in the history that Astruc heralds. His prodigious body of work has rightly been central to scholarly debates regarding the viability of a sound-andimage practice that not only converses with extant philosophies but works as a complex process of philosophizing in its own right.2 Adieu au langage, I will show, reconfirms Godard’s centrality to such a discussion, but we should recognize that there is a more genre-specific element at issue in this ongoing history, one that has to do with the “essay film.” Godard has famously referred to himself as an essayist since the earliest phase of his career. In critical overviews of the form, he is named with regularity alongside other leading practitioners such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, and Johan van der Keuken. No more constant and predictable than its literary counterpart, the essay in cinema has long evaded classification, but recent accounts have persuasively stressed a certain amalgam of traits that many key examples exhibit: an unorthodox mix of fiction and nonfiction, the inscription of the “first-person” subjectivity of the filmmaker; a self-reflexive concern for the procedures enlisted and the goals pursued; a pensive voice-over commentary together with, or in counterpoint with, a digressive and open-ended montage of heterogeneous material; and direct address to the viewer, who finds him/herself encouraged to take an active role in the reflection.3 Roughly along these lines, a host of reviewers have labeled Adieu au langage an “essay,” but at least where Godard’s output is concerned, a more refined description is in order. From the early 1960s, when Godard claimed to create audiovisual “essays in novel form or novels in essay form” (1972 [1962], 171), through to his similar comments in the twenty-first century—“I have always been divided between what is commonly called the essay and what is commonly called the novel” (2002b, 21)—his uses of the terms “essay” and “essayist” have implied not a formulaic type so much as a reflective disposition that inspires his very approach to working with sights and sounds, an activity of thought that forgoes a rigid choice between two generic options: staging a drama and carrying out a concerted critical inquiry. It’s customary in Godard scholarship to distinguish his essay films from his more narrative features, but his longstanding definition of himself as an essayist rather insists that an essayistic verve takes effect in the latter instances as well, with undiluted potency. We should keep this conception in mind as we study Adieu au langage, given that its play of ideas and arguments coexists with a splintered story that shifts between two couples. Reviewers have tended to use the “essay” term in exclusive reference to the film’s ideational content, as though the “essay” part must be filtered out from the narrative it competes with and interrupts. However, it is precisely this elaborate, inseparable conjugation of dramatic and (meta-)critical



JEAN-LUC GODARD

63

components that is so distinctive of Godard’s essayism and that qualifies Adieu au langage as yet another of his “essays in novel form or novels in essay form.” In her monograph The Personal Camera, Laura Rascaroli contends that “the essay film is the expression of a single, situated authorial ‘voice’ that enters into dialogue with the spectator” (2009, 37). For Rascaroli, the essayist’s presiding agency can assert itself through a vast array of techniques and can be either barefaced or implied. But she holds that, at some level, every filmic use of the essay form engages and appeals to the viewer directly, through an “I–You” rhetoric of address and interpellation that allows the film to become a collaborative affair (33–6). I am going to argue that Adieu indeed attempts to establish a tacit dialogue with the spectator, but that this happens in a manner that is less direct, less mechanistic, and less anchored in first-person subjectivity than what Rascaroli theorizes. Godard, after all, sparingly inhabits this film in body and speech. His singular voice all but dissipates in a polyphonic barrage of mostly unattributed quotations that are spoken by characters who themselves lack stable and consistent identities. The screen presence that most vitally intercedes to convey the film’s arguments is a stray dog that is not the filmmaker’s alter-ego (such as Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypte) but a more mystical embodiment of radical alterity, a creature invested with superior faculties of perception and love. Adieu, to be sure, is a film in which Godard’s signature is everywhere evident, but as we shall see, the intellectual and dramatic ambitions of the work converge around a profound, ethically inclined unsettling of the self that complicates the “I” of the essayist. This troubling of his authorial persona stems from how Godard has refigured and partially revoked the model of auteurship that he helped to usher in with the New Wave, both as a critic and director. Through selfmocking and self-denigrating performances in his later efforts (e.g. First Name: Carmen [Prénom Carmen, 1983], Keep Your Right Up [Soigne ta droite, 1987], King Lear [1987], Message de salutations: Prix suisse / remerciements / mort ou vif [2015]), through forms of citation that obscure “his own” ideas, through an embrace of certain philosophies that dislodge the entrenched status of individual subjectivity in Western thought, and through casting his creative work as a matter of receptivity instead of production (e.g. the quirky scenes in his library in Histoire(s) du cinéma [1988–98] that depict him as a fellow reader and viewer), Godard has taken steps to distance his enterprise from the romantic excesses of la politique des auteurs. And yet, his essayistic ways of working have preserved one of the most important gestures of auteurial labor: the careful construction of a more or less continuous and self-conversant oeuvre, riddled with recurring motifs and preoccupations that surface across multiple films. Several of Godard’s late projects—Histoire(s) is the most seminal example—not only add to such an oeuvre but intensively animate its

64

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

retrospective logic. That is to say, they return to and reprocess his earlier work either through allusion or, more strikingly, through recycling material he has already used. Adieu, for instance, reflects back on and reconsiders nearly every major period in Godard’s shape-shifting corpus. It invokes his beginnings as a critic (the line uttered by a male voice-over, “Showing a forest, easy; but showing a room with a forest nearby, difficult,” quotes his Cahiers du cinéma review of Astruc’s Une Vie [1958]). The film recalls his New Wave years as well (cited verses by Aragon and Apollinaire hark back to Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) where they both figure on the soundtrack of an odd “cowboy film” that Godard’s lovers take in while hiding from the police), and refers here and there to his Maoist politicization (the reiterated image of blood draining from a shower evokes not just Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), but the Dziga Vertov Group’s Pravda (1970) in which a similar shot links up with a series of red-hued references to the brutal subjugation of the working class). The film, in addition, abounds with echoes of Godard’s work since the 1980s, from exquisite images of nature to somber meditations on the wars of the twentieth century. If these recursions and variations across projects build a rapport with the knowing spectator over time, Godard turns this durational element of auteurism toward essayistic aims. In fact he presses into service a structural principle that is close in character to what Michel de Montaigne meant by the word “essays” when he applied it to his experimental writings. Montaigne’s Essais is not simply a collection of discrete articles that belong to the same prose genre. The main title instead names the tentative, trialand-error process of reflection itself—a process that exceeds the bounds of each individual “chapter” and weaves a dense network of provisional weighings over a lengthy period. The essayist’s old, modified, and newly ventured ideas overlie at each turn, and competing versions of “Montaigne” sketch for the reader a dispersive, changeable persona whose style and wit nevertheless remain familiar. To be an essayist in this prolific sense is to cast off the pretense of a definitive or mastered stance; it is to enact a perpetual reworking of ideas, while eliciting the (repeat) reader’s or viewer’s contribution accordingly. I do not have the space here to explore each revisionary gesture that Adieu makes with respect to the Godard canon—let alone each of its borrowings from other authors—but I would like to show, as thoroughly as I can, that this essayistic spirit of inquiry colors the film as a whole and encompasses both its dramatic and noetic operations. More specifically, my objective in what follows is to throw light on the indirect, mostly cryptic ways in which the film tries to draw us into its pursuit. I intend to lay bare the stakes of this process and to show that the film’s thinking, for all its perplexity, wants to be shared.



JEAN-LUC GODARD

65

Forces of coupling The handwritten synopsis for Adieu au langage that Godard provided for the press kit suggests a modest work: the idea is simple a married woman and a single man meet they love, they argue, fists fly a dog strays between town and country the seasons pass the man and woman meet again the dog finds itself between them the other is in the one
the one is in the other and these are three persons the former husband shatters everything a second film begins the same as the first and yet not from the human race we pass to metaphor this ends in barking and a baby’s cries This skeletal account almost comically plays down the film’s convolutedness. Even on a second or third viewing, it is exceptionally hard to follow the precise unfolding of events and the logic of their arrangement. Recurring titles, “1 Nature” and “2 Metaphor,” seem to distinguish two strands of narrative and the fraught interactions of two similar-looking couples respectively. But Godard’s digressive manner ensures that much of the plot and its outcome escape us. Periodic black screens, indistinct commotion in off-screen space, boldly discrepant textures of sound and image, spliced-in documentary footage and clips from fiction films, disembodied voices strangely peripheral to the scenes they haunt, an onslaught of semi-occulted citations from a daunting range of texts and media, truncated framings of characters that withhold their identities—these and other familiar Godardian touches see to it that instead of continuous events, we encounter elliptical fragments that pique our curiosity and demand our constructive participation. We are given to examine less a fully realized story of two couples than uncanny repetitions and parallels that crop up “vertically” between the enumerated divisions. And we are challenged, moreover, to work out how this “simple” domestic drama set on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva folds in with a citational play of arguments that broods on such matters as the traumatic history of modern Europe, the diverted promise of revolution, and the persistence of despotism at the heart of Western democracy.

66

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Discussing the film’s bifurcated structure in an interview, Godard claims to have relied on “Hitchcock’s theory” that “when you want something to be understood” by the audience “you say it at least twice” (2014b). What then do the reprises in Adieu push for us to understand? Our first task is to notice how the film’s focus on two couples arises in the context of—not as a retreat from—the larger social crises that are raised in the film’s opening minutes. As David Bordwell argues, Adieu begins with two prologues shown in succession, each set in a different public spot in Nyon but enacting a version of roughly the same event (2014). A somewhat fatigued philosophy professor, Davidson (Christian Grégori), converses with other minor characters, including two students—Marie (Marie Ruchat) and her unnamed companion (Jeremy Zampatti)—and an older woman, Isabelle (Isabelle Carbonneau), who only appears in the first prologue. These friendly exchanges are disbanded by a German-speaking businessman (Daniel Ludwig) who emerges from a Mercedes and accosts his wife at gunpoint. The wife’s non-compliance sends him away; then a male stranger approaches and pledges his devotion to her. Josette (Héloïse Godet) pairs with Gédéon (Kamel Abdeli) in this way, as does Ivitch (Zoé Bruneau) with Marcus (Richard Chevallier). The dramatic action in both prologues coincides with a buildup of ideas voiced by Davidson and his interlocutors. The first scene, which takes place near a bookstall across the street from a cultural center, references at length Jacques Ellul’s 1945 journal article “Hitler’s Victory” through spoken recitations that sketch in a historical backdrop for the film’s concerns. Ellul’s argument is that Hitler, despite his army’s defeat, must be seen as having achieved a definitive political victory insofar as his conquerors put in place more cunningly veiled forms of mass control, guaranteeing the absolute authority of the State while promising its subjects freedom. The seeds of this agenda, Ellul writes, were sown long before the Third Reich, by innovators in deceptive statecraft such as “Machiavelli, Richelieu, Bismarck,” but Hitler’s triumph is to have machinated a circumstance where the people demand the exercise of unconstrained State power over every aspect of their lives (1945, 1, 3). Godard’s scene supplements this thesis with ideas drawn from Ellul’s 1964 (1954) treatise The Technological Society. The continuation of this system of governance into the twenty-first century is depicted as a takeover of daily existence—an occupation of our very gestures, thoughts, and habits of being procured through ever more efficient technology. Hence the use of smartphones in the first prologue and Davidson’s ominous remark, with a punning reference to the French “Little Thumb” fairytale, that “the Ogre takes us by the hand, all of us.” Expanding on Ellul’s claims, Davidson reminds his two students that Hitler democratically became chancellor the same year in which Vladimir Zworykin invented television—the suggestion being that these disparate events launched similar schemes of domination.



JEAN-LUC GODARD

67

That the French polymath Ellul here serves as a prophet of doom is an intriguing choice on Godard’s part, given the other pioneering continental philosophers of modern technology he might have cited to comparable ends (such as Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas). Ellul’s place in Adieu owes in part to his biography. As a one-time leader in the French Resistance, he fits in with Godard’s focus on the political history of France. More expressly, the film’s major and minor characters can be said to abide in an advanced version of the “technical milieu” that Ellul delineates (1964 [1954], 319–35), a world in which all human activities (social and economic) are organized by a techno-rationalist quest for maximum efficiency at the expense of spontaneity, intuition, and creativity. What most seems to concern Godard is the noxious impact of this milieu on interpersonal relationships. In terms of the plot, as several reviewers have noted, it is the character of the brutish, mustachioed husband (a banker in the first story, an events coordinator in the second) who overtly ties the drama to a history of oppression in step with Ellul’s analysis. But Godard’s essayistic thinking on this score extends to stylistic matters as well. This is why the work everywhere urges us, as viewers, to scrutinize the 3D compositions on display, their sensory details and textures, their choreographies that impart an enticing sense of mystery. The first prologue is a case in point. Godard’s meticulous staging of action around the bookstall insists that we closely inspect the physical interactions between characters as well as the spatial intervals their movements traverse. The canted framing excludes faces and rivets our attention to hands and to used paperback books whose covers are just legible on-screen. Accents of orange-red establish resonances between planes in the image, from the USINE-A-GAZ bannered fence of the cultural venue and headwear of an extra in the background to Marie’s curly hair and the large umbrella above the bookstall in the foreground.4 This use of color grants particular importance to one of the paperbacks that passes between different characters at different moments in the scene. The slow-building reveal of this orange-red book’s title culminates in a shot that condenses and enlarges on motifs adapted from Ellul. Gathered around the bookstall, Davidson and the male student trade and fidget with their iPhones as Marie, in the more immediate foreground, picks up and flips through the book in question. The shot thus stages a contrast between two media and the kinds of gestures they cultivate. At the precise instant that the German husband’s Mercedes makes its first menacing appearance by passing through the background in the pictorial space between Davidson and the male student, Marie turns the book so that we can finally make out the text on its cover: it is Emmanuel Levinas’s Time and the Other (1987 [1947]). A stereo effect of slight negative parallax further emphasizes this object such that it appears as if within our reach, too.

68

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 3.1  As Marie picks up Levinas’s book, the businessman coasts through the background. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.

Crucial borrowings from Levinas’s thought can be discerned in many of Godard’s late works, perhaps most saliently Notre musique (2004). There the Jewish philosopher’s book Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (1991) factors within a reflection into self-other dynamics that motivate imperial aggression and sustain disastrous antagonisms between whole cultures. A pivotal figure for the ethical turn of French philosophy in the wake of May 1968, Levinas is less a guide for Godard than an occasional interlocutor whose ideas lend nuance to the director’s own, at times dissenting quests (e.g. he critiques Levinas’s fixation on the face-to-face relationship as a “bad” use of the shot-countershot principle [2002a, 64]). The impetus of Time and the Other dates back to notebooks Levinas wrote while interned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. The book consists of provisional lectures that put forward a “phenomenology of alterity,” an account of the subject stripped of the all-assimilating power of the transcendental ego by virtue of a disruptive encounter with something or someone absolutely Other. The lectures build toward the negotiation of an “I–Thou” sociality that respects the “mystery” of the other person, maintains the distance between subjects, abandons self-serving impulses toward “possession,” and welcomes the onset of an unknowable future (Levinas 1987 [1947], 74–94). In Adieu, the foregrounding of Levinas’s book is complexly allusive and a hint as to what Godard is out to achieve through his own essayistic undertaking. It is not that the film borrows specific passages from Time and the Other. More generally, this reference, appearing as it does on the



JEAN-LUC GODARD

69

heels of the film’s engagement with Ellul’s dystopian vision, brings into the tangled web of associations a strand of philosophical inquiry that offsets, decries, and militates against the all-pervasive reach of State control. In short, Levinas’s humanist thought here represents a (post-Holocaust, postHeidegger) phenomenology of the interpersonal encounter wherein an ethical “metaphysics precedes ontology” (Levinas 1969 [1961], 42–8). Here again the film’s reflection bridges intellectual content and cinematic form. As the initial prologue continues to develop, Levinas’s philosophy of the encounter at some level inspires Godard’s stereoscopic mise en scène, in particular the way in which each shot dynamizes the spaces of interplay between characters. The husband’s arrival sparks an event of decoupling and coupling, and the film focuses our gaze on toings and froings portrayed crosswise in the frame, as well as between background and foreground. The intersection of bodies, forces, and references is marked by a slatted chair in the frontal plane—an object that, not unlike the used paperbacks, seems tangible, as if jutting into the space of our viewing. The film’s appeal to our involvement here comes with two insinuated questions. To what extent are these interactions conditioned by “Hitler’s Victory?” And where, if anywhere, do we spot interhuman connections that are removed from and perhaps resistant to that scheme? This inquisitive concern for what arises in the spaces between characters vis-à-vis the larger cultural forces that impress on their quotidian lives is of course nothing new to Godard’s work: it stretches back to the recitation of Élie Faure’s lines on the late style of Velázquez at the start of Pierrot le fou

FIGURE 3.2  A chair juts out where planes converge and characters cross paths in the 3D image. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.

70

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

(1965) and endures well into Godard’s late videos and films. Here, it takes on a more philosophical cast, but without rigorous adherence to an existing tradition or text. The nod to Levinas is certainly weighted. It is reinforced by an aphorism from the philosopher’s Totality and Infinity (1961) that we hear later in the film, when an undisclosed male voice remarks over a shot of what seems to be a vision test (a solitary white dot in an otherwise black frame) and then another shot of Roxy the canine frolicking outside: “Only free beings can be strangers to each other. They have a shared freedom but this is precisely what separates them.” That said, in the unfolding of the film, Levinasian moments vie with equally key citations from a host of other authors, from Paul Valéry to Jorges Luis Borges, that speak in different ways to the linguistic and perceptual dimensions of self-other proximity. In the second prologue, which more flagrantly couches philosophy as an activity concerned with investigation (hence the private detective trench coats and fedoras worn by Davidson and Ivitch), there occurs a recitation in voice-over from a text that conflicts fundamentally with Levinas’s outlook, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943): “Philosophy [le philo] is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself.” The unnamed male student speaks this line, which is made to combine with two trembling and vertiginous shots that study up close the body and limbs of a tree. Yet this is not a faithful quote. “Philosophy” has taken the place of “consciousness” in the original, and this change on Godard’s part is instructive. Levinas’s basic quarrel with Sartre’s phenomenology comes down to what Levinas calls the latter’s “reduction of the other to the categories of the same” and inability to conceive of otherness except as a “degradation” of the “I” and its freedom (Levinas and Kearney 1986, 16–17). The word Godard replaces, “consciousness,” names the very principle that Sartre calls upon in his treatise to bring about what Levinas views as a totalizing and self-oriented fusion of different forms of being, “the for-itself and the in-itself, the self and the other-than-self” (17). Godard’s work in the scene suggests an ousting of this egoism, this ontology that, according to Levinas, institutes in the interpersonal realm a corrosive autarchy of the “I” even as it pretends to secure personal liberty.5 Adieu, to be sure, is intent on exploring a sense of individual subjectivity that is more radically unfixed through engagement with the other and with the external world. The student’s recitation is disrupted by off-screen sounds, a boat horn and lapping waves, that trigger a cut and force his voice into a more abstract register; and the camera’s caress of the tree diverges from the viewpoint of any character. It is further significant that the casual abbreviation of philosophy as “le philo” strips the term of its presuming attachment to knowledge (-sophia) and places the accent instead on loving (philo-). In this way the dual prologues set up the domestic scenes that follow as sustained reflections into a philosophical problem—namely,



JEAN-LUC GODARD

71

the possibility of realizing a kind of love that prioritizes the freedom of the other above that of the self. At the same time, though, the shots of the tree and the acoustic disturbances from off-screen alert us to the fact that we will have to attend not only to interpersonal relationships but to an insistent world outside.

Eros is sick: Roxy as intercessor Godard’s synopsis of the film reports, at least of the first couple, “they love, they argue, fists fly.” But where is “love” actually represented? The scenes that make up the “1 Nature” and “2 Metaphor” sections of the film dramatize not romance so much as its ruin, as the two couples, in states of undress, lounge and shift about a remote house (the same location in both parts, Godard’s actual residence in Rolle) while at cross purposes. It appears that somewhere between the vows of allegiance by Marcus and Gédéon in the prologues and these later events, love has already begun to wane. These scenes could be said to respond to Levinas’s treatment of erotic relations in both Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, but Godard’s handling of the matter is far less optimistic. The bulk of the repetitions that compare his two main couples reveal an impasse of communication. In one repeated scene, the woman protests the inequality of their dynamic (one should note that “égalité” and “liberté” are freighted terms in their dialogue, invoking as they do the clarion call of the 1789 Revolution and eventual slogan of the French Republic), but the man replies, while sitting on the toilet, that equality finds its only legitimate expression in the act of defecating, where all assume the same function and position, that of Rodin’s The Thinker. His line at least follows on from hers on this occasion. What generally prevails in the dialogue between either couple is an absence of continuity. Language itself seems to be a stumbling block, as tends to be the case in Godard’s fictions. “With language, something is happening. Something awkward about our relation to the world,” Marcus tells Ivitch at one point, or rather he says this aloud in her presence. “It acts against pure freedom. I am speaking: subject. I am listening: object.” As he delivers these lines and moves across the room, the film deploys its most spectacular and disorienting optical effect. One of the two side-by-side cameras used for shooting in 3D stays focused on Ivitch, who sits at the left perimeter of the composition. The other camera, however, pans to follow Marcus and so the image suddenly pulls apart into two overlapping views, producing a superimposition, one in which each layer visualizes “the off-screen space of the other,” as Nico Baumbach words it (2014, 37). Whatever we make of the ingenuity of this moment—its combination of montage with a long take, its destruction of 3D cinema’s illusionist

72

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

trappings, and so on—we need to observe the multifaceted work it does with regard to the philosophical concerns of the scene. The multilayered image effectively discloses, for the spectator, a field of interconnectedness between these two characters, one that confounds the subject-object binary Marcus complains about; but at the same time, the characters themselves remain unattuned to this potential. In some of Godard’s late films, such as Hail Mary (Je vous salue Marie, 1985) and Nouvelle vague (1990), unhappy couples are able, however momentarily, to reconcile, to reach a sense of togetherness based on reciprocity, an achievement that is conveyed through a tender dialogue of gestures as much as through speech. But in this case, what Godard’s technical virtuosity shows us is an interpersonal gap within which love fails to materialize. The mise en scène playfully exploits a cliché of melodramatic staging that Godard has tinkered with in a number of ways since Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963): the placement of conspicuous things in the pictorial space between two quarreling lovers in order to stress their mutual alienation.6 Here, the superimposition orchestrates a jarring collision between a lamp and an equally prominent vase of flowers. It isn’t that the film urges us to see these interlying things as obstacles; rather, this convention of staging, as Godard makes eccentric use of it, highlights the insufficiencies of the dramatis personae, their inability to access and share the kind of sight and thought toward which the intricate composition leads the viewer. It is in the light of both couples’ shortcomings that we can begin to understand just how the dog cited in Godard’s synopsis—a lurcher mix, credited as Roxy Miéville—comes to the fore as a central character, a kind of hero. Godard’s synopsis and remarks in interviews describe this animal primarily as an intercessor, as “a link, between two people” (2014a), a figure that forges new lines of communication. This would seem to suggest that Roxy goes from person to person, somehow assisting an enhanced means of dialogue, but the film depicts nothing of the sort. Roxy, in fact, never occupies the same shot as a human being. Both couples take him in (the dog is male, despite his feminine first name) but in the few moments where they interact with him, Godard reduces their presence to voices from beyond the frame, and what they say to or about this creature indicates their lack of awareness of his mediating role. What Adieu actually expresses, I want to argue, is Roxy’s intervention in and for the film’s essayistic relationship with the viewer. This becomes evident in the recurring scenes in which Roxy, unleashed, explores natural landscapes with his amplified senses. While the film’s other characters are absent from these somewhat abstract promenades, which are shot in low-grade, vibrantly colored digital video, it would not be accurate to say that Roxy is alone. His intermittent looks-to-camera both stare back at the audience and betray an intimate familiarity with the person filming him (Godard himself, who co-owns



JEAN-LUC GODARD

73

Roxy with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, handles the camera in these episodes, although the film makes no candid reference to this). Roxy’s performance serves, in part, to render the “fourth wall” unstable and to conceptualize the screen as more a threshold than a barrier. This comes across not only through his returned glances but also through 3D protrusions of his exploratory muzzle. Further, these recurring interludes bring to the film a relatively less turbulent mood of contemplation, allowing us more time to process the ideas and impressions we have been bombarded with so far. Godard often films Roxy up close and from the back, framing him as a Rückenfigur that faces into the recess of the image, that is to say, as a seer within the work whose conduct opens up a crucial locus for the film’s address to the spectator. This is not precisely to say, however, that Roxy functions as a surrogate observer with whose faculties we are readily aligned. Within the film’s economy of motifs, these promenades work in multifaceted ways that complicate—and limit—our involvement as much as they induce it. At one level, these segments circle back to and reach beyond the earlier use of Levinas. During one of Roxy’s jaunts, a male voice-over casts into relief the dog’s ethical and sensorial importance: “It is not animals who are blind. Man, blinded by consciousness, is incapable of seeing the world. What is outside, wrote Rilke, can be known only through an animal’s gaze. And Darwin, citing Buffon, maintains that the dog is the only living creature that loves you more than it loves itself.” Together these lines point up the way

FIGURE 3.3  Roxy in the forest, detecting what a narrator calls “the revolutionary force of signs.” Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.

74

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

in which Roxy embodies an unsparing kind of love, as philos or friendship rather than as eros—a selfless and joyful regard for the other that goes hand in hand with a rare, heightened sensitivity to the world outside (to the “forest,” as the film’s idiolect puts it). While this characterization continues to draw on Levinas’s framework, Godard starkly revises the philosopher’s exclusion of nonhuman animals by holding up Roxy’s capabilities of love and vision as a cause for emulation.7 And yet, at the same time, the film delimits these powers as falling beyond our reach—as belonging to a realm of sensation to which humans, as verbocentric and egocentric beings, have no direct access. With the citation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the film figures Roxy’s gaze as an opaque medium that lets us indirectly and partially take “what is outside” into account. Godard’s stereoscopic style and address to the viewer draw near to this creaturely vision without quite matching it. In this use of the animal as both a lure and a limit there inheres a utopian conceit, namely, that if the couples in the fiction (and if we ourselves) were somehow made able to see and think in the manner that he does, then their (and our) relationships with one another and with the world at large would conceivably undergo an ecstatic and revolutionary transformation. In interviews, Godard has articulated Roxy’s significance in terms that invoke the Third Estate of France, as if the dog intercedes for “the common people” and still-unmet demands for political equality (2014b). While this is far from obvious in Adieu itself, the film invites us to consider Roxy’s aptitudes within a circuit of associations that includes past revolutionary causes. Early in the film we see a close-up of a young woman singing with a crowd from Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) (the clip is technically recycled from Godard’s own Histoire(s) with its added graphic title “something,” one of the core bywords of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate?). More glaringly, an Italian folkprotest song circa 1968 plays over the opening and end titles of Adieu (“Always united we win / long live the revolution!”). What Roxy’s spirit of being holds out, in the gestalt of the film as a whole, is the possibility of undoing the effects of “Hitler’s Victory,” not through violent revolt, as Godard lectured in his Maoist films, but instead through a loving embrace of alterity that seeks to rebuild, from the ground up, our ethical sense of interrelatedness.

The dream of the individual At least for the film’s principal characters, Roxy’s intercession is to no avail. The dual narrative ends in disaster with the deaths of the men in both couples, indistinctly at the hands of the German husband. But



JEAN-LUC GODARD

75

then a tranquil coda takes place in which the tone of the film shifts and becomes more hopeful. This occurs at the same time that Godard’s personal investment in the reflection becomes more pronounced. Twice in a short stretch, the French-Swiss director physically intrudes, making more manifest and more pressing the essayistic “I–You” address to the viewer that has been obliquely in play throughout the work. This pursued relationship, however, is still marked by curious conditions that make for a rather indirect and difficult interaction. For one, Godard’s performance inscribes neither a forthright nor a unitary nor a neatly demarcated authorial subject. His first “appearance” is via spoken word alone as he recounts Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley’s famous journey to Lake Geneva in 1816 whereupon the novel Frankenstein was conceived, the two writers signifying a creative couple. A minute later, Godard’s rasping voice cuts in once more, in a scene with a woman where he tries to demonstrate, using watercolors and graph paper, a gnomic point about fitting “flatness into depth”—a point which pertains to his unruly and at times antagonistic use of stereoscopy. Though he and his interlocutor are absent from the frame except for their hands, and though his voice divides into multiple, overlapping audio tracks, the basic fact of their two-person dialogue is significant. Dialogue and coupling thus endure as reflective tropes in the coda, and Godard’s self-inscribed role is tied ambiguously to a new, older couple that surfaces in the same house shown earlier. We see a man reading A. E. van Vogt’s science fiction novel Null-A Three (1984) in the bedroom (the scene is reenacted from JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre [1994]) but otherwise we become aware of these characters only by their voices as they debate, for example, the content of Roxy’s dreams. Spectators conversant with Godard’s work and life will recognize that this couple to some extent stand in for his partnership with Anne-Marie Miéville whose voice also graces this section of the film. Indeed, these scenes in Adieu call to mind some of their past collaborations, not least their co-narrated video essay The Old Place (1998). Godard in this way enters into—and defines as essential to his work—a condition of radical twoness, of being, seeing, and thinking with another. The film, through its style of address, extends this sort of intimacy to the viewer as well. In the montage that carries Adieu to its unfinished end, we see, in addition to more shots of Roxy returning our gaze, a series of unpeopled scenes that nevertheless evoke shared experience: two vacant place settings at a kitchen table, one angled diagonally toward the viewer, the frame alive with shadows of trees from outside; two chairs facing a television filled with electronic snow; and two scarlet poppies swaying in the wind along the roadside. If, on the one hand, these views refer to the couple in the coda (and to Godard-Miéville), they also apostrophize our potential involvement.

76

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 3.4 Spectatorship curiously evoked as a matter of coupling in the film’s last minutes. Source: Farewell to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015) © Wild Bunch.

Invocations of Godard’s partnership with Miéville recur across his late stage, not as mere autobiography but as a reflexive way of transposing to the register of the film’s reception a certain prospect of seeing together. Their bond attests to the lived possibility of realizing a dyadic “we” founded on perceptual sharedness, an intimate and dialogical “we” that allows for dissensus, retests its principles habitually, and still espouses forms of ethicopolitical resistance, if in a gentler key. To be sure, these parting intimations of twoness in Adieu bear the trace of a lingering defiance, as if to confirm a maxim aired at various turns in late Godard and credited to Sophie Scholl: the dream of the State is to be one, whereas the dream of the individual is to become two. This notion imbues the coda intertextually. The link with Null-A Three resonates in that the novel’s two-brained hero wields extrasensory faculties to foil an oppressive galactic empire—faculties not unlike Roxy’s. And the red poppies return from The Old Place where they conjure up memories of revolutionary dreams and defeats while still managing, as Godard remarks, to “organize a small demonstration, but only for love.” Mixing as it does elegiac and optative moods, valedictory and inceptive energies, the non-ending of Adieu does not simply interpolate the viewer into an already obtained condition. It conveys a deep longing for a situation that, within the bounds of the film’s own rhetoric, cannot be presently claimed or pictured. With a blacking-out of the visual field, we hear a duet of barking and a baby’s cries (the sound is sampled from a popular Lumière-like YouTube video, “Husky Sings with Baby”). The film thus gestures toward a threshold beyond its current reach, toward the dawn



JEAN-LUC GODARD

77

of a new perceptiveness, the birth into the world of a language keyed to the potentialities that Roxy incarnates. But there is a tension—not a neat groove—between this song of two creatures and the Italian protest anthem that succeeds it. Rather than a “we” postulated in advance as an entire collective waiting to be mobilized by a dogmatic discourse, Godard pursues a friendly “we” of just two, starting provisionally from there, and he forces us to confront the ethical challenges of its foundations. His essay is such that revolution remains imaginable only on the other side of a black screen, a night of the senses that obliges us to think through the very limits of our not-yet-seeing.

Notes 1

This rebuttal to Descartes’ proposition finds expression in Godard’s For Ever Mozart (1996), Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98, Chapter 4A), and the teaser trailer for Adieu au langage.

2

See Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), particularly pp. 25–7, 64–6.

3

See Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), for the two most canonical book-length studies of the essay film.

4

Usine-à-gaz translates as “gas factory,” although in French, as Godard’s wordplay acknowledges, the phrase idiomatically refers to a system of extreme and distressing complication.

5

Targeting Heidegger and Sartre, Levinas (1969 [1961], 46–7) contends that Western ontology emanates an egoism that unwittingly allies itself with state tyranny.

6

Take the famous moment in Le Mépris where the camera shuttles between the at-odds couple seated on either side of a lamp.

7

Roxy’s function possibly alludes to a rare instance in which Levinas (1997) verges on granting ethical status to a nonhuman animal, his account of a mongrel dog that strayed into the Nazi POW camp where he and other Jewish soldiers were confined and restored their sense of humanity.

Works cited Astruc, Alexandre. 2009 (1948). “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La CaméraStylo,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, 31–7. London: British Film Institute. Baumbach, Nico. 2014. “Starting Over,” Film Comment 50 (6) (November/ December): 34–41.

78

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Bordwell. David. 2014. “Adieu au langage: 2+2 x 3D.” Observations on Film Art. Available online: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/09/07/adieu-aulangage-2-2-x-3d (accessed June 15, 2015). Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ellul, Jacques. 1945. “Victoire d’Hitler?,” Réforme 14: 1, 3. Ellul, Jacques. 1964 (1954). The Technological Society, trans. Tom Wilkinson. New York: Vintage. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1972 (1962). “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard,” in Tom Milne (ed. and trans.), Godard on Godard, 171–96. New York: Da Capo. Godard, Jean-Luc. 2002a. “A Long Story,” interview by Jacques Rancière and Charles Tesson, in The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/01, trans. John O’Toole, 45–64. Bern: Gachnang and Springer. Godard, Jean-Luc. 2002b. “The Future(s) of Film,” interview by Emmanuel Burdeau and Charles Tesson. In The Future(s) of Film: Three Interviews 2000/01, trans. John O’Toole, 11–43. Bern: Gachnang and Springer. Godard, Jean-Luc. 2014a. “Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Le cinéma, c’est un oubli de la réalité,’” interview by Philippe Dagen and Frank Nouchi. Le Monde, June 10. Available online: http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2014/06/10/jean-lucgodard-le-cinema-c-est-un-oubli-de-la-realite_4435673_3246.html (accessed June 15, 2015). Godard, Jean-Luc. 2014b. “In Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard,” interview by Cécile Mella, Canon Professional Network. Available online: http://cpn.canoneurope.com/content/Jean-Luc_Godard.do (accessed June 15, 2015). Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969 (1961). Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987 (1947). Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1997. “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, 151–3. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original edition in French 1991.) Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard Kearney. 1986. “Dialogue with Levinas,” in Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas, 13–34. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rascaroli, Laura. 2009. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower.

4 Michael Winterbottom: A self-effacing auteur? William Brown

In this chapter, I shall argue that Michael Winterbottom is a paradoxical auteur who qualifies more as an artist than as a commercial director, not just in spite, but also because, of what I shall call his “self-effacement.” I shall also argue that the processes that allow this paradoxically self-effacing auteurism are specific to the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, as befits the title of this edited collection, not least through the development of lightweight digital cameras that emerged at around the same time as Winterbottom did as a director of feature films (although not all of his films have been shot digitally).

An eclectic career April 2015 saw the release of Winterbottom’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, a documentary featuring Russell Brand, which is an investigation into the wealth gap in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. It followed hot on the heels of The Face of an Angel (2014), released a month earlier, which tells the story of a filmmaker, Thomas Lang, who travels to Siena to research a potential film about the trial of an American woman who stands accused of the murder of a young British student. As has widely been reported, the film is a fictionalized version of the trial of Amanda Knox, an American living in Perugia who was accused of murdering British student Meredith Kercher in 2007.

80

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Two Michael Winterbottom films released within a month of each other is unprecedented. However, the close release of these two films conveys the way in which Winterbottom is a prolific filmmaker, or, as he himself puts it, “the more you do, the more it gives you ideas for other things you’d like to do” (Nayman 2010, 88). The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Face of an Angel were the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth feature films that Winterbottom had made since 1995, when Butterfly Kiss, an unusual tale about two lesbians who wander northern England on a killing spree, was released, and which played at the Berlin International Film Festival. There followed increasing recognition in the form not only of festival appearances, but also nominations and prizes through films like Jude (1996), Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Wonderland (1999), In This World (2002), A Mighty Heart (2007), and The Killer Inside Me (2010). This recognition has made Winterbottom one of the most distinguished British filmmakers working today. Also included among these twenty-five feature films are the two Trip films, The Trip (2010) and The Trip to Italy (2014), shortened versions of which had international theatrical releases, but which were shown primarily as TV shows (with overall longer running times) in the U.K. I mention the Trip films because they reflect Winterbottom’s formation in, and ongoing relationship with, television, which helps us to understand not only his propensity to keep working, but also how and why he is self-effacing. For, prior to making feature films, Winterbottom worked on television films (some of which had festival screenings, like Forget About Me, 1990; see Ciment and Tobin 2010, 10) and in television more generally. As Winterbottom says: “with television, which forms most of us [British filmmakers], directors rarely have a choice of subjects; they do film after film proposed by others—with screenwriters being perhaps the more distinctive voice in the medium” (Ciment and Tobin 2010, 11). In other words, television directors tend to be busy, but relatively anonymous, a medium-related “anonymity” that perhaps informs Winterbottom’s selfeffacing tendencies in the “other medium” of film—although the distinction between film and television is being eroded thanks to digital technologies. Given his formation, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Winterbottom is an eclectic filmmaker. Upon first blush he appears an anonymous director, or someone who does not have consistent stylistic or thematic concerns. His films span literary adaptations (Jude, The Claim [2000], and Trishna [2011] are Thomas Hardy adaptations; A Cock and Bull Story [2005] is an adaptation of sorts of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy), crime films (Butterfly Kiss, The Killer Inside Me, Face of An Angel), family dramas (With or Without You [1999], Wonderland, Genova [2008], Everyday [2012]), documentaries (The Road to Guantánamo [2006] and The Shock Doctrine [2009]—both with Mat Whitecross; The Emperor’s New Clothes), period films (Jude, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, in part A Cock and Bull Story, The Look of Love [2013]), and “political” films



Michael Winterbottom

81

about contemporary issues (the documentaries, Welcome to Sarajevo, In This World, A Mighty Heart). Winterbottom has even made forays into dystopian science fiction cinema (Code 46 [2003]) and art house sex films (9 Songs [2004]). One might be able to recognize a film by Michael Winterbottom (in that a good number of these films are well known), but that is not the same as being able to recognize “a Michael Winterbottom film” (in that he has a distinctive and repeated style), something that Winterbottom himself suggests relatively early on in his career (Ciment and Tobin 2010, 11). Referring to Winterbottom’s repeatedly elusive interview performances, Damon Smith says “he doesn’t like to be pigeonholed” (2010, ix). In some respects, then, Winterbottom is antithetical to the concept of the auteur, or the owner of what Alexandre Astruc (1968) might term a distinctive cinematic signature. And yet Winterbottom has paradoxically emerged as an auteur, even if not obviously so. Indeed, that he has a signature is perhaps clear from the very start of his otherwise anonymous TV career. Winterbottom’s first job was as a documentarian under Lindsay Anderson, director of such iconic British movies as This Sporting Life (1963), If … (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982), while his first directorial effort was a documentary about and called Ingmar Bergman: The Magic Lantern (1989). In addition to his television work, Winterbottom cut his teeth working with/on renowned auteurs. Furthermore, there are recurrent themes in Winterbottom’s work that do help us to see his oeuvre as a coherent, if multifaceted whole.

Recurrent themes In his erudite study of Winterbottom’s work, Bruce Bennett (2014) identifies the director’s consistent testing and crossing of borders. Welcome to Sarajevo, In This World, and Code 46 are all, for example, about literal border crossings: in the first, a disillusioned journalist can no longer tolerate the plight of an orphan school in war-torn Sarajevo and so decides to smuggle one of the children, Emira, back to the United Kingdom; the second film follows two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to London as they recreate, documentary-style, the perilous journey that many humans in war-affected areas undertake in order to find a better life in the West; and in the third, an insurance fraud investigator tries to cross borders without the necessary “papelles,” or papers, with an insurance document forger in a world where who has access to the rich cities and who is left to fend for themselves in the wilderness is highly regulated. In addition to these literal border crossings, however, we can also interpret Winterbottom’s predilection for literary adaptations as a “border

82

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

crossing” between media, one that is made all the more prominent when we take into account his roots and ongoing interest in television. While Winterbottom has worked with such prominent film actors as Kate Winslet (Jude), Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Tom Robbins (Code 46), Colin Firth (Genova), and Casey Affleck (The Killer Inside Me), he nonetheless works most regularly with actors who are most familiar to (British) audiences for their appearances on television: Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, Christopher Eccleston, Shirley Henderson, and John Simm. Even some of the most “Hollywood” actors to have appeared in Winterbottom’s films are as well, if not better, known for their iconic TV roles as opposed to any great movie performances—for example, Woody Harrelson (Welcome to Sarajevo, perhaps most famous for Cheers, 1982–93) and Gillian Anderson (A Cock and Bull Story, perhaps most famous for The X-Files, 1993–2002). Furthermore, as many reviewers and commentators have noted, Winterbottom also regularly challenges the border between fiction and documentary. In a documentary like The Road to Guantánamo, Winterbottom not only includes interviews and other techniques associated with the latter form, but he also includes elaborate and semi-scripted re-enactments of the incarceration of the men who became known as the Tipton Three, three British Pakistanis who were handed over to American forces by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, having entered the country from Pakistan while on a trip to the region in 2001. Meanwhile, in a fiction film like In This World, Jamal and Enayat, non-professional actors who are playing versions of themselves, enter into semi-scripted situations also played by non-professional actors in real-world locations. Even a film like The Claim, which involves a transposition of Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge from Wessex to northern California in the aftermath of the Gold Rush, and which therefore would not likely contain much in the way of documentary elements, was nonetheless filmed on a set built especially in the mountains of Alberta, Canada, for the purposes of giving the film an authenticity that is not too far removed from that which we supposedly find in documentaries. A film like 9 Songs, meanwhile, intersperses full-song performances by contemporary bands and musicians at concerts in London (from the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club to Michael Nyman) with scenes of various sexual encounters between Matt and his American girlfriend Lisa. That we see full penetrative sex and male ejaculation over the course of the film blurs the boundary further between fiction and documentary; Matt may be having sex with Lisa, but that is still actor Margo Stilley’s body, and that is still Kieran O’Brien’s semen. The fiction/documentary blurring perhaps reaches its apogee in A Cock and Bull Story, in which Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan respectively play themselves in addition to the more typical roles of Uncle Toby (Brydon) and Tristram and Walter Shandy (Coogan), characters from Sterne’s novel. Indeed, the film opens with Brydon and Coogan supposedly in make-up



Michael Winterbottom

83

debating not only the color of the former’s teeth (“pub ceiling,” says Coogan in response to Brydon’s suggestion of “Tuscan sunset”), but also about whose name should go first in the film’s credits (it is Coogan’s). In other words, we are immediately in the realm of not simply a film about a film—like Day for Night (La nuit américaine, François Truffaut, 1973)— but also one in which actors play not just characters but also versions of themselves. It is for this reason that one can begin to think of A Cock and Bull Story as a documentary of its own making. This process extends to other films that blur fiction and documentary, especially The Road to Guantánamo and In This World. It applies to 24 Hour Party People, in which real-life figures at times verify or deny to the camera/audience the events just depicted and which supposedly took place during the 1980s and 1990s Madchester music scene. And we can also see this process at work in the Trip shows, where Coogan and Brydon again play themselves, touring first the U.K.’s Lake District and then northern Italy in order to review restaurants for the Observer (the Sunday edition of the U.K. Guardian). As Brydon and Coogan travel by car between restaurants, boutique hotels, and monuments that often relate to British poets (William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge loom large in The Trip; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats haunt The Trip to Italy), they reflect on their own careers, lament their ageing bodies, and exchange impressions of various Hollywood actors and other personalities.1 In other words, there are emergent patterns in Winterbottom’s work, which suggest that in some respects he is an auteur—as does his practice of repeatedly working with the same people, as we shall discuss presently.

Recurrent collaborators Steve Coogan has starred in 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, both of The Trip series, and The Look of Love, a biopic of sorts about Paul Raymond, a former publisher of adult magazines Men Only, Escort, and Mayfair, the owner of various adult nightclubs, especially in London’s Soho area, and a property developer who at one point was the richest man in the U.K. However, Coogan is not the only actor regularly to work with Winterbottom, whose films often feature performances from Rob Brydon (24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, the Trip shows), Christopher Eccleston (Jude, With or Without You, 24 Hour Party People, as well as earlier television work), Shirley Henderson (Wonderland, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, Everyday, The Look of Love), Kieran O’Brien (24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs, A Cock and Bull Story, The Look of Love, as well as doing the voice-over The Road to Guantánamo and some voice work on Genova), and John Simm

84

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

(Wonderland, 24 Hour Party People, Everyday). Even supporting roles are constantly taken by Winterbottom regulars; for example, Paul Popplewell has small roles in 24 Hour Party People, the first Trip series, and The Look of Love, as well as doing the voice-over for In This World; and Raymond Waring features in small parts in 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, and The Look of Love. It is not just actors with whom Winterbottom works repeatedly. After producing Winterbottom’s TV mini-series Family (1994), Andrew Eaton set up Revolution Films with the director, and has since produced or executive produced all of his movies (and TV shows) except Butterfly Kiss and Welcome to Sarajevo. Furthermore, Trevor Waite has edited nine of Winterbottom’s features, and Marcel Zyskind has worked as a cinematographer on eleven (and as a camera operator on a twelfth). Winterbottom also works frequently with the same screenwriters: Frank Cottrell Boyce has written the script for seven of Winterbottom’s films, including the abovementioned TV film Forget About Me, and Laurence Coriat has written three (Wonderland, Genova, Everyday). Winterbottom has co-directed two films with Mat Whitecross, who also edited 9 Songs and worked on In This World and A Mighty Heart, while Melissa Parmenter has worked in various capacities on over a dozen of Winterbottom’s films, primarily as a producer, but also as a production manager and a composer. Finally, Michael Nyman has written the score for four of Winterbottom’s films. As per established auteurs like Ingmar Bergman, then, Winterbottom works repeatedly with the same people. Furthermore, Bruce Bennett notes how there is regularly in Winterbottom’s films a character who in some senses stands in for him as the director. In A Cock and Bull Story, this is most clearly Mark (Jeremy Northam), the director of the Tristram Shandy adaptation being made—and who reportedly mimics Winterbottom in various ways (see Porton 2010, 102). But we also find journalist figures in Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, and A Mighty Heart, which tells the story of Mariane Pearl as she seeks to discover the fate of her husband, Daniel, who has been taken hostage by Omar Sheikh, a British terrorist of Pakistani descent, and his followers in Karachi in 2002 (see Bennett 2014, 15). Furthermore, we also see this same device at play in The Face of an Angel via Thomas, as well as, to a certain extent, in The Shock Doctrine and The Emperor’s New Clothes via narrators Kieran O’Brien and Russell Brand. The effect of having such figures in the films not only functions as a way for the audience to follow a character’s journey (via their investigations) into the fictional world, the reality or (in the case of A Mighty Heart and The Face of An Angel) the case history under consideration, but it also functions as a substitute for Winterbottom himself, not least because when working in documentary mode, there is a sense in which he as a filmmaker is doing work similar to that of a journalist—investigating and finding patterns. In other words,



Michael Winterbottom

85

having an embedded, ersatz Winterbottom figure in a number of his films helps to give a sense that, in spite of the heterogeneity of his work, Winterbottom is nonetheless an auteur of sorts. A final way in which we might consider Winterbottom to be a traditional auteur is simply through his allusions and the way in which he positions himself within the history of cinema and British-European culture more generally. Working with classics of English literature such as Hardy and Sterne, and having his characters quote Coleridge and Keats, Winterbottom clearly adds to his films an intellectual dimension that raises them above mere entertainment, even if his films are also full of characters who indulge in humanity’s more lustful appetites; sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll also abound in Winterbottom’s oeuvre, as is clear in 24 Hour Party People, which takes in rave culture and which sees its main protagonist Tony Wilson (Coogan again) snorting copious amounts of cocaine while managing the Happy Mondays. This is also clear from 9 Songs and Code 46, both of which feature explicit sex scenes. But more than his literary allusions being twinned with moments of physicality, Winterbottom’s films are also full of cinematic references. Winterbottom mixes high and low; in the Trip shows, for example, Coogan and Brydon will riff impressions at length of Michael Caine and Christian Bale as Batman. But The Trip to Italy also features a sequence during which the two leads visit the remains of Pompeii, a scene that recalls (for those who know it) a similar moment in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954). In A Cock and Bull Story, production assistant Jennie consistently expounds her love of auteurs like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and at one point provides a detailed analysis of a famous fight scene from Robert Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974) (“it’s actually like a metaphor for life, you know? It’s about the impossibility of connecting with another human being”). And a film like Everyday, which was shot over five years and is about a woman, Karen, trying to raise her four children in the absence of their father, Ian, who is serving a prison sentence for drug smuggling, ends with a sequence on a beach that recalls the final moments of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), in which Antoine Doinel also runs along a beach. The reference is apposite, since just as Winterbottom filmed his actors, especially children Shaun, Robert, Katrina, and Stephanie Kirk, over a five-year period, so, too, did Truffaut film Léaud over a twenty-year period for the five Antoine Doinel films that he made. As per Truffaut and other directors from the French New Wave, Winterbottom also puts in his films the kind of formal touches that are typical of those who endeavor not simply to tell stories, but also to expand the vocabulary of cinema, testing what can and cannot be said with film. While Everyday does not end with a freeze frame in the same way that The 400 Blows does, we do nonetheless see freeze frames in, for example, Welcome to Sarajevo, while Jude is a film that mixes black and white, sepia

86

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and color footage in a fashion reminiscent of, say, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979). Winterbottom also uses, for example, split screens—as happens when producer Simon calls the United States in order to hire Gillian Anderson for Tristram Shandy (we simultaneously see shots of Simon, Anderson, Anderson’s agent, screenwriter Joe, and Coogan). And in The Emperor’s New Clothes, much of the archive footage that Winterbottom uses is surrounded by glitch art patterns to convey the technological era in which we live and the fact that much footage from this film has been sourced from the internet. Finally, it is worth mentioning that in his choice of music, Winterbottom also positions himself as an auteur in “dialogue” with other films and filmmakers: in A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom uses Nino Rota’s music from Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), itself a film about filmmaking, and Michael Nyman’s score from The Draughtman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982), itself a highly regarded British period art house film. The use of Nyman’s score also suggests Winterbottom’s playful intertexts with his own films: we see Nyman himself performing his score for Wonderland in one of the concert sequences of 9 Songs, while in A Cock and Bull Story, Coogan is interviewed at one point by Tony Wilson, the man whom Coogan plays in 24 Hour Party People. Even if his cinema is eclectic, then, all of these aspects of Winterbottom’s work suggest continuity and coherence, not just within his own oeuvre, but also within the history of cinema, and particularly a history of European art house, auteur-driven cinema.

Imperfect digital cinema The fact that Everyday took five years to shoot is in some respects possible as a result of digital technology. Because lightweight digital cameras are cheap and can be used in natural lighting conditions, one need not spend lots of money on sets and lighting rigs, since one can shoot on location; and one need spend less on the film’s crew more generally, because the production team can be very intimate (a camera operator and a sound recordist might be the only necessary personnel beyond the actors). The reduction in production costs, especially if one is not hiring expensive locations like the various country houses that we see in A Cock and Bull Story, or the elaborate set in the Alberta mountains of The Claim, allows for making different, more innovative types of film—for example, ones that are shot over five years—because there is less financial risk involved. Most more mainstream productions would require a quicker return on investments. Thus while it is of course possible to spend five years making a film with analog equipment, it seems something easier to achieve in the digital age.



Michael Winterbottom

87

Since the late 1990s Winterbottom has consistently investigated the possibilities created via the development of lightweight digital cameras. The films allow for greater intimacy, not just in terms of entering locations that might otherwise be too small for a camera and lighting rig and which therefore need to be mocked up in a studio, but also in terms of getting closer to actors. In this way, Winterbottom can make a film like Wonderland, which is about the lives of three sisters and their parents in contemporary London. Aside from memorable fast-motion shots of one of the protagonists, Eddie, riding around London on his moped, the movie is also characterized by intimate access to working-class spaces in London—the kind of spaces that are increasingly under threat as a result of gentrification. The central family is dysfunctional in some respects; no one is quite happy in their lives, and yet over the course of the weekend of November 5, when British people celebrate with bonfires and fireworks the failure of Guy Fawkes’ plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, hope is found. The film culminates in the birth of Eddie’s daughter, Alice (in Wonderland), while Nadia, after a series of disappointing dates, meets Franklyn. A low-budget and melancholic film, the hopeful note upon which Wonderland ends suggests that revolutions are possible, even if they are slow and gradual, as opposed to explosive and exciting; and this hopeful turn is perhaps linked to the “digital revolution,” in that the film takes us into what seems an authentic London, which is full of imperfections, but also life. There is in Wonderland a relatively graphic sex scene between Nadia and one of her dates, Tim, although sexual intimacy is most explicit in 9 Songs, which features repeated sex scenes between Matt and Lisa, and Code 46, which includes a graphic yonic shot of Samantha Morton. Again, digital technology plays a crucial role in bringing about the intimate aesthetic that Bennett also identifies in Winterbottom’s work (Bennett 2014, 47–104), and which extends beyond simply sexual intimacy. However, Bennett does not link this intimacy to the digital. While one can of course shoot explicit sex with analog cameras, again, the possibility of losing greater sums of money by making an analog film that contains explicit sex scenes (ones which do not feature the deliberately performative antics that are the preserve of the traditional porn film, but which instead are sex scenes that are part of a convincingly acted relationship in naturally illuminated locations/on a set with only diegetic lighting) generally would make directors (or at least producers) shy away from such material, especially if an 18 certificate (or equivalent) might also curtail the film’s chances of making money. Furthermore, it is also digital technology that allows a director to shoot for longer and simply to accrue more material, which can then be selected during the film’s edit. It thus makes sense as a result of the cameras that are being used to make the film for Winterbottom to enter into intimate spaces, and also to shoot for longer periods (a process that no doubt allows for greater intimacy, too, since his actors will “open up” more in

88

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

front of the cameras). This digital methodology, then, is one pioneered by Winterbottom, and one that makes him stand out as an auteur as a result of the fact that he in some respects has “invented” the language of digital cinema. The relatively low cost of such filmmaking has also allowed Winterbottom to be so prolific; as the camera continues recording, so Winterbottom continues working. This digital aesthetic is, however, an “imperfect” one in various different ways. First, although analog films can be—and have been—made in a “guerrilla” fashion, i.e. without permits and on location, the development of lightweight digital cameras seems to encourage this sort of shooting style. Indeed, Winterbottom has adopted this style, with Wonderland, In This World, and Code 46 all described as being made using “the same semi-guerrilla technique” (Winter 2010, 62). Damon Smith also suggests that A Mighty Heart was shot “guerrilla-style” (Smith 2010, xv). While we might say that the films also have a “punk” aesthetic, a term that Winterbottom is happy to use when it comes to 24 Hour Party People (see Kipp 2010, 57), since that film is about the post-punk Madchester music scene, both “punk” and “guerrilla” have in common an aesthetic imperfection that is married to a sense of authenticity and a non-mainstream political outlook. Damon Smith suggests that Winterbottom’s films “do bear a signature, both in terms of the conditions under which they are filmed and the sense of reality that erupts through his fictional constructs, as well as in the types of location-specific stories and characters (marginals, outsiders, ‘people excluded from society’) that continually draw his attention” (Smith 2010, xix). The conditions to which Smith refers are Winterbottom’s insistent location shoots; filming without permits, these are not locations prepped for filming, but rather locations captured in “documentary” fashion, and so in both In This World and A Mighty Heart, we see streets filled with real people who, as Bennett has noted, occasionally stare at the camera (Bennett 2014, 180). Such moments, together with the grain of the digital image, which certainly is not as rich or detailed as those captured with full lighting and on 35mm, lend to the films an “imperfection” (or to use terminology more suited to punk, a rawness) which is, significantly, political. Julio García Espinosa (1979) famously wrote about the need for an imperfect cinema that would challenge the domination of the aesthetically “perfect” mainstream from Hollywood—and it is perhaps no surprise that García Espinosa is referenced in relation to Winterbottom’s cinema, especially his more overtly “political” films like In This World, The Road to Guantánamo, and A Mighty Heart.2 For, while a film about Afghan refugees might not attract funding from a large studio, nonetheless there is perhaps a need for Afghan refugees to be represented in cinema (especially as something other than villains in a global action movie). Bereft of the funding to make an aesthetically “perfect” film, Winterbottom instead



Michael Winterbottom

89

embraces imperfection and makes a film featuring moments of confusing sound, in-camera night vision, amateur actors, and real locations in which one cannot control all aspects of production. Imperfect cinema, then, is related to politics. However, I would like to suggest here that this “political” dimension applies not just to Winterbottom’s “political” films (Welcome to Sarajevo, The Shock Doctrine, and The Emperor’s New Clothes), but also to films like A Cock and Bull Story and the two Trip shows. As I shall suggest, this political dimension comes at the expense of Winterbottom’s position as auteur, thus making him self-effacing.

Filming work; film as work Often related to García Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” is the clarion call made by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (1976) to create a “Third Cinema.” Third cinema would stand in opposition both to the First Cinema of Hollywood, but also, significantly, to the Second Cinema that was the European auteur tradition into which Winterbottom at times tries to insert himself. In other words, Third Cinema is not an auteur-driven cinema (even if, paradoxically, the makers of many Third Cinema films are fêted as auteurs, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Glauber Rocha, Jorge Sanjinés, and Ousmane Sembène). In other words, considered as a whole, tension emerges between Second and Third Cinema tendencies in Winterbottom’s work, with his auteur aspects in part contradicting his digitally-enabled “political” outlook. What is more, Winterbottom even makes the occasional foray into First Cinema, through American films like The Killer Inside Me. Is Winterbottom’s co-opting of “third cinema” thus simply an expression of First World privilege? Furthermore, if enabled by digital technology, is Winterbottom’s cinema really revolutionary if that technology is a product par excellence of capitalist development? These questions are just, not least because Winterbottom cannot help being (comparatively) privileged. Nonetheless, he does use digital technology not to make low-budget copies of mainstream films, but politically-charged films that do not hide but show labor, including the labor of their own making. Winterbottom cannot be a Third World filmmaker, but he can use the products of capitalism to expose the injustices of capitalism. Going on location and following Enayat and Jamal from Pakistan to London clearly means that In This World is about the labor involved in traveling and crossing borders. The Road to Guantánamo details the labor that takes place at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Wonderland clearly demonstrates how labor plays a key role in the lives of contemporary Londoners as we see Nadia at work in her Soho café and Eddie trying to find work. Similarly, Everyday details the labor that is involved in family life,

90

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

especially in the absence of an incarcerated father. 24 Hour Party People gives significant screen time to a peripheral figure like producer Martin Hannett as well as demonstrating the talent (or otherwise) of Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays. Welcome to Sarajevo and The Face of an Angel are clearly interested in the work of journalists. And The Killer Inside Me is viscerally affective because it shows the physical labor that goes into murder (Casey Affleck sweating as he beats people to a pulp). Even if envious-making, The Trip and The Trip to Italy are also interested in the working lives of Coogan and Brydon and in the work of reviewing restaurants (we regularly see chefs at work). In other words, Winterbottom is consistently interested in labor in its various different forms. Moreover, Winterbottom is interested in showing the labor that goes into his own films, a trait that is tied both to the digital and to the self-effacement that characterizes his work. Filmmaking is, with the odd exception of lone filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, collaborative, and this is something that Winterbottom himself emphasizes (Smith 2010, xviii). In A Cock and Bull Story, we see Coogan and Brydon acting versions of themselves. Given that the cameras are continuously rolling without cut or action being said, it becomes impossible to work out where the acting begins and ends. As such, the film becomes a documentary of its own making, documenting not just the performances of the actors, but also the work that goes into those performances—as if there was no distinction between the two. If A Cock and Bull Story is obviously a film about its own making, the same also applies to a “political” film like In This World. Here, again, it sometimes becomes impossible to work out what was planned and what was not, what is fictional and what is real. In other words, the film documents its own making, refusing to hide from view the work that has gone into its creation. This is also made clear by the various other Brechtian aspects of Winterbottom’s films, such as freeze frames and direct address to camera, that feature throughout his oeuvre. Although not unique to the digital, the ability of digital cameras both to access unusual locations and to shoot for longer helps to bring about this aesthetic. Nonetheless, it relies not just on Winterbottom showing the work of his collaborators (thus in some senses minimizing his own “presence” in the film), but also in allowing his collaborators to influence the film as much as, if not more than, he does. For, just as actors without direction must improvise (and bring life to their performances, or demonstrate the performed nature of what seems like liveness), so, too, do the camera crews improvise, since Winterbottom does not tell them what to film and when as they shoot constantly and in more than one place at once (see Kipp 2010, 57; Porton 2010, 101). In this sense, Winterbottom effaces himself from his own films. It is because of this emphasis on collaboration that Damon Smith tellingly describes Winterbottom as an “anti-auteur” (Smith 2010, xviii). In relation to In This World, writer Tony Grisoni says that the inability



Michael Winterbottom

91

to tell reality from fiction can infuriate some viewers (Winter 2010, 61). However, I would suggest, as do both Bennett (2014, 184–5) and Yosefa Loshitzky (2010, 120–3), that this Brechtian technique also involves viewers, since it asks them to work by thinking precisely about what is “real” and what not. This appeal to the spectator to become intellectually (as well as emotionally) engaged in Winterbottom’s films applies not just to his “political” films, but also to the more entertaining films, i.e. Winterbottom’s comedies, especially those featuring Coogan. While In This World clearly asks us to think about the pressing issue of political refugees, and of transnational migration more generally, A Cock and Bull Story and the Trip films similarly use digital imperfection and an inability to tell rehearsal from performance to ask the viewer to engage interpretatively with the film and to think. This involvement of the viewer is, finally, what makes Winterbottom’s work art.

Art: Between cinema and non-cinema In analyzing the “distribution of the sensible,” Jacques Rancière (2004) defines art as that which blurs the boundary between art and non-art, which, by extension, asks us, the audience, to reconsider not just art, but the world in which art is produced. That is, both the artist and the audience put work into art as a result of the artwork’s blurring of the distinction between art and non-art (see Rancière 2004; see also Chow and Rohrhuber 2011). With regard to Winterbottom, something similar takes place, in that the audience is unsure as to where the film begins and ends. This is not just a case of the blurring of fiction and documentary, leaving the audience to think about where the performances start and where the actors “being themselves” begins—although this echoes Rancière’s statement that “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (Rancière 2004, 38). It also reflects the digital moment in which Winterbottom makes his films. For, the digital blurs the boundary between cinema and non-cinema beyond the issue of what was staged and what was not. The manipulability of the digital image perhaps inherently raises questions about the real, but Winterbottom’s digital films also playfully work with the non-cinematic aspects of television—using TV stars, working in the consistent and eclectic fashion of a TV director—as well as the non-theatrical possibilities of home-viewing. Not only have some of Winterbottom’s films been released simultaneously in theaters and on television, but the director also expresses his desire for the films to have simultaneous theatrical and DVD releases (see Nayman 2010, 87), thus affirming the digital erosion of the cinema/ television distinction. Indeed, films like 24 Hour Party People and A Cock

92

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and Bull Story seem at times made for DVD, in that the movie is almost entirely the sort of “behind the scenes” DVD extra that we would typically expect from that format (with the former film even involving a joke about this by the real Tony Wilson in a moment of Brechtian direct address to the camera). Indeed, the “everyday” nature of some of his stories, and/or the way in which his more extraordinary stories are filmed in an everyday fashion (A Mighty Heart is embedded within a bustling Karachi) also helps to blur this boundary. Winterbottom treats in the same fashion the lives of refugees, Londoners, criminals, people having sex, terrorists, journalists, and, in effect, whatever he finds, because all are equal as a result of being “in this world.” In blurring the boundary between cinema and non-cinema, then, Winterbottom paradoxically produces cinema. In effacing himself from the filmmaking process, he paradoxically produces art—the paradox being that art is typically thought of as requiring an artist, and thus, in the language of film studies, an auteur. Michael Winterbottom never works entirely outside of cinema as a commercial enterprise (unlike, say, my own films, which cost a small amount of money to make but which do not require financial returns). Nonetheless, Winterbottom’s digital filmmaking methods allow him to minimize commercial risk, while at the same time exploring as best he can the artistic potential of the medium—an artistic potential that lies precisely in testing the boundaries of the medium. Straddling First, Second, and Third Cinemas, Winterbottom thus produces cinema, even if he has a televisual work ethic and uses to its fullest a digital medium that has been theorized as non- or post-cinematic. More particularly, in demonstrating the work that goes into the making of his own films, Winterbottom reminds his viewers that they, too, are in this world and not just observers without any say or ability to do anything. Not only are his films themselves interventions, then, but in some senses his films invite us also to intervene in the world. This is directly raised as an issue in The Emperor’s New Clothes, which, in the build-up to the 2015 U.K. general election, asked audience members to become involved in creating a world in which the rich no longer get richer and the poor no longer get poorer, but in which there is a democracy in which the work done by people is duly recognized, rather than exploited. By definition, Winterbottom effaces himself somewhat as an auteur, because the work done by all on his films is work that must democratically be acknowledged; he is no more important than anyone else. Enabled by and participating in the digital age, Michael Winterbottom paradoxically emerges, therefore, as a key auteur for the twenty-first century.



Michael Winterbottom

93

Notes 1

For an insightful reading of the shows, see Adam Underwood (2015), “The Trip as Mourning Comedy,” Senses of Cinema 74 (March). Available online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/feature-articles/the-trip-as-mourning-comedy (accessed April 25, 2015).

2

See, for example, Andrew Dix (2009), “‘Do you want this world left on?’ Global imaginaries in the films of Michael Winterbottom,” Style 43 (1) (Spring): 3–25; and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega (2011), “Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political film-making: Illegal bodies in motion,” Transnational Cinemas 2 (1): 3–19. For the punk dimensions of In This World, see Steve Rubio, “Making it Real,” in Nicholas Rombes (ed.), New Punk Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 138–49.

Works cited Astruc, Alexandre. 1968. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La caméra-stylo,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, 17–24. London: Secker & Warburg. Bennett, Bruce. 2014. The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror. London: Wallflower. Chow, Rey and Julian Rohrhuber. 2011. “On Captivation: A Remainder from the ‘Indistinction of Art and Nonart,’” in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus, 44–72. London: Continuum. Ciment, Michel and Yann Tobin. 2010. “People Who are Excluded from Society: Interview with Michael Winterbottom,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, trans. Leighton Walter and Catherine Chomat, 9–19. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. García Espinosa, Julio. 1979. “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut 20: 24–6. Available online: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html (accessed April 27, 2015). Kipp, Jeremiah. 2010. “Anarchy in the UK: An Interview with 24 Hour Party People Director Michael Winterbottom,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, 54–9. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nayman, Adam. 2010. “Chaos Theory: Michael Winterbottom on Tristram Shandy,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, 82–8. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Porton, Richard. 2010. “In Praise of Folly: An Interview with Michael Winterbottom,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, 97–105. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum.

94

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Smith, Damon. 2010. “Introduction,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, ix–xx. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. 1976. “Towards a Third Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods: An Anthology, 44–64. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winter, Jessica. 2010. “World in Motion,” in Damon Smith (ed.), Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, 60–3. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

5 Provocation and perversity: Lars von Trier’s cinematic anti-philosophy Robert Sinnerbrink

Ever since his early “European” features and provocative Dogme 95 period, Lars von Trier has been both celebrated as a brilliant stylist and criticized as a cynical charlatan. What his twenty-first century “cinema of cruelty”1 challenges, however, is precisely this questionable opposition, exploring the ways in which artistic provocation, cinematic game-playing, and philosophical satire can interact in a creative and critical manner. To this end, I propose to read von Trier’s films as a series of experiments in “anti-philosophy”: a cinematic-aesthetic challenge to idealistic rationalism and moralistic humanism that uses philosophical discourse as a weapon of satirical cinematic critique. Focusing on von Trier’s Depression or Trauma Trilogy—Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), and Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and II (2013)—I explore von Trier’s cinematic experiments in antiphilosophy as a form of negativistic aesthetic critique that challenges our convictions through a dissonant conjunction of moral provocation, cinematic game-playing, and philosophical satire.2 Inheriting but also displacing the legacy of European modernist cinema, von Trier applies this subversive aesthetic critique to cinema itself, not least to the figure of the auteur (see Schepelern 2004; Bainbridge 2007; Goss 2009; Badley 2010; Elsaesser 2015).3 In this respect, von Trier is a distinctively twenty-firstcentury auteur whose work enacts an ongoing critical engagement with the difficult inheritance of cinematic modernism in an age that remains skeptical toward the possibilities, whether aesthetic and moral-cultural, of

96

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

cinematic art. In challenging spectators through provocation, game-playing, and satire, von Trier’s trilogy offers, I suggest, an ambiguous, ironic, yet timely revitalization of the “cinema of cruelty”: a series of provocative cinematic experiments in subversive anti-philosophy.

Provocation One distinctive feature of von Trier’s cinematic practice is the repeated combination of aesthetic and moral provocation. What do we mean by “provocation” in this context? It is useful to contrast it with evocation (indirectly suggesting or prompting a view, perspective, idea, or sensibility) and with invocation (to directly point to, refer to, or induce a view, perspective, idea, or sensibility). Provocation is an active stance, a relational performance, demanding an active response: a deliberate, intentional, concerted effort to “force” the recipient—the viewer or critic—into an affectively charged response, using means that are confronting or confusing, surprising or shocking, dissonant or disturbing. Forms of provocation in cinema can be typically moral-psychological (explicit depictions of violence, for example) or aesthetic-cinematic (von Trier’s depiction of unsimulated sexual acts within a fictional narrative film). Consider the aestheticmoral provocation of Antichrist’s opening prelude, which combines artful, sexually explicit, black-and-white imagery of a couple engaging in “real” intercourse in the shower coupled with beautiful, tragic images of their young child climbing onto a window ledge and falling to his death. The entire sequence is rendered in carefully composed super-slow motion images accompanied by a poignant baroque operatic score (Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” from his opera Rinaldo); images that present the domestic collision of sex and death in a tragic-melodramatic, yet stately and stylized, register (see Sinnerbrink 2011). Melancholia offers a similar case of aesthetic stylization doubling as provocation in its opening prelude. The latter uses Wagner’s Vorspiel to Tristan and Isolde to accompany, again, super-slow, tableau-vivant style color imagery condensing theological and cosmological motifs, allusions to modernist film (Resnais, Bergman, and Tarkovsky), neo-romantic painting references, and prophetic apocalyptic visions mediated via the combined genres of domestic melodrama and metaphysical disaster movie (see Shaviro 2012; Read 2014; Sinnerbrink 2014). Or in Nymphomaniac, which combines literary modernist/eighteenth-century philosophical pornography with more recent forms of modernist narrative cinema (visual, formal, and thematic allusions again to Tarkovsky and Bergman, but also Haneke and Greenaway), juxtaposing sexually explicit imagery, violence and trauma, with philosophical/ theological speculation and cinematic self-reflexivity. In all three cases we



LARS VON TRIER

97

FIGURE 5.1 She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and He (Willem Dafoe) making love while their child falls to his death. Source: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) © Zentropa Entertainments, Slot Machine, Memfis Film, Trollhättan Film AB, Lucky Red.

find the merging of aesthetic with moral provocation, linking cinematic modernism with ironic pastiche, sexual explicitness with neo-romantic lyricism, apocalyptic fantasy with a poetics of sublimity, cinematic gameplaying with metaphysical speculation, Dogme-style realism with modernist self-reflexivity. The overall effect of this combined aesthetic and moral provocation is to beguile and enchant, to confront and shock the viewer. It interrupts any reflexively distanced, or affectively immersed, involvement so as to encourage a dissonant, cognitively and affectively conflicted, ambivalent form of spectatorship. We could describe this strategy of moral-aesthetic provocation as a way of inducing thought through moving images, or what I have described elsewhere as “cinematic thinking” (see Sinnerbrink 2011).

Game-playing As Jan Simons has argued in recent years, Lars von Trier is a filmmaker committed to varieties of cinematic game-playing, imposing various “rules” that he and his production crew are supposed to observe during the filmmaking process (Simons 2007, 2008).4 Indeed, there are many examples of such game-playing in von Trier’s oeuvre, both at a diegetic level (within the narrative development) and at a meta-cinematic level (referring to the practice or process of filmmaking itself). The Five Obstructions (De fem benspænd, 2004) takes this combined form of artistic/cinematic gameplaying to an extraordinary pitch of complexity, imposing various rules or “obstructions” on the filmmaker Jørgen Leth while constructing the entire

98

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

film experiment as an elaborate game in which von Trier is supposed to be pushing Leth to reveal his shortcomings and weaknesses as an artist (and man) but in the end exposes and subverts his own directorial persona in the process of documenting (but also deconstructing) the two filmmakers’ collaborative cinematic contest (see Hjort 2008). This inherently “ludic” dimension of von Trier’s work perhaps explains the persistent ambivalence his films generate; a troubling or unsettling uncertainty, a philosophical “undecidability,” as to whether they are serious or not, ironic or sincere, or, one might suggest, somehow both at once. If one overlooks this ludic dimension of von Trier’s work, however, one risks missing a central feature of their form, function, and meaning—the fact that his films feature, which is to say embed, enact, and perform, various kinds of cinematic gameplaying (see Simons 2007). The latter encompass diverse forms of aesthetic/ cinematic play in which a series of more or less arbitrarily chosen, loosely defined cinematic “rules” are invoked in order to direct a course of action or series of happenings with an intended but also unpredictable artistic outcome; and where the ultimate purpose of the game, despite its obvious competitive and ludic aspects, is performative and aesthetic rather than moral or dramatic.5 In Nymphomaniac: Vol. I, an obvious example is the young Jo and B’s provocative game of sexual seduction on a long-distance train—in the chapter allegorically entitled “The Compleat Angler,” which also features Seligman’s playful commentary on the intriguing parallels between angling and seduction—using lures and artful strategy to notch up sexual conquests in competition with each other to win the arbitrary prize of a “bag of chocolate sweeties.” Or consider Jo’s ingenious ludic solution to the problem of keeping track of her numerous lovers, who leave a variety of telephone answering machine messages, namely rolling a dice to randomize her responses to each lover (from indifferent to encouraging to outright rejection), which arbitrarily imposes a rule leading to an unpredictable series of stock responses to her lovers. At a more reflexive level, however, we might also consider The Boss of It All’s (Direktøren for det hele, 2006) outsourcing of directorial control via “automavision;” the deadly cognitive therapy/subversive resistance “battle of the sexes” game between He and She in Antichrist; or, more allegorically, the cosmicpsychological game being played between the Earth and Melancholia (and by the film with us) as Justine’s crippling depression begins to lift—and her “seduction” of Melancholia begins to work—just as the planet performs its teasing “dance of death” before destroying the Earth (and the cinematic world that is Melancholia itself).



LARS VON TRIER

99

Satire One of the challenges posed by von Trier’s works, evident in the highly polarized responses they generate, is that they both deploy and enact forms of artistic and philosophical satire. The latter, unfortunately, is uncommon in contemporary cinema (as compared, for example, with the acerbic and absurdist political satire one finds in Buñuel, in Hitchcock’s ironic games of allusion and imitation with psychoanalysis, or Kurosawa’s brash juxtaposition of Shakespeare and Japanese myth within action and other genres). A satirical work both presents and subverts its object, parasitically invoking it while at the same time parodying or critically reflecting upon it. Philosophical satire both plays with ideas that we might describe as “philosophical,” while at the same time seeking to make a point through such subversive intervention. Artistic satire does the same with reference to other works, genres, or media, finding aesthetic means to engage in parody, ironic subversion, or pastiche (in particular, through the use of cliché).6 Such combined artistic and philosophical satire can function within the diegetic world of the film or at a meta-cinematic level concerning the nature of cinema itself. In von Trier’s films, for example, we might think of Tom’s (Paul Benthany’s) moral-philosophical “lessons” in Dogville (2003), which are presented satirically, ironically, evoking but also mocking moralizing forms of philosophical edification. At a more meta-cinematic level, the film’s explicitly Brechtian staging and distantiating effects, moreover, are themselves satirical expressions and ironic deployments of a recognizably modernist “political” practice of filmmaking that is enacted and subverted at once (which goes some way to explaining the highly ambivalent reactions to this film).7 Antichrist’s presentation of cognitive aversion therapy—as contrasted with the female character’s disturbing genealogy of Western misogyny as encompassing witchcraft and its demonization within modern psychiatry—is likewise an intradiegetic element that is mercilessly satirized, being contrasted, in good horror film fashion, with the “supernaturalist” elements within the film’s unnerving psychogeography of “the forest”: a locale that is at once a mythical fictional setting and an aesthetic expression of the woman’s conflicted, psychic-emotional mood or state of mind. To cite another example, the philosophical disquisitions in Nymphomaniac, along with its allegorical “Chapters,” playful semantic grids, artistic-cinematic allusions, and recurring visual and theological motifs, offer another instance of complex artistic-philosophical satire deployed as an intrinsic feature of the narrative world and its distinctive aesthetic expression. Such presentations are at once serious and ironic, formal and substantive, endorsed within the fictional world even as they are submitted to critical scrutiny or comic-ironic deflation. This strategy of aesthetic-cognitive dissonance is another key feature of von Trier’s cinematic experiments

100

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

in anti-philosophy, with their disconcerting combination of irony and sincerity, playfulness and trauma, philosophical pretentiousness and artistic game-playing. One might argue that the highly self-reflexive character of these cinematic strategies would qualify von Trier’s films as instances of what Stephen Mulhall (2008) calls “film in the condition of philosophy.” It would be misleading, however, to describe these works as “film doing philosophy” in any conventional sense, since they deploy philosophical motifs and ideas in an ironic and ludic manner, even as they explore these ideas and offer cinematic-philosophical commentary on various cultural and philosophical issues. We could cite Dogville’s theologico-political and ideological commentary on (American) democracy, for example, and its brutally deflationary critique of the follies of idealist-humanist forms of moral-political “democratic” intervention (see Sinnerbrink 2007). Hence it is more precise, I suggest, to think of von Trier’s work as a perverse and provocative case of cinematic anti-philosophy: of film both deploying and subverting philosophical ideas, while at the same time provoking questioning via cinematic means.

The Depression or Trauma Trilogy Von Trier’s three most recent films (Antichrist, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and II) form what has been described as a “Depression Trilogy” but could also be described as a “Trauma Trilogy.”8 All three films deal with various experiences of depression in relation to trauma, exploring not only the phenomenology of traumatic states and their subjective effects but also various philosophical-moral questions raised by the experience and cultural significance of these mental/affective states (how they are represented aesthetically, the relationship between the medical model and earlier accounts of mental illness, the relationship between these states and gender, the confrontation between rationalism and romanticism in modernity, madness, mental illness, and art, to name a few). All three films engage, reflect upon, or draw attention to their nature and status as cinematic works as well as their complex relationships with other cinematic works (see Sinnerbrink 2011, 2014; Shaviro 2012). Nonetheless, it would be difficult to argue that von Trier’s Trauma Trilogy represents a straightforward case of “film as philosophy,” principally for the reasons outlined above (the key roles played by provocation, game-playing, and satire in von Trier’s oeuvre). For these reasons, I suggest that von Trier’s films can be regarded as expressions of anti-philosophy that deploy philosophical ideas to aesthetic or cinematic ends, yet in doing so engage in a “negativistic” critique that is also an expression of the ongoing struggle between rationalism and



LARS VON TRIER

101

romanticism. Indeed, his films consistently return to this critical motif, exhibiting and exploring the clash between an Enlightenment-idealist conception of rational order applied to human psychology and social community, and a romanticist-skeptical critique that emphasizes not only the creative-artistic but the destructive-violent tendencies in human beings that resist this rationalistic will to order. The “rebellious” critical romanticism of his films offer a skeptical and ironic counterpoint to an overly idealistic Enlightenment optimism and dogmatic faith in moral-historical progress. They offer subversive filmic exercises in anti-philosophy rather than overt cases of film as philosophy. Anti-philosophy can be taken here in two senses, namely as using philosophical ideas and themes “against” philosophy in its more traditional or received Enlightenment sense (philosophy as the highest expression of Enlightenment ideals of reason); and as a form of cinematic critique proceeding via negativistic means (by way of aesthetic expression and the evocation of negative or dissonant forms of cognitive experience). To be sure, this is an idealized Enlightenment conception of “philosophy” that serves as the primary target of von Trier’s cinematic critique; the latter, however, shares much with cognate forms of subversive philosophical critique—from romanticism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis to critical theory and poststructuralism—that have also challenged Enlightenment rationalism in the latter part of the twentieth century. From this point of view, von Trier’s films are both philosophical (in the critical-romantic sense) and anti-philosophical (in the Enlightenment-rationalist sense): they enact and subvert the ongoing cultural-philosophical dialectic between romanticism and rationalism by combining moral provocation, game-playing, and philosophical satire in a manner that is at once critical and ambiguous.

Antichrist Perhaps the most confronting of von Trier’s three trauma or depression films, Antichrist provides the template, thematically and aesthetically, that Melancholia and the two Nymphomaniac volumes elaborate and develop. All three films deal with a central trauma that precipitates, or manifests as, states of depression or a more generalized “melancholia.”9 In Antichrist it is the tragic accidental death of a child; in Melancholia the cosmic cataclysm of the Earth’s imminent destruction; and in Nymphomaniac it is Jo’s compulsive quest for self-knowledge through traumatic experiences of sexual excess. In each case, there is a central female protagonist whose melancholic responses to this central trauma open up a space of subjective but also aesthetic-expressive engagement (the subjective depressive mood of the protagonist corresponding to, or resonating with, the melancholic mood expressed by the film-world in which she exists). We can see this explicitly

102

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

in all three films. In Antichrist, it is evident in the woman’s intense anxiety and depressive withdrawal expressed through the neo-romantic landscape and supernaturalist elements of the forest to which she and her partner have retreated in order to grieve the loss of their son. In Melancholia, it is manifest in the parallel between Justine’s melancholic withdrawal and loss of world that is echoed by the apocalyptic “dance of death” between the planet Melancholia as it threatens to destroy the Earth. In Nymphomaniac, it is apparent in Jo’s initial traumatic state, left beaten and unconscious in a dank alleyway before being discovered by Seligman, taken to his flat to recover, and narrating her pornographic-picaresque tale of ascetic self-examination and masochistic resistance achieved through sexual transgression. All three films feature carefully composed, hermetically sealed, and cinematically reflexive filmworlds. The latter are presented in similar ways, colored with subdued hues and weak light, evoking existential moods and a discomfiting generic dissonance—juxtaposing stylized musical/slow-motion tableau vivants, for instance, with jarring, handheld Dogme-esque camerawork—coupled with a destabilizing combination of generic hybridity, romantic pathos, and ironic ambivalence. The narrative aspect of Antichrist is gothic in its uncanny effects, yet mythic in its psychological density and cultural-religious resonances. A child dies while a couple are making love. Eschewing conventional medical treatment, the shattered couple leave their home, the scene of the tragic death, and head for their remote forest cabin (with the evocative name of “Eden”), where the wife is supposed to overcome her grief and anxiety by undertaking cognitive exposure therapy under the guidance of her husband/therapist. Instead of catharsis or conversion, however, what ensues is a nightmarish, supernaturally-tinged, life-and-death struggle, at once psychological and sexual. The suppressed guilt over their child’s death returns to haunt both husband and wife—identified simply as “He” and “She” in the credits—in diametrically opposed ways. Assuming the burden of guilt for her child’s death, She begins to brutally punish her husband, sexually and physically, as both accomplice and tormentor, before eventually mutilating, even “castrating,” herself (a truly harrowing scene of genital mutilation). Displacing this guilt on to Her, He thereby allays his own anxiety and fear, perhaps even his misogyny, by strangling Her to death, before burning her, witch-like, on a pyre. He then leaves Eden, alone, his heavy-handed, coercive attempts at cognitive therapy having led to the murder, rather than cure, of his wife. Before returning to civilization, however, He has a final series of visions, in which he sees the forest strewn with the corpses of other women who have been sacrificed in the past. In the movie’s final ambiguous image, He beholds, accompanied again by Handel’s aria, a vast throng of faceless women emerging from the forest, silently overtaking him as he attempts to flee the scene of his wife’s immolation.



LARS VON TRIER

103

Von Trier’s signature combination of provocation, game-playing, and satire are abundantly evident in Antichrist. As suggested by its simultaneously philosophical, blasphemous, and “pulp fiction” movie title, Antichrist confounds the distinctions between domestic melodrama and art horror movie, between misogynistic and feminist explorations of feminine subjectivity, sacrifice, and masculinist violence (see Zolkos 2011). Despite its cinematic excesses, however, it nonetheless recalls a Nietzschean account of tragic art: enacting an aesthetic critique of Enlightenment optimism while also eliciting a (quasi-religious) sense of awe or sublimity in response to the nihilism of modern rationalism. At the same time, von Trier’s abundant provocations in the film make any monological line of interpretation difficult to sustain. These provocations are as much cinematic and aesthetic (concerning the hybridity of genres and styles, from art cinema to pornography, melodrama to modernism, horror to realism) as philosophical, moral, and theological (concerning romanticism versus rationalism, feminism versus misogyny, theological supernaturalism versus naturalistic atheism). It is thus difficult to respond to a film like Antichrist as simply satisfying our desire for cognitive mastery (since that is refused by the film), or aesthetic contemplation (since this is elicited, then rendered traumatic as the film unfolds), or to say that it provides a serious metacinematic commentary on violence, sexuality, misogyny, or other cultural anxieties and myths (because of the film’s deeply ambiguous treatment of such themes). The manner in which the film depicts “cognitive aversion therapy,” for example, is a case in point. On the one hand, therapist-husband He outlines the basic principles of cognitive therapy, which exposes the subject to repeated encounters with the source of their anxiety, showing that Her fears are unfounded and beliefs erroneous, thereby clearing a space for a correction of Her beliefs and thus a modulation of their debilitating affective responses. On the other, the therapy sessions, with their simple tasks and crude rules soon become a perverse kind of game between husband/therapist and wife/patient—which fits admirably von Trier’s ludic aesthetic. The woman pits her aborted project on the history of misogyny and ambivalence toward parenting against her husband’s rationalistic detachment, disenchanted view of nature, and disciplinary exercises in cognitive and moral correction. Elements of philosophical satire also come into play, with reference to Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, but also in presenting cognitive therapy as a pragmatic but dubious attempt to demystify and “correct” unconscious dimensions of psychic experience that elude rationalistic accounting and practical engagement. Indeed, the film’s ambivalent conclusion hints that the cognitive therapy that was supposed to cure Her of depression was itself a kind of violence or will to control. His misguided therapy unleashes a latent misogyny that leads Him to act out yet another historical repetition of the cycle of persecution,

104

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 5.2  Kirsten Dunst in a shot referencing Millais’ Ophelia.

Source: Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) © Nordisk Film, Les films du losange, Entertainment One, Magnolia Pictures, Concorde Filmverleih.

conflict, and violence that is the history of Western culture’s (masculinist) attempts to rationally master and control (internal and external) Nature. At the same time, the perverse conclusion that She draws from her thesis research into Gynocide, trumped by her own mad experience of the malevolent force of Nature, is both endorsed and questioned by the film. We are forced to endure the affective dissonance of violent psychological, sexual, and physical trauma; but also the cognitive dissonance of attempting to reconcile clashing yet complementary worldviews that do not cohere in any rational whole. Indeed, the film’s treatment of intractable trauma can only be confronted obliquely, through a cinematic performance of trauma, while leaving open the moral provocations, game-playing, and ambivalent satire that von Trier employs. The deeply disturbing effects of the film—the first in his Depression Trilogy—are in large part due to the dissonant moralcognitive and cinematic-aesthetic effects of these overlapping strategies.

Melancholia Von Trier’s second film in this trilogy, Melancholia, is a remarkable fusion of Dogme-style melodrama, apocalyptic disaster movie, and mock-Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Combining Schopenhauerian pessimism with German romanticism, Bergmanesque psychodrama with art cinema experimentation,



LARS VON TRIER

105

Melancholia also explores the “mood disorder” of depression (or melancholia, to use the premodern, cultural-aesthetic term on which the film insists) through a combination of moral provocation, cinematic gameplaying, and philosophical satire. On the one hand it presents a devastating portrait of melancholia, dramatizing the main character Justine’s pathological experience of a “loss of world” that finds its objective correlative in a sublime cinematic fantasy of world-annihilation. On the other, Melancholia attempts to “work through” the loss of worlds—cinematic but also cultural and natural—that characterizes our historical mood, which we might call a deflationary apocalypticism. It is a cinematic exploration of nihilism, of melancholia as a cultural-aesthetic mood, which provokes and seduces its audience with sublime apocalyptic spectacle. Despite the allusions, gameplaying, and self-reflexivity, it stages an ambiguous cinematic critique of rationalist optimism through a neo-romantic allegory of world-destruction. Many critics have singled out the film’s powerful, veracious depiction of depression for particular praise. To be sure, its authentic presentation of the experience of melancholia is not confined to one character’s subjective, psychological, or bodily experience but shows how it seems to afflict “the world” itself and reveal it in a certain light (see Shaviro 2012; Read 2014). For all the brilliance of Kirsten Dunst’s performance, however, it would be misleading to interpret the film primarily as a psychological study of depression. Rather, melancholia is evoked in the film as a mood, an aesthetic sensibility, a way of experiencing time; it expresses a visionary condition and aesthetic experience of revelatory temporality that contemporary cinema has all but lost. Indeed, Melancholia is distinguished by the manner in which the subjective perspective of the character’s (Justine’s) mood, and the mood expressed by the filmworld or narrative point of view, coalesce and merge with each other—aspects that are ordinarily kept apart in most narrative films (see Plantinga 2012). It is not only Justine’s state of mind that we experience but how the “world itself” is revealed as melancholy, imbued, for example, with a pervasive blue light, doubled shadows, rumbling base sounds, and thinning atmosphere. Chiming with Kristeva’s remarkable study of melancholia, Black Sun (1992), von Trier’s Melancholia attempts to reclaim the romantic association of melancholia with prophetic vision and artistic genius (hence the references to Brueghel, Wagner, and Tarkovsky). It evokes melancholia as an aesthetic, anachronistic yet historically resonant mood expressing contemporary cultural-historical anxieties, while also commenting on the corruption and possible redemption of cinema in the digital age. Indeed, Melancholia attempts to retrieve some of the possibilities of art cinema in a commercial-digital age by channeling modernist cinematic “masters” while fusing genre cinema with hybrid forms (domestic melodrama meets metaphysical disaster movie). In an important scene, Justine, having withdrawn from her own wedding celebration, reacts violently to the

106

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

pictures of modernist art in the books on display in the library, replacing them with pre-modern and romantic images (Brueghel, Millais, and so on), as though her melancholia were itself a symptom of the decadence of modernist optimism, its corruption into contemporary advertising design. Justine’s gesture of refusal and negation signals that these ideas—the corruption of modernist art by advertising, and the retrieval of romanticism as an antidote to the myth of progress—prefigures the destruction of the image-world that is soon to come (recalling the image of Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow being consumed by flame and turning to ash). What is it that defines Justine’s—and the film’s—melancholia? In Melancholia (the film), Justine’s negation of self and failure to participate in the rituals of everyday life—like her own wedding reception—leaves her bereft of the capacity for affective engagement and meaningful social agency. She strives to play the smiling bride, but like the oversize limousine that gets stuck on the way to her wedding reception, she no longer fits the social world in which she now exists—the social rituals strike her as empty, trivial, and absurd. In the course of the evening, she withdraws from the wedding reception, withdraws from her husband, rejects the demands of her boss, loses her career, seduces an underling and prompts her husband to leave her, is abandoned by her family, and falls into a deep depression that leaves her unable to speak or to move. This melancholia, however, is not only confined to Justine’s crippling depression but pervades the entire world of the film. Melancholia is a mood that imbues the world with a distinctive sensibility, congealing the present, negating the comportment defining everyday activity, thus revealing an uncanny, “prophetic” dimension of temporal experience. Justine’s selfnegation extends from her family and work to her investment in the world itself. It is thus with a sense of relief that she learns of the impending collision of Melancholia with the Earth. Her sister Claire becomes increasingly frightened about what is to come, her anxiety overpowering her otherwise calm, emotionally stable, supportive demeanor. Her husband, by contrast, initially reassuring, even patronizing as he explains how the “fly-by” presents an exciting natural spectacle rather than an existential threat, clings to his faith in science, only to fall into fatal despair once he realizes that the scientists and their theories were wrong. He commits suicide rather than face the truth: admitting his humiliating impotence in the face of disaster, his inability to shield his family from certain death. Shattering our myths of progress, von Trier seems to suggest, could lead to a cultural nihilism, collective depression, if not societal self-destruction. Justine, by contrast, slowly emerges from her depression, gains strength, and becomes calm and contemplative. Seduced by the presence of the vast planet, she bathes nude in its eerie blue light, beguiled by its growing presence as it hurtles toward the Earth, pulling our planet into its fatal embrace. Justine’s melancholia takes on cosmic dimensions, her negation of self and world



LARS VON TRIER

107

enveloping the world itself. Her melancholia thus achieves its end, just as the planet Melancholia destroys the Earth, destroys Justine, Claire, and Leo in their “magic cave,” and just as the film Melancholia annihilates, in a sublime spectacle, the image-world it had so beautifully composed. What is this metaphysical comfort afforded by the sublime spectacle of world-destruction? At one level, Melancholia is a Nietzschean tragedy drawing on Wagnerian romanticism and Schopenhauerian pessimism; on another, it is a meta-cinematic meditation on the “end of cinema” as an art form capable of revealing new worlds. Here again one of the provocations of the film is to decide to what extent the references to romanticism, Wagner, pessimism, depression, modernism, apocalypticism, and the like, are “serious” or elements of an elaborate cinematic game (or indeed both at once). From one perspective, Melancholia is a metaphysical and romantic film fable that finds its completion in a sublime depiction of the destruction of life on Earth—the only life in the universe, according to Justine— rendered as a random act of cosmic justice: “The Earth is evil. No one will grieve for it when it is gone.” On the other, it constructs an elaborate and exquisitely detailed cinematic game or “experiment”; one that puts quasiallegorical characters (representing melancholia, optimism, anxiety, and so on), within a domestic melodrama animated by the unthinkable specter of species-annihilation, accompanied by Wagnerian pathos, romantic antimodernism, and an undertone of philosophical pessimism.10 Indeed, although the film resonates with contemporary “apocalyptic” themes, there is no didactic “political” or cryptic “messianic” message within it. Nonetheless, it is difficult to ignore the mood, sensibility, and aesthetic disposition of the film as clearly critical of the complacency, moral blindness, and destructive denialism of consumer capitalism and its willful indifference to environmental catastrophe (see Matts and Tynan 2012; Shaviro 2012; Read 2014). Rather, what we find in the film is an ironic critique of a destructive rationalist optimism: that given our irrational faith in the myth of progress, and destructive fantasies of controlling nature, the only foreseeable end is a scenario of world-destruction. At the same time, this thought is presented through a sublime cinematic spectacle of worlddestruction. The ambivalence and moral dissonance of the film’s cinematic games, ideological allegories, and metaphysical elements are thereby powerfully reinforced. On the one hand, Melancholia offers us a tragic insight, an ethical experience of sublimity, of the finitude of our world horizons. On the other, it is an aesthetic spectacle of world-sacrifice, a sacrifice of the “corrupted” image-world defining a melancholy modernity; one that also presents itself as part of a cinematic game that could be criticized for its own ironic nihilism and ambivalent skepticism. Melancholia’s radical gesture of world-sacrifice thus offers an intimation of the ethical challenge posed by the thought of world-destruction: the difficulty of imagining a future beyond the end of the world, while undercutting any stable moral-ethical

108

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

framework from which such an encounter could be represented, let alone averted, in cultural-political life.

Nymphomaniac: Volume I and II Von Trier’s third film in the Trauma or Depression Trilogy, Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and II, continues the theme of a “woman in trouble” (to quote Lynch’s Inland Empire [2006]), one who is enduring a state of mental distress or mood disorder, struggling with depression, anxiety, or compulsive risktaking, and the inability of those around her—particularly the men in her life—to understand or cope with her state of mind and her erratic, drastic forms of “acting out.” It is also concerned, at a more reflexive level, with the performance of narrative cinematic art, and the complex “dialectical” relationship that obtains between film, director, and spectator, the ambiguous “contract” set up between the film and us. Here too we find the interaction of moral provocation, cinematic game-playing, and philosophical satire played out against a framing, pornographic, picaresque narration interrupted by various “digressions” that complement, interrupt, or displace the woman’s recounting of the agony of her sexual journey. The obvious provocation of the film’s title (with its iconic-vulvic visual graphic) and controversial subject-matter is coupled with a deliberate framing of the film as drawing on generic conventions of literary-philosophical pornography as well as aesthetic modernist/arthouse cinema. The film’s slow, melancholy opening tracking shot—coursing through a labyrinthine alleyway, dank and crumbling, the camera resting on nondescript elements of the urban wasteland space, contemplating rainwater dripping down old brickwork and pattering on empty rubbish bins—recalls the worlds of Tarkovsky and Bergman. The sudden interruption of this cinematic reverie by the brutal aggression of Rammstein’s industrial, hard rock anthem Führe Mich [Lead Me] (recalling a similar musical interruption used in the opening sequences of Haneke’s Funny Games) reframes and complexifies the film’s intertextual referencing, but also anticipates the film’s essential dynamic contrast between passages of contemplative reflection, meandering digression, and violent interruption. The stark presentation of Jo’s inert body, collapsed on the wet pavement, battered and bruised, opens the film’s questioning of this woman’s identity through her story. She is discovered by the ascetic, asexual, and erudite character of Seligman, who explains later to Jo that his name means “happy” or “blissful one.” Bringing the traumatized Jo back to his austere, modernist apartment (again, seemingly borrowed from a Bergman or Tarkovsky film), plying her with tea and a sympathetic ear, Jo, who describes herself to him as one of the (morally) worst people he could ever meet, is now ready to tell him (and us) her story.



LARS VON TRIER

109

The first “chapter,” entitled “The Compleat Angler,” referring to Izaak Walton’s famous 1653 text, begins the story of Jo’s discovery of her sexual being as a young girl and the motivations behind her sexual odyssey as a young woman. The Tarkovsky-esque opening shot of reeds wavering in the water is coupled with a “literary” title announcing the chapter in a manner recalling Godard or Greenaway. Indeed, the cinematic game that follows recalls Greenaway’s ludic engagement with sexuality and corporeality: the imposition of arbitrary schemata on to the stories—and the chaotic forces of sexuality and corporeal desire that underlie them—via lists and rules, and formal, visual, as well as conceptual correspondences that intersect but also interfere with the narrative’s depicted content. In Nymphomaniac it involves Jo and Seligman’s narrative game (a game also played by von Trier with the spectator) in which Jo recounts her “pornographic” story, taking as her cue arbitrary elements within Seligman’s bleak apartment (a fishing fly, for instance), while he interrupts her story with a variety of imaginative digressions based upon his literary-historical erudition, artistic imagination, and philosophical preoccupations. There is Jo’s affectless recounting of the joyless loss of her virginity to gruff Jerome, for example, who brusquely yet briefly penetrates her (vaginally and anally) in a manner (2 + 3 = 5, expressed in a graphic overlay) that inspires Seligman to draw a sublimating parallel with the Fibonacci series in mathematics (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.). Here as elsewhere in the film, Jo plays feminine body/sexuality/desire to Seligman’s mind/spirituality/asceticism. Her libertarian skepticism about romantic love and self-abnegating masochism is modulated by her insight into the mechanics and dynamics of both feminine and masculine sexual desire. Her grueling physical examination of selfhood through acts of sexual transgression is offset by her passionate yet tragic attachment to flawed first lover and later husband/father, Jerome. This ludic interaction between Jo and Seligman—in part recalling a priest/confessor, therapist/patient, but also artist/critic relationship—sets the scene for the chapters of the two volumes that follow: some alluding explicitly to other films and filmmakers, such as “The Mirror,” but also to von Trier’s own films Antichrist (reprising the scene where the young boy appears to be about to fall from the open balcony) and Melancholia (using footage of the planets taken from the film accompanied by Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde). It would be idle to list the various provocations in the two films comprising Nymphomaniac. To cite the most obvious, we might include the explicit sex scenes (including unsimulated scenes shot with body doubles); Jo’s embrace of her identity as a “nymphomaniac” and refusal to be pathologized as a “sex addict” (which parallels Justine’s embrace of “melancholia” and her refusal to accept the clinical term “depression”); her controversial digressions on paedophilia (defending those born with unacceptable desires but who nonetheless manage to suppress these and not act upon them) and abortion (in the Director’s Cut there is a graphic

110

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

presentation of Jo performing a home abortion and subsequent heated debate with Seligman over the morality of abortion and the controversial question of its depiction). There are explicit diegetic games such as the aforementioned sexual train game between Jo and B; the “The Little Organ School” Jo and B form, a blasphemous secret “sect” of young women dedicated to sexual libertarianism without romantic attachment; the strict, disciplined, technical rituals of posture, binding, and the inflicting of pain between K and Jo during their underground sado-masochistic game-playing sessions. Finally, we could mention Jo’s confronting use of her sexual experience and knowledge of male perversions as part of her work as a debt collector, which culminates in her extracting involuntary signs of desire from a paedophile once she begins narrating to him a story involving a young boy. And so on. There are also what we might call extra-diegetic cinematic games in Nymphomaniac, typically using cross-cinematic references, including to his own oeuvre, as well as varieties of aesthetic and intellectual game-playing, which we see in Seligman’s schematizing of Jo’s stories via arbitrarily chosen cultural, historical, literary, or theologico-metaphysical schemata or “grids.” Again, there are too many of these to cite exhaustively but suffice to say that they constitute a major part of the narrative logic of development driving the film from one episode (and chapter) to the next. To mention some of the most obvious, there is the aforementioned fly-fishing discussion; the references to musical intervals and the devil’s tritone used by “The Little Flock”; a recitation of the opening of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); Seligman’s learned discussion of the theological and moral differences between the Eastern

FIGURE 5.3 Charlotte Gainsbourg after the harrowing abortion scene (only available in the director’s cut). Source: Nymphomaniac (Vol. II) (Lars von Trier, 2013) © Zentropa Entertainments, Heimatfilm, Film i Väst, Slot Machine, Caviar Films, Concorde Filmverleih, Artificial Eye, Les Films du Losange, Caviar.



LARS VON TRIER

111

Church and the Western Church focusing on the relationship between sensuality and suffering; a tea stain conjuring up an image of James Bond’s favorite weapon; Charlotte Gainsbourg’s interpretation of Jimi Hendrix’s hit song “Hey, Joe” at the film’s end, and so on. Philosophical satire too is patently present, with the film’s playful referencing of mathematical, moral, literary, and theological themes. This stands in stark contrast with the manner in which Seligman’s moral humanism, pedagogical ethics, and philosophical tolerance is brutally exposed and negated by the film’s deflationary denouement—Jo’s remembering to “rack” the gun (as Seligman reminded her) just as he is about to rape her is concealed from the spectator, being played out in an off-screen darkness, beyond the space of cinematic presentation that is otherwise so abundantly exploited. All three films, in sum, play out this ambiguous and ironic strategy of moral provocation, cinematic game-playing, and philosophical satire. All three films also explore different dimensions of depression, and indeed of trauma, both valorizing the aesthetic dimensions of these mood disorders for artistic purposes, and subverting or satirizing the well-meaning but misguided idealistic and rationalistic attempts to master, control, or correct such cultural “pathologies.” The Depression or Trauma Trilogy could thus be described as an experiment in cinematic anti-philosophy: a subversive critique of rationalistic humanism, or, alternatively, a performative case of film-philosophical irony with ambivalent (both serious and ludic) intent. At the same time, von Trier’s cinematic provocations remain highly self-reflexive, referring not only to a troubled relationship with the history of cinematic modernism but to his own authorial persona—as neurotic, depressive, ludic, and ironic—thus presenting this persona as another recursive feature of his experiments in cinematic game-playing. Indeed, a recurring pattern can thus be discerned across von Trier’s oeuvre: a subversive aesthetic critique applied to cinema itself, both mimicking and distorting, affirming and negating, the inherited traditions of (European) modernism (via a mediated romanticism) in a ludic, ironic, and “philosophical” manner. This is an ambiguous yet necessary strategy for a filmmaker dealing with the difficult legacy of modernism: both inheriting and adopting various elements of modernist filmmaking style and ethics, while at the same time acknowledging the “impossibility” of simply reproducing modernism without falling into an aesthetic “bad faith” concerning contemporary cultural conditions. Hence von Trier’s ingenious strategy of cinematic anti-philosophy: far from staging serious philosophical thought experiments, von Trier’s ambiguous provocations, aesthetic game-playing, and satirical critique achieve a uniquely dialectical and dissonant quality of being at once philosophically subversive, antiphilosophical works.

112

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Notes 1

Indeed, von Trier might be regarded as one of the contemporary contributors to what Truffaut, in honor of Bazin, dubbed “the cinema of cruelty” (1982): a loosely defined tradition of moral provocation and aesthetic subversion including the work of filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Carl Dreyer, and Akira Kurosawa.

2

See Elsaesser (2015) for a related discussion of von Trier’s Melancholia as a cinematico-philosophical “thought experiment” that belongs with the contemporary sub-genre of (melodramatic) “mind-game” films. My reading of his films—in particular the Depression or Trauma Trilogy—emphasizes, rather, the role of philosophical satire as part of von Trier’s cinematic game-playing, an emphasis that renders ambiguous the “seriousness” of the philosophical thought experiments at play in his work.

3

Von Trier’s much-publicized bouts of depression, experience of cognitive psychotherapy, unfortunate media statements, and problems with alcohol are all well known. More intriguing is the manner in which these elements both constitute and undermine the “authenticity” of his cinematic authorial persona.

4

Simons emphasizes the role of game theory scenarios (such as the prisoner’s dilemma) and is followed in this regard by Elsaesser (2015). I would suggest, however, that von Trier focuses more on the ludic-artistic, rather than the rationalist “choice theory” dimensions, of the various cinematic game-playing strategies in his films.

5

The Dogme manifesto, with its notorious “rules” comprising the “vow of chastity” might be regarded as precisely a cinematic-aesthetic game in this sense, which is not to imply that it is not serious and purposeful with respect to its intended effects as an intervention in the contemporary condition of cinema. See Thomas Elsaesser “The Mind-Game Film,” in Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films and Complex Storytelling (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) for an extended discussion of (Hollywood) “mind-game” films.

6

See Bonnie Honig and Kori J. Marso “Introduction: Lars von Trier and the ‘Clichés of our Times,’” Theory and Event 18 (2) for an illuminating discussion of von Trier’s ironic exacerbation and subversion of received political (and cinematic) clichés. Available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/theory_and_event/v018/18.2.honig.html (accessed August 1, 2015).

7

See Angelos Koutsourakis, Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2013) on von Trier’s post-Brechtian cinema.

8

“Depression Trilogy” is highly evocative (and clearly refers to von Trier’s own professed struggles with depression), but I prefer “Trauma Trilogy” to capture not only the central role of trauma in these films but the manner in which the depressive responses depicted therein are a response to trauma and subject the spectator to something akin to a traumatic experience (rather than one of depression).



9

LARS VON TRIER

113

The distinction between “melancholia” as a premodern, aesthetic sensibility or mood and “depression” as a thoroughly modern, clinical, rationally construed condition, becomes thematic and submitted to allegorical exploration in Melancholia.

10 See Elsaesser (2015) for a discussion of the melodrama of Melancholia.

Works cited Badley, Linda. 2010. Lars von Trier. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bainbridge, Caroline. 2007. The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Bazin, André. 1982. Cinema of Cruelty: From Bunuel to Hitchcock, ed. François Truffaut, trans. Sabine d’Estrée. New York: Seaver Books. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2015. “Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment,” Theory and Event 18 (2). Available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v018/18.2.elsaesser.html (accessed June 30, 2015). Goss, Brian Michael. 2009. Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodóvar, von Trier, and Winterbottom. New York: Peter Lang. Hjort, Mette (ed.). 2008. Dekalog 01: On The Five Obstructions. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1992. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Matts, Tim and Tynan, Aidan. 2012. “The Melancholy of Extinction: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Environmental Film,” M/C Journal 15 (3): “Ecology”. Available online: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/ article/viewArticle/491 (accessed September 24, 2012). Mulhall, Stephen. 2008. On Film, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Plantinga, Carl. 2012. “Art Moods and Human Moods in Narrative Cinema,” New Literary History 43 (3) (Summer): 455–75. Read, Rupert. 2014. “An Allegory of a ‘Therapeutic’ Reading of a Film: of Melancholia.” Available online: Sequence 12, http://reframe.sussex. ac.uk/sequence1/1-2-an-allegory-of-a-therapeutic-reading (accessed June 30, 2015). Schepelern, Peter. 2004. “The Making of an Auteur: Notes on Auteur Theory and Lars von Trier,” in Torben Kragh Grodal, Bente Larsen, and Iben Thorving Laursen (eds), Visual Authorship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media, 103–73. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2012. “MELANCHOLIA, or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime,” Sequence 1.1. eBook Available online: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence/ files/2012/12/MELANCHOLIA-or-The-Romantic-Anti-Sublime-SEQUENCE1.1-2012-Steven-Shaviro.pdf (accessed June 30, 2015). Simons, Jan. 2007. Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Simons, Jan. 2008. “Von Trier’s Cinematic Games,” Journal of Film and Video 60 (1) (Spring): 1–13.

114

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2007. “Grace and Violence: Questioning Politics and Desire in Lars von Trier’s Dogville,” Scan, Special Issue “Film as Philosophy” 4 (2) (August). Available online: http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_ id=94 (accessed August 31, 2015). Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. “Chaos Reigns: Anti-cognitivism in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,” in Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images, 157–76. London and New York: Continuum. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2014. “Anatomy of Melancholia,” Angelaki 19 (4) (December): 111–26. Zolkos, Magdalena. 2011. “Violent Affects: Nature and the Feminine in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist,” Parrhesia 13: 177–89.

6 From political engagement to politics of abjection in Polish auteur cinema: The case of Wojtek Smarzowski Izabela Kalinowska

“Quite unexpectedly, [Wojtek] Smarzowski has become the most important film director of our times,” wrote film reviewer Zdzisław Pietrasik for the weekly Polityka, in May of 2014. Citing the cult following gained by some of Smarzowski’s films in Poland, and the commercial successes the director has scored, the reviewer asserts that Smarzowski has effectively “furnished” the Poles’ national imaginary with plenty of grist for their mill. Post-communist Poland has recognized itself in the crooked mirror of his cinema. Why has this success been “unexpected”? The issue begs a question that the author of the cited text does not fully answer. So far, Smarzowski belongs neither to the small group of Polish film authors who have succeeded in attaining a presence on the international festival circuit, nor to the venerable ranks of makers of “feelgood” national epics that have often relied on the national literary canon, and have been destined for the domestic market. Within the realities of the increasingly globalized film industry, Smarzowski defies classification. And yet, since his 1998 debut film, Earlobe (Małżowina), and with six other feature films that he has directed so far, he has undoubtledly established himself as one of Poland’s most influential and noteworthy filmmakers of this century.

116

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

In interviews, Smarzowski jokingly refers to himself as the author of romantic comedies, but such ironic statements only go to emphasize the bleakness and near-hopelessness of the world that he has consistently been constructing in his films. Smarzowski’s first feature film centers on an aspiring young author who divulges, at one point, that his new book will be “about life,” that is “about everything: sperm, love, stiffs, blood, tears, spit.” In fact, an abundant display of bodily excretions becomes Smarzowski’s own visual “authorial stamp,” and, at the same time, a defining conceptual feature of his cinema. His films investigate the place of—what Julia Kristeva refers to as—the abject, that is, of all that is usually smoothed over or relegated outside of the symbolic order because it disturbs and threatens to cause the breakdown of meaning.1 Reduced to the basest, the human condition as presented in Smarzowski’s cinema points to the fragility of conventional moral systems and of the myths that bind communities. Yet, for all his originality within the context of Polish cinema, Smarzowski’s work may best be assessed within a broader framework that includes the establishment of the institution of film authorship in modern Polish cinema in the post-World War II period. In a speech he gave at the height of the Solidarity movement in 1980, Andrzej Wajda spoke of cinema as the one branch of the arts in Poland “resolute enough to say new and important things about contemporary realities.” Cinema dealt, according to Wajda, in “an attempt at a new description of our present situation and a new diagnosis of our social conflicts and tensions.” Wajda emphasized a “new kind of contact with the viewers” alluding to the great social resonance that Polish cinema enjoyed in the 1970s, and at the beginning of the 1980s (1983, 169). Wajda clearly saw filmmakers as continuators of politically engaged authors who had dominated Polish culture since the nineteenth century. In addition to inspired assertions of art’s autonomy, Polish Romanticism abounded in statements emphasizing the writers’/artists’ social mission and obligation to serve the nation. Such political orientation of most of Polish, nineteenthcentury intellectual production stemmed, to a large extent, from the nation’s statelessness: for over a hundred years Poland persisted as an idea rather than a territorial and political entity. These circumstances inspired statements, such as in Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz: “Oh, if I could only live long enough to see these books find their way to peasant huts.” Polish writers, including many who lived in exile, were not merely interested in speaking to a small circle of like-minded bohemians. They considered it their mission to critique the status quo and address issues that were relevant for broad circles of their compatriots.2 At first, the circumstances of the national film industry’s birth in post-World War II Poland did not seem to favor the development of auteur cinema. Established, fully-funded and controlled by the communist government, Polish film industry was to serve as a means of spreading



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

117

political propaganda. Yet, instead of advocating for a wider acceptance of the political system that resulted from Soviet military and political dominance in the region, young Polish filmmakers soon began to ask challenging questions—from the perspective of the Communist Party establishment—about the nation’s past and present. Especially after the end of Stalinism in 1956, a growing degree of independence from the official party line became very apparent in filmmaking in Poland. Many young filmmakers began, at that point, to establish themselves as film auteurs, in nearly every sense of the word. It will remain one of the many paradoxes of the communist period of Poland’s history that the government continued to fund the state film industry, even after the dissenting sympathies of major film authors, such as Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Feliks Falk, Wojciech Marczewski, and others became very apparent. Thus, instead of becoming a party hack, Wajda, for example, established himself as a filmmaker who continued in the tradition of great Polish romantics: he became an engaged author who challenged the political establishment and agitated his viewers to question the legitimacy of the system and to oppose its injustices. And—what’s most interesting—he was actually quite successful at getting the message across to a wider public. When Wajda’s iconoclastic Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru) was released in 1977, people lined up outside movie theaters to see it, and ordinary “citizens” organized themselves to make sure that the hard-tocome-by tickets to the film’s screening were distributed fairly. The ability to speak to a broad audience about ideologically-charged contemporary issues distinguished Polish film authors from other modernist filmmakers and artists of the time. As is usually the case, the victorious revolution of 1989 devoured its own children. Now lacking a concrete force to react against, the model of politically engaged film authorship exhausted itself along with the collapse of communism. A rapid transition to a free market economy opened the floodgates for Hollywood productions, and imposed new limitations on Polish filmmakers. Initially, democracy appeared to wreak havoc in the world of the Polish film industry. Not until the turn of the century, did the situation start to change for the better, as the economy in Poland improved, a growing number of Polish film productions succeeded in competing with Hollywood at the box office, and government funding for the local film industry was partially re-introduced. The political and economic changes that, at first, seemed to spell doom for what had been an established institution of Polish culture, the film author, brought new opportunities for filmmakers determined to assert their artistic autonomy within the reconstituted landscape of filmmaking in post-communist Poland. Among the growing number of film authors in contemporary Polish cinema some, like Jan Jakub Kolski, draw their inspiration and creative energies from being

118

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

manifestly local, others, for example Małgorzata Szumowska and Paweł Pawlikowski, function transnationally, and have succeeded in being present within the international film festival circuit. Smarzowski, one of the most consistent and commercially successful film authors working in Poland, is also the closest to being a continuator of the previously evoked tradition of Polish romantic film authorship. He depends on the model of engaged author, functioning as a de facto institution and political player. In the age of growing transnationalism Smarzowski, like Wajda before him, acts as a quintessentially Polish filmmaker whose cinema reflects on Poland’s past and present from new and unorthodox perspectives. In the case of Wajda, two thematic threads seem to underlie all of his work: the filmmaker either dwells on personal and communal losses, or engages his viewers in attempts to overcome and compensate for such losses. In Wajda’s most self-reflexive film, Everything for Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaż, 1968), the film director (portrayed by actor Andrzej Łapicki) drives around with Elżbieta (Elżbieta Czyżewska), the partner of the missing Zbigniew Cybulski (whose real-life death the film is founded upon). At one point, the director suddenly brakes, and injures his forehead. Elżbieta gets out of the car, and rushes to the river to wet her scarf to wipe off the blood. In the meantime, the “director” gets his film camera and starts filming his own wound. When Elżbieta notices this, she drops the scarf in a gesture of resignation. The self-reflexive and ironic moment of photographing one’s own injury reveals what has been one of Wajda’s major preoccupations throughout his career. The compulsion to relive the wounding experience of World War II underlies most of the remarkable films of the Polish school of cinematography, and—in Wajda’s case—it culminates in his 2007 picture Katyn (Katyń), in which he deals with the death of his own father, a Polish officer executed by the Soviets in the Katyn forest, and, at the same time, with all the losses and traumas that are at the heart of modern Polish identity. Another important strain within Wajda’s oeuvre is the attempt to regain what has been lost by, for example, reimagining the lost home. Such reconstructions of an idealized, idyllic Polish homestead are especially noticeable in Wajda’s adaptations of literary classics, including, of course, Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1999). In many instances, Wajda’s films attempt to “uncover the truth,” and to piece the entire story together, in a gesture of defiance vis-à-vis the communist establishment, in order to fill in the gaps and omissions resulting from the official rewriting of history. The aforementioned Man of Marble illustrates this aspect of his work well. What motivates and unites both thematic strands within Wajda’s filmmaking is a sense of purpose: an engaged author is obligated to bear witness, and to speak the truth in order to fulfill his obligation to the national community. Smarzowski’s cinema, like Wajda’s, consists of various permutations of the project of photographing one’s own wound, but—at the same time—it obviates any compensatory, restorative gestures. His first film, Earlobe,



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

119

is as self-reflexive as Wajda’s Everything for Sale. Likewise, it provides interesting insights into Smarzowski’s Weltanschauung and prefigures the themes and motifs of his following pictures. The film may be interpreted as auto-thematic as it features a young writer who finds an apartment to write his second novel in. A woman speaking with a serious lisp takes him there (“Why does everything have to be so blurred,” asks the writer in his voice-over). He ends up in a squalid tenement in an old apartment building. A large wardrobe with a mirror, whose door won’t stay shut, may reference Polanski’s early short, Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafą, 1958), in which two social outcasts carrying a wardrobe both witness and are subject to an accelerating spiral of senseless violence. But the most obvious source of Smarzowski’s inspiration in his first feature film comes from the Coen brother’s Barton Fink (1991). Not just in the film’s self-reflexivity, but also in many thematic elements, notably the figure of an author suffering from writer’s block, but other elements of the narrative as well: the disturbing noises that invade the writer’s space, troubled neighbors who end up being murdered with an ax, the fact that the writer becomes a suspect in the case, even though he is not the culprit. Other quotes from the Coens are present in the film’s style: for example, Smarzowski repeatedly shows the writer on his bed, from a bird’s-eye perspective. Smarzowski’s fascination with the Coens persists beyond Earlobe, and is reflected in at least one other of his films, The Dark House (Dom Zły, 2009), whose snow-covered landscapes, and the figure of a pregnant police woman who investigates a gruesome murder hark back to Fargo (1996). Thus, rather than emphasize his Polish lineage, Smarzowski appears to feel greater affinity with the two American film authors, to the point of referring to himself, jokingly, as “the third Coen brother” in an interview given after the premiere of The Dark House (whose more accurate translation would be The House of Evil) at the Warsaw Film Festival.3 The film’s subdued Polishness might point to a tendency that is quite apparent in the work of other Polish contemporary film authors, for example, in Szumowska. But in the case of Smarzowski, this initial clue is misleading. The generic setting, the fact that Smarzowski does not anchor the narrative of Earlobe to an identifiable period, and the troubled subject who appears to be disintegrating in front of the viewers’ eyes, as well as the uncertain status of the reality that surrounds him, all of these elements point to the picture’s embrace of global postmodernity. If in Everything for Sale, the “director” turned the camera on himself to film his wound, in Earlobe the writer repeats the same gesture, but all that he records is a meaningless blabber (“and me, and me, if I was a man, I would now be 36 years old”). Yet, gradually the narrative assumes a directional character, and Smarzowski leads his viewers back to a concrete place and time, while also allowing the subject to reconstitute himself. Incidentally, the self-reflexive camera, present within the picture in Earlobe, will remain a frequent

120

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

element of Smarzowski’s filmmaking, in a number of permutations. In The Wedding (Wesele, 2004), it appears in the shape of the video camera of the man who is the bride’s former lover, and whose child she is carrying. In The Dark House, the police investigating a murder record parts of their investigation with a camera. In Traffic Department (Drogówka, 2012) we see the world through the lenses of police cameras and cell phones. In The Mighty Angel (Pod Mocnym Aniołem, 2014), patients in a rehab facility are being watched and recorded by closed-circuit television. Not long after Earlobe’s writer moves into his new apartment, his world becomes dominated by the arguments—punctuated with the sound of loud sex—of a couple who live in the apartment next door. After vainly pleading for silence, the writer throws his typewriter at the wall, in a gesture of desperate frustration, asking the couple to stop disturbing him. The burly neighbor threatens him through the peephole. “I invented them,” says the writer, “and they are getting out of control.” The neighbors’ problems begin to physically spill over into his life when the woman knocks on his door, asking for help. Impressed by his “kind eyes,” she first wants him to accept some money for safekeeping, then brings him a TV set, explaining that unless he keeps it, her husband will sell it and use the money to buy alcohol. After the sounds of a drunken brawl next door intensify, the woman appears once more, showing him her bruised body and complaining of spousal abuse. He throws her out, and says that he does not want to have anything to do with her problems. In Smarzowski, humanistic impulses such as helping a neighbor in need have been relegated to the margins. The dominant mood of his pictures may be described by the dilemma formulated by Kristeva in her essay on abjection as “I am afraid of being bitten” or “I am afraid of biting”(1982, 38). As such, it serves as a perfect analog to self-centeredness and selfishness, which have increasingly characterized Polish mores (and so many other post-communist nations plunged into the cesspool of late capitalism) in the twenty-first century, and are for instance poked fun at in the “prayer for the neighbor’s misfortune” in Marek Koterski’s highly popular comedy Day of the Wacko (Dzień świra, 2002). After his pleas for silence have failed, the writer reaches for an ax. After uttering the rather poetic-sounding “how beautifully a dewdrop glistens on the ax’s blade,” the writer complains that the weapon is not long enough. The obvious Freudian connotation of such pronouncements is combined with the protagonist’s intense hostility toward his alcoholic neighbors. Later on, the writer’s voice-over narration returns to inform the viewers: “My first book was about childhood, everyone was once a child so it’s the easiest thing to write about. My next book will be about something that is nearby. The closest are my neighbors, strangers who eat dogs.” This last statement foreshadows the thematic and philosophical concerns of Smarzowski’s later films, with surprising accuracy. His focus on neighbors takes on broad historical and philosophical resonance, and it becomes one



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

121

of the major structuring elements of his films’ narratives, comparable to the unifying role that loss played in Wajda’s oeuvre. The way neighbors are presented in Smarzowski relies heavily on the representation of bodily excretions: blood, sperm, spit, and vomit spill out of people’s bodies in his films, proportional to the amount of alcohol that they imbibe. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the most important message of the New Testament, undergoes a Dostoevsky-like refashioning in Smarzowski’s cinema. An existential dilemma emerges here: what becomes of the imperative to love one’s neighbor if humanity appears at its basest in their person? The ax of Earlobe reappears in Smarzowski’s other films, and comes to be an objective correlative of the feelings of enmity towards neighbors who instead of inspiring feelings of selfless love, are either abhorrent or threatening, or both at the same time. The word “neighbors” may connote people in one’s own community. But within the context of Polish history, the same concept assumes yet another, more nuanced meaning, especially following the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland in 2001. In this sense, neighbors are those near “us,” who may bear the marks of ethnic or religious difference. In times of crisis, neighbors can turn into deadly enemies, as has often been the case in the turbulent history of East-Central Europe. Smarzowski, who hails from the once multi-ethnic Eastern Poland, is very attuned to the potential for violence that exists in neighborly relations. He is also cognizant of the long-term traumatizing effects of historical events that turn ethnic and religious communities against each other. As his most recent project, Volhynia (Wołyń, 2016) proves most decisively, the director does not shy away from confronting the ghosts of Poland’s traumatizing past. In The Wedding, Traffic Department, and The Mighty Angel, Smarzowski critically re-examines relations within an apparently homogenous Polish national community to expose the superficiality of the myths that bind it. One element traditionally cementing human relations and community in Eastern Europe is social and ritual alcohol drinking. At first reinforced by this near-obligatory activity (he who refuses to drink is not to be trusted or considered disrespectful), communal bonds disintegrate as larger amounts of vodka are consumed, and feelings of group camaraderie turn out to be an illusion, revealing true feelings and often turning to violence. In The Dark House, the interlacing of personal and national traumas becomes most complex, evoking, for the first time in Smarzowski’s oeuvre, the theme of crimes committed against minority groups. This issue comes to the fore in Rose (Róża, 2011) and Volhynia, two films that focus on individual tragedies precipitated by strained relationships between ethnic groups in times of historical turmoil—the displacement of the Mazurian minority from North-Eastern Poland after World War II in Rose, and the murder of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during World War II in Volhynia.

122

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Thus, like Wajda, Smarzowski speaks about Poland and tackles difficult topics in Poland’s present and past. The two filmmakers’ worlds intersect most directly in The Wedding. Both directors took their inspiration from a 1901 play by the same title. Although written during the time when modern Poland did not yet exist as an independent state, Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding refrained from lauding the heroic struggle for independence. Instead, it presented a troubling picture of a community divided by prejudice and unable to unite in action. The merrymaking of the wedding is, in the play, just a deceitful surface that covers up social discord, mutual resentments, and a general inability to engage constructively in bringing about change. Wajda alluded to The Wedding in the final scenes of Ashes and Diamonds (1958), and he adapted the play to the screen in 1973. While his costume drama remained very faithful to the literary original, Smarzowski’s grittily realistic picture merely acknowledges Wyspiański’s text through a couple of direct quotes. First, the drunken wedding guests sing a patriotic song whose lyrics (“we shall answer the summons of the golden horn”) cite The Wedding. Towards the very end of the film, the drunken, morally and financially bankrupt father of the bride speaks using another line from the play: “one ought to wear shoes to a wedding.” What unites the three works is a biting criticism of contemporary reality. The first message for the rapidly transforming post-communist Poland in Smarzowski’s The Wedding comes from a priest’s sermon at a mass celebrating the marriage: “At the root of all evil, is the love of money.” Shortly thereafter, the film becomes a showcase of people implicated in all sorts of dirty financial deals, including the priest himself. The bride’s father, Wojnar, pays off the groom to marry his pregnant daughter by giving him a fancy new car. The priest takes money for mediating the car deal. “Friendly” policemen—who take bribes instead of punishing the people they pull over driving under the influence—discovering that the car has been stolen, need to be paid off in order to erase the car’s records and identification number. The mobster who sells the car, demands a desirable plot of land as payment. The plot of land in question is in the possession of Wojnar’s father-in-law. The forlorn grandfather is the only person among the wedding’s participants who seems to have any sense of a moral compass left. However, he is relegated to the margins of the festive community, spending the celebrations inside a dirty bathroom. In the end, upon finding out about the plight of the bride—his beloved granddaughter—the old man dies of a heart attack. Smarzowski thereby associates post-communist Poland with a reversal of dominant moral and social hierarchies. Everything that was ugly in the times of Poland’s rapid transition to a market economy comes to the surface in this picture. While the wedding guests imbibe gallons of vodka, bodily fluids spill out: the mobster shoots off Wojnar’s finger, the cameraman—the bride’s former lover—is beaten to a pulp, some guests engage in sexual acts, while others, afflicted with diarrhea, line up to use the filthy bathroom. This



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

123

revolting orgy of abjection threatens to obliviate the boundaries that mark out what we habitually refer to as civilized human behavior, and thereby to undermine the existing social order. A sequence that immediately follows the opening church ceremony illustrates Smarzowski’s method. The inept cameraman, who has been directed by the bride’s father to “record everything,” fulfills this mission quite literally. As people line up to congratulate the newlyweds, the camera wanders and shakily records wedding guests in unflattering poses, and their uncensored comments: “he knocked her up, and that’s that,” “it could be worse: Wojnar won’t let them starve,” “they say that his business is not going well. He had to take out loans,” “That cheap sausage that they bought to save money, it’s gross.” Initially, there appear to be two conflicting audiovisual tracks: on the one hand, the official record corresponds to Wojnar’s desire for a picture-perfect wedding; the subversive point-of-view of the mock-cameraman, on the other hand, reveals the “real” picture. The presence of the cameraman at the wedding, incidentally, is due mostly to his desire to find out if his former girlfriend—the bride— who is pregnant with him, is really in love with the man she is about to marry. Yet his camera becomes a means to discover the truth not only about the arranged marriage, but about the corrupt nature of human relationships more generally. Inadvertently challenging Wojnar’s patriarchal narrative, he assists in the process of bringing the abject—including the grandfather’s pitiful corpse—to the surface. The revolting element of the abject that represents an unsettling transitory sphere, a boundary between nature and culture, life and death, is—in most of Smarzowski’s cinema—associated with the abuse of alcohol. In The Wedding, The Dark House, and Traffic Department, a world that is at first tenuously held together by bonds established through drinking, as already mentioned, unravels also as the effect of the use and abuse of alcohol. The pinnacle of Smarzowski’s obsession with drinking comes in The Mighty Angel, his adaptation of a popular novel by the same title, in which a recognized writer who is an alcoholic goes down the path of addiction until he hits rock bottom, and is confined in a facility for alcoholics. Interestingly enough, Smarzowski’s use of alcoholism as a vehicle that signals an existential crisis is very different from the way drinking was portrayed in Polish cinema of the communist era. As Krzysztof Kosiński points out, under communist rule, drinking alcohol became a mass phenomenon in Poland. The same author argues that the government’s calculated policy of promoting the sale of alcohol led to the transformation of Poles into the heaviest drinking people in the world (2008, 7–8). Marek Piwowski’s ingenious documentary Corkscrew (Korkociąg, 1971) juxtaposes an official speech celebrating the fifty-second anniversary of the founding of the state alcohol monopoly with footage of people who—as suggested by intertitles—suffer severe effects of alcohol abuse (including

124

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

severe mental disorders). While clearly and subversively suggesting a link between the state monopoly and the effects of addiction, Piwowski objectifies the alleged alcoholics to a disquieting degree, hinting at some of the problems with the representation of alcoholism in Polish cinema of the era. At the time, heavy drinking was mostly featured in comedies. Anna Wieczorkiewicz argues that the popularity of the motif of alcohol use resulted from the censors’ permissive attitude toward a light-hearted treatment of drinking. “There is nothing wrong with drinking,” writes Wieczorkiewicz about the world of communist comedies, “quite the contrary, in many situations it proves to be the precondition of social acceptance” (2014, 394). “Drinking is not represented as excessive or pathological, it has been inscribed into the strategy of a satisfactory functioning within the family, as well as in neighborly, and professional communities” (2014, 395). Indeed, even in pictures that effectively deconstructed the enterprise of building communism, such as, for example, Stanisław Bareja’s 1984 TV series Alternatywy 4, the omnipresence of drinking in both social and professional situations amounts to a wink in the direction of the audience, rather than a diagnosis of a social plague. In The Mighty Angel, a film offering an earnest anatomy of addiction, Smarzowski looks at the conjunction of communism and alcoholism in a slightly ironic way. Jerzy, the alcoholic writer, provides a friendly service to one of the people who, like him, is confined in an institution for alcoholics. He lends his pen to write an obligatory essay-confession for his fellow-inmate, stating: “My life represented an attempt to escape from the hopelessness of everyday existence (under communism). The worse the situation in the People’s Republic of Poland, the more one drank.” Blaming the system for one’s own failings becomes here just another discursive exercise, and one of a limitless number of options for self-diagnosis. Yet in Smarzowski’s earlier Dark House, heavy drinking is unambiguously connected with the corrupt nature of the communist system. As elsewhere in the director’s work, the tone of representing a world that is awash with liquor is traumatic, and not comedic. While the way the director talks about alcoholism situates him very much within the post-communist context, his historical retrospectives bring us back once more to Polish style auteurism, and to the obsessive photographing of one’s own wound that I have previously mentioned. Historical retrospection has been present, with varying intensity, throughout the history of modern Polish cinema. Attempts at dealing with the trauma of World War II gave shape to the so-called Polish School of the late 1950s. The loosening of censorship and greater freedom of expression that came with the birth of the Solidarity movement resulted in many projects that looked back on the experience of Stalinism. Toward the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s, there were still some historical turning points and moments of trauma that few Polish



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

125

filmmakers dared touch upon. The imposition of martial law in December 1981 was one such event, the establishment of communist rule on the territories inhabited by the German-speaking minorities in the north-east in 1945, another one, and—going back further in time—the murder of some tens of thousands of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia in the 1940s, yet another. Smarzowski focuses on these events in three successive films: The Dark House, Rose, and Volhynia. Seen from the outside, the 1981 martial law may appear as a relatively benign event, especially in view of the much more traumatic events Poland underwent through the course of the twentieth century. Yet as Polish historian Andrzej Paczkowski writes, “For tens of thousands of Poles— these who were arrested during the night of 13 December, and those who were brutally attacked in their work places—it was a traumatic experience” (2006, 268). As Paczkowski points out, after June 1956 the incidents of social unrest in Poland were quite frequent, but only martial law was simultaneously and directly experienced by a large part of the population in the entire country, and the participants of this experience included the inhabitants of all the cities and industrial regions … Even though direct losses, that is the number of people who lost their lives during martial law was relatively small—the shock that was caused by the obvious discrepancy of the means that were employed by the architects and the administrators of martial law, was long-lasting. (2006, 270) From the moment that martial law was imposed by the regime, it became a widely “mediated” event. The obvious visual and aural epitome of the times was the bespectacled General Jaruzelski, reading the decree declaring the imposition of martial law. Since then, martial law has often been associated with pictures of soldiers warming themselves by the sides of barrels filled with burning coal, and with Chris Niedenthal’s photograph of a Warsaw movie theater, Kino Moskwa, featuring a poster of Apocalypse Now, and a tank stationed in front of it. Yet, for obvious reasons, martial law was not likely to be tackled by filmmakers during the first part of the 1980s. Smarzowski is a filmmaker who is meticulous in his attention to detail, and whose story is propelled by a careful arrangement of visual clues on the level of a single frame. In The Dark House, the typical iconographic representations of martial law Poland feature predominantly urban landscapes: pictures of military troops and demonstrations that are being dispersed with the use of water cannons, for instance, are absent. Yet, the film’s exposition hints unmistakably at the communal trauma of martial law. For viewers who lived through the events, the stark winter landscape, a militia car, and three militiamen standing right next to it amply suffice to metonymically

126

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 6.1  Irony and martial law in Poland, 1981.

Source: Chris Niedenthal’s Apocalypse Now © Chris Niedenthal.



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

127

evoke this dark period. This is confirmed by a title that anchors the scene in time: February 1982. The following sequence moves the film’s action back to the 1970s. The voice-over narration of a very average man named Środoń, who works for a collective farm in the west of Poland, introduces us to the relatively carefree life he leads. It is interrupted abruptly by the sudden death of his wife to a stroke. Traumatized, Środoń decides to take up a job at the other end of Poland. His introductory voice-over is discontinued when he arrives at the Dziabas’ farm, ten minutes into the film, never to return again. In some cases, a voice-over may serve as a device implying the narrator’s control of the story. Yet it is often employed in situations in which the narrator is losing command of the circumstances of his life as, for example, in film noir. Smarzowski’s use of voice-over narration is consistent with the noir convention. In the course of a night of heavy drinking at the farm where he finds shelter, Środoń becomes implicated in a situation that leaves Dziabas, his adult son, and his wife dead. When the case is revisited four years later, shortly after the imposition of martial law, the unjustly accused Środoń is brought back to the “house of evil” to serve merely as a pawn in a deadly game that is meant to cover up the wrongdoing of officials in the Communist Party and security apparatus. The strengthening of government control spells a death sentence also for the only “just” among the police, Officer Mróz, who uncovers a corruption scheme involving his superiors and parts of the plot meant to cover it up. In the end, with both Środoń

FIGURE 6.2  The wintry set of the fateful re-enactment on the crime scene in The Dark House, during the period of martial law. Source: The Dark House (Wojtek Smarzowski, 2009) © Film It, Polish Film Institute, SPI International.

128

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and Mróz already dead, a female police officer gives birth to a child that may have been fathered by Mróz (she is married to a fellow officer, but is known to have had an affair with Mróz). Smarzowski’s embrace of the abject manifests itself again in a disturbingly naturalistic presentation of the birth. In the cold, and among the dark and gray ruins of the house, a purple-colored, blood-covered newborn emerges from the mother’s womb. The camera then moves away and upward from the gruesome scene to reveal the desolate location of the house and to further emphasize the utter hopelessness of the scene. In a narrative that encompasses successive layers of traumatic experiences, Smarzowski makes extensive use of flashbacks. They serve, primarily, to maintain narration along two main temporal lines that emerge following Środoń’s introduction: the events that unfolded after his arrival at the farm, on the way to the new job, and the police investigation into these events that follows in the winter of 1982. A Bruegel-esque closing shot of the house and its surroundings, seen from a bird’s eye view, provokes further questions about the story’s implied timeline. In a discussion that focused on Smarzowski’s film that took place in Vienna (on May 12, 2014), historian Timothy Snyder pointed out that The Dark House’s action takes place in an area of Poland that saw the forceful expulsion of its Ukrainian population back in the 1940s. The repeated motif of an ax may therefore resonate beyond the events that are presented as part of the film’s plot. Had the house where Dziabas and his wife live been in the family before the war, or was it originally inhabited by Ukrainians? The architecture of the church that Mróz visits as part of his investigation points to its Eastern Orthodox origins. Thus, the “house of evil” may have also been a site of unspoken traumatic events during or right after World War II. The layering of trauma in Smarzowski’s film seems to point to both, the location’s possible painful past and its burdened future, present in the disturbing image of a child born among ruins. Smarzowski’s first overt involvement with representing war trauma comes in Rose. As the film opens, a severely wounded and incapacitated soldier turns his head toward the camera, then raises his eyes to see his girlfriend first being raped and then shot by German soldiers. In the next scene, the same man has become an exile in his own land. He travels eastward, and eventually searches for a woman whose husband’s death he witnessed along the way. The problem is that he is a former soldier of the Home Army, now in hiding from the Soviet and communist Polish authorities, and the woman is a Mazurian whose husband was in the German Wehrmacht. The Mazurians are a Slavic people who inhabited the lake district in the north-east of Poland, and became partly Germanized in the course of their history, due to the influence of the neighboring East Prussians. Rose, the widowed Mazurian, owns a farm that is now being invaded by looters and threatened with confiscation by the new, brutal,



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

129

and boorish communist government. To add to the hardship, she has been raped numerous times by Soviet soldiers, who do not differentiate between the Mazurians and the Germans. Living in constant fear of a Soviet officer who rapes her every time he is in the vicinity of her farm, she greets the Pole, who brings her news of her husband’s passing, with distrust, but she quickly discovers a kindred soul in him, and takes him in. Smarzowski’s story of tragic love among ruins has all the markings of a film destined for international success: the story of two people, bitterly tried by life, who find first support and then love in each other; the focus on women who, as objects of rape, become the war’s silent victims; the issue of troubled borderlands. Smarzowski, who was first trained as a camera operator, shows great sensitivity to the quality of the film’s cinematography. The starkness of the image in Rose finds a correlative in a very somber and blunt musical score composed by Mikołaj Trzaska. And yet, to a foreign audience, the mix of people who pass through the small Mazurian town and the farm’s environs—Poles escaping from Warsaw, migrants from the forced resettlements that resulted from Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland, Germans and Mazurians fleeing westward—must be fairly indistinguishable from one another. Thus, Smarzowski continues to speak of the world as he has internalized it, and of the wounds of the community to which he belongs, without much regard either to political correctness or to the commercial resale value of the messages that his pictures offer. “All we know about Smarzowski is that he makes movies,” wrote Polityka’s film reviewer in the text cited as this chapter’s incipit. “We do not hear about him signing letters in support of whatever just causes, he does not comment on the events in the Ukraine, we do not even know what his political views are, even though it is hard to imagine that he could be a favorite of the political right” (Pietrasik 2014). While not overtly didactic, and not trying to impact the politics of the day, Smarzowski is just as implicated in Polishness as Wajda and other filmmakers of previous generations had been. Unlike other contemporary filmmakers (such as Oscar-winner Pawlikowski) who seem to aim for the international festival circuit, and often make substantial compromises to this end, Smarzowski wants his cinema to be first and foremost popular among Polish viewers, without pandering to popular taste by lowering the artistic demands that he places on his work. The difference between him and someone like Wajda is that he no longer bears the burden of making sure that the ideal of the Polish home lives on. In the context of post-communism in Poland, the way Smarzowski has chosen to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, is his perennial concern with individuals caught up in history, and yet not fearing to reveal the abyss of life’s meaninglessness. In our globalized capitalist environment, wherein individuals are increasingly atomized, such dark and despondent topics as the ones tackled by Smarzowski seem to constitute the only weapon left at the disposal of the

130

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

national auteur in search of real, if tenuous and eminently immaterial, community building. This is achieved, however cryptically, by pointing at the ailments of society and, through the violence of the past, traumatic national history, at the rather brutal socioeconomic reality which, far from being the “Polish miracle” hailed by some, left many people in a state of disarray, unemployed and afflicted by poverty, in a world moving too fast. In this sense, it is not difficult to see the relevance of the abjection Smarzowski portrays, marked by his morally corrupt characters and profuse bodily secretions that emanate from their bodies, in such stark contrast with the cinematic representations of the communist period. Indeed, bereft of an outside oppressor, Poland, as a modern, sovereign state, can only turn to itself as its own material, locatable site, and reason of misfortune, unable to “totalize” the ills of capitalism, in which it now thoroughly partakes. The abjection portrayed in Smarzowski’s films is therefore of a pointedly parapractical nature, in a country now tearing itself apart for lack of a cause to unify against. Characterized by vivid internal divisions, the country now notoriously features “two Polands”: established, Europe-oriented (and mostly urban) Poles on the one hand; and the “backward,” reactionary (and often rural) Poles on the other. Each group constitutes a form of abjection for the other: the rural group portrayed as xenophobic and backward by the liberal media, while the liberal, “enlightened” Poles are viewed as abject in their embracing of market economy and “betraying” true Polishness (and its Catholic Church) for which the country fought for decades and had to suffer such unfathomable losses. Mutually reminding each other of what they find most repulsive about themselves, the strife between “progressive” and “conservative” Poles is rendered more complex by the additional division between affluent beneficiaries of global capitalism, and those left out by it. In the latter’s state of abject destitution, often marked by violence and alcoholism indeed, their “progressive, enlightened” compatriots find a constant reminder of the country’s traumatic past, soaked not only in liquor and mud, but also in blood. The precariousness of the country’s former stateless existence, as well as the duties toward the (next door) neighbor, are mutually shortcircuited by a knee-jerk reaction of rejection and desire to overcome on the one hand, and deep, almost unconscious understanding of the abject nature of such a project of denial in its own right on the other. In this sense, through the constant thematic concerns of national ailments and their corollary abjection, and the self-reflexivity that pervades his cinema and clearly allegorizes a nation looking at itself, Wojtek Smarzowski may not only be the best auteur in contemporary Polish cinema, but also one of its most relevant political (if non-militant) figures.



WOJTEK SMARZOWSKI

131

Notes 1

I use the notion of the abject as defined and introduced into critical discourse by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjections, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

2

It is interesting to note that the embrace of an anti-authoritarian social mission by many Polish nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals inspired even Karl Marx, leading him to advocate for the Poles’ national rights.

3

The interview can be found online: https://youtu.be/CRG6DL2ejeA (accessed October 1, 2015).

Works cited Gross, Jan. 2001. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kosiński, Krzysztof. 2008. Historia pijaństwa w czasach PRL. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton. Instytut Historii PAN. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Paczkowski, Andrzej. 2006. Wojna polsko-Jaruzelska. Stan wojenny w Polsce 13 XII 1981–22 VII 1983. Warszawa: Prószynski i Ska. Pietrasik, Zdzisław. 2014. “Polska bardziej Be,” Polityka May 13. Wajda, Andrzej. 1983. “The Artist’s Responsibility,” in David W. Paul (ed.) Politics, Arts, and Commitment in the East European Cinema, 168–88. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Wieczorkiewicz, Anna. 2014, “Kraj, alkohol, system i ludzie. Alkohol w komediach filmowych PRL-u.” in Elżbieta Morawska (ed.), Terytoria smaku. Studia z antropologii i socjologii jedzenia, 389–427. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Filozofii i Socjologii PAN.

7 Of intruders (and guests): The films of Michael Haneke and Aleksey Balabanov Jeremi Szaniawski

Without music, life would be a mistake. (FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE TWILIGHT OF IDOLS)

Many readers are likely already familiar with the tale of the frog boiled alive when a flame is lit underneath the pot in which it was leisurely bubbling. With the temperature rising, the warmth of the water is at first pleasant to the amphibian, before it becomes uncomfortable, and finally deadly. The point of the (apocryphal) experiment was to demonstrate that, if brought about gradually, change to a new condition, even of a dangerous or lethal nature, will be accepted by the subject. On a more allegorical plane, we find here a reflection about the moment when a pleasurable state imperceptibly lapses into discomfort. In our “warming global sphere” the little story acquires a whole new set of resonances, from environmental to geopolitical concerns of burning urgency.1 Eminently timely, the anecdote is also very cinematic: at once thought experiment and morality tale, the horrific and suspenseful scene it lays out, in its irony, sadism and voyeurism, could be easily found in the films of many contemporary auteurs, who hail in equal parts from a tradition of “cinema of cruelty” (the raw flesh and the sensation of being cooked alive, as when a film catches us unawares in its tangles after having charmed and lulled us into a sense of false comfort) and the absurd (the incongruous

134

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

image of the live frog in a pot). While the revolting scenario could be seen realized literally in a film by Lars von Trier or Park Chan Wook, I want to use its less literal, but no less powerful affect—the feeling of the deadly and ineluctable trap, how “heat” impinges upon our lives—correlating it to the oeuvre of two defining figures of the contemporary European cinema: Michael Haneke and Aleksey Balabanov. Austrian-German director Haneke is hardly in need of an introduction. The winner of two Academy Awards for best foreign film, and scores of prizes at the most prestigious art film festivals (including two Palmes d’Or), he incarnates the ideal of the “global auteur”: artistically independent and thematically cogent like the great modernist masters of yore, constantly relevant in his deft tackling of contemporary issues, from new media technologies and their implications (Benny’s Video [1992], Funny Games [1997, 2007], Caché [2005]) to the place of high culture and romantic, outmoded concepts and emotions, such as love and compassion, in our time (The Piano Teacher [2001], Amour [2012]), all bathed in pointed considerations and criticism of class (particularly the bourgeoisie) and ethnic difference. His films enjoy quasi-ubiquitous visibility, distributed internationally and accessible through a variety of platforms. Balabanov, on the other hand, remains for all intents and purposes a confidential figure outside of his native Russia, where he was rightly hailed as a master, and where his low-budget Brother (Brat, 1997) became the cult classic of a whole generation coming of age in the troubled and depressed, but also hopeful, Yeltsin years. His rich and original oeuvre, inspired in equal parts by modernist literature and classics of New Hollywood, remains mediocrely distributed in the West, in spite of isolated efforts by connoisseurs who regard him as one of the truly great filmmakers of the last three decades.2 Upon first glance, Balabanov and Haneke could be dismissed as manipulative or nihilist filmmakers, for their darkly upsetting and pessimistic narratives, often describing perverse situations.3 But this would be missing the point—the rush of élan vital the films of both auteurs procure. This is correlated to several factors, not least humanist and moral drive on the one hand (both men could be described as societal conservatives—but never reactionaries—preoccupied with matters of morality);4 and the philosophical and existential preoccupations with which their cinema is imbued. As such, they have both captured the zeitgeist with uncanny accuracy, boasting a deep degree of insightfulness into their respective societies’ ills, although each in their own, very personal way: Haneke, as the cosmopolitan, international figure, at home in several languages and cultures, and still frisky well into his eighth decade—a reflection, if there ever was, of the fashionable, twenty-first-century, affluent culture industry actor at the height of his powers; Balabanov, as the scarred artiste maudit in the Russian tradition, a prophet with a tragic fate, digging deeply into his unconscious (informed by his experience in the Soviet-Afghan War), the ebullient and



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

135

dark nature of which must have contributed to his untimely death, in 2013, at the age of fifty-four. Beyond the sheer brilliance of their (highly reflexive and often metacinematic) mise-en-scènes, both directors are known to deploy narratives of transgression that are sordid, claustrophobic, but also highly ironic and sometimes wickedly funny. Both have been noted for their remarkable (though highly contrasted) use of intra- and extra-diegetic music (often blurring the boundaries between the two), as well as, perhaps most notoriously, for their simultaneous representation and critique of violence. Therein lies the conundrum of their “didacticism.”5 The cruelty in both men’s methods has been known to elicit rather strong reactions in some of their audience members.6 It should, however, be noted that, though undeniably characterized by a sense of menace and permanent tension, actual on-screen representations of violence are relatively rare in their films, often displaced, especially in Haneke, to the off-screen space, and conveyed through naturalistic sound design (the murder of the girl in Benny’s Video being the canonical example), which of course renders them, in their suggestiveness, all the more disturbing, and not only to the squeamish. Yet this visceral quality does not constitute provocation for provocation’s sake: rather than for their shock value, the films remain engrained longer in our minds than in our nervous systems. Beyond reminding the reader of the famous motto by Gilbert Lely about Sade (1961), that aesthetic predication of evil precludes its enactment, I want to argue that its representations in both Haneke and Balabanov always go beyond violence as mere event. They constitute warnings, signs of a broader, far more upsetting phenomenon, to the morally and politically attuned viewer. More than a story and its idiosyncratic representations, they elaborate a cogent moral, political, and philosophical worldview and program—scathing accounts of their respective socioeconomic realities. It is rare enough that an auteur produces works whose political consciousness are as interesting as their political unconscious. And while the latter will always partly escape the makers themselves, it is quite obvious that there is, in the case of Haneke and Balabanov, a deep reflection and observation of their contemporary societies—namely Western Europe, and post-Soviet Russia. It is no wonder, then, that although they share so many traits, they seem also to operate in two very different realms and periods. This anachronism is easy to account for, as they are lucid witnesses of two distinct stages of capitalism: Haneke entertains us with stories which show the collapse of traditional humanism, social democracy, and the redundancy of industrial capitalism, as they are brushed aside by its latest avatar—global/corporate capitalism. As a result, the director revives the cinematic modernist idiom (long take, anomie, solitude, writerly compositions, quoting Bergman in extenso,7 for instance, in several scenes from The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band, 2009), finding, instinctively perhaps, that

136

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

the 1960s—the second golden age of art cinema—was the crucial moment when the old Europe lapsed imperceptibly and irretrievably into market economy, and, even more crucially perhaps, into what Jacques Ellul (1964) prophetically called “technological society.” Balabanov was equally timely in a country freshly becoming acquainted with the charms of a deregulated, liberal market, still riding the wave of artistic ebullience and creativity the generation of late Soviet youth enjoyed in a country otherwise in ruins, compelling others to yearn for its pre-revolutionary or Stalinist “grandeur.”8 To express this torn reality, the director devised two cinematic realms, both equally decadent: one, a strange pre-revolutionary Russia, as though characters out of Beckett and Kafka9 had found themselves in the hallucinated Petersburg of Dostoevsky, often shot in sepia and black and white (Happy Days [Schastlivye Dni, 1991], Of Freaks and Men [Pro urodov i lyudyey, 1998]), the other, reaching for the imagery of American 1970s cinema, adapted to a contemporary Russia ridden with crime and conspicuously populated by mobsters and hired guns (The Stoker [Kochegar, 2010], Me Too… [Ya tozhe khochu, 2012]), the action of Brother 2 (Brat 2, 2000) being partly set in the United States.10 And indeed, whereas they are usually out of sight in Haneke’s cinema (as in the West in general), crime and criminals are a visible part of the fabric of society, a social class, almost, in Russia, as reflected in Balabanov’s cinema. In short, Haneke and Balabanov happen to be exactly of their time, perfectly capturing the contradictions, dilemmas, violence, and absurd human condition in their respective geographic zones. And when they take place in earlier periods, their films provide a potent antidote against nostalgia and prelapsarian fantasies, through the genealogies of evil they propose: in the children of The White Ribbon, we are to divine the seed of Nazism, and in the youngsters of Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007), which takes place during the troubled Andropov-Chernenko period (1984–5), we recognize the hedonistic seed that would turn into the oligarchs, but also the corrupt police, whose cruelty and violence did not abate in Putin’s Russia. As has been amply commented upon, Haneke and Balabanov clearly represent audiovisual media in their film, most often to reflect upon their effect and the societal changes they instantiate. As such the medium is presented at once as a means of creating a distance with and of (inaccurately) seeing the world. Video and digital technologies abound in Haneke, their initial purpose (surveillance, security) subverted and associated with intrusion and death, from Benny’s Video to Funny Games to Caché. The latter’s opening shot of the protagonist’s apartment, taken with a digital camera, stands in for an uncanny gaze, leading to the confrontation of the bourgeois Frenchman’s guilt when confronted with his lower-class, Algerian “br/other.” In Balabanov, photographic apparatuses are also clearly associated with death and exploitation, indicating that these “new media” mark new stages in our technological evolution, as well as societal changes



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

137

inherent in them. In Of Freaks and Men, turn-of-the-century innovations (music records, cinema) supersede photography just as bourgeois society is brutally overtaken by the people who introduced the media (and pornography) to their homes. This film in particular can be read along the lines of Gilles Deleuze’s remark (1989, 77–8) that any self-reflexive film (about its own production process) is also about money, the inevitable and dangerous intruder—and often at first welcomed guest—par excellence. But the power of Haneke’s and Balabanov’s evocation of film and audiovisual production are surely neither only about themselves, nor strictly about capitalism. They are, in the dialectical merging of capitalism and technology, about the next step, where the capitalist ghost and the technological body coalesce, leading to a very substantial blow to the “human” in our societies, with its corollary (and already amply witnessed) pauperization of means, of language, of democratic resources, of state of law, more or less obviously, yet also unbeknownst to most. So that, beyond commenting on and critiquing their respective worlds with accuracy (depicting them as violent and possibly absurd)—already an accomplishment which alone would merit attention—our two auteurs go further: they give us a doubled or second look at the world (thereby, as has been said ambiguously of Haneke, a “second chance,” possibly a second opportunity to torture the inattentive pupil). The fact that they do so through cinema is particularly relevant insofar as the medium, fulfilling its ideological function, contributes to capitalism’s project of obliterating the fact, which should be in plain sight, of the loss of sovereignty of human beings as individuals (see Agamben 1998). Cinema pretends that this loss is not a serious one, if it even exists: all the while enabling the sovereign entity (corporations, which are its major financier) it deceives us into believing that we all have, somewhere, the potential to be dominant, to be “special,” to be sovereign. Going beyond what is essentially tantamount to a 1970s ideological critique of cinema, Haneke and Balabanov portray a world wherein, on the contrary, this “not-so-funny game”—whereby we are anesthetized and cooked alive like helpless frogs—is in plain sight. There are no refuges or escapes in their cinema: no bourgeois household, no train ride west of the Russian Empire, no catechism, no hectoliters of vodka, no love in old age, no morphine, and surely no door codes (known or not) or surveillance cameras will provide shelter. What we view as shields and protection—in this case, audiovisual media, and of course cinema itself, which the latter allegorize—are the instruments that torture us or dispassionately witness our undoing. This is where the story of the frog, beyond revealing that it is not only cinematic (but also “about” cinema indeed), returns as an allegory for our position in capitalism: beyond telling us of the dangers of becoming oblivious to potential peril, it is also about a form of insidious intrusion, which is all around us, a “whole” in which we all warmly bathe. In giving

138

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

us masterful allegories revealing the perverse mechanics and inequities of contemporary society, our two auteurs allow us to momentarily elevate ourselves, as though witnessing the course of history from above and from within. I have introduced my key term, namely the intruder. Even a most cursory review of Haneke and Balabanov’s films will point to countless instances of intrusion. Let us but think of the most obvious examples: Peter and Paul invading the lakeside home and torturing the bourgeois family in both versions of Funny Games; and the upstart pornographers Yohan and Viktor Ivanovich taking over the households of Engineer Radlov and Doctor Stasov in Of Freaks and Men. In both cases, the intruders are easily identifiable and proceed by first inviting themselves into the home, before abusing and murdering their hosts—a rather unambiguous reflection, no doubt, of the first surreptitious, then brutal process of substitution of one society by another, one regime by another, one medium by another one. But intrusions can be much more immaterial and complex: the mysterious events shaking the community in The White Ribbon, and the multifarious, quasidemonic force slowly destroying the life of the old couple in Amour;11 it is two-faced—a delectable cure which then turns into a terrible addiction— like the drug the doctor injects himself with in Morphine (Morfii, 2008), or as the revolution that will interrupt his rehab in the fateful year 1917. Lastly, an intruder can be unwitting and “innocent,” as the unfortunate Angelika (the daughter of a Soviet dignitary) falling into the nightmarish “utopia” of social outcasts in Cargo 200. In short, an intruder is not necessarily identifiable, nor evil, but it always is an “other,” bringing about some sort of violent, abject reaction, and change, one way or another. Cinema has always thrived on the notion of intrusion, a perennial engine of narrative development. As early as the films of Griffith and their “races to the rescue,” the intruder, in its diegetic bareness and primary quality, fostered conflict and suspense, these sacrosanct elements of entertainment cinema, while also allegorizing it as one of the most conspicuous technological intrusions of modernity into late nineteenth-century society, exciting and disturbing. Now, in a context of massive immigrant flux and concerns with the many toxic agents we absorb (in our food and the air we breathe, etc.),12 the motif of the intruder has become increasingly complex. A fixture of media and social networks’ narratives, often tainted with paranoia and conspiracy theories, it entertains dark fantasies about the “other” and the “Other.” In Hollywood cinema, intrusive events are organically integrated, not meant to shatter a worldview, but, quite on the contrary, to uphold it (in this sense, the entertainment industry has almost always been an extension and tool of capitalism’s glossing over its own contradictions): the other is in the same and the same is in the other, in a carefully framed whole. And when Hollywood produces “paranoid” narratives (masterfully described by Jameson (1992), showing the inability of capitalist society to “totalize”),



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

139

the “other” of liberal capitalism’s external elements (death, illness, fanaticism, communism, etc.) must be fought and destroyed. Whatever is outside the system (our “Other”) and not absorbable by it must perish. Haneke and Balabanov, I contend, propose a third kind of intruder: an always problematic intrusion, destabilizing and philosophically productive at one and the same time. In reinventing the intruder and its function(s), they show one of the few possible avenues of reinvigorating a moribund art cinema, and thus a renewed role for the auteur in society. In view of the above, it is important to clearly distinguish a primary, first-degree intruder, which is tantamount to any form of event generating conflict/propelling a narrative forward, from a second-degree intruder, which is less concerned with narrative conflict, and more so with a quasiSocratic “maieutic” thought process. This is an intrusion of a different, reflexive kind, at once a literal intrusion and a meta-intrusion, at once a jarring event causing a moral knee-jerk reaction and an allegory of the intrusion of capitalism into the human (intimate) sphere, and the loss of sovereignty it implies. So, while the vast majority of cinema is founded upon an endless chain of intrusive events one upon another, most films by Haneke are impoverished in simple “events” in which the second-degree intruder reigns supreme. In the (arguably) more traditional fictions of Balabanov, the two are often blended together. Both auteurs forcibly thematize the motif of intrusion, often to the absurd. This dis/continuation of a deep-rooted cinematic tradition accounts for the feeling, when watching their films, of a bridge between innovative and “old school” cinema. So that a term needs to be coined for this second-degree intruder, and, following the call of Deleuze to create concepts, I suggest branding it the pareisaktos, and its multiple markers, pareisaktosigns. In one of the most commented upon chapters of Cinema 2, “The Powers of the False,” indebted to Nietzsche, Deleuze (1989) stresses the dynamic superiority of “false” narratives (illusions, fabulations) over static “truth,” insofar as the former, albeit in oblique and sometimes negative ways, promotes life and thus the élan vital so dear to the French philosopher. The films of both Haneke and Balabanov, filled with traps and pitfalls at every turn, are a late and “negative” instantiation of the “powers of the false”: the matters of intrusiveness, violation, progressive rubbing that end up producing painful burns and scars, physical and psychological, all doused in a sometimes cynical dose of dark humor and intellectual “massage” (a sensory and moral, as much as a thought experiment, to riff on Elsaesser’s concept [2015]) constitute the pareisaktos. Used thus, the term suggests a new function and usefulness in cinema (political and/or negatively utopian), composing elaborate tapestries, and, further, a new type of crystal image, wherein all types of intrusion echo and resonate with one another, becoming a tool of reflexive knowledge. In our current context, one of the few truly political cinemas is that which obliquely enables a position of lucid witness,

140

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

teaching us to recognize signs of intrusion, as though guiding us with a dark light in an otherwise blindingly white global landscape. In his “‘Post-script to Societies of Control,” Deleuze (1995), with uncanny clairvoyance, predicted the beyondness, or at least subsequent stage of Foucauldian “disciplinary” society (characterized by physical surveillance systems such as the Benthamian panopticon, etc.): an invisible, decentered, modulable paradigm of control. Beyond, the folding of one stage of capitalism into another was suggested: from industrial capitalism, still attached to an idea of nation-state, etc., to the eminently global, fluid corporate capitalism, promising a new medieval hierarchy sans the assets of the Middle Ages (the sovereign, hyper-wealthy ruling a mass of atomized and pauperized individuals—Agambenian homines sacri), enabled by the latest developments of technology. Twenty years after Deleuze’s death, his terrifying prediction of a soft, almost invisible totalitarianism has indeed become a reality, wherein we are more oblivious than ever of the nefarious workings of the ruling class and its control machine(s), feeling “freer” yet surreptitiously more “disciplined” and limited in our daily lives.13 All indicators, however, point to the increasingly disastrous nature of this new age, and its wide and far-reaching effects on the environment and democracy: first and foremost, our natural environment is in an alarming condition, reflected in that of human society and democracy: in 2012, using the Gini coefficient (calculating wealth inequality)14 the highest discrepancy between the richest and poorest people in the world in human history was recorded, confirming a new era wherein global corporations are more powerful than many nation-states (with logical consequences toward delocalization, deterritorialization, and a thorough renegotiation of the rules of finance, still unmatched by any truly effective legal reaction). While a spate of “leaks” revealed the anti-democratic use made by various entities, not least governments, of technologies such as the internet, the general reaction of the everyman has been close to sheer (or blind) indifference. Beyond apocalyptic considerations which may (and have) naturally arise(n) in this context (hence the score of end-of-the-world films, not least Haneke’s own Time of the Wolf [Le temps du loup, 2003]), I want to point out to the notion of the invisible intruder, perhaps best allegorized and instantiated in our relation of codependency with the internet, social networks, and the like, for reasons that I think need not be explained at length here. Let me return to and expand the scope of our opening anecdote: what was the live frog doing in a pot in the first place? And whose sadistic hand lit the stove underneath it? Since the frog was not in its natural element to begin with, did it not essentially deserve its cruel fate? Would it not have starved to death, had it not been cooked alive? As a result, was that death not preferable? In short, here are proposed just a few of the ratiocinations, exposing the many conundrums of our position within global capitalism,



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

141

from which there would be purportedly no escape. If we cannot solve the problem of global and corporate capitalism through individual effort, what we can do is to follow Ellul’s cue, which advocated for lucid witnessing in the face of the ills of technological society (which he saw as superseding capitalism itself, and which we see as enmeshed with it). It is here that I want to differ with Thomas Elsaesser, who in his study of the “mind game” in Haneke’s films (2010), subordinated the motif of intrusion to the multiple enigmas and riddles his cinema presents us with. Indeed, in Haneke as in Balabanov the intruder as pareisaktos is the engine of moral reflection and political realization, though disguised as gimmicks and distractions. One way in which Haneke and Balabanov have reflected upon this question and found answers to it is in their manifest fondness for “lower” genre cinema, the many liberating (or anarchist) traits of which, along with their garishness, the two rework and potently cerebralize. Subverting and critiquing the rules of traditional genre cinema thriving upon such narratives of intrusion (for instance, the horror film or the thriller), Haneke and Balabanov demonstrate that these films are very much about the productive nature of the encounters between host and guest/intruder, and that it is as a result of the encounter that the film is made indeed. In this gesture for a category considered inferior (which did not prevent Dreyer, Bergman, Kubrick, etc. from reaching for it in order to transcend it as well), the two men also comment on the societal shift and the impoverishment of cinematic art, while resisting it through various strategies. Funny Games serves again as an object lesson: as the well-to-do bourgeois family becomes the toy of the sinister intruders who subject them to a series of increasingly sadistic games, Haneke lays bare the manipulative nature of (genre) cinema. As opposed to a traditional thriller of such type, the family’s fate is sealed from the get-go: their torturers are invincible (like the sovereign to the naked life), capable of creating “predictable events,” anticipating every move by their desperate hosts/victims, even “rewinding” the action when an unfavorable turn of events has taken place. On the surface, the film offers a delightfully perverse deconstruction of the equally perverse, emotionally manipulative nature of Hollywood cinema. But in the irresponsible and invincible psychopaths enjoying their “funny game,” we see also a reflection of the sovereign hyperclass, Gods (because always given the benefit of a second chance, even when making a deadly mistake) to the “mere humans,” the well-to-do bourgeois, who, irritating though they may be, still retain some measure of commonality with the middle class witnessing their ordeal, divining a whole world of naked lives in the making. There seems to always be, to a greater or lesser extent, in Haneke, an intermediate stage, between pure diegetic markers of intrusion, and those that float between the factual and the allegorical. Amour, for all its deceptive narrative simplicity, constitutes one of the director’s deepest and most complex attempts at tackling the pareisaktos. In the everyday of an

142

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

elderly couple, the markers of intrusion abound: from the police barging through the door of the apartment, now filled with the stench of a decaying body,15 through the remark by the old man, early on, that someone tried to break into the apartment (the most banal, and, to the bourgeois homeowner, relatable form of intrusion); the nightmare; the pigeon; the insensitive and entitled nurse; her verbal and physical abuse; the couple’s old age and growing helplessness in the face of the old woman’s disease; the final miseà-mort in all its excruciating, exhausted mercy. All this is quite literally a case study of the promotion of life through the representation of death and decay, but also through a stark yet subtle critique of greed and the notion of private property. As we remember, the film opens with the aftermath of the old couple’s tragic end, the coda taking place after the removal of the body. A final, simple wide shot reveals the daughter, walking in the empty apartment, heiress at last, she who had deflected the plight of her parents by complaining about her own (relatively) affluent person’s petty material concerns. She is now a moral intruder to her own inheritance, a demonic circle having been closed, until the next round. Balabanov’s plentiful oeuvre is equally entwined with knowledge, lucidity, and death in their relationship to the intruder and their formal representations. His cult, low-budget Brother, wherein a provincial delinquent drifter becomes a quasi Savior-figure and hired gun in a corrupt and socially divided St. Petersburg, constitutes a remarkable commentary on post-Soviet Russia—and filmmaking, the protagonist intruding upon a film set in the opening scene. This is enabled, of course, as with Haneke, through the care put in to the writing and production, the filmmaker staunchly refusing to allow the violence and chaos of the narrative to contaminate the rigorous mise-en-scène. His most radical example might be the devastatingly droll (and supremely understated) The Stoker, the story of a shell-shocked war veteran who ends up murdering fellow soldiers-turned-mobsters, after they take advantage of his Myshkin-like “holiness” to burn the corpses of their victims (including his daughter) in the ovens he mind-numbingly stokes up. The film’s repetitive score and meditative mise-en-scène (tracking shots of people perambulating through a wintry urban landscape), productively “intrudes upon” its drab and minimalist plot of senseless violence. Drifting away from the diegetic and toward the discursive, it brings cinema and reflexivity back to the fore, not least in the short story the stoker is trying to write (a tale of cruelty imparted by an ethnic Russian onto a Yakut household), echoing powerfully the motif of senseless exploitation and a corrupt, decaying society—and, of course, one of many instances of intrusion in the film, echoed here through the device of a frame narrative. It is clear that neither Haneke nor Balabanov are content with illustrating matters of intrusiveness from a strictly thematic and diegetic perspective, or even in terms of mise-en-scène. The pareisaktos is expressed on many levels and dimensions, including time. The careful work of pacing,



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

143

timing, editing, and framing in The Stoker and Amour constitutes an apex of directorial control, where nothing is left to chance, specifically because they embrace contingency (the inclusion of animals, such as dogs or a pigeon). Balabanov channels the outright demented energy of the Russian socioeconomic acceleration and turmoil of the early post-Soviet years by carefully crafting his sequences like choreographies, either by resorting to classics of nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic music, or pop-rock tunes, always corresponding to the period and mood of the diegesis; or by measuring the weight of his frame through moments of carefully distilled tension: the dialogue between characters, filled with a sense of doom and absurd humor, timed like clockwork, underlining the sheer uncertainty of their fate. I have mentioned already the many instances of audiovisual (and digital) technologies in Haneke and Balabanov, and their correlation with death. Recent technological shifts have given this correlation further resonance, allowing also the pareisaktos, in its crystal-like reflections, to procure a meta-commentary about cinema as an intruder to itself. This is particularly timely as the old ghost of analog (35mm) film and its rules (of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, etc.) still heavily inform its digital replacement, parading as it does under “nothing has changed” propaganda.16 Digital could have renewed the cinematic idiom, for a variety of reasons, including its more democratic costs. Instead, weighed down by the logic of the market, through insidious, chameleon-like strategies, it stifles it, while the corporate greed behind its latest development also informs the sheer mediocrity of most film scripts, ruled by the mentality of petty or cynical accountants, rather than writers, artists, or even the cruel and megalomaniac studio moguls of yore. Perhaps, we cannot determine clearly which event preceded the other, but it is evident that the triumph of digital as pareisaktos must serve as a warning against the continued decline of humanist values, their reduction to a footnote in history as the abolishment of morals goes rampant and aesthetic sentiment is lost, or merely evaporates, like boiling water. In short, the most productive dimension of the second-degree intruder/ pareisaktos, which finds its thematic, formal, and philosophical expression in the comedies of menace of both Haneke and Balabanov, is to bring our attention to certain sets of problems, however obliquely, of intrusiveness, of defilement of our intimate (not to be mistaken for private) sphere, and to call for a realization of the latter, thereby fostering a strange community of lucid witnesses, all the while finding strength and inspiration in these works—the ineffable dimension of art, perhaps what is left of art in our time: aesthetic predication as the surest (if not safest) way to not only witness and realize, but ultimately resist the intruders’ nefarious action on our human community. In this, the pareisaktos and its depictions of violence turns out, like the Deleuzean “false,” to be equally negatively life-affirming as it

144

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

enables and expands the purview of the medium. Conversely, the “traditional,” first-degree intruder/event has become “truth” (or formula): stale, rehashing and exploiting a successful formula, reducing it to a cliché—an unwitting and unimaginative reflection, however shrewd and clever its engineers, again, of the sway of global capitalism on contemporary society, homogenized to the extreme. Since they promote life negatively, the pareisaktos-filled films of Haneke and Balabanov would be the mirror reflection of surface, life-affirming, and politically progressive films filled with an element of “positive guest,” xenos (which in Greek designates at once the host and the guest), and its markers, xenosigns. Think, for instance, of the no less indispensable films by queer and female filmmakers, such as Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010). The film’s stunning if austere mise-en-scène tells the slow yet riveting story of a group of settlers walking up the Oregon Trail, in search of a better life. The group, losing its way after following a “shortcut” promised by their guide, the suspicious fortune-seeker Meek, soon runs out of water. Midway through, they encounter and capture a Native American whose intentions vis-à-vis them are all but inscrutable, who may lead them even further into the desert—and a sure death. Eventually, it is the leap of faith by the female protagonist, Mrs. Tetherow, to trust (and even save the life of) the Native American without any guarantee, against the xeno-phobic distrust and struggle to retain leadership by the failed guide, Meek, which proves to be the productive gesture. But it is not so much the ultimate undercutting of Meek’s “guiding” or leadership, as his tacit acknowledgment of his mistakes and deferral to Mr. and Mrs. Tetherow—an act of humility and commonsense—which constitutes the film’s elating narrative élan vital. A limpid and almost too unambiguous allegory of our society, (mis)led by patriarchal figures blinded by fear and hatred, wherein the followers are petrified by uncertainty, on the verge of local extinction, ultimately uncomprehending of the global situation, and in dire need of a new direction, both environmentally and politically, Meek’s Cutoff at once exemplifies the luminous polysemy of the xenos (seen in its host/guest reversibility in the Native American and his captors, etc.) and its limits—the fact that it does, however subtly, stand on the side of a “truthful” discourse (wisdom, tolerance, openness) against racism, xenophobia, ignorance. If the teaching of films filled with pareisaktosigns is to be vigilant and embrace the dialectical virtues of intruders, the beautiful political message of the xenos-driven film is that we need to suspend our distrust toward those we manifestly identify as other and therefore as intruder. But we need to beware of such humanism in an age of global co-option, and about the political motives and disingenuousness that may (if they don’t always) lurk behind overtly positive and life-affirming narratives, even if our preference will always go toward those who have convinced us of their sincerity. The masters of the pareisaktos, as Haneke or Balabanov, have the luxury of



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

145

dispensing with this constraint, though they are confronted, of course, as is the viewer of their films, with many others. Beyond their didacticism, there might be a careful utopian drive behind the despondent films of Haneke and Balabanov: what if the intruder as pareisaktos carried the seed of dialectical progress in itself, and the ills caused to cinema as a medium by digital-as-pareisaktos did eventually carry the medium’s rebirth? After all, we already see the encouraging results brought about by affordable digital cameras in talented hands, from the invigorating pearls among the swines of the Vine phenomenon, to the professional works of documentarians and Third and Fourth Cinema makers. So that the problem lay not at all with the technology’s existence or even its use, but, as Ellul (and, obliquely, our two auteurs) warned, in the way that technique and technology become primordial, sovereign, dominating all other aspect and consideration of human society and life. But what, one may wonder, of a third degree of the pareisaktos (and, logically, of the xenos, too)? Could it be a dialectic point, as of yet unrealized, toward the third and final level of the intruder/host? In the ultimate, third-stage, pareisaktosign and xenosign would no longer just distantly echo one another, but merge, become one, calling for a reinvention of cinema—perhaps by a forthcoming generation of auteurs, or perhaps by a post-human creation, for a medium having gone through, as the rest of civilization, one of the most spuriously difficult and dangerous challenges it ever was confronted with. We see inklings of this, flashes, in the most prophetic and/or lucid works of our time, as well as unwittingly, in the very worst the medium has ever produced. In the meantime, cinema, like global capitalism, is a clumsy intruder in our lives, the Deleuzean snake,17 which, perhaps, entangled in its own coils, will end up biting its own tail and instilling its venom there, a lethal intruder, at last, to itself. Surely such optimism is all but unwarranted. The films of Haneke and Balabanov have often inscribed in their diegeses the ultimate failure of art, though an ideal to be sure, to transcend us, and from which to learn. Think of The Piano Teacher or the reminiscences, to the tune of Liszt, in Amour; Of Freaks and Men’s Putilov, the young idealist photographer, who keeps promising Liza that he “will save her,” before becoming the operator of the pornographic films in which she is forced to perform (later, he becomes a successful filmmaker, adored by his fans). Or, in the same film, one of the two conjoined twins with angel voices, exhibited like freaks, becomes an alcoholic and eventually dies, thereby condemning the brother with the stronger superego … Art, and music particularly, are the vectors of the Real in the Symbolic “reals” of these films, in which there might be second chances (Haneke), random escapes (Balabanov), but no genuine redemption within the recesses of the story. But what if we inverted these terms indeed, suggesting that where art cannot save the fictional characters, perhaps the teachings of art can constitute hope and a form of resistance in our global

146

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

sphere? At the very least, we can continue to impart meaning to cinema (and our lives) through this belief. After all, if the frog of the fable fell asleep before it realized that it was being cooked alive, without illusions, as Nietzsche taught us, life would be impossible. Conversely, without life, illusions would cease. It is up to us now to distinguish the pleasurable from the deadly illusion, if indeed we were ever capable of such discernment.

Notes 1

I wish to thank Monika Dac, Ivan Soll, Michael Cramer, and Seung-hoon Jeong for their help and suggestions in the elaboration of this chapter, and particularly Caroline Mahon and John Pitseys for their sustained reading of its various drafts, and for their precious feedback.

2

As of October 31, 2015, most Balabanov films could be viewed, free of charge (but without subtitles), on his production company’s Youtube channel. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/user/CTBFilm.

3

As such a sophisticated, perverse manipulator Haneke seems to have spawned a generation of superficially cynical followers, led by the talented but vapid Michel Franco, decried à propos in a recent issue of Cahiers du Cinéma (May 2015).

4

Balabanov has been described as taking in equal parts after Dostoevsky and John Ford.

5

See the brilliant analysis by Thomas Elsaesser in “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 53–74, in the case of Haneke, of the “double-bind” in which his use of violence puts his cinema and its reception.

6

Elsaesser (2010, 54) writes of his own reactions to Haneke’s films: “shock and awe after seeing Caché (2005), intrigued and interested by Code Unknown (2000), uneasy and queasy about The Piano Teacher (2001), repelled and exasperated by Funny Games (1997) and Benny’s Video (1992) ….” For Russian critic Natalia Sirivli (in her critique of Cargo 200), “with all his usual flair and professionalism [Balabanov] masterfully extracts from the spectator’s soul powerful emotion of disgust, horror and abjection” (“Kinoobozreniye Natalii Sirivli,” Zhurnalny Zal, Novy Mir 9, 2007. Available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2007/9/si20.html [accessed October 26, 2015]).

7

See Jeremi Szaniawski, “Soli deo gloria? Art, evil and Bergman’s legacy in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon,” Tativille, 2010. Available online: http://tativille.blogspot.kr/2010/04/special-to-tativille-soli-deo-gloria_17.html (accessed October 30, 2015).

8

Balabanov produced several scathing and ironic accounts of pre-revolutionary Russia, particularly Of Freaks and Men, Morphine, and the unfinished



ALEKSEY BALABANOV AND MICHAEL HANEKE

147

The River (Reka, 2002). At the time of his death, he was planning a film portraying Stalin in his criminal youth and early adulthood—a forefather and master figure, no doubt, to all the many mobsters and corrupt figures of authority to be found in the director’s films. 9

Both Balabanov and Haneke adapted Kafka’s The Castle (Zamok, 1994, Das Schloss, 1997), and it is interesting to see that Amour and Me Too (both 2012) deeply resonate with one another as evocations of an elusive happiness, and with death deeply inscribed within not only their narrative, but their philosophical fabric.

10 In this affection for narratives dealing with the underworld of crime and exploitation, Balabanov can be compared to his contemporary virtuoso Quentin Tarantino (Dead Man’s Bluff [Zhmurki, 2005] seems at times to be a pastiche of Pulp Fiction [1994]), who could serve as our third party here, reflecting the hollowness and dead end of traditional American values—the great “Other” of any discussion of capitalism in Europe, and, later, Russia. But, against the odds, Balabanov is anything but a postmodern, as I hopefully show in my discussion. 11 It is important to point out that this “immaterial” intruder is accompanied by several markers of physical intrusion, including, like a dark foreshadowing, the damaged door lock, as if a burglar had tried to break into the couple’s home. The couple pays little attention to this pareisaktosign. 12 Beyond what has been somewhat ingratiatingly referred to by the European media as “the crisis of the migrants,” let us but enumerate a few intruders that we process on a daily basis with our very bodies: fine particles in the air (particularly the lethal PM2.5); polluted water (lead and mercury, etc.); toxic and carcinogenic chemicals (from pesticides to antibiotics meant to kill intrusive agents) found nowadays in alarming levels in our food (not to mention GMOs …); microwaves and radiations, produced and relayed by portable communication devices and homeware alike, and whose effects on the human body have yet to be amply documented. Arguably less immediately damaging is the way in which these “information” and “communication” technologies, far more than enabling/facilitating modern life, have created sheer and medically documented cyber-dependencies, banning, under the impetus of the “one-click-away” mentality and instant gratification, “boredom” and moments of “idle curiosity” (to use Thorstein Veblen’s terms) from our vocabulary and daily habits. 13 As John Wilkinson synthesized: “The denizen of the state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom” (in Ellul 1964, xvii). 14 It is in the wake of the success of David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years (Hoboken, NJ: Melville, 2011) and particularly Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) that the Gini coefficient was brought up in a variety of venues. For a synthetic view, see the following articles http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/ richer-and-poorer and http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettysinequality-story-in-six-charts (both accessed July 31, 2015).

148

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

15 In the putrefied features of the dead old woman at the beginning of the film, I thought I saw a merger of sorts of actors Emmanuelle Riva’s and Jean-Louis Trintignant’s faces, as though reunited in love and death. 16 Most remarkably, unlike some proponents of 35mm, neither Haneke nor Balabanov seem to have produced their biting critiques out of frustrated fetishism, but truly out of a humanist, if dejected, concern. 17 In his “Postscript” (1995), Deleuze compares this latest stage of control society to the complex coils of a snake, having replaced the earlier regime, that of the mole and its subterranean burrows, undermining the grounds of our human community.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998 [1995]. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Ellul, Jacques. 1964. The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2010. “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann (ed.), A Companion to Michael Haneke, 53–74. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2015. “Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment,” Theory and Event 18 (2). Available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v018/18.2.elsaesser.html (accessed June 30, 2015). Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lely, Gilbert. 1961. The Marquis de Sade: A Biography, trans. Alec Brown. London: Elec Books.

8 Suffocating kinesis: The late films of Aleksey Gherman Fredric Jameson

Who will deliver us from the unexpected restoration of the reign of beauty and its disreputable ideology, aesthetic philosophy? In a society in which the near-total commodification of the world, linked with the already looming world market, can be glimpsed, beauty is no longer a momentary relief from “interest” (Kant’s word for business and its rationale) but rather the law of the land. For the existential support of universal commodification, even when we try as so many have done to grasp it psychologically, was always aestheticization. One may see it as an addiction, halfway between drugs or pornography and the mania of the pathological collector; but then the only rather pitiful treatment turns out to be that “diet cure of images” called for by Baudrillard (2003) (or in Susan Sontag’s formulation, “an ecology of images”). An outright ban on advertising might be more effective, acknowledging the role that images and the visual as such play in the epidemic (Debord’s attack on the unreality propagated by the “spectacle” spilled into narrative itself). To isolate that particular symptom which is the image, however, is to miss the fundamental toxin of beauty as such. “Beauty is evil, Yeats,” Pound quotes a fin de siècle contemporary as warning; and it is certain that it presents a trap which is in fact a double-bind. Maurice Blanchot, a specialist in those paradoxes which those of us in Hegelo-Marxian circles call contradictions, once powerfully observed that the problem with Pascal’s anguish was that it was expressed too eloquently (1949); the beauty of its language neutralized all suffering and pain and turned them into aesthetic content. Much of modern art and literature, seeking catharsis in its production, found itself wrestling with

150

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

this intractable dilemma. Meanwhile, on the level of present-day consumerism, it is perception itself which is infected to the core: to appreciate the sheer appearance of the commodity is already to have been caught up in its circuits. This is not an aesthetic problem, it is the problem of the existence of aesthetics as such; and if the problem needs to be situated, it would surely be better to identify it as a political one, for the commitment to commodity society is necessarily the abandonment of the project to replace it with something else. This is why Lenin’s well-known attitude toward Beethoven (“he makes you caress the enemy rather than bite him!” [Lenin and Gorky 2002, 289]) is paradigmatic of the way in which traditionally politics interrupted the aesthetic and antagonized the aesthetes (without for all that discovering any satisfactory formula for political art, surely in this context a contradiction in terms). This is not to deny that in a few modern situations—that of the fin de siècle, for example—beauty has been able to function as a negative and critical force, at least for a time. That is the sense in which Godard’s deployment of extraordinarily glossy images was always an ingenious modification of this form-problem, offering the loathsome in a sensually seductive and mesmerizing appearance that blew all the circuits. But already Victor Hugo’s subversive attack on beauty in his “Preface to Cromwell” (1827) could still only be theorized in terms of yet another aesthetic—the grotesque, as Quasimodo so alluringly incarnated it, thereby leaving us with yet another version of Blanchot’s paradox. Yet postmodernity—the very name for the hegemony of the commodity as it perpetuates itself in the form of a thorough-going and inescapable aestheticization of daily life—has known the presence of a few inexplicable meteorites, whether the last convulsions of a virtually extinct modernism or shudders reaching us from some inconceivable future; and these objects seem to resist the laws of our present-day consumerist world. We walk around them cautiously, inspecting their unintelligibility, regretting their damage to the landscape or attempting to read them as omens or warnings, punishments or glimpses of the unknown. These objects are not sublime, for however forbidding and monstrous we fail to assimilate them aesthetically. Indeed, they are not aesthetically accessible at all, and this only heightens their interest, and our own malaise. Such are Aleksey Gherman’s last two films, Khrustalyov, My Car! (Khrustalyov, mashinu!, 1998) and Hard to be a God (Trudno byt Bogom, 2013). Only Oleg Aronson has articulated the scandal of the former work (2003, 225–7), which resists all aesthetic categories and reaches the limits of the intolerable: neither good nor bad, they simply exist, defying our assimilation, let alone our appreciation. Nor do they fascinate in their repulsion: our reception is by them paralyzed, a little like those contraptions that held Lincoln’s head immobile for ten minutes while Matthew



ALEKSEY GHERMAN

151

Brady’s camera internalized his face; or that deadly television sequence by which David Foster Wallace’s characters in Infinite Jest are transfixed and then extinguished. But I hasten to add that Gherman’s films are not dystopias either, however much we might be tempted by that popular classification. Today, indeed, as a fundamental genre of the postmodern, dystopia, far from warning of apocalypse, has rather aestheticized it and transformed it into an object of consumption and satisfaction. Khrustalyov, My Car! has its external, its historical referent in the infamous Doctors’ Plot, from which the aged Stalin promised himself some properly Soviet “final solution” to the Jewish question; the meaning of the title, indeed, only becomes clear when we discover that the film also portrays Stalin’s death, and Beria’s speechlessness (his only words, on viewing the remains, consisting in the call for his limousine, which furnishes Gherman’s title). Can we not then simply consign this work (along with its no less repulsive sequel) to some belated paroxysm of anti-Stalinism (thereby translating it back into a known quantity)? My sense is that expressions of this intensity, like certain types of hatred, are life choices that, like certain evocations of the Holocaust, go well beyond the estimable task of perpetuating a memory; they will themselves into a delirium of obsession that poisons existence itself, like that Bergman character brooding inexplicably on “the yellow peril” in his peaceful arctic village (in Winter Light [Nattvardsgästerna, 1963]). Such obsessions are to be sure immediately available for the appropriation and use by state power; but their intensity is also existentially frightening: “sad passions” that threaten other people and the world itself, however justifiable they may be by the “facts” as such. Perhaps, indeed, they represent the rage at the termination of the provincial respite of Gherman’s (genuinely aesthetic) masterpiece, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Moy drug Ivan Lapshin, 1984), which tells a sad story about the eponymous hero, a policeman in the lull between the end of collectivization and the onset of the purge trials. But it is as though Khrustalyov were played out in an altogether different medium from the earlier film, nor can one even tell its story in any comparable way. We know this because the more ambitious reviews have tried to do so, focusing on the “hero.” a wealthy and powerful Jewish doctor, arrested by the secret police and humiliated, beaten, and even sexually violated, up to the moment they suddenly receive a call to return to Moscow, where he is already implicitly rehabilitated by an unsuccessful mission to revive the dying Stalin. But I venture to say that no one sitting through this three-hour film is likely to remember these events in that form (or perhaps in any other). Rather, what we live through is a non-stop sequence of movement from left to right which operates on much the same principles as the classical Chinese storytelling scrolls, or the bas-reliefs on ancient buildings and porticos. It is appropriate to say that I have always felt the ontological fascination of these last, friezes which only partially emerge from their

152

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

stone, never achieving the free-standing autonomy of sculpture but for all that preserving the tactile grain of their matter and communicating to it a momentum and a tempo—movement, metamorphosis, eventfulness—which their sculptural cousins suddenly lose when translated to their immobile pedestals and released to freely circulating and circumnavigating public exposure. The great Assyrian friezes are something like the fullest embodiment of this formal potential, the beards of the great dynasts expressing power in the very precision of their minimalist curls. Nor should one forget Pergamum, dear to Peter Weiss (2005, 3–11), with its fragmentary earth gods and giants smitten by the Olympians and frozen in the convulsions of some truly bodily warfare. Probably great mural painting (think above all of Diego Riviera!) recaptured this spirit in its twin urge to emerge from and sink back into the wall itself. But in order to grasp the relevance of this ancient form or medium to Gherman’s films, we need to add a psychological, indeed a well-nigh McLuhanite, curiosity: it is said, indeed, that our training in literacy habituates us to an eye movement and an attention that moves from left to right, so that, for surveillance and enhanced observation, we should break that habit by inspecting the space in question from right to left. What this might mean for speakers whose language is written from right to left (let alone vertically) is not recorded, although the perceptual changes it implies lie right up McLuhan’s alley. One hesitates to add in boustrophedon here (named after the movement of the ox in plowing), in which the reader, having reached the right-hand end of his line, reads the next one in a leftwards direction, and vice versa. Hitchcock used to demand head movements from his audience, as in a famous scene in North by Northwest (1959) in which the two protagonists, separated by a birch forest, alternately spoke to one another from distant ends of the wide screen. Still, in Gherman, it is a question of a relentless movement across the screen from left to right, which homogenizes the content of the film just as surely as the perpetual regime of close-ups does in other contexts (the concomitant reduction of all perspective to close-ups will only become absolute in Hard to be a God). Here in Khrustalyov, however, what this kind of movement does is to obliterate scenic distance along with perspective itself; and this is another reason why the plot summary simply does not work here. The latter tells us, indeed, that we pass from a party at the doctor’s house (in which his status and power are lavishly demonstrated), via his customary hospital rounds, to a van on the way to prison, and thence to the clinic (or perhaps the dacha) in which the dying Stalin is lying abandoned. But the difference between these places and settings, these spaces and architectures, is virtually wiped out, as in a landscape seen from a moving train. They run into each other like a moving background, while the protagonist, in the foreground, seems in perpetual movement from left to right, no matter what his fate or



ALEKSEY GHERMAN

153

destination, no matter what his status and whether he is the agent or the passive recipient of an action which is itself homogenized. Only the figure in motion counts, and like History itself, the background is scarcely relevant. This is the world viewed by Heraclitus, and it is a shocking change from our own. Narrative is thus here subverted or undermined, but in a rather different way than in the standard modernist omissions and gaps or ellipses, the temporal distensions, the metaphoric substitutions or displacements. Here narrative is simply flattened out; or, if you prefer, relegated to the background. The absolutization of this particular filmic feature—one hesitates to call it a technique or a trope—rather, something like the interiorization of the tracking shot, its transmutation into content—retains its linearity while divesting even plot of its organizational function (as, for example, the Odyssey might be seen to furnish the framework for all the other kinds of attention demanded by Ulysses). This is why even the characters lose their interest in favor of a generalized and nightmarish tone, the effect of totality clearly desired by the director himself. One significant move in Gherman’s strategy must therefore be noted: the utter exclusion of any pathos from these events. The protagonist—unlike the equally authoritarian “tragic hero” of Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (Utomlyonnye solntsem, 1994)—has nothing likable or sympathisch about him: a physician who is also a high-level military man and an authoritarian in public and private, his subjective fate (even after “rehabilitation” he does not regain his power but ends up as a conductor on a train) is effaced by the objective situation itself. If the film is taken to be a denunciation of Stalinism, then at least one must say that pity and indignation play no part in its rhetoric, and even terror is rather far removed from this nightmare, along with any conceivable form of aesthetic pleasure. In that sense, the film scarcely solicits a reaction: it has no interest in its public; as I observed above, it simply is; and in that sense stands on the outer limits as an extreme and unrepeatable phenomenon. Nor does Hard to be a God attempt to repeat it, although many of the features we have ascribed to the earlier work are once again deployed here. For this one has a plot, or is at least based on one: the eponymous 1964 novel by the Strugatsky Brothers (and recently re-issued in English in a welcome new translation by Olena Bormashenko). It is worth saying a word or two about this source, since (despite the Soviet practice of issuing science fiction under the rubric of children’s literature) this very distinctive pair of writers occupies a place in the science fiction canon of considerable significance, comparable only to those of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem, at that crucial historical moment when the genre began to emerge from its ghetto and produce works of original literary quality. The Strugatskys had a rich history in film adaptations and scenarios, most notably Alexander Sokurov’s classic Days of Eclipse (Dni Zatmeniya,

154

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

1988). Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) offered a distressingly inadequate version of their masterpiece Roadside Picnic (Piknik na obochine, 1971), apparently as the result of the technical shortcomings of a first, more faithful version (apparently allegory and vacuous mysticism are useful for low-budget solutions!). Here they work in a framework they shared with Ursula LeGuin and which both derived from the U.S. TV series Star Trek, namely a galactic United Nations (Star Trek called its NATO-like alliance the Federation, LeGuin her far less Americano-centric alliance the Ekumen), which occasionally ran into global enemies but above all faced the problem of unassimilated planets or civilizations. Thus, alongside the classic Cold War situation (Boris Strugatsky’s Afterword to the new edition is illuminating on this subject), the centerpiece of the plot most often involved what the American series famously named the “Prime Directive,” namely non-interference in the cultures of alien planets. It is precisely on this fundamental rule that the action of Hard to be a God turns. As a historical context, we should note that the rivalry between the Soviets and the Americans in this period promoted the seduction of the so-called non-aligned nations and in particular the newly decolonized states of Africa. To be sure, China and Cuba had already been “lost” (as we liked to put it), but “modernization” was still the dominant ideological value and competition turned on financial and technical “aid” (it should be added that in 1964 the Americans were only beginning their disastrous adventure in Vietnam, while the analogous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979, still lay in the far future). But the Strugatskys’ heroes have one advantage over their American counterparts: they are equipped with a theory of cultural evolution and difference—Marxism, here renamed “basis theory”—which provides the scientific justification for the Prime Directive. This is the doctrine of “modes of production,” which in its orthodox form stipulates that a population must first pass from feudalism, through a bourgeois revolution, before reaching the climactic struggle for socialism. Shades of Lenin’s quarrel with the Mensheviks! While not denying the premise of the mode of production as such, the Strugatskys (and above all their hero Rumata) take a dim view of orthodox “basis theory” and dramatize a unique and unforeseen historical situation in which the end of feudalism leads not to this or that bourgeois hegemony, but rather directly to fascism. (This is a kind of Heisenberg Principle of cultural contamination: the very presence of the observer changes everything, and here Rumata can never be sure his intervention—however justified by instincts of humanity and simple justice—has not itself caused this unforeseeable and untheorized outcome.) This historical deviation motivates the dilemma of Earth’s observers, benevolent spies scattered like so many “sleepers” among the population of the alien and still feudal and medieval Arkanar. They are to record their observations for the Historical Institute for which they work; they have had twenty years to “pass” convincingly (Don Rumata indeed is universally



ALEKSEY GHERMAN

155

assumed to be a scion of one of the wealthiest noble families on the planet); nonetheless, they are sorely tempted to use their immeasurably superior technological force to put an end to the brutality and systematic bloody repression of the quasi-fascist regime of Don Reba, a colorless intriguer without any social base or following who has risen to power virtually out of nowhere, and whose immediate target is literate intellectuals, all those Earth has been counting on to lift this population, via Enlightenment, science, and invention, out of its feudal animality. It is time to observe that very little of this intricate political dialectic is preserved in the film itself. To characterize it most vividly, we need to return to the issue of beauty with which we began. I have been criticized for having evoked a memorable remark of Pauline Kael in an earlier note on this film: it was thought to be frivolous and offensive to associate such a quip with one of the (only recently) canonized “great directors” of the filmic pantheon (or perhaps I should say, of an only recently institutionalized “film studies”). The present context will, however, justify its relevance. Kael is said to have observed, about John Travolta’s production of the film version of L. Ron Hubbard’s novel Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000), “I don’t know if it is the worst film ever made, but it is certainly the ugliest!” With this formulation, indeed, we can complete our discussion of beauty: ugliness is demonstrated here not to be the opposite of beauty but rather the opposite of the aesthetic as such. Is this an effect one can strive for? Indeed is it an effect at all? What Hard to be a God offers is rather what ultimately comes as a consequence of filled space. Sokurov’s Faust (2011) already took some steps in this direction; but the suffocating claustrophobia of his medieval village is still the result of artistry, it is a calculated aesthetic effect which can still lay claim to the pleasures of harmony, even if they are unpleasant pleasures. And indeed there are exhilarating aesthetics for which filled space has the well-nigh metaphysical sense of the satiation and banishment of the void as such: I think of the Baroque, for example, and in particular the Spanish Churrigueresque and its Aztec equivalent in Mexico. But here, in Gherman, filled space is both litter and filth: the stuff of old, eviscerated mattresses in abandoned houses, heaps of rags, sofas in landfills; if one is tempted to associate it par excellence with fabric, rather than with dirt, with dust and mud as such, this is because fabrics will already have been worn, they will already bear within them, unredeemable, the smell of humans, the stench of human bodies, in comparison with which even inorganic muck is somehow clean. This litter is essentially unclean, such is the sense of Gherman’s overflowing deep shots; and we inevitably assimilate their visual filth with excrement and endow the cinematographic image with the one sense it cannot directly convey, namely smell. All of which can no doubt be taken for an “objective correlative” of Rumata’s misanthropy on this retarded planet: the ignorance of the

156

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

population for soap and water is only an external manifestation of their status as less than human: I sincerely hate and despise them … I can justify the stupidity and brutality of the kid I just passed–the social conditions, the appalling upbringing, anything at all—but I now clearly see that he’s my enemy… And I don’t hate him theoretically, as a “typical specimen,” but him as himself, him as an individual. I hate his slobbering mug, the stink of his unwashed body, his blind faith, his animosity toward everything other than sex and booze … (Strugatsky and Strugatsky 2014 [1964], 127) All of the loathing of the “modern” for the “pre-modern” is here, despite the official “humanism” of Rumata’s mission; the nausea of the West for what has fallen short of Western “Enlightenment,” the very notion of history as progress. But if the Strugatskys diagnose this instinctive reaction as a profound contradiction, in Gherman it threatens to become an ontological condition, and only Rumata’s indignation at injustice—as brutal as it is in and of itself—rises above the intellectual and cultural level of his neighbors (that, and the habit of taking a bath). All of which is enhanced by the regime of the close-up, which now accompanies that inexorable movement from left to right into which all of Rumata’s actions and gestures—his visits, encounters, conferences, clashes, rescues, arrests, imprisonments, confrontations, releases, gallops, and challenges—have been, as though dimly remembered from the novel, assimilated: yet not telescopically, as though from a great distance peering into the past, but rather magnified to the point of becoming unreadable, fiber by fiber, a belt, a tassel, a sword’s hilt filling the screen in the absence of any identification of the character in question or the space in play here. The wall of the proscenium—it is known that the first medieval drama emerged from the aesthetic of the base relief—is held to gropingly, unyieldingly, as though the camera’s shoulder were rubbing against it. The contradiction in this filmic style lies in the impossible manner in which it conjoins the clutter of the deep shot and the microscopic inspection of this prying, tireless gaze into the very pores of soiled things and faces, bodies, detritus. But now the political spaces of the novel—an architecture whose corridors and rooms house the intrigue of class conflict—merchants versus nobles, night-time bandits, a senile monarchy, ominous armed friars alongside venal and corrupt official armies, peasants and city-dwellers, and among them all the inscrutable Don Reba, organizing his own Doctors’ plot against the intellectuals, weaving his murderous schemes and orchestrating his strategic conflicts—those spaces can no longer be explored by this camera apparatus obsessively intent on forward movement. The plot of the novel is thereby transformed into increasing clashes between Rumata



ALEKSEY GHERMAN

157

and the coalescing masses of the Untermenschen he finds on his path, until a full-scale Armageddon is underway (the film’s original title was to have been History of the Arkanar Massacre) which can only conclude with the virtual extermination of the inhabitants and the climax of the film itself, followed by its coda, at the miserable watering hole of the opening, in the fragile calm of devastation, and Rumata’s reflection that it is “hard to be a god” (as these advanced observers from Earth surely are in the face of a well-nigh subhuman population). The novel had been, if not an indictment of the ideology of modernization, then at least a foregrounding of the fundamental contradiction of Enlightenment itself as a social project. One cannot deploy judgments of this kind in dealing with Gherman’s artifact, where they tend to slip into psychological hypotheses of the type I indulged in earlier in this chapter. If these late films of Aleksey Gherman are to be grasped as experimentation, they are not likely to point the way or open any new paths for present or future generations of the postmodern, but rather to take their place among the lonely monuments of a scattered and isolated “late modern,” along with the relics and remains of the work of people like Albert Serra, Victor Erice, and other names awaiting canonization if not discovery and excavation. The question for any serious theoretical meditation on them is then this, which replicates the dilemma of Benjamin’s juxtaposition of Erlebnis (occurrence) and Erfahrung (long-time experience) (1969): How can so idiosyncratically shaped and molded a form of temporality be made to fit meaningfully into our everyday experience, assuming to be sure that normal everyday experience still exists in our own distinctive (and even idiosyncratic) moment of history?

Works cited Aronson, Oleg. 2003. Metakino. Moscow: Ad Marginem. Baudrillard, Jean. 2003. “La violence de l’image,” in Victoria Grace, Heather Worth, and Laurence Simmons (eds), Baudrillard West of Dateline. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Blanchot, Maurice. 1949. “La Main de Pascal” in La Part du Feu, Paris: Gallimard. Hugo, Victor. 1827. “Preface to Cromwell,” Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Classics. Lenin, Vladimir and Maxim Gorky. 2002. Lenin and Gorky—Letters, Reminiscences, Articles. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. 2014 [1964]. Hard to be a God. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Weiss, Peter. 2005. The Aesthetics of Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

9 Contemporary Romanian auteurs: Politics, irony, and reflexivity Dominique Nasta

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Romania, an East European country from which only a few isolated auteurs had previously gained international visibility, unexpectedly produced one of the few coherent New Waves in the context of world cinema. The rather diverse domestic Romanian circuit has garnered important recognition on the global film market over the last ten years (2005–15) and is comprised largely of directors belonging to the same cultural era. The leading figures of this cinema were by and large born and raised during the period dominated by Ceaușescu’s communist “reign” (1965–89), roughly between the late 1960s (the current “trendsetters” Cristi Puiu [1967] and Cristian Mungiu [1968]) and continuing into the 70s (Radu Muntean [1971], Adrian Sitaru [1971], Corneliu Porumboiu [1975], Călin Peter Netzer [1975], Radu Jude [1977], etc.). Most of them started making short films by narrating simple stories which they later developed into complex features. They eventually established a minimalist thematic and aesthetic line, partly for economic reasons and, to a larger extent, as a political gesture aimed at the grandiloquent topics and conventions at work imposed for more than thirty years within the Romanian film-making industry. Their films, most of which are familiar to art cinema specialists, have fueled an important amount of recent exegesis reflected in highly original ways particularly as the twenty-first century zeitgeist of Romania has occupied a continually complex position within the European sociopolitical and cultural sphere.

160

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

As such, contemporary Romanian auteurs raised a set of questions without necessarily aiming to answer them. These questions both relate to a new way of confronting historical or ideological facts and moral dilemmas as well as to a rhetorical reshaping of the grammar of cinema. Thus, though attempts have been consistently made to compare the Romanian movement to Italian neo-realism or to the French Nouvelle Vague and, in a less consistent way, to similar East European movements from the sixties, it is obvious that these auteurs developed a unique, specifically Romanian way of telling stories on film and of addressing an international audience who, when they came to their films, had little if any understanding or knowledge of the realities of this former Soviet satellite country. My main argument is that there are three essential features to new Romanian cinema, quite often at work simultaneously: the concern with politics and/or ideology, the use of verbal and visual irony, and reflexive audiovisual strategies. The ensuing theoretical contention I consider as being essential when dealing with noteworthy Romanian auteur films is that the much debated notion of “realism” that has often been at the core of numerous appraisals of Romanian New Wave films paradoxically limits and narrows the scope of analyses. A wider ontological framework dominated by consistently ambivalent fictional universes will be at stake in what follows. Contrary to recent hypotheses about Romanian cinema having turned transnational, I argue that it is its highly national specificity situated at the crossroads between Latin and Balkan sociohistoric representations that explains its unprecedented complexity in the context of world cinema. This national specificity is of course valid in terms of art cinema and does not necessarily extend to more commercially cinematic outputs, which deal with contemporary topics in more conventional ways belonging to genres or sub-genres (thriller, comedy, horror, fantasy), and stick to universal story-telling and stylistic conventions. Reflexive art as theorized by Robert Stam’s essential Reflexivity in Film and Art, constantly reminds us of the multiplicity of styles available to an artist. Stam revisits the reflexive categories (intertexts, metatexts, paratexts, hypertexts, etc.) theorized in Genette’s Palimpsests: they are often at work in films precisely because they manage to concomitantly approach historical and/or political facts and fictional ones (1992, 23). As a modality of reflection relating facts from reality to diegetically constructed narratives, mise en abyme, eventually proves to be one of the all-encompassing tropes used by Romanian contemporary auteurs. In The Mirror in the Text (1989), Lucien Dällenbach distinguishes between a plain reduplication based on the similitude between the main story and the one that is the mise en abyme, an ad infinitum reduplication, when the same fragment is embedded endlessly, an aporetic and ultimately more complex reduplication. Jacques Gerstenkorn alternatively postulates two types of mise en abyme, the first one is filmic and homo-filmic, the second one hetero-filmic (Ron 1987, 421).



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

161

We find in Romanian contemporary cinema what Mikhail Iampolski has labeled as “structural isomorphism” between the framing text and the secondary text, films which feature both highly realistic political hints at the visual fabric of pre- and post-communist society as well as digressions brought in by the “ironic voice.” (Iampolski 1998). As such, irony indicates the existence of a narratorial voice and disrupts the construction of a closed fictional world which could otherwise yield an impression of reality: what appears to be case on the surface differs radically from the truth. The strength of the movement away from the referential discourse is illustrated by the fact that the ironic text tends to foreclose any referential meaning by establishing a heavily coded intertext as its proper language. Linda Hutcheon argues that irony is transideological, it is not limited to any person by their political persuasion: “in irony, there is a great complicity with the historical referent, given its inability to free itself from the discourse it contests” (1998, 5). For Romanian auteurs, situational, dramatic, and verbal irony as figured in the works of playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, the Romanian Molière, and in Eugene Ionesco’s nonsensical absurd universe have often served as a weapon against ideology. Caragiale (1852–1919), the author of essential plays of the national repertory which have become classics, such as A Stormy Night and The Lost Letter, was endowed with a formidable gift of satirical observation of the Balkan Romanian society, often veering into the grotesque. Not wanting to adhere to Caragiale’s rather vaudevillian tonality, but to remain close to his themes and his sense of irony, the absurd as developed by Ionescu refuses psychologism, and instead combines the tragic with the ironic and favors sub-text and restraint.

Past continuous and time within time: Romanian contemporary auteurs and the political legacy of communism Most Romanian auteurs began defining their creative arc by trying to chronicle recent history by revisiting the past as “present continuous,” In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur declines to translate mimesis as representation, for he believes that the relationship between narrative and the world is more complex and the ideas’ beginning, middle, end are not necessarily indicative of real experience. Fictional narrative therefore cannot be “life-like” and narratives cannot impose a form they do not possess (Carr 1991, 15). In his essay “Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the 21st Century,” Constantin Parvulescu provides a very comprehensive survey of the links between politics and narrative in post-1989 Romanian cinema:

162

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

After the fall of Communist regimes Romanian filmmakers abandoned heroic narratives. Three facts can be construed as reasons leading to this change. First, filmmakers looked for alternative ways for representing the past. … Second, they sought new faces of heroism because traditional ones had become uncomfortably connected to the regime’s propaganda practices and Mao-style personality cult … Third, they were led by a certain perception—postmodern, but specifically Central European— that neither is history ruled by rules or reason, nor are its protagonists home-grown heroes, Romanian history being mainly shaped by international superpower actors such as the empires of the 19th century and the great war makers of the 20th: Germany, the Soviet Union and the US. … Among the films grouped under the label The Romanian New Wave, the few that addressed the past assumed a relativistic perception, questioning the legitimacy of filmmakers to assume the role of moral judges. (Parvulescu 2013, 365) Intimations of reflexive narrative and aesthetic choices which Thomas Elsaesser calls “marked diegetic spaces” are to be found in some Romanian films of the 1980s and early 1990s (Elsaesser 2008, 47). They are at work in Mircea Daneliuc’s outstandingly modern Microphone Test (Proba de microfon, 1980), in Dan Pița’s highly encrypted and allegorical Contest (Concurs, 1982), in Alexandru Tatos’s systemically self-reflexive Sequences (Secvențe, 1983), or in Nae Caranfil’s polyphonic tale, Sundays on Leave (È pericoloso sporgersi, 1993) (Nasta 2013a, Chapters 6 and 8). These films boldly deal with the highly problematic aspects of the sociopolitical Romanian situation in covert and allusive ways, while maintaining the awareness of the spectator at all times “he is witness not to the real but to a fiction about the real” (Zavarzadeh 1991, 71). Lucian Pintilie, whose career spanned nearly half a century, starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the twenty-first century, helped to establish a ground-breaking thematic and aesthetic base from which other, later “new directors” benefited. Mise en abyme and irony appear as thematic and aesthetic corollaries as early as Pintilie’s second, albeit revolutionary feature, Reconstruction (Reconstituirea, 1969), a film which most New Wave directors refer to on regular basis. As the mirror of totalitarian conformism is broken, the plot centers upon an act of juvenile delinquency, meant to be re-enacted and filmed to serve as an example to other potential offenders. The absurdist humor turns a ridiculous totalitarian enterprise into a huge mise-en-abyme for a deranged authority. After a twenty-year artistic exile, Pintilie’s first post-totalitarian opus The Oak (Balanța, 1992), opens with an embedded meta-diegetic home movie: a joyful Christmas party featuring the film’s heroine and her father disguised as Santa Claus. It degenerates into a surrealistic, macabre killing,



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

163

with the girl snatching her father’s pistol and aiming randomly at guests. By means of a homo-filmic mise en abyme, the heroine re-infuses her hatred for the communist regime into reworked images from her childhood. In Too Late (Prea tîrziu, 1996), prosecutor Costa investigates several unexplained deaths. During one central scene, while the miners protest against the threat of mine closures, Costa watches the same event on a TV set. In Next Stop Paradise (Terminus paradis, 1998), a deranged soldier shoots his fiancée’s lover following a grotesque scene. The discovery by the police and the media of the blood-stained body, his back against a courtyard wall, is a strong reminder of the image of Ceaușescu’s corpse that the whole world was privy to on TV a mere ten years earlier. We witness a duplicated, hetero-filmic mise en abyme, in actuality a synecdoche: the small-scale model refers to an extra-diegetic, yet highly similar image. Pintilie’s Niki and Flo (Niki Ardelean, colonel in rezervă, 2003), a film which marks his “entrance” into the twenty-first century, is narrated in the mode of a diary, and remarkably co-scripted by the two key figures of the New Wave trend, Cristi Puiu and screenwriter Răzvan Rădulescu. A sarcastic, ironic tale, the film portrays two representative figures of the postrevolutionary upheaval as they prepare for the departure of their children to the United States within the timeframe of the 9/11 turmoil. While watching the children’s wedding film on their TV set, Niki and Flo have an argument over how Romanian history should be read. Both director and

FIGURE 9.1  Next Stop: Paradise.

Source: Next Stop: Paradise (Lucian Pintilie, 1998) © Canal+, Cinematográfica Filmex S.A., MK2 Productions.

164

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

screenwriters perfectly synthesize the Romanian post-1989 zeitgeist, after years of imposed nationalist clichés: while watching the grandiose wedding celebration—the feast, speeches, and dances—Flo ironically comments (“We’re now in the room of our ancestors Trajan and Decebal/And here are their descendants with their chief sucker the colonel, dancing the traditional ‘hora’”): the comments pertaining to the decadence of the wedding become another ironic instance of mise-en-abyme. Walter Benjamin’s concept of evoking “time within time,” a momentary presence that miraculously combines similarity and difference, may be used to explain many of the thematic and aesthetic choices made by Romanian New Wave auteurs (Melberg 1995, 6). Three films directed by twenty-firstcentury auteurs about the Romanian revolution have been at the center of a considerable amount of exegesis. They each contain interesting examples of mise en abyme and use irony to counteract the chaotic and manipulative aspects of the revolution: the way the revolution was presented on TV, the controversy surrounding the revolution, and the long era of post-socialist disappointments are treated by these films in overtly reflexive ways. Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue (Hârtia va fi albastră, 2006) focuses on a military conscript who finds himself tragically caught up and in the events of 1989. While the militia unit searches the conscript, the Salvation Front is seen on the television screen, and soldiers arrive to report that Ceaușescu’s car has been spotted. Once inside the almost-mythical TV station, an embedded reflexive paradigm is unleashed. The mise en abyme reveals history in the making, enhanced by homo-filmic reflexivity and by highly ironic intra-diegetic dialogues. (“Listen guys / We just got a phonecall / The Ceaușescus were seen seen in a yellow car / With a licence plate 1918 / Actually, It’s his birthday …”) Moshe Ron notes in “The Restricted Abyss”: “When mise en abyme is visually and verbally motivated, irony reigns supreme” (1987, 436). According to Parvulescu: The revolutionaries are driven by a determination to act heroically, yet research on the governmental committees on the Romanian 1989 has shown these loyalists did not actually exist. This research established that the street battles that developed in Bucharest between December 22 and 25 1989 were either cases of friendly fire or part of a hunt for imaginary enemies … The ultimate metteur en scène of the 1989 street battles is ideology itself. (2013, 370) Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08, East of Bucharest (A fost sau n’a fost?, (2006) deals with the TV broadcast station in 1989, which this time must decide on whether or not to report that there has been a simultaneous revolution in a provincial hinterland, a “locus of post-history.” Porumboiu employs comedy in order to examine the past, recalling both the grotesque



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

165

comedy of Caragiale and the absurd vein of Ionesco. The films also points out the futility of revolutionary action and puts an astute twist symptomatic of history rethinking. Reflexive irony operates according to subtractive principles: the studio looks improvised, the town hall poster in the background could fall down at any moment, one of the participants provides comic relief as he desperately tries to enter the frame, and the cameraman trainee tries to frame them all correctly but fails to do so (Booth 1974, 177). Mise-en-abyme is based on a debunking of ongoing mimetic enterprises: a structural isomorphism including witty dialogue, tableaux-like visuals, and deadpan humor, questioning the reality of events, captured by the actual Romanian title “Did It Happen Or Not?” Cătălin Mitulescu’s first feature, How I Spent the End of the World (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârșitul lumii, 2006) less minimalist in style than those of his contemporaries, echoes themes more closely related to Emir Kusturica’s entertaining post-communist chronicles. It sticks quite closely to classical cinema standards: transparent narration with multiple storylines converging at the end via a satisfactory payoff. As its oxymoronic title suggests, the film mixes story time and political history in ironically stimulating ways: within a framed narrative, both the film’s prologue and its final scene feature Ceauşescu, first caricatured by an impersonator, and then again during his widely broadcast final public speech. The film’s first payoff is an interesting case of embedded homo-filmic mise-en-abyme: through dynamic crosscutting, a group of young boys relish the main character’s deliberate targeting of the dictator with his slingshot. When the image starts to tremble because revolution is on the move, an old neighbor is persuaded there is something wrong with the set, nervously banging his fist on it. Almost twenty years after his Videograms of a Revolution (1992, with Harun Farocki), Andrei Ujica, a Romanian-born German academic and visual artist born in 1953 (hence not generationally related to the New Wave) watched 1,000 hours of footage on Ceaușescu. He became the author of The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu, 2010), a montage film which ironically offers a version of history the dictator could have endorsed himself: it features celebrations, public appearances, but does not include any voice-over comments. A three hour case of intertexts edited from pre-existing, most often propagandistic footage, the film has a fictionalized soundscape so as to ensure a narrative progression of the visual discourse. The film begins and ends with the almost poignant testimony of the deposed dictator during the mock trial. A long flashback recounts the important stages of his career, as though in a double mirror reflection, corresponding with layers of the past and the time crystals theorized by Deleuze. At his trial, filmed in a school classroom with a shaky camera that does not yet know how to treat the deposed tyrant, Ceaușescu denounces the hearing as a “masquerade.”

166

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

The documentary presents the history of Romania, and of the rest of the world over almost three decades as an exciting fiction. Thus, watching a ludicrous show featuring the patriotic ode “Românie, Românie,” sung in Romanian by a North Korean singer and applauded by both dictators during Ceauseșcu’s official visit to Korea, we quickly understand that this film is a perfectly orchestrated aporetic mise-en-abyme. Ujica, who actually chose the show excerpt with his editor Dana Bunescu for the film’s international trailer, saw Kim Il Sung as “one of the biggest propaganda artists …, as he managed to produce a synthesis between Nazi aesthetics and Stalinist personality cult, with real directors hired for shows.”1

Post-89 topics: Filling the hole in the flag and minimalist aesthetics As noted by Parvulescu (2013, 381), the symbol of the Romanian revolution, the flag with the hole in it, also appears on the cover of Slavoj Žižek’s Tarrying with the Negative (1993),2 Žižek figures it as an attempt to reveal, by a philosophical synecdoche, what it meant to have an absence at the center of national identity, particularly as the population felt like the servants (and later executioners) of a master in whom nobody believed any more. New symbols were needed to counter the communist heritage both in its cultural and social dimensions. In Image and Memory, Giorgio Agamben discusses Aby Warburg’s concept of Zwischenraum, a substitute for past symbols, an interval, a no-man’s-land where the principles of a new liberty and line of thought require humans to handle them differently, while still keeping in mind what defines their psyche and their national identity (Agamben 2004, 18–21). The films mentioned above prove to what extent episodes from the communist past, its traumatic memories, and the long-standing effects of the December Revolution paradigm determined thematic and aesthetic patterns both in the case of already-established twentieth-century auteurs such as Pintilie, and current New Wave Romanian auteurs. As surveyed elsewhere (Nasta 2012, 2013a, 2013b) both the 1990s and the first years of the new century saw more films and directors either dealing with the evils of communism or with the ambivalence of a country struggling with economic and moral difficulties created in the wake of the conditions of a newly regained liberty. The faltering post-communist regime indirectly fostered a “demonstration effect” overtly showcasing capitalist symbols and new lifestyles through comparison with the most advanced Western societies. The situation could be described as a sort of cultural anomie of



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

167

people “suspended halfway between two worlds and their values, feeling nowhere at home” (Daskalov 1997, 141). Cristian Mungiu’s ravishing, multi-story first feature West (Occident, 2001), as well as more mainstream tragi-comedies directed by Nae Caranfil, Asphalt Tango (1996) or Philanthropy (Filantropica, 2002), offer ironically salient alternatives to the communist clichés and post-89 miserabilist views of Balkan society, in particular the Romanian one. In a different vein, Maria, Călin Peter Netzer’s debut (2003), based on the true story of an impoverished working mother who eventually turns to prostitution to save her family, is a violent reflection on the tragic consequences of the post-communist transition in the domestic sphere. Six years later Netzer directed Medal of Honor (Medalia de Onoare, 2009) a story about a medal for heroic World War II achievements being awarded to the wrong person: a subtle black comedy with a self-reflexive ironic twist, since the hero is awarded the medal by one-time president Ion Iliescu. In Cristian Nemescu’s (1979–2006)3 California Dreamin’ Endless (2007) an obscure stationmaster from a small Romanian village next to the Black Sea stops a U.S. NATO convoy during the Kosovo War: blending a love story with a geopolitical one, it is a highly convincing and enjoyable parable of national identity. Marian Crișan’s Morgen (2010) takes the sensitive issue of illegal immigration, verging on black humor. Florin Șerban’s When I Want to Whistle I Whistle (Eu când vera să fluier, fluier, 2011) parallels in both topic and style the moral radiography and sensitive society issues of the Dardenne brothers: the main hero nearly at the end of his four-year prison sentence in a juvenile youth-detention center jeopardizes his impending release when things go wrong in an almost unbearably claustrophobic hostage scene. Much like the new sociopolitical and cultural identity in Romania (as in the other ex-Soviet satellite countries), the line separating new cinematic realism of the new Romanian cinema and the mini revolution caused by the generalization of minimalist aesthetics also proves difficult to articulate. Though predating the New Wave “revolution” films, Cristi Puiu’s programmatic The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea Domnului Lăzărescu, 2005), the harrowing journey of a sick old man shuffled from one hospital to the other until he slowly expires, needs to be approached as a subsequent attempt to redefine both the persistence of memory and the paradoxes of an uncertain present. Parallels critics have drawn between Lazarescu and a similar hero from the Italian neo-realist school, De Sica’s Umberto D (1952), reveal to what extent Bazinian ontological realism fails to answer all the questions raised by the film’s ambivalent universe. Miles away from the radical hyperrealism of his first feature, Stuff and Dough (Marfa și banii, 2001), Puiu actually sets up, inside a minimalist chronotope, a discourse which oscillates between the realistic depiction of pain and suffering in a

168

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

sustained ironic, albeit symbolic mode. What has been labeled as “an observational aesthetics which abandons classical, analytical editing” (Gorzo 2013, 8) favoring long takes, arbitrary framing, and hand-held camera work is counterbalanced by recurrent verbal irony. Răzvan Rădulescu’s witty and complex dialogue sheds a critical light on the post-1989 health system, while also introducing embedded jokes, quid pro quos, even puns and intertextual allusions to classical nursery rhymes. Previous contributions to the “Tragic and Ironic” dimensions of contemporary Romanian films have tackled the paratextual, onomastic symbolism of the film’s title, crafted by Puiu and Rădulescu as a prospective miseen-abyme. Additionally, ironic reflexive patterns are set into motion by the titular character Lăzărescu himself in a breathtakingly understated performance by Ion Fiscuteanu. Throughout the film he engages in hypodiegetically isolated sub-stories: more or less articulate discussions centered on his condition and the state of Romanian society at large, on immigration and its consequences on broken families, on the side-effects of World War II, etc. One of the film’s final scenes reveals a case of challenging retrospective mise-en-abyme which we will examine here. Transferred to the final hospital, Lăzărescu grows weaker until he can no longer utter his name. Economic staging and reframing devices theorized by David Bordwell are at play: frontal staging and lateral framing render each character surrounding Lăzărescu equally important. The dialogue in this scene, embedded ironically, “subtracts” the events of the recent past and arrives at the conclusion that the ongoing situation is

FIGURE 9.2  The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Source: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) © Mandragora. U.S. Distributor: Tartan.



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

169

hopeless: first the nurses comment that he “cannot” speak any longer, then it appears that he gets there “too late,” and finally they conclude that he has “no” member of his family at his side. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, in Lăzărescu’s anticipated “end” we find the beginning of a still unfolding paradigm in contemporary Romanian auteur cinema: it materializes in narratives favoring individual destinies and minimal chronotopes and is used to address major moral, social, and political issues. Žižek notes that in Le siècle Alain Badiou deploys two models of the “Passion of the real” as defining passion for the twentyfirst century: “purification” (which arrives at the kernel of the real) and “subtraction” (which isolates the minimal differences that become palpable in the symptomal point of the existing order of reality). The Real can be isolated through violent purification and as the singular universal that marks the minimal difference (Žižek 2004, 101). In the same minimalist, “less is more” line as Puiu, Cristian Mungiu’s, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 săptămâni si 2 zile, 2007) chro­ nicles in an extremely accurate manner the anti-abortion terror of everyday life during the last days of communist dictatorship. Mungiu, incidentally “a child” of the Anti-Abortion Decree, clearly opts for a reflexive paratextual title which relates directly to a line spoken by one of the heroines of the film. The DVD edition of the film actually features another metatext with the inclusion of Florin Iepan’s documentary Children of the Decree (2004) which looks at the tragic intervention of the communist state in the private sphere through Ceauşescu’s infamous Decree 770 of 1967 (Bradeanu 2007, 45). Notwithstanding the important amount of exegesis dedicated to the film’s transgressive image of the aborted fetus, the latter is clearly a homodiegetic mise en abyme of the entire ideological enterprise, it is meant to denounce, namely Ceaușescu’s demographic policy which had long-term devastating effects on Romanian society. Another case of politically relevant mise-en-abyme occurs en route to the hotel where the abortion is set to take place: the abortion doctor asks Otilia, the main character, to wait for him in the car as he needs to talk to his mother. From their exchange we understand that a friend has been queuing for the mother to get some sugar at the supermarket. It is clearly meant to circumscribe communism’s end of reign’s profound economic crisis into the bigger issue of illegal abortion. The depth of the composition along with the embedded dialogue and foregrounded sound leads to an ironic, heterodiegetic mise-en-abyme. As in Tintoretto’s eighteenth-century painting Susanna and the Elders, we are invited from a point of relative distance to observe and eavesdrop with Otilia from a distanced, static point of view. After having successfully experimented with the omnibus format writing and co-producing burlesque episodes in the style of the Ceaușescu era ironically labeled Tales from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur,

170

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 9.3  4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Source: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007) © Mobra Films, Centrul National al Cinematografiei (CNC), Saga Film. US Distributor: IFC Films.

FIGURE 9.4  Susanna and the Elders, Tintoretto, c. 1555. Source: Wikipedia.



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

171

2009), Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (Dupa dealuri, 2012), proves a highly original rendering of a politically significant societal issue. The film takes on the case of exorcism from a Romanian monastery, where a young orphaned girl died in 2005 under mysterious circumstances after having spent time abroad in an effort to find work. The screenplay, a free adaptation of two non-fiction novels by journalist Tatiana Niculescu-Bran, overtly deals with the theme of feminine hysteria, featuring also a subtle lesbian subtext. Embracing democracy after the fall of communism Romanians claimed they suffered because the leadership suppressed religion and destroyed numerous churches and monasteries. Consequently, the Orthodox Church extensively used this myth to support the creation of a new state based on stronger religious values. In many regions of present-day Romania, superstition and religious faith have thus coexisted amidst a background of increasing poverty and unemployment (Leustean 2008, 421). Mungiu’s staging of character interaction inside the monastic world of the film is, as noted by Mircea Deaca, “a rematch of the iconic template”; within the cinematic frame the characters occupy the positions as dictated by the Orthodox icon’s composition. He thus brings about a new type of reflexive metatext, alternating hand-held takes with fixed shots staged in depth so as to highlight the dynamics of dogmatism and eroticism (Deaca 2015, 131). The final scene of the film unfolds inside the van transporting the priest guilty of manslaughter by exorcism and the nuns to the police station. While they are shown listening in full frame, the prosecutor casually explains to the driver that a man stabbed his mother and put the pictures of the deed on the internet. Then he comments that the eternal muddy winter “of our discontent” seems to never end. A group of children cross the street and a big truck splashes mud onto the windshield obstructing the vision of the passengers. Mungiu’s choice to end the film in this manner may

FIGURE 9.5  Beyond the Hills.

Source: Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012) © Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma, Mandragora Movies. Worldwide distributor: Wild Bunch.

172

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 9.6  Beyond the Hills.

Source: Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012) © Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma, Mandragora Movies. Worldwide distributor: Wild Bunch.

be interpreted as a warning about the future of a new generation adrift in an unsympathetic world, but it ultimately proves itself as a highly ironic mise-en-abyme displaying homo-filmic visuals and a hetero-filmic metatext. The director has been rather ambiguous in interviews, regarding the significance of the film as either a commentary on the uneasy mix of religion and science, or the current sociopolitical state of Romania. “This film, more than others, is like a mirror: everyone projects his or her values upon it” (Ioniță 2015, 165).

Unstable microcosms, alternative reflexive paths A series of auteur films from the New Wave, following the aesthetic trends of Puiu and Mungiu, offer equivocal, ambivalent levels of meaning and maintain high standards in their ways of challenging both domestic and international audiences. Though the societal and ideological issues at hand are now less connected to the Ceaușescu era traumas, their stories still cohere as self-contained narratives, and at the same time invite the viewer to read them as allegories of the political or social events in contemporary Romania. Within the diversity of mainstream and arthouse film output of the last decade, the family microcosm-related films outdo the observational realism and “kitchen sink” dramas from the first post-communist features primarily by opting to pursue and create new forms of reflexivity and situational irony. Established film and theater actors as well as newcomers and non-professionals become paradigms for the social and political issues



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

173

they portray by giving both over- and understated performances, emphasized as such by directors who focus in on the minute details of gesture, body language, dialog, and physiognomy. Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (Marți, după Crăciun, 2010) tells the classic triangular story of middle-class infidelity from the vantage point of Paul, a man torn between two women: there is an agonizing tension as he has to leave one of them before the family Christmas celebrations commence. The paratextual title (yet another line from the film) serves as both a concrete indication and an allegory. The formal, albeit minimalist economy is subtle, consisting of a few dozen shots with the camera only slightly moving. It deliberately feels like a voyeuristic intrusion into the intimacy of the characters, such as the “postcoital” opening sequence where husband and mistress lie on the bed naked and kiss—a foil to the final cruel testimony of a couple’s implosion. Adrian Sitaru’s second feature, clearly inspired by Puiu’s Lazarescu, Best Intentions (Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intenții, 2011), centers on a man in his mid-thirties unable to accept his parents’ mortality. When his mother is hospitalized after a stroke, Alex attempts to thwart the doctors, by changing her medication, the irony deriving from the rift between his good intentions and his perceived behavior. The film is shot from the point of view of different characters, and subjective (often hand-held) camera leads the viewer to feel more sympathy for Alex. Humor emerges from unexpected scenes with the convalescing mother’s roommates: one in particular, whose face was disfigured in an accident, is only seen wearing a cheap, plastic bunny mask. Radu Jude’s kinetic tale of domestic abuse in Everybody in our Family (Toată lumea din familia noastră, 2012), is interspersed with flashes of dark comedy echoing Cassavetes and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (Stojanova 2013, 34). At the same time, it provides a highly insightful overview of contemporary Romanian family dynamics. The film begins with the stressed and anxious divorced Marius Vizereanu as he frets over the coming visit of his daughter Sofia and their planned trip to the seaside. As soon as the camera enters the cramped flat where he resides, every emotion, sarcastic remark, threat, or self-abasement is recorded in meticulous fashion. When Marius loses control of his domestic situation—his wife assaulted, her boyfriend tied up, and the police hopelessly knocking on the door—the scene provokes laughter despite the almost unbearable portrayal of domestic violence. After the carnage, Marius simply walks away from the camera down a busy street. Călin Peter Netzer’s highly acclaimed contemporary social drama, Child’s Pose (Poziția copilului, 2013), remarkably captures a domineering mother, consumed by self-love, in her struggle to save her immature and ungrateful son who caused the tragic death of a fourteen-year-old child in an accident. Răzvan Rădulescu’s perceptive screenplay reflects with tragic irony the moral turmoil of a woman of the Bucharest elite, tempted to

174

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

resort to bribery and corruption through emotional blackmail. In a style still faithful to the minimalist vein, favoring hand-held cameras, POV shots, and the use of incidental, pre-existing music, the film meticulously reconstructs the events. Luminița Gheorghiu’s performance as the mother, shot in pitiless close ups, has an iconic, somehow metonymic scope: she represents the whole post-communist world, the ambivalence of which is still puzzling to Western eyes. Cristi Puiu’s third feature, Aurora (2010), the second episode of his six-installment series Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest, is doubly self-reflexive, expressing an auteur’s concern with reality and with representation in a politically and socially diffuse Romanian context. The series follows the story of an anti-social, isolated divorcee with two daughters and a mistress, who, frustrated with his ex-wife’s family, commits a series of murders. The slow-paced tragedy features Puiu himself in the role of Viorel, a character he plays with a deliberate, expressionless demeanor. As the series progresses and the gradual downfall of Viorel becomes more pronounced, his performance takes on a more sarcastic tone. The director’s outward performance suggests the inside of the character’s disturbed mind. When he finally confesses his murders to the police, it is in the same understated, precise, sarcastic tone which inspires laughter. Deconstruction of violence and examinations of the banality of evil follow the minimalist line: long takes and sparse dialogs, features of a varied strain of austere cinema that favors mood over action. The title is an obvious reflexive oxymoron: most of the narrative unfolds either at night or in poorly-lit environments, while Viorel kills his in-laws and turns himself in to the police on a bright summer day. Instead of “express[ing] himself” directly, Viorel is rather “expressed” through dysfunctions and signs (Ferencz Flatz 2013, 38). Corneliu Porumboiu’s second feature, Police, Adjective (Polițist, adjectiv, 2009) is a slow-moving police procedural with minimum action and dialogue taking place in the same small town as 12:08. In the film, the stubborn policeman Cristi doggedly pursues a teenage high-school student suspected of hash possession, staking out and waiting for his suspect next to their home. The young detective is later confronted by a moral dilemma involving the boy’s arrest, knowing that a future law will legalize the kind of crime he is accused of. The policeman’s moral crisis (doing reports in a meticulous way in the same way Viorel prepares his killing) resonates with the deep crisis in post-communist society norms and behaviors (drugs, unemployment, unorthodox police techniques, etc.). Unstable irony is also oriented through sound, as Cristi argues with his wife about her listening to an insipid hit from the 1980s sung by Mirabela Dauer, the lyrics of which seem nonsensical to him. Porumboiu obviously favors deconstructive verbal and visual irony and returns to mise-en-abyme in terms of metatext by debunking the sense of the word “policeman.” During the final scene Cristi, summonned by his boss, is questioned on the literal meaning of



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

175

words, juxtaposing an abstract text with representational images. Guido Kirsten rightly argues that: “By adding a political discursive dimension to its realism, Police, Adjective becomes reflexive … The film’s strength lies in the combination of phenomenological and reflexive realism” (2015, 5). The director’s third feature may be seen as a hypertextual alternative to Fellini’s 8½ (1963). Metabolism, or When Evening Falls on Bucharest (Metabolism, sau când se lasă seara peste București, 2013) is about a filmmaker who starts an affair with one of his actresses while he is supposed to be shooting a film: he is feeling sick and the audience never knows if he will actually shoot the picture. A medical x-ray shown by the director in one of the film’s scenes surprisingly becomes a metaphor for the world, a homodiegetic mise en abyme. Paul explains to his actress and mistress the difference between analog and digital film and how digital technology enables the extension of the shot indefinitely. Accordingly, as noted by Agnes Pethö “because we see no progress being made, the scenes are only loosely linked; we could even view them in a different order” (2015, 7). Porumboiu’s ensuing pure experiment in intermediality, The Second Game (Al doilea joc, 2014) is a reflexive, audiovisual tour de force, the topicality of which is essentially political: the director and his father in real life, an ex-referee, comment off-frame on a 1988 football match making spirited ironic observations about the country’s political situation one year before the fall of Ceaușescu. Real dialogue is paradoxically less overt than ironic dialogue because the viewer’s recognition of the double meaning depends upon an ability to draw the connections between onscreen diegesis, characters, and events and the wider political significance. Finally, his latest film The Treasure (Comoara, 2015), initially conceived of as a documentary because it was inspired by real-life events, offers a wonderfully ironic reframing of the fairy-tale intertext: while a young father is reading Robin Hood to his son, he is tempted by a neighbor who asks him to help excavate a buried treasure from his garden. However, if the treasure turns out to be of interest for Romanian heritage, the state will force them to report the riches and seize it. Communism’s shadow still looms in the distance, in the heat of some mysterious summer night. Though the line between auteur and mainstream cinema has recently become more difficult to identify and new genres have emerged, receiving international acclaim, Romanian film financing and distribution are hugely dependent on co-production strategies and domestic cinema attendance is still highly problematic. However, the future looks bright, as Romanians themselves seem to realize at last the extent to which their filmmakers have contributed to the improvement and transformation of the miserable image of the country, imparted by decades of dictatorship and economic disarray. We may thus close with the paratextual title of Radu Jude’s highly popular black

176

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and white nineteenth-century epic Aferim! (2015), an Ottoman Turkish expression meaning “Well done!”4

Notes 1 Author’s email exchange with Andrei Ujica, March 2015. 2

It also happens to be the title of a political essay by Andrei Codrescu; The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1991).

3

Nemescu tragically died in a car crash aged only twenty-seven.

4

Parallel genres and formats have emerged during the first decade of the twenty-first century, equally challenging in content and style and requiring the same analytical triad (ideology/irony/reflexivity) in order to be fully grasped. Such is the case of Anca Damian’s (b. 1962) highly praised animated film for adults Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Crulic, drumul spre dincolo, 2012), close in spirit and style to two other celebrated foreign animated films for adults. The story mixes animation techniques with live footage from TV news, paper inserts, and photographs, reminding one of surrealist “collage techniques.” Inspired by the authentic case of a thirty-three-year-old Romanian wrongly accused of theft and imprisoned while working in Poland. Seeking to prove his innocence, Claudiu Crulic embarks on a hunger strike but neither the Polish nor the Romanian authorities are ready to admit he is innocent, so he is left to die. The hero’s life story is narrated by the character from beyond the grave.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. Image et mémoire. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Booth, Wayne. 1974. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David. 2005. Figures Traced in Light. On Cinematic Staging. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradeanu, Adina. 2007. “Romanian Documentaries and the Communist Legacy,” Cineaste: Contemporary Balkan Cinema 32 (3): 45–7. Carr, David. 1991. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1989. The Mirror in the Text. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daskalov, Rumen. 1997. “Ideas about and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans,” East European Quarterly 31 (2) (Summer): 141–80. Deaca, Mircea. 2015. “Cristian Mungiu: From Symbolic Composition to Figural,” in Mircea Deaca (ed.), Images: Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies 4, 129–50, Bucharest: CESI. Dondero, Maria Giulia. 2012. “Le spectacle dans l’image et la spectacularisation de l’image,” Degrés 149–50 (Winter): a2–10.



Contemporary Romanian auteurs

177

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2008. “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema,” in Temenuga Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory, 48–61. New York: Routledge. Ferencz Flatz, Christian. 2013. “Aurora, Elements from an Analysis of a Misunderstanding,” Close Up 1 (1): 32–42. Gerstenkorn, Jacques. 1987. “A travers le miroir. Notes introductives,” Vertigo. Le cinéma au miroir 1: 7–10. Gorzo, Andrei. 2013. “Concerning the Local Precursors of the New Romanian Realism,” Close Up 1 (1): 4–11. Hutcheon, Linda. 1998. “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern.” Available online: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (accessed July 30, 2015). Iampolski, Mikhail. 1998. The Memory of Tiresias. Intertextuality and Film, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ioniță, Maria. 2015. “Vision and Blindness in Cristian Mungiu’s 4, 3, 2 and Beyond the Hills,” in Mircea Deaca (ed.), Images: Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies 4, 129–50. Bucharest: CESI. Kirsten, Guido. 2015. “Fictions of Everydayness: Focalization Patterns and Narrative ‘Reality Effects’ in Police, Adjective and Other Films from the Romanian New Wave.” Available online: http://www.photogenie.be/ photogenie_blog/article/fictions-everydayness (accessed July 30, 2015). Leustean, Lucian. 2008. “Orthodoxy and Political Myths in Balkan National Identities,” National Identities 10 (4) (December): 421–32. Melberg, Arne. 1995. Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nasta, Dominique. 2012. “Continuity, Change and Renewal in Romanian Auteur Films,” Film International 10 (1): 34–56. Nasta, Dominique. 2013a. Contemporary Romanian Cinema. The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Nasta, Dominique. 2013b. “Rhetorical Figures and Romanian Film Acting: From Pintilie to Mungiu,” Close Up 1 (1): 13–18. Nasta, Dominique with Aurélie Lachapelle. 2012. “Images de la fin d’une dictature et mise en abyme spectaculaire,” Degrés 149–50 (Winter): 2–10. Parvulescu, Constantin. 2013. “Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the 21st Century,” in Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film, 365–81. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Pethö, Agnes. 2015. “‘Exhibited Space’and Intermediality in the Films of Corneliu Porumboiu,” in Christina Stojanova and Dana Duma (eds), New Romanian Cinema. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1990. Time and Narrative, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ron, Moshe. 1987. “The Restricted Abyss: Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme,” Poetics Today 8 (2): 417–38. Şerban, Alex Leo. 2010. “Romanian Cinema: From Modernity to Neo-Realism,” Film Criticism 34 (2–3) (Winter). Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Art: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press.

178

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Stojanova, Christina. 2013. “Ethics is the New Aesthetics Comic Ironic Modes in New Romanian Cinema,” Close Up 1 (2): 23–36. Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud. 1991. Seeing Films Politically: Pleasure, Resistance and the Postmodern. New York: SUNY. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge.

10 Fatih Akin’s moral geometry Dudley Andrew

Does anyone doubt that auteur films played a serious role in aesthetic, political, and philosophic discussions of the postwar period until 1968, 1975, or maybe 1989? What about in our era? Is there anything left of the “classic art cinema” aside from a trivial niche market inside an entertainment system that went fully global at the fall of a communism and at the advent of the digital? If so, we need to look for it in auteurs, either contrarians like Carlos Reygadas or Pedro Costa, who assert a truly obsessive style (modeling themselves on Bresson) or more accessible directors aiming at the festivals and the larger public alike, such as the Dardennes, Jia Zhangke, or … Fatih Akin. These latter immediately attract scholars looking to identify striking political or philosophical positions, often to promote them against mainstream films and ideas. German and English critics quickly pointed to Fatih Akin as a strikingly new cinematic voice ready to reformulate the idea of affiliation, especially after 2004 when, as Daniela Berghahn notes, he embraced his Turkish roots and his bifurcated identity, “problematizing the notion of difference” (2011, 255). She suggests that the title of his music documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005) should be taken as emblem of a full-out project that aims to reconfigure social attitudes toward otherness. His films became the occasion for scholars to lay out demographic data about the Turkish diaspora and historical information on evolving attitudes toward both his nations and bi-nationalism in general. As we will see, the better studies (like those of Göktürk 2008; Brochman 2010; Bergfelder 2011; Berghahn 2011) go beyond the many articles that tally up such predictable sociological points as conflicted character types (Halle 2008), or differential audience responses in Germany

180

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and Turkey, or the marketing of his films in Germany (Cox 2012; Machtans 2012). Yet even if they introduce fascinating subjects like Akin’s musical and narrative sources, most discussions treat his films as a barometer that registers a turbulent sociopolitical weather system. Nearly all those writing about Fatih Akin are invested in German or Turkish studies, where I remain at most an interested bystander. Can one engage a political filmmaker at a level other than that of his/her immediate political situation? Mahmut Mutman (2008) begins to do so by subordinating the political allegory of Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) to the musical aesthetics that shape rather than bolster that film, and Claudia Breger (2014) looks beneath sociopolitical readings of The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007) to account for the sensory composition that animates what would otherwise be a lifeless syllogism. But it is particularly Thomas Elsaesser who has lifted Akin’s situation above Germany and Turkey through his felicitous concept of “double occupancy” which he applies elsewhere in Europe and beyond (Elsaesser 2008, 2009). That “beyond” represents the cinema itself, a non-national site where abstractions take on physical force.1 My contribution here aims to climb to a higher branch, no doubt perilously, where the abstractions of geometric figures inform (give form to) the raw social material of these films. ** “Crossing the Bridge” may wind up the aptest epithet for his oeuvre, but Fatih Akin baptized his career with the nastier title of his 1996 short, Getürkt.2 This word means “faked” or “trumped up” and doubles as a racial slur due to its sound and putative etymology. In Getürkt, the director himself plays a German-Turkish student, Musa, on summer vacation tending the garden of his mother’s new home on the Black Sea, not far perhaps from where the Akin family has its roots. Boasting to a pair of local toughs about his access to drugs, he finds himself forced into a car and taken on a frightening drive, with comic cut-aways to the execution he imagines in store for him when the truth emerges. In a sweat, he concocts a ruse: his kidnappers wait outside while he enters his mother’s place pretending to get the goods, but heads straight to the back yard to pull up weeds. In a scene Chaplin could have written, he passes around a joint of this “Turkish grass,” declaring that only an empty head could fail to be affected by it. The ruffians feign hilarity to prove their manhood, but then return the next day for more. When they find the mother pulling up weeds that they instantly recognize as what they had smoked, the irony of the title grows and they prepare to finish off poor Musa. But he talks them into a deal to sell the stuff on the streets to others who likewise will surely imagine themselves players in a netherworld of adults. Who has screwed (getürkt) whom? The mother at least has a clean yard.



FATIH AKIN

181

A year later, the same character types (and two of the actors) returned in his initial feature, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998), a gritty drama directly modeled on Mean Streets (1973), the film that a quartercentury earlier had kicked Martin Scorsese’s career into gear.3 It’s not just the similarity of the plots (bosom buddies trying to grow into, or escape, their gang-infested cities), but far more that of style: pop music layered over faces and action, dramatically slow hand-held follow shots, splashes of garish colors amid dark or naturally tinted lighting, the bounce of new wave editing.4 Behind both films stands the dominion of ethnicity that can make a gang cohere, exact rituals of violence, and provide a powerful and sensual alternative to violence in the display and demands of religion (Catholic in one case, Muslim in the other). It may be controversial to say it, but a filmmaker’s parentage can propel a career. I’m not talking about Marcel Ophüls getting started because Truffaut loved his father’s films. I’m talking about circumstances of birth and environment that provided Akin, even more than Scorsese, with striking motifs and characters, and with a “spicy” sensibility he has exploited to both dramatic and comedic effect. Professing Islam right into adulthood and growing up in a home where Turkish was often spoken, he also threw himself into Germany’s cutting edge youth culture at school, in cafes and clubs, and on the streets. The relentless tension within and around him in the Altona district of Hamburg tightens the knots of his films; in his best works, Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, this produces concentration, excitement, and release, including the knowledge that comes with release. His work rises to the complexity (political and ontological) of Elsaesser’s “double occupancy,” not just because characters share a roof in so many of his films, or because Germans share “their country” with Turks, but because the director’s soul harbors two sensibilities. While “Fatih Akin apparently detests the hyphenated label Turkish-German” (Elsaesser 2009, 49), he has admitted that “my personality is split in two—and I still don’t know whether I am a Turk or a German” (Akin 2004a). He draws tremendous dramatic energy from the disparity of the two landscapes he feels close to and the mores of the cultures that inhabit these territories and, he might say, inhabit him. This binary existence underlies Akin’s nearly atavist approach to narrative. With Head-On he effectively split both main characters down the middle, then observed them trying to find coherence in finding each other. Has this not been a main highway of cinematic melodrama ever since Griffith? The workings of this mechanism are transparent in Solino (2002) where two brothers who feel destined to work together forever become riven by jealousy and betrayal, then move apart. In July (Im Juli, 2000) took the reverse trajectory when a man and a woman, apparently at antipodes as they travel from Hamburg to Istanbul, wind up a couple at journey’s end. So it is that in comedies just as in melodramas, starkly drawn binary oppositions in characters and in locales motorize plots

182

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

thanks to the electricity that, as in a battery cell, runs between two poles. Fatih Akin’s movies flow across specifically engineered circuitry, taking different pathways and moving at different tempos, but they all are driven by the same bi-national dynamo. Up through The Edge of Heaven, his features measure the itineraries of their plots as with a ruler. He parses his scripts into readily definable acts, claiming for instance, that In July is structured precisely in the manner of Shakespeare’s comedies (Akin 2004b). Each of the three acts that comprise Solino opens with a date (“1964,” “1974,” and “1984”) superimposed on its initial shot, so we can calculate what has been gained and lost decade to decade. Edge of Heaven will go further still, signaling through a title card what is to happen in each of its three chapters. With self-conscious narration of this sort accompanying highly melodramatic plots, Akin has baited critics, disrupting any simple characterization of how he works in general and confounding interpretations of specific films. Speaking about Head-On, which excited and mesmerized a large public, he claimed obtusely to have taken a certain Brechtian distance. And then came the clearly more distant and cerebral The Edge of Heaven, for which he downplayed any strongly political perspective, saying he wanted to be taken as a “classical storyteller” (Breger 2014, 73).5 By “classical,” I venture he means that his films are well-proportioned, balanced between extremes, appealing to our intelligence but also to our feelings—indeed demonstrating the necessity of keeping these allied.6 For extremes find a certain balance even in Head-On, despite its title and despite the mayhem its main characters strew around them. True, the first sequence of the story has the wildly intoxicated Cahit stealing a Mercedes, and, with us in the passenger seat, plowing straight ahead like a maniac bent on self-destruction. But we mustn’t forget what preceded this scene and the story as a whole: on the banks of the Bosphorus with the Süleymaniye Mosque rising up across the Golden Horn behind her, a woman in scarlet (Idil Üner) renders a soulful ballad about the trials of love. She does so facing us in extreme long shot, and with a tuxedoed saz band flanking her, three to a side, arrayed on splendid carpets. This ensemble, belonging to the film’s narration—to its telling rather than to what is told—appears five times to demarcate the melodrama into its five acts. And for symmetry they are there at the end to deliver the coda, an exquisite, if moralizing lament. It is as if the tale of Sibel and Cahit that carries us along for two hours is merely the illustration—or the dream—of these musicians. This is what Akin meant by “Brechtian” (Akin 2005, 4; Mutman 2008, 327; Brochman 2010, 481). But he exaggerated. The framing device in Brecht separates the narrator and audience from the fable that unrolls between them. Whereas the musicians of Head-On abet the characters in their mad love by expressing, in their eastern “kitschy postcard” way (Akin 2005, 4) what this Western melodrama represses or renders through



FATIH AKIN

183

FIGURE 10.1  Idil Üner and the saz band: a Turkish (rather than Greek) chorus.

Source: From Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004) © Arte, Bavaria Film International, Corazón International, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Panfilm, Wüste Film.

Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You.” They frame the tale, to be sure, but do so as in certain baroque paintings, where the thick, ornate, gold leaf frame is designed to reflect additional light onto the canvas, to dazzle and draw the audience into the painting. The musicians multiply the feelings involved by giving them an Eastern resonance rather than surmounting them for the clarity of analysis that Brecht worked to achieve.7 “Sung in the mother tongue, sent from the shores of the mother country,” the musicians who open and close Head-On would seem to call its characters down from Germany toward a destiny to be played out in a more mysterious land (Mutman 2008, 329–30).8 Germany vs. Turkey, head vs. heart, Brechtian distance vs. immersion and sensation, form vs. energy … all of Fatih Akin’s films wriggle between these convenient binary categories in different ratios, each arriving at some new formulation adequate to a twenty-first-century world that has outdistanced traditional designations in both social life and in art. Viewed chronologically, his films mount up as increasingly intricate compositions whether we take “composition” to refer to plot designs, or to vibrant patterns of music, languages, and colors, or to familial, ethnic, and sociopolitical arrangements. In all these dimensions, Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are more ingenious, dexterous, and ambitious than his early features; the last-mentioned seems measurably most weighty of all. **

184

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Conceived as the first two panels of a tryptic (Love, Death, and The Devil), Head-On and The Edge of Heaven share a number of elements: an airliner taking characters from one city to another, the Immigration window at Istanbul airport, a German prison where, in each film, a former Gastarbeiter is incarcerated for manslaughter committed while drunk. As both films come to their conclusions, these men board buses in Istanbul that take them to the places of their birth on Turkey’s coast. However, as artistic negotiations of bi-nationality, the films move in quite differently. Their German titles hint at Akin’s maturation, and do so as a function, precisely, of “distance.” Head-On (whose German title literally means “Against the Wall”) delivers its title image at the end of the first sequence when the drunken Cahit accelerates his car to blaring music (and to jump-cuts on his fulminating face in profile) until he aims it, kamikaze fashion, directly at a building. The smash-up, shot from a window above, looks like the record of a seat-belt test, the car squashed against the wall. It will take the rest of the film to unflatten this character, thanks to his encounter in the hospital with Sibel, another suicide survivor. Head-On, an angry, intemperate film with an impetuous style, races at high speed in a straight line, no matter what it encounters along the way. By contrast, The Edge of Heaven (literally “On the Other Side” in its original title) stands back from its six protagonists so as to observe the lines of force and of fate that bring them into a series of encounters that alter the trajectories of their lives and that form a striking moral pattern; one, as we will see, taking the elegant shape of an ellipse. There’s not much elegance to be found in Head-On, which, despite the stabilizing device of the saz band, tends at times toward the visceral “cinema of sensations.”9 A double-suicide tale in reverse, it opens with the failure of Cahit and Sibel to end their solitary lives, and concludes when they have consummated their amour fou. Neither protagonist feels at home in Hamburg, Sibel a prisoner of her Muslim family, Cahit a discarded Gastarbeiter, now a barfly without prospects who literally lives on dregs. Fertilized by the compost of their own blood and vomit, love takes root; it flowers at last in Istanbul, but only for a single night of gentle lovemaking, photographed in close-up. Shot-reverse shots show the two absorbed in each other’s eyes, then coming together still in close-up to couple silently, softly. This sacred union of faces and thoughts redeems their bodies, hers which had earlier been degraded in rape, his which, on cocaine, had frantically attached itself to a sex partner flailing like an insect. When shot from twenty meters away, sex with others is objectified, a repellent struggle. In intimate close-up, in the dark green room at the Hotel Londres in Istanbul, it luminously transforms Sibel and Cahit. They may be transformed and luminous, but they are not meant to live “happily ever after,” in the manner of the final declaration and kiss of In July.10 For Head-On pulls back from its own fantasy when, while packing



FATIH AKIN

185

to leave her family, Sibel hears the off-screen voice of her daughter and then of her husband. Cahit must imagine hearing something similar in the waiting room of the terminal. Despondent, he boards the bus that pulls out of the station and leaves the screen. Such a doubly conventional ending (fulfilled, they turn from each other to accept responsible but unfulfilling futures) blunts the film’s maniacal drive against social conventions and repression. The entire final section must disappoint Elsaesser since it returns to the categories that had been daringly de-activated in Hamburg where the deliberately unconsummated co-habitation of Sibel and Cahit had offered relief and support for both characters and had multiplied social and sexual possibilities via “intersubjectivity beyond identity … a very dangerous but potentially liberating state” (Elsaesser 2008, 30–1). Such liberation was, however, under constant threat from within. For at any moment, either character might descend into self-destruction, Sibel prone to slitting her wrists to escape her situation if not herself, Cahit prone to hitting someone else … or a wall. While the film may appear to whirl like the cocaineaddled dancers at the Taksim nightclub, in fact it moves in a direct line and with little hesitation. When they first meet at the hospital, and before even knowing his name, Sibel asks Cahit to marry her. This improbable détente between two aggressive iconoclasts is meant not to integrate them within the social system but the opposite, to protect them from rules aiming to harness their free energy. That brimming energy inevitably turns them toward each other, driving the plot toward genuine consummation in Istanbul. Nothing we encounter—no one else—matters in this pursuit. As the characters throw themselves obliviously this way and that in the intoxications of drink, drugs, dance, and sex, the film knowingly, single-mindedly hounds them. It presses them forward with musical pieces, selected in collaboration with Alexander Hacke, calculated to infect the spectator (songs by Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy, The Birthday Party, Zinoba, Maceo Parker, Mona Mur, Ninos con Bombas, and Wendy René). But it is the Turkish performers (Aylim Aslim, Sultana, Orientation, Bulent Ersoy, and Mercan Dede, not to mention Selim Sesler’s saz band), which have received attention for infecting the characters with the ecstatic but self-destructive pathos of “Arabesk,” an Istanbul style that came into its own in the 1970s with the city’s new immigrant poor (Siewert 2008, 205; Berghahn 2011, 253). Its extreme pathos evidently borrows from Balkan Roma (gypsy) music (Göktürk 2008, 164) which Emir Kusturica has shown can do damage to those who drink and dance to it.11 As music sets or abets the scenes—when it doesn’t bridge them—so Akin and his editor Andrew Bird sharpen the edges of the visceral acting by cutting into many dramatic set-pieces. Early on, after they have sneaked away at midnight from the hospital, Sibel tries to seduce Cahit into marriage while he, intrigued, resists. Carried by twenty soft close-ups in a row (ten shot/reverse-shots), she thrusts and he parries as they sit at an

186

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

after-hours bar. Their positions become explicit (“Will you marry me now, Cahit?”—“Forget it”), just as Akin pulls back to mid-shot and a profile view of their table that momentarily cools the atmosphere. Then, still in the same take, Sibel impulsively breaks the beer bottle before her and slashes her wrist, precipitating nine jagged shots that deliver the mayhem of the moment, including brief cuts to blood spurting on Cahit and a longer take as he improvises a tourniquet. A close shot of her drooping head propped up by her bloody forearm moves this sequence directly to the next one on a bus, where their argument continues, she loudly pleading from her seat, he screaming back from across the aisle. Stabilized by classically composed, alternating mid-shots of each of them and by two symmetrical long shots from the front of the empty bus, their argument is at an impasse when the driver abruptly looms above them and throws them off board. An extreme long shot then shows the bus from across a highway. When it drives off, Sibel is revealed walking quickly away from the hobbling Cahit. She passes off-screen as he yells “Hey, Wait. What’s your name?” then tries to follow her into the night. The saz band now returns to close this first act, singing: “Her window faces the street / Her admirers throw gravel / My beloved is the girl with the most beautiful eyebrows / Find yourself a love too / And make of her your wife.” Cahit will progressively be drawn to follow these lyrics; against his own first inclinations, he will find his love in Sibel and make her his wife in Istanbul, bartering his impetuousness to do so. The film calms down as well. Berghahn (2011, 243–4) points to this eventual re-assertion of social norms, including, I would add, the normalization of the music and the editing. In the final act, panorama shots of Istanbul from high up in hotels—Hamburg was never shown this way—orient a methodical search for Sibel. Cahit proclaims, explicitly and in English, “I was dead; then she comes into my life and she gives me love; she gives me power.” Cued by such conventional dialogue, the editing loses its dynamism. Just once does it overbrim itself, and it does so not, as earlier, to embody the film’s energy and infect us, but instead, and disappointingly, to represent Cahit’s dream: a blend of light and movement with screeching tires gives way to an image of his initial smash-up but in reverse this time, so that the car returns whole from the wall, its driver evidently given a second chance. Cahit’s conversion has regularized the film’s aesthetics as well as its ethics. Both characters, going to the limit of intoxication, hit a wall (he commits manslaughter, she is raped); both are imprisoned, he for a while in Germany, then exiled to Turkey, she in a good marriage. Have they repented for something they were responsible for, or was their wildness in Hamburg an improper and ultimately untenable response of the human will to its restrictions? The tail credits roll atop Zinoba’s cover of Hannah Montana’s lyrics which undermine the film as social critique or even as social tragedy: “Life’s what you make it / can’t escape it / nothing can change it / yesterday’s



FATIH AKIN

187

favorite / don’t you hate it / Don’t try to shade it / don’t back date it / anticipate it / there’s nothing can change it / so celebrate it.” Ultimately, Head-On reached the end it sought, a very satisfying one too, as evidenced by its tremendously popular success. The palpable social tensions that had built up in both characters over years in Hamburg pull the bow’s string to breaking point, then the arrow (Cupid’s) is released, taking the characters to Turkey, where they at last conjoin, and, satisfied to have reached this end, can separate. Improbably, the pressures within and around them are resolved, Sibel having been swooped up in a comfortable marriage, Cahit on his way back to the womb of his family on the Mediterranean. This bittersweet conclusion, in the tradition of Sirk and Fassbinder, underlines the sociopolitical barriers to happiness. Still, despite interruptions to the melodrama by its “Brechtian” saz band, Head-On proceeds at a rush and on a track, sweeping reflection, political or otherwise, out of the way, just as do Sibel and Cahit. Its momentum having been spent in hurling its characters, and us, in a straight line, point to point, from Hamburg to Istanbul, Head-On left Fatih Akin the problem of how next to move forward, artistically speaking. Unable to abandon bi-national issues, indeed wanting to make a related film, he needed to follow a more complex route, the route taking him zu der anderen Seite and to The Edge of Heaven. ** The Edge of Heaven begins with a polite greeting (“Happy Bayram,” something like “Happy Thanksgiving”); then, like Cahit, its hero, Nejat, gets into the driver’s seat, the car enters a tunnel, and both the brilliant Turkish daylight and the music fade. A title card announces “Part I: Yeter’s Death.” When this segment concludes thirty-five minutes later, we return briefly to Nejat’s cross-country cruise through the stunning landscape, still accompanied by Kazim Koyuncu, till twilight fades to darkness and another title card announces “Part II: Lotte’s Death.” Preceded as each is by this “prologue” scene in the car, these two large narrative parts, we figure out, represent short stories occurring simultaneously, Part II (Lotte’s death) folded back over Part I (Yeter’s death). The prologue, we come to learn, in fact takes place at a point a bit beyond both these stories, when the film catches up to itself, as it were, in the midst of the final, third part. This occurs when Nejat explains the Bayram Festival to Lotte’s mother, Suzanne, and spontaneously determines to use this holiday period to leave Istanbul in his car seeking reconciliation with his father. Were this film made in the era of cinematic modernism (the era of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries [1957]) we would process the plot as Nejat’s flashback during an automobile trip; after having replayed everything in retrospect he is then ready to calmly await his father’s return from fishing on the beach

188

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

of a lovely cove. But The Edge of Heaven stands in the postmodern, not the modernist mode, and the two overlapping short stories stand independent of Nejat, who is just one character in a network that forms a pattern only the audience can recognize. The precise repetition of the prologue sequence in the film’s third part, with Nejat at the gas station, is formally, rather than psychologically, satisfying. And what is that form? One might expect it to be a circle, with the plot coming around to repeat the prologue, allowing us to understand, along with the protagonist, how he got to his present state, by connecting origin and consequence. But this film does not revolve around the single center of a main character: its multiple characters instead revolve around two centers, Germany and Turkey, and around two deaths, Yeter’s in Part I and Lotte’s in Part II. The Edge of Heaven forms an ellipse. The elegance of this rounded plot won a prize at Cannes and the admiration of many commentators. In the most extensive article in English devoted to the film, Claudia Breger (2014, 72–3) emphasizes the cerebral distance of its narrating posture. Yet she is properly reluctant to see Brecht standing behind its self-exposure. Playing the lecture hall scene from Nejat’s perspective in Part I and then from the position of the sleeping student (now recognized as Ayten) in Part II, brings The Edge of Heaven close to the genre of the Lehr-stücke, Brecht’s judicial form in which the audience sits on a jury, listening to one and then another account of a perplexing situation and then is asked to decide what “measures” should be taken. But the film’s political or moral lesson is very hard to decipher, leading Breger to link it to “puzzle plots” like that of Biutiful (2010) or Babel (2006), whose scriptwriter Akin evidently consulted. Such postmodern works invert chronology and propose “complicated, layered, and fictional—but not impossible— worlds” (Breger 2014, 72). Meanwhile Akin seems to have disowned both the political label as well as the postmodern one, dubbing himself for this film a “classical storyteller” in the new mold (Breger 2014, 73). That new mold, we have intimated, encouraged him to share his focus and sympathy among six characters. The even-tempered Nejat with whom the film’s journey begins may stand in for the director, but curiously, it is Suzanne, the stalwart German matriarch, and the last character we meet, who is given the most privileged subjective moment. Left alone in the room that her deceased daughter had occupied in Nejat’s flat, Suzanne rummages through Lotte’s boxes and finds, then reads, her diary. She drops off to sleep, and immediately Lotte is conjured to look down on her like an angel, her blonde figure glowing in beatific luminescence in front of a white wall. Akin highlights this supernatural or psychic intervention as a moral turning point. Evidently he judged that the hieratic lighting along with Lotte’s stiff smile, which I think trouble the homogeneity of the rest of the film’s look, was required to initiate the reconciliations that follow: Suzanne by honoring her daughter in adopting and freeing Gül, Nejat by



FATIH AKIN

189

searching for the father he had earlier renounced. In fact it constitutes a double “double-occupancy,” Lotte moving back in with her mother in Nejat’s flat. Recognizing her daughter in herself (Suanne too had ventured a trip to India as a young girl, passing through Istanbul), she takes the step of recognizing Gül as her adopted daughter. Reconciliation fills Nejat’s flat; he explains to Suzanne the Abraham-Isaac origin of Bayram, proudly underlining his father’s protection of him, even in defiance of God. He then leaves immediately to find that father. Suzanne has learned that the rounded figure of the ellipse is the general case, while the (family) circle is the exception in which two gravitational points are superimposed, the center doubled, as it were. Accepting Gül as part of Lotte, or Gül and Lotte as two points around which her world turns, Suzanne has broadened her humanity and her politics, welcoming Gül into the home Nejat has provided her; whereas earlier she had closed Gül off: “You can talk like that in your home; don’t talk like that in mine.” Unbeknownst to him, Suzanne has fulfilled the promise Nejat made to redeem Yeter’s daughter after his father killed her, a promise that follows through on Yeter’s own goal to care for the daughter she left in Turkey by sending money to educate her. In fact the script traces two ellipses; one that takes shape around Suzanne’s extended family, the other around Nejat’s, for he had taken on responsibility for Yeter’s obligations when she and he both occupied his father’s home in Bremen. The spectator gasps when, unbeknownst to the characters, these ellipses touch: Lotte and Ayten in the car, searching for Yeter who is riding the streetcar just meters away; Suzanne and Ali standing next to each other at the passport control desk in Istanbul; Lotte attaching her “Lodging wanted” sign beside the mimeograph picture of Yeter-Ayten; or Lotte’s last-second decision to call Ayten “Gül” when Nejat asks the name of her incarcerated friend. Such excruciating near-misses crop up in what could be called modern metaphysical melodramas, since the narrator and spectator grasp the design that links what otherwise appear to be random human beings spread across far-flung places (in this case Hamburg, Istanbul, Bremen, Trabzon). Fatih Akin makes sure this design is cleanly traced, by repeating not just the scene in the classroom and the motif of double-occupancy, but the actions of characters: Suzanne and Lotte sauntering down the street in Istanbul and, as they pass a café, greeting the same domino-players; Ayten and Lotte taking the same water taxi to the prison; Ali and Ayten looking out the window from their respective prison cells; and—starkly underlined—the coffins of Yeter and Lotte coming off Turkish Airlines planes, one in Istanbul, the other in Hamburg. These repetitions, along with that of Nejat’s drive to Trabzon, forcefully superimpose two stories atop one another and thus detemporalize the film. Yes, the action moves forward, but it does so by following a path laid out before it.

190

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Any pathway that moves along two ellipses that touch or cross each other at one point can form a Mobius strip. Satisfying because its motion is perpetual and contained, this is a much revered figure in New Age thought and fiction. And it is related to a classical rhetorical figure, the chiasmus, which Fatih Akin goes out of his way in one scene to spell out for us. This occurs when the German bookstore owner quips to Nejat: “Wouldn’t that be ironic: a Turkish Professor of German wants to sell German books in Turkey?” The elegance of this, like all chiasms, derives from its way of repositioning, by flipping, the elements in a proposition after a verb or a preposition. Nejat’s drive to Trabzon is the “verb” that lets us replay the second story as existing both after, and simultaneously with, the first story, but with the elements reversed. For instance, both stories begin with street demonstrations, a tame May Day procession in Bremen, and a violently repressed political march in Istanbul, placards blaring “Long Live May Day.” Simultaneously the two countries and six characters pursue interrelated goals without fully recognizing those interrelations even when circumstances bring them to coincide in the same space (a classroom in Hamburg, for example). However, there is one form of repetition all the characters recognize, that of the generations they comprise. From Abraham and Isaac to Ali and Nejat, fathers beget children whom they hope will “succeed” them, in both senses of the term. In this ultimately optimistic tale, the children of The Edge of Heaven all have something to teach their parents, even as they follow them thirty years on in history. Nejat rightly reprimands his father’s treatment of Yeter and gets him to substitute reading a Turkish novel for drinking too much raki. Lotte, full of youthful idealism, sacrifices the privileges that her parents worked hard to give her, so she can live for something grander, for love and for a world free of intolerance. Her mother listens to her diary and goes out to effectively adopt Ayten, widening the family circle into the ellipse it should become. As for Ayten, she misses seeing her mother by inches. Ayten has received her mother’s proud intransigence, without, however, becoming entrapped in prostitution. Each life cycle forms an ellipse, and each successive cycle raises the level. Fatih Akin surely felt this about his own profession in the midst of a career that has grown in continuity atop that of Fassbinder who himself grew out of Sirk. As if to stamp this notion of cinematic generations directly onto the celluloid in the credits, Akin cast Fassbinder’s muse, Hanna Schygulla, who plays Suzanne and is paired her with the equally iconic Turkish actor Tuncel Kurtiz as Ali. Both are given space to exercise their prowess, particularly Hanna Schygulla in her exceptional all-night grief sequence, shot pitilessly from a single angle above her, but relieved through extended poignant dissolves. Akin draws on the power (both innate and accrued) that she and Kurtiz carry into his film so as to slingshot it toward a new century. Both actors had starred in over eighty films in their respective



FATIH AKIN

191

national cinemas before appearing together in a work that begs the question of nation. Here as with Head-On, the director realized he was addressing three distinct audiences: Germans, Turks, and the Turks of Germany. Alternative dubbed and subtitled versions identify these differences, and point to a fourth public, the art-film audiences around the world who, unlike those living in the two nations involved, may not be able to distinguish which language is being spoken, since English subtitles homogenize the dialogue. For The Edge of Heaven is clearly a festival film, where the category of the “transnational” prevails. Akin feeds this more expansive purview through references to Chernobyl, Isabella Allende, the European Union, India, and American consumerism. Moreover, The Edge of Heaven is transnational literally by design. That design has been my focus since it leads to a view of cinema and an ethic of viewing that the era of transnationalism demands.12 ** From Getürkt to The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin’s films grew increasingly sophisticated and morally complex. But at a price. The freedom and spontaneity of his early years produced energy and surprising techniques that he recruited for the more intricate and highly planned later work. To keep in view the partially interlocking perspectives of six characters in The Edge of Heaven, while steering them toward meetings and missed chances, he needed brief scenes and efficient sequences to replace the more leisurely way characters are given a chance to fill themselves out in Short Sharp Shock or In July. The latter’s sundown sequence at the beach just outside Hamburg, for instance, lets the actors fall under the spell of local musicians around a campfire, bringing us under their spell as well, à la Une partie de campagne (1946). There is no time in The Edge of Heaven for such apparent insouciance. Renoir’s influence in the latter film is found instead in the framing and camera movements that maintain multiple elements on screen. This task occasionally lies beyond the director, however, who resorts to telltale inserts. As she runs frantically from the police down a narrow street, we notice that Ayten unknowingly drops something before fleeing off-screen past the camera; without a cut Akin shows the police run by as well, all except a plainclothes man who stops and bends down to pick up something in mid-plane then stare at it. An extreme close-up insert of a cellphone interrupts the chase for but three seconds, just long enough for us to glimpse a list of names and so later to understand how her co-insurgents were rounded up. This insert, like one of the book Nejat gives his father, suggests the pressure the director felt to keep his film on track by orchestrating its fragments.13 Brief sequences at the race track and at the hospital after Ali’s heart attack play just long enough to place the characters in the proper order, because it is the order, the shape, of this film that is so

192

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 10.2  Nejat contemplates “the other side” on a beach in Trabzon. Source: From The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) © Anka Film, Dorje Film.

meaningful as it culminates in the exquisite, nearly ten-minute final image of Nejat scanning the horizon. He gazes toward the future from a cove that forms a beautiful hourglass outline with the sea, almost a chiasm, in nature herself, connecting shore and sea. The “flipping” movement characteristic of the chiasmus, like the movement of the ellipse around the two separate points, acknowledges the obdurate necessity of difference, as well as the moral energy with which difference propels movement. The Edge of Heaven offers, and then goes beyond, two common responses to difference: confrontation and unification. Confrontation, to take the first, is exactly how Parts I and II begin … confrontation ritualized on May Day in the streets of cities everywhere. In Istanbul intransigent demonstrators surge forward until dispersed by violent police who then raid and imprison armed revolutionaries. A bureaucrat high up in his office scoffs at Nejat’s goal to finance Ayten’s education if he can find her; there are innumerable uneducated, gluesniffing Kurdish youngsters running through the alleyways down below and hassling citizens, he says, implying that one can only corral them, keep them at bay. In Germany confrontations are subtle, civil, even polite. Suzanne scolds Ayten in her kitchen to shame her, while maintaining her own dignity; the judge who deports her does so with considerate but condescending words. That’s one way to deal with opposition. Another way, intimidation, we see brandished within groups that compel solidarity. Two Turkish moral thugs accost Yeter on the tram, forcing her to change her life, while the leader of Ayten’s revolutionary cell threatens to kill her so she won’t change hers: “Whose side are you on?” she implies, teeth bared. Confrontation is the motor of drama, and it drives genres like the western, the gangster, and the



FATIH AKIN

193

science fiction film, not to mention war movies. Getting behind one side or the other, audiences know just how to interpret motivations, actions, and all the accoutrements (acting, props, lighting, color, etc.) that enhance opposition. Fatih Akin had exploited all this to the limit in the confrontational Head-On. But Head-On also flirted with the opposite of opposition in the sexual union of Sybil and Cahit, even if it ultimately refused the temptation to conclude as a romantic comedy. The Edge of Heaven holds out the same temptation; Lotte’s fascination with Ayten leads them on their first evening to a club where they dance with increasing pleasure, then share the same intoxicating smoke, and, oblivious to what surrounds them, kiss in a haze that envelops their conjoining. Though sundered by Ayten’s arrest, Lotte is gently pulled toward her in a bare Hamburg room; later they clasp hands in the face of close surveillance in the Istanbul prison. Lotte becomes an extension of Ayten, acting for and as her, to the point of her shocking death. The Edge of Heaven is too intelligent a film to blithely proselytize for the assimilation of Turks in Germany, or for the achievement of some post-national, Turkish-German hybridity (with its ugly hyphen), or for a genuine European “Union”; as for Turkey, the film prudently recognizes the complexity as well as the intransigence of a state that stands between West and East and that juggles, hides, and often represses the many differences that mock its displays of unity. The Edge of Heaven rises above the dual temptations held out by cinema and by politics, i.e. to pit self against other and to incorporate self and other. Instead, it begins to ascend a spiral ellipse that encompasses

FIGURE 10.3  Lotte and Ayten.

Source: The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) © Anka Film, Dorje Film.

194

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

different poles but does not erase them. It crosses over and back between Germany and Turkey, between self and other, between language and language, teacher and student, parent and offspring, again and again. As I have argued, by having Suzanne adopt Ayten, the film draws out an ethic whereby the family circle is enlarged into such an ellipse. Their interview at the prison is so charged with immediate emotion that Ayten’s resistance dissolves in her tears; and yet their communication is hyper-mediated, conveyed in English (native to neither) via telephone across the glare of a glass partition. That glare produces a superimposition on the film image, both women visible to the spectator who is indirectly addressed as well. This emblematic superimposition survives the crosscuts from one side of the partition to the other, since in all cases both women are in view thanks to the reflection off the glass. Visually joined, though separated, their empathy overflows. This magnificent conversion scene implies an ethic of viewing that I take to be crucial to bi-national issues and to “world cinema” overall. For it asks us to avoid stances toward the “foreign” that we routinely adopt whether watching our own native films or those once called “foreign.” Such stances revel in imperialism, self-gratification, exoticism, exhibitionism, tourism, and even benevolent anthropologism. In its German title, Auf der anderen Seite, The Edge of Heaven announces its refusal to adopt any of these uni-directional positions or gazes; instead it swirls us to the other side of the screen and back again in a dialectic that spirals toward a higher understanding both of ourselves and of that which, traced on the screen, lies beyond us. Fatih Akin would have The Edge of Heaven enrich our feeling and understanding, viewing after viewing, while, on the underside of the Mobius strip of its celluloid, we enrich the film, interpretation upon interpretation.

Notes 1

I lay some claim to the concept, though not the term, “double occupancy,” which is entirely Elsaesser’s brainchild. In Amsterdam in 2005 we were surprised that both of us had recognized this trope in two films about home invasions that fascinated us, The Edukators (Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei) and 3-Iron (Bin Jip) (both 2004). Elsaesser went on to define “double occupancy” as a term that crosses between cinema and (national) politics, applying it especially in the post-1989 European context, while I have pursued the idea more abstractly as it operates in films that are emblematic of cinema as a site of haunting, such as Ugetsu (1953), and thus to characterize the film experience in the movie theater in general.

2

One earlier student short, Sensin, du bist es (1995) is purportedly viewable, but Getürkt is the earliest of his films I could locate on tape or DVD. While



FATIH AKIN

195

this chapter could balloon into a discussion of his entire oeuvre, I focus instead on his two great critical successes. 3

In an interview “Heimat is ein mentaler Zustand” in filmportal.de (November 11, 2002) Akin claimed Scorsese as his main influence, mentioning Mean Streets in particular. One of his motivations for scripting his “Italian film” Solino was to follow Scorsese’s own roots in Italian neorealism. He tried to recruit the director for a role in his film but without success.

4

For instance, when Gabe sees that Bobby is carrying a gun he instantly slaps him and is slapped back, while the image jumps three times across the 180 degree line, New Wave style. Or, when Alice leans over to kiss Gabe (behind the wheel of his car), the movement is imperceptibly repeated just as their lips touch, and without a change in music.

5

Breger counters Alexandra Stäheli’s article that takes up Akin’s alleged Brechtianism: “Liebe ist starker als der Tod,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 4, 2007.

6

The German DVD of Edge of Heaven contains as an extra a 13-minute “short story” that is a sequence deleted from the final cut. In what would have been the film’s penultimate sequence, Nejat, on his drive to Trabzon, stops in a village where he runs into a woman he knew from childhood. A beautiful, wistful day and night ensue with lovemaking. Fatih Akin must have realized that adding Nejat’s erotic side at the tail of his film would have unbalanced it, no matter how attractive the scene might be. And it would have involved a seventh character.

7

In his article “Dark Passion” (Sight and Sound 15 [3] [March 2005]: 21): Asuman Suner believes the director when he suggested (Akin 2005) that the saz band serves as an Antic chorus (we’re not far from Troy). The band is our representative to comment on what is happening and to elicit our feelings.

8

Mutman holds the Bosphorus musical shots to be distinct from melodramatic expression. They comprise “a cryptic figure rather than just a nostalgic postcard … a certain force of otherness … in which the scene both points to and displaces something that is not in the order of visibility” (Mutman 2008, 330). I fully agree.

9

This term, initially applied to Scorsese and David Lynch, has come to characterize certain European philosophical auteurs who aim to represent the coalescence of thought out of inchoate sensory affect (Martine Beugnet, A Cinema of Sensations [Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007]; Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011]); Breger (2014, 71) believes Head-On resonates with this trend.

10 This follows the same trajectory as In July whose German couple only consummate their love in Istanbul. But this film’s tidy, repressed teacher who doesn’t know how to pass his summer vacation has more in common with Eric Rohmer’s heroines than with Cahit. He is like Blanche in Boyfriendss and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie, 1987) or Delphine in The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert, 1986). With its reversal and happy end, In July is made in

196

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

the mold of the “Comedies and Proverbs.” Head-On, by contrast, is more primal. 11 That the protagonists seek their emotional outlet in dancing at a club called “Taksim” might suggest that Turkish culture acts as the id of an otherwise bureaucratic German city. Berghahn (2011) and Göktürk (2008) independently attribute the motif of ecstatic self-mutilation to Roma musical culture, noticing that Sibel puts on the CD Agir Roma before cutting her wrists. Agir Roma is the title of a powerful novel and popular 1997 adaptation (Cholera Street, directed by Mustafa Altioklar) that Head-On clearly drew upon. Mentioning Time of the Gypsies (1988), Göktürk links Sibel and Cahit to Kusturica’s Pehran and to the characters of Underground (1995) who mutilate themselves with shards of glass as this music plays. 12 Elsaesser (2011) pushes beyond the formalism of Akin’s plot design to interrogate the political and ethical concerns that come into view precisely because of the clarity of that design. By insisting on an unspecified reciprocity between characters coming from opposite positions of power and different ethnicities, and by showing the formidable presence yet limits of political power and institutions, Akin activates our ethical imagination, especially when, as Elsaesser astutely points out, Ayten renounces her political solidarity to pursue ethical singularity, substituting herself for Susanne’s dead daughter. The neat aesthetic solution of this Mobius strip design leaves things suspended, however, which Elsaesser sees as potentially feeding into Rancière’s politics of immanence, particularly if we project that politics toward the next film Akin might make to complete his trilogy. However, I take the final image of Nejat looking out to sea less as an image of suspension than as a calm figure for (and as) the return of violence. For as the sea is about to become agitated, Nejat awaits his father, with the violence (as victim and perpetrator) that man embodies. Elsaesser credits this film with going far beyond bi-nationality by raising questions of unequal relations and unfounded, yet unmistakable demands. He thus links Fatih Akin’s film to “The Ethical Turn” of philosophy, and to Rancière’s critique of that turn, implicitly praising Akin for pursuing such intransigent and dangerous issues yet frowning on the way he settles things all too facilely here, and hoping that the genuinely powerful possibilities he brings up might issue forth in the final film of the trilogy. The Cut (Kesik, 2014) is this awaited final installment. What its ethical and political dimensions portend has yet to be fully analyzed. 13 The epic scale of The Cut, his most recent film, is orchestrated to a fault, no matter how noble its moral intention. Wanting to erase not just the hyphen between German and Turk, but the historical slash line between Armenian and Turk, Akin tells the tragedy of the Armenian genocide, from its other, silent side. This epic of the death and dispersal of millions of humans, unfolds from the perspective of a courageous villager who goes in search of the daughter stripped from him during the terrible events of 1915–17. To orchestrate the pace of this private odyssey within the history of post-World War I Turkey and the exodus that followed from it, Akin took his actor and crew not just to Germany but to Jordan, Malta, Morocco, Cuba, and Alberta, Canada. Over twenty producers are listed, Fatih Akin at their



FATIH AKIN

197

head, employing scores of extras, costumers, visual effects personnel, and stuntsmen. His faithful collaborators, Alexander Hacke (composer) and Andrew Bird (editor), help provide the feel that makes it a Fatih Akin film, but The Cut’s scope, rivaling that of Doctor Zhivago (1965), lands it in a different category. The director’s moral ambition has grown beyond that of his aesthetic and perhaps beyond that of cinema’s powers. Like Emir Kusturica or Federico Fellini, Akin has taken on ever-larger projects that risk submerging the brilliant play of actor and circumstance that has made his oeuvre distinctive and valuable.

Works cited Akin, Fatih. 2004a. “Das Zornige gehört auch zu mir. Fatih Akin über seinen preisgekrönten Film,” dpd Film 4. Available online: www.epd.de/1stgate epd/ thementexte2/19191_28985 (accessed July 21, 2005). Akin, Fatih. (2000) 2004b. “Interview on the set of In July,” extra on In July. DVD distributed by Koch-Lorber. Video. Akin, Fatih. 2005. “Going to Extremes: Fatih Akin on his Turkish-German Love Story Head-On,” interview with Indiewire January 19, 2005. Available online: http://www.indiewire.com/article/going_to_extremes_fatih_akin_on_his_ turkish-german_love_story_head-on (accessed July 19, 2015). Akin, Fatih. 2007. “Der Islamismus in der Türkei macht mir keine Angst,” interview with Andreas Kilb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagzeitung, September 3, 2007. Bergfelder, Timothy. 2011. “Love beyond the Nation: Cosmopolitanism and Transnational Desire in Cinema,” in Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi, and Karen Diehl (eds), Europe and Love in Cinema, 61–83. Wilmington, NC and Bristol: Intellect, Ltd. Berghahn, Daniela. 2011. “‘Seeing Everything with Different Eyes’: The Diasporic Optic of Fatih Akin’s Head-On,” in Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood (eds), New Directions in German Cinema, 239–56. London: I.B. Tauris. Breger, Claudia. 2014. “Configuring Affect: Complex World Making in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite,” Cinema Journal 54 (1) (Fall): 65–87. Brochman, Steven. 2010. “Gegen der Wand,” in A Critical History of German Film, 479–88. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Cox, Ayça Tunç. 2012. “Hyphenated Identities: The Reception of Turkish German Cinema in the Turkish Daily Press,” in Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (eds), Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium, 161–72. New York: Berghahn Books. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2008. “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema,” in Miyase Christensen and N. Erdogan (eds), Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, 14–32. Newcastle: Cambridge: Scholars Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema,” in Temenuga Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory, 47–62. London: Routledge.

198

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2011. “Politics, Multiculturalism and the Ethical Turn: The Cinema of Fatih Akin,” in Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Rax Yosef and Anat Zanger (eds), Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic, 1–19. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Göktürk, Deniz. 2008. “Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Drama,” in Miyase Christensen and N. Erdogan (eds), Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, 153–71. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Halle, Randall. 2008. German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Machtans, Karolin. 2012. “The Perception and Marketing of Fatih Akin in the German Press,” in Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (eds), Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium, 149–60. New York: Berghahn Books. Mutman, Mahmut. 2008. “Up against the Wall of the Signifier,” in Miyase Christensen and N. Erdogan (eds), Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, 317–33. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Siewert, Senta. 2008. “Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On,” in Jaap Koojman, P. Pisters, and W. Strauven (eds), Mind the Screen: Media Concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser, 198–208. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

11 Richard Linklater’s post-nostalgia and the temporal logic of neoliberalism Dan Hassler-Forest

Of all the main Oscar contenders in the 2015 awards season, few were as widely and intensely beloved as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014). This low-budget, independent production, pieced together over the course of twelve years, had by February 2015 in fact received so much acclaim that an “anti-Boyhood backlash” was already in full swing (Adams 2015): many critics and film bloggers were describing it by that point not as the little indie that could, but as prestigious “Oscar bait”—no longer an experimental work of film art, but an audience-pleasing, high-concept arthouse blockbuster. At the same time, many saw in Boyhood not only a compelling and profound experiment in narrative cinema, but also the culmination of thematic motifs and aesthetic compulsions that have featured prominently throughout Linklater’s career as an independent director. The film’s success therefore offers a compelling opportunity to investigate the changing nature of American film auteurism, as Linklater’s enduring interest in the ephemerality of time connects to the emerging spirit of capitalism in the neoliberal age. Boyhood’s overwhelming popular and critical appeal illustrates first Linklater’s ability to occupy a middle ground in the American film industry: on the one hand, he expresses post-classical Hollywood’s reliance on directors with a track record in edgy, indie productions, while at the same time embodying arthouse cinema’s own form of high-concept gimmickry. But secondly, and perhaps more productively, the Boyhood phenomenon

200

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

provides a useful occasion to examine in more detail the ambiguous role of the American film auteur in the twenty-first century. Like Steven Soderbergh, his style is one of radical eclecticism, alternating experimental independent films with documentaries, television work, and mainstream studio productions. Like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, his primary register is that of explicit and emphatic cinephilia, often fusing and combining images, patterns, and motifs from highly diverse film favorites like a cinematic magpie. But unlike other successful “indie” directors such as Christopher Nolan, Sam Raimi, Marc Webb, James Mangold, or Jon Favreau, Linklater has over the past twenty-five years carefully maintained his status as an independent-minded auteur figure who hasn’t leveraged his arthouse success into a career in superhero blockbusters. As eclectic as Linklater’s output has been in terms of genre and visual style, I will use this chapter to examine more closely a thematic motif that has featured repeatedly throughout his filmic oeuvre. More specifically, I wish to interrogate and historicize the director’s focus on questions of pastness, temporality, and nostalgia, offering some suggestions on how to interpret these motifs’ resonance in the context of global capitalism. I approach Linklater’s ambiguous treatment of pastness and nostalgia as an expression of some of the contradictions inherent in the cultural logic of neoliberalism. By taking as my main case studies some of the films that articulate neoliberalism’s post-historical framework, I argue that this particular director’s cinematic representation of pastness resonates strongly with global capitalism’s market logic, just as his flexibility and unpredictability as an auteur fits the post-industrial context of precarious labor and just-in-time delivery systems. Since the production of his first experimental film It’s Impossible to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater’s output as a director has spanned multiple genres, styles, and industrial contexts, from experimental independent features such as Waking Life (2001) and Tape (2001) to mainstream Hollywood comedies such as School of Rock (2003) and Bad News Bears (2005). The reception of his first two features illustrates the tension that would come to define his ongoing career as a writer-director: his experimental, micro-budget breakthrough Slacker (1991) led critics to proclaim him a fresh representative of Generation X concerns, while studio production Dazed and Confused (1993) was dismissed by most as a period, high-school comedy. But while it may be tempting to frame Linklater in Scorsese’s familiar “one for them one for yourself” strategy (Grist 2013, 213), his career rather indicates an industrial context in which the binary distinction between “studio” and “independent,” between “mainstream” and “arthouse” appears less solid. Instead, his output is marked by a truly entrepreneurial flexibility, where each film is treated like a project reflecting the networked nature of the new spirit of global capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 106–7).



Richard Linklater

201

In order to address at least some of the range of Linklater’s output and its relationship to issues of temporality and nostalgia, this chapter is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on specific films that establish and develop these thematic concepts. First, in order to introduce what I will call Linklater’s post-nostalgic sensibility, I will discuss his first studio production Dazed and Confused, which draws on the style associated with Jameson’s nostalgia mode while simultaneously attempting to move beyond it. The second section develops the concept of nostalgia and temporality further by examining more closely Linklater’s Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise [1995], Before Sunset [2004], and Before Midnight [2013]).1 By looking both at the films individually and at the temporal gaps they foreground as a serialized cycle, I will relate the central tension they embody to global capitalism’s emerging framework of “timeless time” (Castells 2010, 406). Finally, I will bring these threads together in a discussion of the popular compressedtime epic Boyhood, which brings together many of the thematic concepts that underlie Linklater’s auteurist profile. But while Dazed and Confused and the Before films resist the cultural logic of neoliberalism, I will argue that Boyhood paradoxically reinforces the post-historical spirit of global capitalism and what Paul Virilio has described as its “war on Time” (2006, 69).

Dazed and Confused: Linklater’s post-nostalgia mode For Fredric Jameson, the nostalgia mode is an important ingredient of what he defined as the postmodern aesthetic (1991, 286–7). Theorizing postmodernism toward the end of the 1980s as the cultural logic of late capitalism, Jameson perceived in films like American Graffiti (1973), Star Wars (1977), Grease (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Body Heat (1981), and Back to the Future (1985) a nostalgic articulation of pastness that romanticized earlier historical periods. This operation took place at two levels: first, through the spectacular visual creation of historical periods in the form of a “glossy mirage,” as in American Graffiti, Grease, and Back to the Future; and secondly, through the absorption of narrative modes and aesthetic conventions that evoked older forms of popular entertainment, as in Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, and countless other post-classical blockbusters. Jameson’s nostalgia mode makes perfect sense in the context of the political alliance between neoliberal economic policies and neoconservative sociocultural values, which began during the Nixon administration and took full form during the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s (Harvey 2005, 82). Its totalizing logic presents what Jameson describes as “a collective

202

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

wish-fulfillment, and the expression of a deep, unconscious yearning for a simpler and more human social system” (1991, 283). The main effect of this nostalgia mode is the insistent reification of the styles, fashions, and narrative registers of earlier periods results in the dissolution of any sense of historicity, and the diminished ability to develop what he calls a “cognitive mapping” of the material realities of late capitalism. The nostalgia mode therefore embodies postmodern culture’s dehistoricizing effect, as the reification of earlier periods robs us of our own sense of agency while contributing both in form and content to the neoconservative ideological agenda. Following on from Lukács, Jameson therefore called for a “postnostalgic” register, one that breaks through the nostalgia mode’s inherent neoconservatism and establishes a productive sense of historicity. This term is a crucial one for Jameson, and one that “can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history: that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective” (1991, 284). While the nostalgia mode of the 1970s and 1980s worked against this perception of the present as history, the suggested post-nostalgic mode might result in films that help the viewer experience the present as history, thereby offering tools to facilitate cognitive mapping and allowing the result to become a form of “political art” (Jameson 1992, 188–9). This post-nostalgic mode might at the same time resurrect some of the political potential associated with modernist authorship. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson argued that late capitalist culture reduces modernism’s utopian imaginary and “authorial impulse” to indiscriminate pieces of cultural junk: This discrediting of the “literary,” and the assimilation to it of themes and ideas of the older type, is omnipresent in contemporary (Western) film production, which has triumphantly liquidated its high modernist moment—that of the great auteurs and their stylistic “worlds”—and along with them the genuine “philosophies” to which film-makers like Bergman and Welles, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, could palpably be seen to aspire. (1992, 24) In this typical burst of energetic hyperbole, Jameson here effectively declares the modernist auteur dead in the age of late capitalism, associating postmodern film culture with the use of pastiche and its empty imitation of “dead styles” (1998, 6). But as Linda Hutcheon has maintained, even within the aesthetics of postmodern pastiche and historiographical metafiction, there remain abundant opportunities for creative resistance to ideological imperatives (Jameson 1988, 26–7). Arriving in cinemas a few short years after the Cold War’s end ushered in



Richard Linklater

203

the age of truly global capitalism, Dazed and Confused on the surface seems to mimic the nostalgia film’s ahistorical mode of postmodern pastiche. Iconic 1970s nostalgia film American Graffiti is the film’s most obvious precursor and reference point, and one from which Dazed also inherits its “multistranded plot structure and pervasive sense of banality” (Harrod 2010, 23). The film’s Aristotelian unity of time operates in combination with a soundtrack full of popular radio hits from a decade-and-a-half before the film’s release, while the absence of a central plot foregrounds the social relations among the diverse ensemble cast. But while George Lucas’s sentimental resurrection of the early 1960s is emphatically framed as a pre-Vietnam era of youthful innocence, Dazed and Confused offers a radically different perspective on pastness. While the fact that the film so painstakingly recreates a recent historical moment unavoidably mobilizes some degree of built-in nostalgic appeal, this film goes out of its way to avoid glamorizing or fetishizing the reconstructed past it portrays. As Linklater puts it in the audio commentary he recorded in 2006: I didn’t want to say: “there was this other era, when people acted differently, and it was an innocent time, before…” Bullshit! This was the 70s, after the 60s, after all the assassinations, after the war. … Things were just calming down a little bit, so it was post-lost innocence. There really was nowhere to return to. That’s why this notion of nostalgia is such bullshit. Instead of ossifying its past as a romantic moment that becomes an object for pleasurable consumption, Linklater’s film instead emphasizes a much more ambiguous representation of pastness that does indeed more closely approximate what Jameson as describes as “more complex ‘postnostalgia’ statements and forms” (1991, 287). This sentiment is expressed repeatedly and explicitly throughout the film, its characters inhabiting the fashions and styles of their era with the kind of obvious awkwardness that Adam Kotsko has provocatively identified as global capitalism’s fundamental social form (2010, 9), while expressing repeatedly their strong sense of alienation from their own historical moment. This post-nostalgic sentiment is articulated most explicitly on the occasions where characters in the film reflect upon their era. Articulating a playful theory about their formative decade, one of the more loquacious teenagers tries to see a cyclical logic in the post-war decades: “The fifties were boring, the sixties rocked, the seventies, ohmigod, they obviously suck … Who knows: maybe the eighties will be radical!” The line comments ironically on the notorious neoconservatism of the 1980s from the point of view of the early 1990s, while actively disrupting the film’s nostalgic potential by critiquing the historical age it reproduces. This way of showing characters’ uncomfortable relationship with their

204

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

historical present is profoundly different from the dominant style in the nostalgia mode: films like Grease and Back to the Future and TV shows like Happy Days (ABC, 1974–84) show characters comfortably inhabiting the familiar styles of the past, implicitly reinforcing the cultural, social, and political conservatism of the emerging neoliberal moment at which these films were produced and consumed. But Linklater’s characters are not stereotypes that resonate with a preconceived notion of a stable and unchanging sense of “1970s-ness.” Instead, they resemble more closely the assortment of directionless Generation Xers featured so prominently in his previous indie hit Slacker: homegrown philosophers, pop-culture obsessives, functional sociopaths, clueless conformists, and precocious, teenaged intellectuals. Together, they spend the film reflecting on their own lack of direction much more than they do pursuing clear goals, thus expressing an obviously postmodern and thoroughly awkward sense of aimlessness and alienation. This post-nostalgic sensibility is summed up most clearly in a scene toward the end of the film, where the characters reflect on their own historical moment, and their expectations about pre-constituted nostalgia for their teenage years. While discussing with his friends the limitations of their provincial surroundings and teenagers’ self-conscious ennui, main character Randall “Pink” Floyd ends the discussion by stating: “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life— remind me to kill myself.” This positively anti-nostalgic moment expresses a tension in the film that short-circuits the nostalgia mode’s primary function, which is to present history as fixed and immutable. Instead, Linklater’s film plays upon the post-historical notion that nothing ever really changes, and that we have become stuck in an eternal present where political and economic alternatives are no longer available. In Linklater’s own words: “So part of my point was this film, although the fashions and some of the things scream out ’76, a lot of it screams out 1992, and a lot of it still screams out 2006. Some things never change—that was my point.” This sets Linklater’s work very clearly apart from postmodernism’s nostalgia mode of spectacle and pastiche. Comparing this film’s ending with that of a classic nostalgia film such as American Graffiti brings home this point. George Lucas’s popular tribute to the more innocent age of his teenage years famously finished with a pre-credits roundup of four of the main characters’ later fates in life: the most innocent one a casualty of the Vietnam War, the one unwilling to take risks never leaving his hometown, and the one who made it out developing into a successful author. This important choice first offers evidence that the events portrayed in the film were crucial moments that ultimately defined many of these characters’ further lives, while at the same time sealing off our involvement with it as a distant moment of lost glory. Dazed and Confused, on the other hand, ends much more ambiguously, with four randomly assorted characters



Richard Linklater

205

from the film heading out of town in pursuit of Aerosmith concert tickets. As the camera withdraws from the characters,2 the ending suggests that the moments we have witnessed have no extraordinary narrative or symbolic significance, as no goals have been accomplished, nor have the characters made obviously life-changing decisions at any point.3 Instead, the characters’ dialogue in the last scene is drowned out by the rock music soundtrack, and the film closes on an image of an open road at sunrise, stretching out before them. While there is an incontrovertible symbolic optimism to this ambiguous ending, the events in the film make it impossible to read it as a purely romantic/nostalgic view of the future. First, the film has already acknowledged the fact that the 1980s would most definitely not be “radical” in the sense the characters hoped for, and that the future they are heading for is to be dominated by Reagan’s neoconservative counterrevolution. But equally relevant here is the deliberate lack of closure the film’s final shot expresses: it communicates above all Jameson’s description of historicity as something that doesn’t seal us off from our historical context, but that creates a present that is experienced as history, with ourselves as active agents within it. At the same time, the film’s open-ended and universalizing approach to historical periods runs afoul of another of Jameson’s fundamental critiques of postmodernism. As Jameson famously wrote, the nostalgia film “registered its historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination with lavish images of specific generational pasts” (1991, 296). Linklater’s post-nostalgic approach on the other hand unavoidably creates the illusion of a “perpetual present” that resonates strongly with global capitalism’s post-historical spirit. In this sense, Dazed and Confused can be read not so much as a product of the cultural logic of late capitalism, but as an early expression of the cultural logic of global capitalism: our current era that many voices, from Francis Fukuyama to Slavoj Žižek, have described as “post-historical.”

Linklater’s Before films and the timeless time of capitalist realism Approaching our current historical moment as an intensified continuation of what Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, and many others have associated explicitly with the post-Fordist transformations of capitalism, Linklater’s status as a film auteur illustrates some of the key elements of global capitalism. Mark Fisher’s term “capitalist realism” provides a concept that expresses a waning ability to imagine social, political, or cultural alternatives. Fisher frames this term specifically as an extension of Jameson’s postmodernism in an era defined by its lack

206

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

of options, where “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (2009, 8). Linklater’s post-nostalgia therefore comes to resonate not only as a politically progressive response to postmodernism’s nostalgia mode, but at the same time also as an expression of capitalist realism’s posthistorical mindset. If the marriage of convenience between neoconservative values and neoliberal economic practices defined the late capitalism of the 1980s, neoliberal global capitalism jettisons the nostalgia mode’s glorification of the past and moves instead toward the post-historical eradication of temporality. In their grand theory of global capitalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify three fundamental characteristics of post-Fordist labor as flexible, mobile, and precarious: “flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment” (2000, 112). This transformation toward post-industrial capitalism affected the experience and representation of time, as just-in-time production systems and the exponential growth of information technology replaced the relative stability of the welfare state. These changing material practices express themselves in changing cultural dominants that articulate and negotiate the tensions and contradictions inherent in this new “posthistorical” spirit of global capitalism. From this perspective, Linklater’s experiments with cinematic representations of pastness and temporality resonate ambiguously with a newly emergent cultural logic that is specific to post-industrial capitalism. Manuel Castells has described the temporal effect of global capitalism as an experience of “timeless time”: “the eternal/ephemeral time of the new culture fits with the logic of flexible capitalism and with the dynamics of the network society” (2010, 493). For Castells, global capitalism’s network society is the product of complex shifts in technology, social relations, and the global restructuring of the capitalist order toward the end of the twentieth century. The combination of information technologies’ impact on production systems and the related financialization of all sectors of industry reshaped the world as a “space of flows,” where both space and time are increasingly experienced as virtual categories.4 The resulting tension between lived experience and increasingly ephemeral time is explored in Linklater’s Before Trilogy, a film cycle haunted by “the ghosts of older artworks about time” (Cutler 2013, 27) in which two characters engage in a precarious romance over the course of eighteen years. The first film, Before Sunrise, introduced American tourist Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and young Frenchwoman Céline (Julie Delpy), who spend a single impromptu night of romance in Vienna. As with Linklater’s previous two features, Before Sunrise registers the verbal interactions of educated and privileged young characters over the course of a short and clearly delimited period of time, employing a “workmanlike” and



Richard Linklater

207

unobtrusive visual aesthetic. Many have indeed pointed out how much the two main characters’ articulate and self-conscious dialogue resembles similar exchanges in Linklater’s previous “Generation X films” (Harrod 2010, 32), strengthening his perception as an emerging auteur figure with a recognizable writerly style and thematic preoccupations. And while the casual way in which this first film frames its picturesque locale resonates with globalization’s emerging space of flows, its plot at the same time hinges on the spatial barriers the characters still experience. While the sights and sounds of a deeply pleasurable and rather overbearingly romanticized global city offer themselves up to the characters (and therefore the viewer) in ways that also typify global capitalism’s space of flows, the narrative tension at the same time lies in a number of key spatio­ temporal restrictions. The distance between Paris, France and Austin, Texas is experienced by both as overwhelmingly large, while Jesse’s (economic) necessity of catching his flight home imposes a dramatically fortuitous deadline upon their developing relationship. Without soon-to-be-ubiquitous technologies like cell phones, the internet, and plummeting travel costs, the geography mapped out by the film remains largely defined by industrial capitalism’s residual logic of rigid borders and stable structures. Viewed in isolation, Before Sunrise therefore consolidated Linklater’s perception as an auteurist director, while dramatizing the tension between residual and emergent capitalist orders. But when viewed as a cycle, the three films offer a vivid illustration of global capitalism’s movement toward increased flexibility, mobility, and precariousness. Before Sunset reunites the two characters in Paris, where their dialogues reflect their generation’s uncertainty about the life paths that seem available to them. The two of them now come to represent two distinct paths for young adults in advanced capitalist countries: where Jesse has attempted to reproduce traditions of stability and continuity by getting married and raising a family, Céline has resisted commitment and pursued her ideals. However, both feel equally frustrated and unsatisfied, while neither is able to pinpoint where their feelings of alienation come from. What has been described as the “wandering, searching, seemingly random aspect” of Linklater’s work connects to the mindset of the first generation to come of age in global capitalism’s post-historical atmosphere (Norton 1999, 62). As Jesse states, “Maybe what I’m saying is, the world might be evolving the way a person evolves. Right? Like, I mean, me for example. Am I getting worse? Am I improving? I don’t know.” Céline, who initially defends her more flexible lifestyle, ultimately concurs: “There are so many things I want to do, but I end up doing not much.” What they have in common is their sense of a world with diminishing horizons, in which the collapse of history and ideology has created a stifling abundance of seemingly meaningless and interchangeable choices. And while the only solution the film is able to offer for their predicament lies in the appealing

208

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

concept of heterosexual romance, the ambiguity and tension in their interactions is fueled by what is ultimately an unresolvable tension that lies within the historical development of global capitalism’s emergent structure of feeling. Arriving another nine years later, Before Midnight adds a third picturesque location to the series’ ongoing depiction of the global “space of flows,” as Jesse and Céline now navigate the trials of a long-term relationship while vacationing in Greece. While the third film follows the basic structure of the previous two by focusing on the interaction between the two leads, there is also a larger cast of supporting characters around them in this third installment. The social group (including their children, friends, and a young couple all too obviously representing a millennial reflection of their younger selves) emphasizes the accumulation of social ties and personal responsibilities resulting from their decision to stay together after the end of the previous film. But while the earlier films foregrounded the spontaneous personal connection between two individuals on a momentary reprieve from the emergent post-historical, spatiotemporal logic of global capitalism, Before Midnight shows primarily how strongly this context of flexibility and mobility has challenged personal and social relations in the long term. The growing resentment between Jesse and Céline is first articulated in a series of passive-aggressive exchanges with the circle of friends at their summer residence, emerging more fully once they retreat to a hotel room for a planned night of intimacy. In both environments, the reassuringly nostalgic familiarity between the two is constantly undercut by a pervasive atmosphere of insecurity and precariousness: the seemingly excessive choices on offer to this white, privileged couple is experienced as challenging and even toxic to their ongoing relationship. The quickly escalating tension between them therefore simultaneously expresses the network society’s lack of stable and fixed coordinates. While the rhetoric of global capitalism’s mandatory flexibility is generally presented as a liberation that allows for increased freedom of choice and individual development, these two characters’ larger trajectory through three films illustrates the fundamental ambivalence of globalization: even for privileged subjects like Jesse and Céline, life in the ephemeral framework of Castells’ “spaceless space” and “timeless time” appears stultifying rather than liberating. At the same time, the film cycle’s unique recursive format, as we return to these characters across substantial temporal gaps, strengthens this logic while developing an ambivalent form of nostalgia. Both for the audience and for the characters themselves, nostalgia in the Before films is not the desire to return to a particular time and place, as the ahistorical locales and “neutral” representational style refuses to resonate with any single



Richard Linklater

209

period in particular. Instead, the series becomes an elegy for the potentiality of youth and the smothering effects of the post-historical age. Céline’s despair in Before Midnight in particular results from her inability to put into action her political ideals in a meaningful way, clearly exacerbated by Jesse’s “common-sense” ideological pragmatism that trivializes and infantilizes her desire to contribute to real change. And since the films’ form itself intensifies global capitalism’s tendency to isolate the individual from a larger context of social relations, fascinatingly fixing both main characters in fleeting shared moments, it both inhabits and interrogates these limitations across the series. Linklater’s auteurist negotiation of global capitalism’s post-historical spirit therefore offers a productive form of Jameson’s provocative but undefined “post-nostalgia mode.” While Dazed and Confused appears most obviously as a canny transformation of the neoconservative nostalgia film, the Before films operate in a Jamesonian “perpetual present” that may have been caught in amber, but which actively works against the rosy glow nostalgic perception could so easily cast upon it. When earlier films in the cycle are revisited, they offer neither stability nor reassurance. Instead, the passage of time leads both characters to question what came before, their constant doubt and ambiguity rendering palpable global capitalism’s “purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will” (Jameson 1998, 57). But even as the inexorable passage of global capitalism’s timeless time continues to frustrate their desires, the trilogy as a whole still offers ways of negotiating the resulting impasse. The final scene in the last film offers an elegant summation of this attempt to move beyond the straightforward absorption of capitalist realism. After the previous exchanges between Céline and Jesse seem to have broken down the remaining basis for their marriage and a separation now seems inevitable, the ending nevertheless offers a precarious and ambivalent comfort “through affirming the reality of a fantasy” (Cutler 2013, 28). By resorting to the shared ritual of role-playing, they are able to escape once more into an imagined world that is paradoxically more real than the fluid and flexible space of flows global capitalism has to offer. After listening to Jesse narrating a fictional version of their own post-nostalgic romance, Céline’s last line perfectly sums up the confusing and deeply contradictory experience of timeless time: “Well, it must have been one hell of a night we’re about to have.” Rather than retreating from the present into an ossified past that offers the illusion of coherence, the Before films have the audacity to cling to a utopian sense of hope, offering an eternal promise of a different future (Speed 2007, 104–5).

210

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Boyhood and global capitalism’s war on time In Before Sunrise, the first exchange between Jesse and Céline humorously describes an imaginary cable TV station. In the scene, Jesse pitches the idea for a channel that depicts an ordinary person’s life for twenty-four hours without any cuts or elisions, literally “capturing life as it’s lived.” Against Céline’s objections that nobody would be interested in watching “all those mundane, boring things everybody has to do every day of their fucking life,” Jesse insists that the result would be “the poetry of everyday life.” The exchange self-consciously sums up Linklater’s observational approach to narrative filmmaking, which all too often resists the conventions of (post-)classical Hollywood, focusing instead on verbal interaction presented (more or less) in real time. This slowing down of time, practiced by Linklater in so many of his films, from Slacker to A Scanner Darkly (2006), allows for endless digressions that counter capitalism’s relentless forward drive. Paul Virilio has equated the system’s indefatigable necessity for speed and reinvention with a “war on Time” that only creates “peace through exhaustion” (2006, 69). Moving well beyond Jameson’s critique of postmodern culture as a depoliticizing force, Virilio sees in contemporary film a “war machine” that fuels and exacerbates capitalism’s military capture of daily life. Jonathan Crary describes this war on time in the context of media convergence and the attention economy, relating the absence of temporal coordinates to global capitalism’s 24/7 environment of precarious employment and on-demand delivery systems, as every waking moment is colonized by information technologies’ multiplying forms of affective and immaterial labor. For subjects who are “constantly engaged, interfacing, interacting, communicating, responding, or processing within some telematic milieu” (2013, 15), there are hardly any interludes left that aren’t over-determined by capitalism’s boundless cycles of circulation. This constant engagement with information across media platforms eradicates historical difference, and results in the creation of a dangerous illusion of post-historical time: “an illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change” (2013, 9). With the slowing down of time and obsessive interest in alternate realities, much of Linklater’s output— including Dazed and Confused and the Before films—resists this 24/7 logic without resorting to the nostalgia mode to keep its growing power at bay. Arriving in theaters in 2014 following years of rumors and a triumphant tour of the festival circuit, Boyhood easily became a true indie blockbuster, crossing over on many occasions from smaller arthouse cinemas to larger commercial multiplexes. The film received unanimous critical acclaim,5 and its unique production history—re-assembling its cast and crew annually for



Richard Linklater

211

a few weeks over a twelve-year period—together with its thematic interest in the passage of time further cemented Linklater’s established reputation as a twenty-first-century film auteur. But where Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and the Before Trilogy had explored his recurrent themes by focusing on single moments and the slowing down of time, Boyhood condenses a much longer period into a 166-minute feature film. The project brings together several of Linklater’s thematic interests, such as the connection between temporality and identity, the blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary filmmaking, and the exploration of youth culture and cross-generational connections. Following main character Mason’s development as actor Ellar Coltrane ages from six to eighteen years old, Boyhood rushes headlong through more than a decade of recent history. True to Linklater’s established mode, this film again resists the nostalgia mode, neither romanticizing Mason’s early childhood nor dwelling on changes in fashion or style that would create a clear sense of difference between past and present. While Boyhood was shot during the years in which the film industry transitioned from analog to digital, Linklater made the conscious choice to use 35mm film stock throughout, in order to allow for a consistent look and feel throughout the film (Rizov 2014). Instead, different haircuts for the main characters are used as the primary indicators of the passage of time, alongside the prominent use of popular music to signal temporal progression. While Boyhood clearly doesn’t use these forms of narrative shorthand as ostentatiously as similarly organized historical pastiche films such as Forrest Gump (1994), its relentless forward movement nevertheless tends to reproduce a similar cultural logic. The most remarkable aspect of the film’s twelve-year timespan is how little actually seems to change outside of the personal sphere. Boyhood’s appeal clearly derives from the tension between the time-lapse effect of childhood and adolescence framed against a historical background that remains strangely static. Indeed, the film’s condensation of twelve years into just under three hours of cinema provides an unusual encounter with the visible passage of time in our cultural context of ephemeral timelessness. Media attention on the film has therefore predictably focused on this uncanny spectacle, with many magazine covers and photo spreads combining images of Coltrane at various ages. And in the context of contemporary American film culture, marked above all by remakes, prequels, franchise reboots, re-imaginings, adaptations, and other forms of rapid cultural recycling, it comes as little surprise that a visual confrontation with time’s implacable forward movement has been experienced by so many as unusually meaningful. Besides the recognizable pop hits signaling the passage of time, historical markers in the film arrive mainly in the form of media events, like the publication of the latest Harry Potter book. And while occasional discussions of

212

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

the Iraq War and Obama’s presidential campaign offer tokenistic indications of the director’s publicly declared liberal political sensibilities, the pervasive mood is one that remains thoroughly “post-ideological” (Žižek 2012, 54–5). It is revealing that the only fundamental change we witness in passing during Boyhood’s twelve-year period is the rise of information technology—from the first Apple iMac popping up in Mason’s classroom, to family members making everyday Skype and FaceTime calls on iPhones and laptop computers. The simultaneous rise of social media is commented on in the film with terms very similar to those Castells uses to describe and critique global capitalism’s network society. On his way to a visit with his sister in Austin, a sixteen-year-old Mason expresses his frustration over the ubiquity of Facebook and social media to his girlfriend Sheena, as she interacts with her smartphone: Mason: “I just want to try and not live my life through a screen, you know. Have, like, some kind of actual interaction. A real person, not just the profile they put up.” Sheena: “Oh, I’m sorry, were you saying something?” Mason: “Yeah, okay, I know you’re joking. But it’s kind of true: you have been checking your phone this whole time. So what do you really do? You don’t care what your friends are up to on a Saturday afternoon. But you’re also not fully experiencing my profound bitching. It’s like everyone’s just stuck in an in-between state—not really experiencing anything.” This constant “in-between state” is precisely the result of global capitalism’s post-historical atmosphere, in which Mason’s desire to “not live his life through a screen” is rendered fascinatingly ambiguous. While at one level the experience of Boyhood tries to capture the very sense of authentic “reality” that seems to be absent from global capitalism’s “ontological lack” (Hardt and Negri 2005, 62), it simultaneously loses those aspects of resistance that make Linklater’s other films politically productive. In this sense, the Before films and Boyhood mobilize distinctly opposite interpretations of “timeless time”: the moments between Jesse and Céline take place outside the regular flow of history, and focus insistently on play-acting, imagined alternatives, and “what if” scenarios. They show characters struggling to break away from the “space of flows” that has paradoxically made possible their encounters. Boyhood on the other hand is steeped in a more literal timeless time, rendering the forward movement of time spectacular without interrogating or historicizing it in any meaningful way. Or, to put it somewhat differently: while time’s absence is experienced as a trauma in the Before cycle, its visible presence in Boyhood has the opposite effect, and becomes pacifying and reassuring. While audiences have clearly responded strongly to the temporal spectacle



Richard Linklater

213

that Boyhood’s high concept provides, the irony is of course that it is at a deeper level simply another screen competing for our time in this attention economy. In this context of timeless time and the nonstop barrage of media content, Boyhood’s affective power can be read both as a symptom of global capitalism’s timeless time, and as the public’s reaction against it: on the one hand, the desire to experience time as something more organic, less ephemeral; but on the other, the discovery that the post-historical subject may in fact be even more powerless to resist the sense that the passage of time in the neoliberal age has become meaningless beyond the purely individual level. From this perspective, Virilio’s “war on Time” offers a suitably hyperbolic intensification of Jameson’s long-standing critique of late capitalism’s cultural dominant. While both see the representation of history and pastness as crucial to understanding capitalism’s cultural logic, Virilio’s perspective aligns itself perfectly with critical concepts like “timeless time” and “capitalist realism.” As a text, Boyhood lends itself to a reading that foregrounds the emergent spirit of global capitalism, with its emphasis on flexibility, precariousness, and immaterial labor as positive, liberating concepts. And as a cultural phenomenon, it resonates even more strongly, positioning Linklater’s status as an innovative and thematically consistent auteur as an expression of successful entrepreneurialism, while thematizing the key notions supporting global capitalism’s post-historical atmosphere.

Conclusion Whereas Dazed and Confused resisted nostalgia by emphasizing how nothing ever really changes, and the Before cycle sought ways to escape for a moment into (imagined and real) alternatives, Boyhood embraces the logic of global capitalism: the passage of twelve years demonstrates change and transformation, but almost entirely in the personal sphere. The callous and unreliable father (played by Ethan Hawke) matures into a bourgeois family man; the mother (played by Patricia Arquette) survives a series of abusive relationships and precarious academic jobs, ultimately finding validation from a Mexican immigrant whose life she has turned around;6 and Mason himself experiences first love, heartbreak, the discovery of a creative vocation, and a moment of true epiphany as he comes of age with the realization that we are all in fact condemned to exist in a perpetual present. At the same time, Linklater’s ability to develop a career as an American film director whose auteurism has been established across a range of genres, styles, and industrial contexts illustrates how the film industry has changed along similar lines. While twentieth-century perceptions would make clear distinctions between studio work and independent productions,

214

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Linklater’s successful auteurism reflects global capitalism’s entrepreneurial individualism. In this post-historical context of evaporating boundaries and just-in-time production systems, every individual is forced to become an “entrepreneur of the self” (Lazzarato 2012, 94). In this sense at least, Linklater’s ambiguous status as a twenty-first-century American film auteur offers one of the most provocative illustrations of neoliberalism’s inescapable logic.

Notes 1

The trilogy also illustrates a range of industrial production frameworks: Before Sunrise was a major studio film, financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures; Before Sunset was produced by Time Warner’s boutique label Warner Independent Pictures; and Before Midnight was financed independently, securing a distribution deal with Sony Pictures only after screening at the Sundance Film Festival.

2

The striking use of a single helicopter shot in this low-budget film emphasizes the ending’s symbolic importance.

3

The only thing resembling a “life choice” is Pink’s decision not to sign a form that confirms his commitment to the football team in his senior year. But even this choice leaves open how this will affect his later life, and therefore again reinforces the film’s narrative ambiguity.

4

Similarly, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello emphasize the networked nature of entrepreneurial management as a fundamental aspect of the new spirit of capitalism (2007, 103–8).

5

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes indicates that 98 percent of the published responses from film critics were favorable.

6

In spite of what seem like progressive politics, the implausible subplot concerning the Mexican immigrant speaks volumes about the film’s ideological investment, finding the solution to social and economic problems in liberal humanist values of individual encouragement and voluntary assistance.

Works cited Adams, Sam. 2015. “Why the Unanimous Praise for ‘Boyhood’ is Bad for Criticism—and for ‘Boyhood,’” Criticwire 4 August, 2015. Available online: http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/why-the-unanimous-praise-for-boyhood-isbad-for-film-criticism-and-for-boyhood-20140804 (accessed June 23, 2015). Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso.



Richard Linklater

215

Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London and New York: Verso. Cutler, Aaron. 2013. “Love in Time: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Richard Linklater’s Before Films,” Cineaste 38 (4) (Fall): 24–8. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Grist, Leighton. 2013. The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1978–99: Authorship and Context II. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Books. Harrod, Mary. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Pastiche in the Work of Richard Linklater,” Screen 51 (1) (Spring): 21–37. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London and New York: Verso. Kotsko, Adam. 2010. Awkwardness. Ropley, Hants: Zero Books. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Norton, Glen. 1999. “The Seductive Slack of Before Sunrise,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 19 (2) (Winter): 62–72. Rizov, Vadim. 2014. “35mm Colors in Digital Translation in Boyhood,” Filmmaker Magazine July 22. Available online: http://filmmakermagazine. com/86820-35mm-colors-in-digital-translation-in-boyhood (accessed June 23, 2015). Speed, Lesley. 2007. “The Possibilities of Roads not Taken: Intellect and Utopia in the Films of Richard Linklater,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35 (3): 98–106. Virilio, Paul. 2006. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London and New York: Verso.

12 “Black in white”: Language, world-making and the American contract in the cinema of Quentin Tarantino John Pitseys

Quentin Tarantino’s cinema is a cinema of words and transactions. Speech is often literally mise-en-scène in his films, as in the fabled dialogues of Pulp Fiction (1994). It is sometimes doubled by camera placement, movements, and editing, as in the opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs (1992). Elsewhere it serves as the main engine of the script, the process of linguistic translation and the latter’s systematic failure constituting the moral stake and narrative nerve of Inglourious Basterds (2009). Finally, it acquires in Django Unchained (2012) the form of the social code par excellence: Law, and more specifically the institution of the contract, unify the adventures of Django through the Parabellum South, where the contract occupies a very specific place.1 Why does the figure of the agreement and transaction, in its many shapes and forms, occupy such an important place in the cinema of Tarantino? What does it reveal of the auteur’s conception of cinema and sociality? I shall first show how, for Tarantino, a film is not a linear sequence articulated around a series of episodes, but a symbolic map of a universe of shared signifiers and meanings between the author and his audience, with whom the filmmaker enters into a symbolic contract with each film. I shall then endeavor to show how and why Django Unchained builds this

218

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

imaginary world around the symbolic figure of the legal contract: the film’s first part presents ironically its ideals, while the second part proposes a fierce yet tragic criticism of this symbolic figure.

Living and killing through language In an otherwise relatively unspectacular scene from Django Unchained, the protagonists, Django—now a free man—and King Schulz, are led to a meeting with Calvin Candie, the owner of Django’s wife, Broomhilde, still enslaved. Revolted by everything he encounters in the decadent Cleopatra Club—the reflection of a whole system, in which female slaves are turned into prostitutes and “Mandingoes” fight to death for the pleasure of their corrupt white masters—Django snarls at Candie’s assistant, Mr. Moguy, whose “One could almost say I was raised to be Calvin’s lawyer” he responds to with a biting, “One could almost say youse a nigger?” This repartee, blurring many lines, reveals at once a clever use of dialogue, customary in Tarantino’s corpus, as well as the trappings his cinema is filled with, and is iconic of the critical debates it generates.2 Whatever the perspective one chooses to adopt when dealing with Tarantino’s politics, the questions rest on a semantic conception of the films’ analyses. More broadly, they assume that there exists a grid of interpretation—liberal, “cultural,” Marxist, or any other—which allows the understanding of an outside beyond the ideology carried by the film, its political unconscious, or the discursive device masking, to the author, the ideological dimension of his work (Reed 2013). But a work does not only carry a message, conscious or unconscious, it also features a communication dispositif (Carroll 2006, 2008). And the latter does not rely only on visual or lexical registers, but also upon a syntax of translated social discourses which themselves possess their own recognition rules. A film’s syntax sends us to what Rancière calls a “police,” namely a set of rules allowing for the organization of “common sensitive evidence.” Be it the formal elements of the film, its structure, or its aesthetic canons, these rules rest on codes.3 These codes imply constraints, which are themselves the object of a plurivocal process of interpretation, which can lead to internal tensions and contradictions: even the ideological function of discourse, as Jameson taught us (1979) contains in itself a transcending utopian dimension that can contribute to its own unmasking or contestation. Such a syntactic and codifying conception in cinema is central to understanding the short scene we just described, and, more broadly, Tarantino’s oeuvre as a whole. For the director, cinema is not just a medium to translate what the author considers to be beautiful, true, or just. Neither does he try to access the “évidence du sensible” (Deleuze 1985). However, he



QUENTIN TARANTINO

219

does propose an interpretive code of the real, and, furthermore, a tool of communication between the world of the director and that of the viewer. For Tarantino, the role of cinema is not to show the world as it exists, nor to prescribe what should become of it, but to build a network of shared and open significations. In so doing, the oeuvre not only represents a set of recognition signs (Carroll 1985), but a common and shared universe and symbolic cartography. Be it in his keenness to use citation or collage,4 or the fanciful biographies of his characters, the cinema of Tarantino has as its goal and strategy the creation of common forms of life between the author and the spectator (Wittgenstein 2001 [1953]). Tarantino is not the only one to conceive of cinema as a symbolic code: think of the work of Peter Greenaway, or, to build the latter around references drawn from popular culture, think of Godard, whose Band of Outsiders (Bande à part, 1964) Tarantino used to name one of his production companies. His originality lies, however, in the way he subverts the apparent specificity of the cinematic medium. Thus, Tarantino has been reproached for building his scripts like a series of virtuoso tableaus, whereas that is precisely what constitutes their internal economy. Tarantino’s films arrest the viewer’s gaze through a variety of effects: the sensational quality of violence, the bright hues of blood, cars, set design, and costumes, the choreographic fluidity of action and dialogue scenes, the syncopated rhythms in editing, the narrative and cultish quality of his soundtracks. Nevertheless, the scenes he crafts are in themselves tableaus which can be viewed separately without much detriment to the narrative pleasure of the viewer—Jackie Brown (1997) and, to a lesser extent, Django Unchained being exceptions to this rule. Tarantino’s cinema suspends or diverts the flow of time. A character murdered in a scene may reappear in a later one (Pulp Fiction), and Kill Bill’s (2003, 2004) duel sequences as well as the car chases of Deathproof (2007) seem to represent variations on the same theme. With an onslaught of information and stimuli thrown at the viewer, the trepidation and excitement generated by Tarantino’s cinema produces a feeling of perpetual movement. However, it is not the narrative which moves forward so much as the viewer’s point of view, gradually displaced from one element onto another one, hitherto unseen, of the symbolic universe woven by the film like a tapestry. On the one hand, Tarantino’s characters move but do not evolve much, if at all. They don’t emerge from the story as wiser or better. Most of them are even mere pawns without a soul, bereft of a real name, often costumed and made-up like marionettes (Sauvage 2013). Mr. Pink, Black Mamba, and the Hateful Eight are first and foremost the symbolic operators of the Vanity that Tarantino paints from one film to the next. On the other hand, movement is not borne here out of the narrative, but out of the progressive unveiling of the canvas/screen. The picture seems to be moving because the viewer can stroll in it freely, not because the

220

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

characters change their position in it. Schultz’s character can be at once the protagonist of the film and a secondary character, the putative grandfather of Hans Landa, a cousin of Alexandre Dumas, an abolitionist figure, or a flesh trader. And Django can at once be a triumphant hero, a stereotype, a slave having internalized the codes of the Deep South, or a liberal icon. Tarantino’s figures propose first and foremost a process of discovery, the meaning of which is necessarily plurivocal, since the relationship of the subject to the sign evolves constantly depending on the scene, the spectator’s cultural background, etc. This process of discovery expands beyond the frame of the “paintings” themselves. The devices whereby Tarantino turns each of his films into an extension of the previous ones have been largely documented (Ortoli 2012): beyond this intertextual and self-referential dimension, the characters all come with a reputation which precedes them, and are inscribed into a legend of sorts—or even a quasi mythical structure—which goes far beyond them, magnifies and petrifies them all at once (Sauvage 2013). Tarantino’s relationship to the sign is neither located in obedience nor in demystification (Ricoeur 1970). Tarantino takes seriously the narrative elements he stages. His work does not stand for parody, suspicion, or deconstruction. Conversely, these narrative elements are not oriented toward a determined meaning. To think that the individual actions of Django may function to express Tarantino’s point of view or (his) political unconscious is tantamount to missing out on what the titular character stands for in Django Unchained: he is an element, among many other ones, of a dispositif of communication and recognition. The films of Tarantino don’t find their consistency and cohesiveness in the succession of actions undertaken by the protagonists, but in the set of signatures deployed through their interactions. Be it in the minutiae of the descriptions, in the precise declamation of identities, in the quasi systematic attribution of titles and nicknames to characters, in the fetishism of bodies, in the enumeration of dates or precise location of events (told or shown), his cinema rests not on the progression of the narrative but on the creation of an imaginary and symbolic common world, which reaches far beyond the frame of the plot or the screen: it is difficult to broach Tarantino’s cinema without also reaching for or falling into the endless critical discussion and debate about their meaning, their lack thereof, or their nihilism (Mendelsohn 2003). In other words, this auteur’s cinema establishes a network of open meaning constituting at once the goal and the strategy of the author. The construction of such a common world evokes in its own turn a certain conception of language. The games of language put into place by Tarantino never rest solely on markers—places, characters, dates, etc.—but also on a grammar. In this context, the Tarantinian conception of language does not concern cinematic language alone, but also the mise-en-scène of language itself: exchanges of words are, in any film by Tarantino, the



QUENTIN TARANTINO

221

driving force of the script. It is the case in Reservoir Dogs, which from its opening sequence describes mostly a long and tragic attempt at mutual recognition. Speech is each time mobilized in order to prevent the worst from happening, and to ensure understanding between the characters. But motives and consciousness remain opaque. The sincerity of some does not guarantee their honesty. The honesty of others does not require sincerity. As attested in the relationship between Mr. White and Mr. Orange, neither loyalty nor sympathy suffice to establish trust, and keep the botched bank robbery from turning into a disaster. In Pulp Fiction, speech aims again at the creation of a common background of understanding among the characters, and between the film and the spectator. Yet except for the closing sequence of the film, characters hardly ever speak to one another, or answer each other having listened to what the other person had to say. It is the silent intervention of the Grand Image-maker, in the return of Butch’s conscience, which saves Marsellus and ensures his survival and redemption. Much the same can be said of Kill Bill, in which the dialogue between the protagonists is neither essential to their (mis)understanding(s), nor capable of preventing their confrontation. The duelists know, understand, and even love each other without having to talk, and Vernita and the Bride’s meeting could be that of two sisters, yet ends in murder. Finally, Inglourious Basterds seems to constitute the most radical example, wherein language supports the entire narrative scaffolding of the film, even though characters soliloquize more than they communicate with one another. Language almost becomes a character in its own right here, through the figure of Hans Landa. The “Jew Hunter” is a Hermes-like figure, who speaks all languages and can put himself in every man’s shoes: he is also, by the same token, the Genesis Serpent bringing about death and the mastery of language at the same time. The violence of the film does not come from the meanness of men. It derives from their need to communicate and their incapability to understand one another. Each massacre is first and foremost a failure of and in translation. Landa’s multilingualism allows him to understand Lapadite, but prevents the Jews hidden in the basement from understanding their grim fate. The massacre in the inn involving a British agent parading as a German officer reminds us how the modernist aspiration to a universal language, of which cinema is one utopian instantiation, is never sufficient to put in check the various and multifarious layers of actual life and experience. And in spite of the perfectly clear utterances and ostentatious politeness of Landa, the viewer will never know whether he recognized Shoshanna and is aware of her plan when offering her the chou à la crème. Finally, the purported bilingualism of the Basterds (parading as Italian filmmakers) is openly ridiculed by Landa, and leads directly to their capture. In this respect, Aldo Raine’s decision to carve a swastika into Landa’s forehead functions as the only way of putting an end to the chaos of the world: by making the “Jew hunter” (and opportunistic

222

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 12.1  “Attendez la crème” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) as embodiment of language. Source: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) © Universal Pictures, The Weinstein Company, A Band Apart, A Zehnte Babelsberg Film GmbH Production, Visiona Romantica, Inc.

Nazi killer and war hero) shut up, he replaces speech with the mute and brutal imposition of a written signifier. While Tarantino is not a political filmmaker, in the sense that his films would be committed to political theses or attached to particular political agendas, his cinema reveals a constant concern for and interest in human sociality. First, he defends an egalitarian conception of language (Hirschberg 1997): the work of the author or the critic does not lie in constructing a legitimate cinematic knowledge, a just interpretation, or a ritual of admission to pop elitism or hipster circles. It must contribute to creating a public sphere, strictly speaking a space of dialogue wherein the positions of epistemic precedence are reversible. Secondly, this egalitarian conception is appended to a pessimistic vision of sociality. Language is, in Tarantino, the pharmakon par excellence (Derrida 1972): the poison he instills ends up nonetheless prevailing over its curative virtues. In Tarantino, physical and psychological violence is not the heart of the plot, but the consequence of a lapsed communication or the characters’ solipsism (Gallafent 2006). Some critics have identified Tarantino’s characters as those of a tragedy: this premise must be mitigated. A character is tragic because he is condemned to playing a determined role in an already written plot. With the relative exception of Kill Bill, which, by the admission of Tarantino, possesses an unclear ending that was written in a sense by the characters themselves— the unpredictable death or fate of a protagonist or secondary character lends his films their violent and comical dimensions. The static nature of the characters does not come from the fact that they fulfill a determined function, but derives from the inevitable failure of their communication.



QUENTIN TARANTINO

223

When Racine’s Antigone dies, the data of the debate between her and Creon are perfectly known and understood: it is their agreement that falters. When Bill or Mr. White die, their understanding with the Bride and Mr. Orange is obvious, but no amount of communication can prevent the worst from happening. One of the fundamental traits of Tarantino’s cinema consists in its depiction of the role that language plays in the emergence and the limitation of violence. In this context, Django Unchained stands out because its conception is inscribed, for the first time in the auteur’s oeuvre, into an explicitly political discourse. The interactions between characters are ruled by the quintessential social language: that of Law. Law is a specific social sub-system, its function consists in organizing the relationship among the other social sub-systems, be it the religious, economic, or domestic spheres. Besides, it represents the quintessential dispositif of power/knowledge, by discursively validating the exercise of a power considered legitimate, all the while transforming various statements of moral, ethical, economic, or political type into a system (mode?) of effective constraint. It is thus Law, and more specifically the legal institution of contract, which allows in Django a discursive currency common to the various dimensions of the narrative, and to extract from them the underlying logic of power.

Flesh for money The contract constitutes the running narrative thread and structuring element of Django Unchained’s political signification, and could be utilized as a metaphor or a thought experiment. Since the interactions between the characters feature demands and obligations, it is not difficult to see in them “contracts”: such are the relations between Cabot, White, and Orange in Reservoir Dogs, or the agreement between Butch and Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. There is a similar notion of tacit agreement running throughout Kill Bill, but wherein the only explicit contract (the contract of marriage) is canceled and drenched in blood. Almost every scene in The Hateful Eight (2015) is rhythmed by series of negotiations and agreements whose rules tend, more often than not, to be broken. Finally, in the specific case of Django Unchained the notion of the contract is, quite remarkably, taken in its strict sense. It designates the conditions of the private contract in American Law: an offer, an acceptance of the offer, the meeting of two minds, the consent of the parties, and the execution of the agreement. It also refers to the political and philosophical forms of the social contract. Among the thirteen sections of the film, nine represent the signature or the execution of the terms of a contract.

224

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

First part: As if the Law soothed the soul The first half of the film exposes the terms of American contractism and seems to take the latter’s justification upon itself. Over the seven sequences that compose this first half, five concern themselves with the conclusion or observing of a contract. The first one shows how Schultz buys Django, beginning and ending with a sales agreement. In the second sequence, we see the pact of emancipation agreed upon by Schultz and Django. In the third sequence, Schultz kills a small Western town sheriff, thereby fulfilling a bounty contract offered by the state. The fourth sequence deals with Schultz negotiating (or pretending to negotiate) the purchase of a slave on the property of landowner Big Daddy, then invoking the contract of a bounty hunt, which initially motivated Django’s purchase. Finally, the first half of the film ends with a dialogue between Schultz and Django discussing the various strategies necessary in order to set Broomhilde/Hildie, Django’s wife, free: the two men agree to parade as slave traders before Hildie’s owner, Calvin Candie. In each of these sequences, the Texas of Django Unchained proposes an anti-utopian version of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. On the one hand, all relations seem to be regulated by private contracts. The fairness of the contract is supposed to proceed from the autonomous encounter of wills. Its just character derives from its ability to coordinate supply and demand, and to allow for each person’s profit to contribute to the wealth of all. On the other hand, the institution of the private contract is inscribed in a social contract of the Lockean type, whereby the state is in charge of insuring the respect of the natural rights of the individual: in this context, the rights granted to the subject aim strictly at protecting personal property and individual integrity. In Django Unchained, the state is neither a Leviathan nor the expression of the Sovereign People, but a contracting body of a higher level. Its action is limited to the respect of the equality of all before the Law. Whether it is King Schultz or the ethereal figure of Judge Morresby, the power bestowed upon them is limited to the act of judging, punishing acts of aggression, and interpreting natural Law. The citizens pay a sheriff to pursue criminals, and hire a bounty hunter if the sheriff turns out to be a former criminal himself. Justice can be brought about through a warrant, as long as the latter’s legality is the object of legal control. Django’s America thus presents itself as a rationalist, merchant, and transactional society. Transactions carried out between characters seem to lead to the liberation of Django and to the capture of criminals. In reality, they only benefit the protagonists because they parody the standard conditions of the contract: their drollness stems from the contrast between the pomp with which the rules of the contract are enunciated, and the hypocritical violence with which the convention is executed.



QUENTIN TARANTINO

225

First, the contract is often concluded in the absence of consent or the legal capacity of one of the two parties. In this way, Schultz formalizes the deed of sale by throwing a wad of cash at Django’s former owner, disarmed and lying under his dead horse. Schultz then proceeds to offer the slaves their freedom by suggesting a neutral course, the choice between respecting established contractual forms, or murdering the owner. And it is Schultz, again, who offers Django his freedom in return for his services even though Django, as a slave, has technically no say in this decision. Secondly, the contract contributes to the reification of individuals rather than to their autonomy. In the scenes mentioned above, the object of the transaction is neither goods, nor a right, nor a service, but the human body itself. While contemporary Law considers the inalienability of the human body as a basic principle, the real stake of these contracts is quite clear: “flesh for money.” The private contract is first and foremost a contract of human body and human existence. The slaver sells slave bodies. The bounty hunter sells criminals’ corpses. King Schultz himself compares his work as a Justice auxiliary to the slave trade, before marrying action and intent by shooting point blank the sheriff of the town where he and Django are set to negotiate the terms of their forthcoming relationship. Finally, the figure of the social contract is here openly mocked. Supposed to guarantee police and protect the natural rights of the individual, the state is presented as a specter, bereft of legislative or judicial power. For Locke, the protection of self-ownership also requires that one does not harm others, does not destroy other humans, does not destroy oneself, and does not injure another’s property (Locke 1982 [1690], §6). And yet, this is what the contractual intervention of the public power brings about, systematically. The work of Schultz relies precisely on the destruction of human beings. The thin line between the criminal and the sheriff is merely a matter of signature. The execution of the Brittle Brothers on Big Daddy’s plantation by Django is an act of personal revenge more than a legal action. Brandishing his warrant in the face of the landowner, furious to find his foremen slaughtered, Schultz seems to be the only one to pretend he believes that the respect of judicial form overrides Southern mores or the law of the fittest. Observing the facade of private contract or Lockean pact, transactions are only carried out because the “nice guys” are on the right side of the gun, or because it is substituted, in the case of Django and Schultz, by mutual respect and friendship.

From irony to despair: Contracting in Candieland Irony abounds in Tarantino’s cinema, but the second half of Django Unchained features only very small amounts of it (save for the final scene):

226

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

the film seems less concerned with the triumph of its titular protagonist than deploying a succession of tableaus crudely exposing and critiquing the foundations of American contractarianism. Criticized for its violence, or conversely commended for its representation of slavery’s cruelty, the Mandingo scene is first and foremost an act of exploitation and economic speculation, which is based not on a direct process of production, but on the terms of the convention between Candie and the other better (played by the original Django, Franco Nero). A bit later, the massacre of the slave d’Artagnan puts Django and Schultz in direct confrontation with their moral responsibility for the first time. D’Artagnan does not die on account of his misbehavior or Candie’s sadism, but because the slave has become a useless, expendable “load,” used in this case by Candie to put his guests’ mettle to the test. At a crucial moment of the film, Schultz tries to call upon the institution of the contract: taking literally the idea whereby the act of purchasing a slave results from the encounter of two wills, he proposes to buy off the slave. But Django makes a point of playing his role of slaver to perfection, opposing the purchase of d’Artagnan, arguing that the latter has no market value whatsoever. Behind the fiction of autonomy of wills, the ideology of the contract is revealed in its naked truth. The contract incepts and justifies exploitation, and the death of d’Artagnan is tantamount to an act of stock evacuation. Be it in these two scenes, or the portrayal of Candieland, the question of race is actually secondary in this description of the Deep South. In Tarantino’s own words: You have all these slaves that are living on the plantation, and the plantation owner actually owns them; they’re his property. But then you have all the white workers who also live on the grounds with their wives and their kids. So you have an entire community living on this piece of land … Exactly like the way a king can own their subjects and put them to death, they can do that with complete impunity when it comes to the slaves and pretty much do that with the poor whites … If I couldn’t deal with the actual social strata inside the institution of lifelong slavery itself, then I wasn’t really dealing with the story. (Tarantino and Gates 2012)5 Tarantino does also make a point of stressing the relationship of servility among whites and among blacks. On the one hand, Candie is an exploiter who exerts his domination as much over slaves as over lumpen-whites living on his property. On the other hand, one mustn’t necessarily be white to be a slave owner. The introduction of Stephen, the black intendant—and perhaps the real master (Cobb 2013)—of the estate, immediately unsettles the viewer precisely because it clarifies the author’s point of view. In Django Unchained, injustice is not a matter of skin color or individual morals, but a question of distribution of social and economic capital.



QUENTIN TARANTINO

227

FIGURE 12.2  Negotiations at the dinner table.

Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.

FIGURE 12.3  Negotiations at the dinner table.

Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.

The figure of the contract, once again, leads to the dénouement of the story. Indeed, it is by contractual negotiation and financial transaction, not by the expected action scene or cult dialogue that the redemption of the enslaved damsel is supposed to be achieved. Django and Schultz pretend they want to buy a Mandingo, with the true intention of negotiating the purchase of Broomhilde, Django’s wife. The dinner scene during which Schultz, Django, Candie, and Stephen negotiate this transaction lasts for almost thirty minutes. Quietly neglected by critics, this scene consolidates the film’s message. Much like the first half of the film, the meal begins with a long exposition of the terms of negotiation. The characters agree on the modalities and object of the contract, and everything seems to go according to plan—as though the convergence of reasonable, individual wills could lead

228

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

to the purchase of Hildie. However, Stephen realizes that the actual goal of Django and Schultz is to deceive Candie, in order to free Hildie. Once the subterfuge has been revealed, the two men, now at the mercy of Candie, could be subjected to harsh penalties such as imprisonment or death. And yet, Candie contents himself with sitting back at the table with them, restarting the process of negotiation, this time having everyone playing with their cards on the table. Why does Candie decide not to send Schultz away, or kill Django? First, his desire for monetary gain outweighs his other impulses: Hildie, whom he viewed as a mere breeding horse, suddenly acquires a much more substantial financial value. Secondly, Candie wants to dominate and to signify his superiority over his guests, and the conclusion in good standing of the contract is a symbolic and political means of achieving this. Showing Django the skull of “old Ben,” Candie wonders aloud why the old slave never rebelled against his master. The only conclusion he arrives at is the following: whatever the intelligence of a negro, he is incapable of taking on an individual decision. He can’t rebel. He is incapable of behaving like an autonomous, legal subject. In this context, the institution of the contract has a threefold ideological function, of which Candie is well aware. First, it contributes to establishing the exploitative system of slavery. Secondly, it contributes to justifying the system and its benefit for white people. As Cheryl Harris or Gloria Ladson-Billings put it: whiteness is the ultimate social good which whites alone can make use of, whose specific internal resources—rights to use and enjoyment, reputation, status, property, and the absolute right to exclude—favor both their social and economic track (Harris 1993; Ladson-Billings 1999, 15). Thirdly, it excludes by petition of principle black people from the legal and political sphere, since they are allegedly incapable of legal capacity, and thus can’t benefit from it. The mise-en-scène of the sequence in which the lawyer prepares an acceptable sales contract for Candie, includes several minutes without dialogue, a feature unsurprising considering Tarantino’s conception of language. On the one hand, the contract fulfills the type-format of the American collective social code. On the other hand, the contract is signed precisely because the use of speech—and here, of negotiation—has failed. In this context, the legal convention follows established etiquette: the receipt, the signature of the parties, payment in consideration, etc. In this scene, the cinematic effects typical of Tarantino’s films seem all muted or neutralized: lighting seems almost naturalistic, color contrasts are left aside, and long verbal sequences replace the usual quick and busy dialogue. The pressure of the gun discreetly pointed at the protagonists is nevertheless present, and the transaction can only be carried out under two conditions. The first one is to listen to Candie’s speech, hammer in hand, on the inequality of races: the other party has to admit that the object of the transaction, Broomhilde,



QUENTIN TARANTINO

229

is not a person but indeed an object, “take it or leave it.” The second condition is the obligation to shake Candie’s hand. The plantation owner does not only demand acquiescence to the terms of the contract, but also the acknowledgment of a whole lifestyle. The contract is not a neutral institution between two autonomous and disengaged individuals. It legitimates and institutes the Southern mores, and, more largely speaking, a capitalist society composed of white owners: the autonomy of the contracting bodies is conditioned by the respect of these principles, and the autonomy of the individual to meeting these conditions. By shaking Candie’s hand, Schultz understands that he not only concludes a contract, but also that he submits to an unjust social order. His refusal puts an end to the tragic farce in which the protagonists find themselves. Schultz kills Candie before being promptly shot dead himself, and the negotiations end in bloodshed. For Tarantino, it is the only possible way out.6 The negotiation would have been narratively pointless if it had come to a peaceful conclusion, the brutality of the killing serving as the mirror reflection of the social system. As Garson points out, “the more the film moves forward, the more the subtlety which King Schultz likes so much, who likes to detail the article of law which authorizes him to kill an outlaw, gives way to the thought-out brutality of Django—a violence which must subvert the existing law” (Garson 2013). Here, the final surrender of Django is tragic precisely because he survives it. If slavery was merely a manifestation of cruelty or interpersonal violence, Stephen—who too survives the shootout—would have many reasons to torture Django to death: it is because he wants to show Django that his rebellion is pointless that Stephen spares him and insists on keeping him for his market value.

Triumph over Candieland: The shameful white man and the complicit black man Django’s flight, his return to Candieland and the final duel with Stephen apparently mark his triumph. For some, the final liberation of Django at best reveals the unconfronted bad conscience of the American liberal Left. In the worst case scenario, it bears the mark of an audience seeking pleasure, blind to the ideological determinants running throughout the film: donning the master’s clothes, rejoining his smitten wife, Django relinquishes the stereotypical behaviors of the black man only to assume those of the white man. In my opinion, this final scene shows the film for what it is: the representation of the individual’s impotence, be it Django or Tarantino himself—in the face of political domination. By organizing the interactions of the characters around the figure of the contract, Tarantino does not merely critique the intellectual framework of

230

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Lockean contractism. He also goes against the grain of the other major influence of the American Constitution, namely Rousseau’s social contract. For the French philosopher, the appearance of language perverts man, but makes social coexistence possible. As mentioned above, Tarantino considers that the latter is characteristic of human civilization, yet dooms it too. Speech is ubiquitous and renders the relationships between the characters dynamic, but ends up always being impotent or deceitful.7 The accomplices in Reservoir Dogs end up killing each other. Butch owes his survival to action not words, and the final agreement between him and Marsellus is unspoken for the most part. The reunion of Bill and the Bride, however civil at first, is incapable of preventing her from killing her mentor-lover figure. Long dialogues of dissimulation are a deadly game in Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds. Finally, in Django Unchained, the contract appears as a social code at once unavoidable and fake. No level of discussion can prevent outbursts of violence. The contract must fail. In a brief cameo, blowing himself up with dynamite, Tarantino represents in his own body the ethical ambivalence of the narrative as well as that of its auteur’s position. Far from marking the spiritual redemption of Django (Cobb 2013), the final massacre underlines the ironic and illusory character of this liberation. Django Unchained marks the impossibility, for the subject, to liberate himself single-handedly, the failure of language to prevent the degrading of sociality, and the difficulty of cinema to “give reasons to believe in this world” (Deleuze 1985). For Deleuze, “the modern world is that in which information replaces Nature.” What are we to do when information fails? For Tarantino, it will be showing the failure of speech, but leaving it its freedom. As the director notes, Django Unchained does not aim to show a process of emancipation, but a regime of oppression (Tarantino and Gates 2012). It opposes the myth of individual assent to the reality of assassinated or enslaved bodies; the factitious prosperity of the pre-war South to the reality of the rapports of domination which founds it; and the ideal of the social contract to the reality of America shifting between the savagery of natural state and the brutality of Southern mores. Whether he takes them seriously or not, Tarantino is well aware of the ideological dimension of the signs he mobilizes. Conversely, that the character be blind to this dimension allows precisely for the contestation from within the codes of the American contract. Besides, Tarantino does not take seriously the dimension of “utopian transcendence” carried by the final liberation of the hero (Jameson 1979). To quote Rancière on the western, Tarantino has “the distance of one who knows the gestures and codes, but cannot any longer share the dreams and the lures” (2001, 121). In this context, the end of the film underlines at one and the same time the heroism of Django and his political ambiguity. His emancipation is due only to his friendship with Schultz, and the destruction of Candieland. Yet his European friend dies,



QUENTIN TARANTINO

231

FIGURE 12.4  A triumphant Django has his horse perform a Spanish walk.

Source: Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) © The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures.

his body left like refuse in the corner of a room. And Django’s revenge is finally only that of an “exceptional nigger,” neither willing to nor capable of overthrowing slavery. The slaves remain in their cage, even if the door has been opened. Whereas Tarantino often features female characters in control of their destiny, Hildie remains a very peripheral character without any agency throughout the plot, her actions limited to fainting at the sight of her man and docilely applauding his final parade. Finally, the face-off with Stephen is the dialogue of two twins.8 One leaves his walking stick and his Uncle Tom’s accent aside, while the other dons the master’s clothes and his cowboy’s panoply. As Stephen cries out shortly before dying: “Can’t no nigger gunfighter kill all the white folks in the world!” (Garson 2013). Even if it is shown ironically rather than disparagingly, the final triumph of Django imparts an ashen taste. It is the reason why the turning inside out of an artistic critique of capitalism is not shown as a fatality (Rancière 2009), but rather as a lever of domination that paradoxically allows the figure of Django to expose it. In this sense, the scene in which he mounts his steed and has it perform a Spanish walk to a celebratory tune might be the most chilling moment of the whole film. On the one hand, it reminds one of American (capitalist) cinema’s unavoidable individualism, precluding collective representations, and going beyond a character-centered narration. In this sense, the film is basically yet another instantiation of the dilemma of centering on the present rather than on finding a solution for it. On the other hand, more positively perhaps, Django Unchained’s derisively triumphant coda marks at least Tarantino’s awareness of the very relative ability of the individual to overthrow the system. It points in equal measure to the residual ability of the author to struggle alone against the state of rationality of American capitalism, and to the skepticism regarding mass culture critically activating the hopes and collective dreams of the public.

232

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

And yet: often overwrought and formalistic, at times infantile, Tarantino’s cinema nonetheless constitutes an ironic call directed to the intelligence of the viewer. The auteur is he who manages to create, in collaboration with the viewer, a common symbolic world of significations. As such, the disenchanted defense of the marginalized becomes inseparable from an egalitarian conception of the work of art.

Notes 1

I wish to thank Jeremi Szaniawski for his suggestions and editorial assistance, the Centre d’Études sur le Droit International et la Mondialisation (CEDIM, UQAM) for allowing me to deepen the theme of this chapter through discussions with its members/participants, as well as Siham Najmi and Edgar Szoc for their invaluable feedback.

2 Overall, when it comes to the subject of race in Tarantino, critics have focused on an interpretive debate, which has been widely documented: is the use of the word “nigger” racist or subversive? (Paul Gormley, The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema [Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005], 148); Sean Tierney, “Quentin Tarantino in Black and White,” in Michael Lacy and Kent Ono [eds], Critical Rhetorics of Race [New York: New York University Press, 2011] 82; Cobb [2013], Does it serve the purpose of denouncing slavery, inverting the stigma, or criticizing the process of the internalization of racism? (Jon Wiener [2012], “‘Django Unchained’: Quentin Tarantino’s Answer to Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’” The Nation. Available online: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171915/djangounchained-quentin-tarantinos-answer-spielbergs-lincoln [accessed June 15, 2015]; Lawrence Bobo [2013], “Slavery on Film: Sanitized No More,” The Root [January]. Available online: http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/ slavery-film-1 [accessed September 15, 2015]; Andrew Serwer [2013], “In Defense of Django,” Mother Jones. Available online: http://www.motherjones. com/mixed-media/2013/01/tarantino-django-unchained-western-racismviolence [accessed June 15, 2015]) Is it instead a product among many other ones of the liberal ideology of “whiteness?” (Tierney 2011). Is its political reach conscious or unconscious? 3

We define the term “code” here as a systematized and self-validated corpus of common rules.

4

Let us but mention the name Django, borrowed from the Spaghetti western character played by Franco Nero; Schultz seemingly borrowed from Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942); Candie’s secretary Leonide Moguy; or, of course, Broomhilde von S(c)haft.

5

This substitution of a class discourse with a race discourse is hardly new in Tarantino: it was already a defining and crucial trait in Jackie Brown (see Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance & the Rise of Independent Film [London: Bloomsbury 2007]).



QUENTIN TARANTINO

233

6

“If Schultz’s plan had worked and they were able to kind of con Broomhilda out of her owner Candie’s clutches and get her bill of sale, then Django would have taken her to New York. She probably would have gone on the abolitionist cocktail party circuit, telling her tales of woe and everything, with Django because he’s not an outlaw now … And everything would be great for Django, and everything would be great for Broomhilda, but he would not be the hero of the story” (Tarantino and Gates 2012).

7

According to Hervé Aubron (“La déesse de la fatigue. Jackie Brown,” in Emmanuel Burdeauand Nicolas Vieillescazes [eds], Quentin Tarantino. Un cinéma déchainé, 37–52 [Paris: Capricci/Les Prairies ordinaries, 2013]), it is also intrinsically liberating.

8

This face-off also gives an ironic echo to Spike Lee calling Samuel L. Jackson the “House Negro” of Tarantino, after the actor defended Tarantino’s use of the word “nigger,” as no less legitimate than Lee’s (see Biskind 2007, 317).

Works cited Biskind, Peter. 2007. Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance & the Rise of Independent Film. London: Bloomsbury. Burdeau, Emmanuel and Vieillescazes Nicolas (eds), 2013. Quentin Tarantino. Un cinéma déchainé. Paris: Capricci/Les Prairies ordinaires. Carroll, Noël. 1985. “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus 1: 79–103. Carroll, Noël. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi (dirs). 2006. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Cobb, William Jelani. 2013. “Django Unchained,” The New Yorker, January 2. Available online: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/tarantinounchained (accessed September 15, 2015). Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. L’image-temps. Cinéma 2. Paris: Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. La dissemination. Paris: Seuil. Gallafent, Edward. 2006. Quentin Tarantino. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Garson, Charlotte. 2013. “Django Unchained,” Études. Revue de culture contemporaine, February. Available online: http://www.revue-etudes.com/ archive/article.php?code=15197 (accessed September 15, 2015). Harris, Cheryl. 1993. “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106: 1709–91. Hirschberg, Lynn. 1997. “The Two Hollywoods: Man Who Changed Everything,” New York Times, November 16. Jameson, Frederic, 1979. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Tex 1: 130–48. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 1999. “Just What is Critical Race Theory and What’s it Doing in a Nice Field like Education?,” in L. Parker, D. Deyhele, and S. Villenas (eds), Race is … Race isn’t: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education, 7–30. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

234

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Locke, John. 1982 (1690). Second Treatise on Civil Government, ed. Richard H. Cox. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2003. “It’s Only a Movie,” New York Review of Books 1 (20): 38–41. Ortoli, Philippe. 2012. Le musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino. Paris: Cerf. Rancière, Jacques. 2001. La fable cinématographique. Paris: Seuil. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique. Reed, Adolph. 2013. “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ is Worse than No Politics at All, and Why,” Nonsite.org. Available online: http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-isworse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why (accessed June 15, 2015). Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sauvage, Celia. 2013. Critiquer Quentin Tarantino est-il raisonnable? Paris: Vrin. Serwer, Adam. 2013. “In Defense of Django,” Mother Jones. Available online: http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2013/01/tarantino-djangounchained-western-racism-violence (accessed June 15, 2015). Tarantino, Quentin and Henry Louis Gates. 2012. “Tarantino Unchained: Q & A with Henry Louis Gates Jr,” The Root. Available online: http://www.theroot. com/articles/history/2012/12/the_nword_in_django_unchained_tarantinos_ explanation.3.html (accessed June 15, 2015). Tierney, Sean. 2011. “Quentin Tarantino in Black and White,” in Michael Lacy and Kent Ono (eds), Critical Rhetorics of Race, 81–97. New York: New York University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

13 Battle with history: Carlos Reygadas and the cinema of being Michael Cramer

The films of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, as nearly all of their commentators have noted, have a clear kinship with many of the canonical works of art cinema. Directors to whom Reygadas is frequently compared include Tarkovsky (first and foremost), Dreyer, Bresson, Rossellini, and Kiarostami. Numerous scholars, meanwhile, have sought to place Reygadas within wider frameworks that would go beyond the influence of specific auteurs, aligning him with a broadly-defined “modernist cinema,” a “transcendent cinema,” or what Gilles Deleuze defined as a cinema of the “time-image” (de Luca 2010; Niessen 2011; Penn 2013; Tompkins 2013; Hershfield 2014). While all of these characterizations strike me as accurate and relevant (and unsurprising, given Reygadas’s proclaimed influences and views on cinema, to which I will return below), I would argue that it is more productive to broaden the field even further, and to place his works among those that manifest (and have inspired) a particular idea of what cinema is and why it is valuable, one that dates back far before Deleuze and finds its first major expression in the writings of Jean Epstein. While manifesting itself in many different conceptual frameworks, the cinema (or idea of cinema) that I have in mind here is valorized not only by Epstein, but by many of the major film theorists of the twentieth century, most notably André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, of course, the aforementioned Deleuze, and is present in the work of many of the auteurs that have been noted as reference points for Reygadas’s works and about whom

236

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

these theorists wrote (Rossellini, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, etc.). While one cannot of course collapse these thinkers and artists together into a single unified way of thinking about the cinema, they are alike in that they tend to locate the power of cinema in its capacity to connect us with “the real.” Cinema, for Epstein, Bazin, Kracauer, and Deleuze, holds the potential to displace a mastering human subjectivity and allows us to access a pre-human form of being, and thus a subjectivity (or even non-subjectivity) that escapes the bounds of human perception, as well as the order and meanings we impose upon “things themselves.” Epstein speaks of the camera as a “subject that is an object without conscience,” thereby able to access the non-human world, arguing that “the lens alone can sometimes succeed in revealing the inner nature of things” (Epstein 1988a, 245; 1988b, 317). Bazin, of course, famously identified photography as the sole process through which “an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man” (Bazin 2005, 15). Kracauer, in the subtitle of his Theory of Film, posits that cinema can achieve “the redemption of physical reality,” and thus offers an escape from the alienation and abstraction characteristic of modernity (Kracauer 1997). Deleuze, finally, valorizes “a pure opticalsound image, the whole image without metaphor,” which “brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty” (Deleuze 1989, 20). Again, I do not mean to suggest that these theorists’ ways of thinking about cinema are reducible to one another: they differ greatly in their philosophical frameworks, in why they think the cinema can give us access to “things in themselves,” and in their arguments about how this operation can be carried out. What they share, I would argue, is a similar desire: to return to or somehow access a state of pure being, to overcome alienated human subjectivity (or even the subject-object divide itself) in order to allow human beings to reconnect with being in all of its pre-signifying splendor. Jacques Rancière reminds us that this idea of cinema is almost always situated in opposition to narrative, which is often positioned as a banal level of expression in need of overcoming (Rancière 2006, 3). We might think here not only of Rancière’s example—that of Jean Epstein and his description of objects freed from narrative, and his dictum that “The cinema is true; a story is false”—but also of Kracauer’s contention that isolated moments disengage themselves from plot, and of course, of Deleuze’s time-image and its need for the sensory-motor schema, closely aligned with narrative, to jam. Rancière argues, however, that this emphasis on non-narrative moments and an insistence that it is only through some breaking of narrative that the full potential of cinema can emerge, conceals a deep dependence upon it, as suggested by the fact that the very images Epstein uses to describe things released from the constraint of narrative are drawn from a narrative film (2006, 5). For Rancière, this relationship between the “aesthetic” moments of films and their narratives proves that the aesthetic itself depends upon a way of thinking about art that he has



CARLOS REYGADAS

237

defined as the “aesthetic regime,” and thus reiterates a logic that we find as early as the eighteenth century, in which narrative, movement, and action, are countered or opposed by moments of passivity and immanent meaning, which define themselves as meaningful through their opposition to that narrative/movement. While I do not contest Rancière’s argument that the sort of cinema aesthetic he describes depends upon what he calls the aesthetic revolution, I would argue that there is another, perhaps even more important tension that arises in this sort of cinema: not one between narrative and moments of passivity that seem to reveal forms of meaning that bypass the human subjectivity and order contained on the narrative level, but rather between a desire to exit from narrative, to access a mode of pure being and of things themselves, and the weight of history itself, which resists efforts both to access a non-human subjectivity and to treat material phenomena as meaningful in a way that removes them from their place in a historicallyspecific context. What, after all, does it mean to seek a reunion with a non-alienated being, with the world of objects, with non-human subjectivities, if not to exit history itself, to free oneself of the weight of all of the material forces (of class and class struggle, relations of production, ideology, and so forth), and to return to some prehistorical or ahistorical mode of being in which all of these have been replaced by a state of “thingness” in which we realize our unity with the one single substance that comprises all? I do not think it would be too polemical to argue that cinema cannot possibly accomplish this task, or that any of the moments at which it seems to fulfill our desire for such unity can only be accessed in terms that retain our historical-ideological situation, just as moments of counternarrative passivity can only be “read” in terms of the narrative framework that they seem to oppose. The kind of cinema I have been characterizing above, which I will call a “cinema of being” in what follows, is both defined by and struggles against what we might call historical material: all of those markers, usually present at but not confined to the level of narrative, that remind us of the historical character of being. It is this struggle between a cinema of being and the weight of history that constitutes the political core of Reygadas’s films. There are several reasons why Reygadas’s films offer a privileged site through which the struggle between a cinema of being and history can be illustrated and analyzed. First of all, Reygadas clearly aligns himself, perhaps more than any other filmmaker working today, with the idea of cinema common to Epstein, Deleuze, and others that I have characterized above, and cites André Bazin as one of the main sources for his thinking about cinema: “I discovered What is Cinema? in 1998,” he states in a 2003 interview. “I read all of the texts, and watched all of the films they spoke about. This book made me understand what makes cinema …” (Regnier 2003). As we might expect, he thus articulates a view of cinema that sees it both as an “art of reality” and

238

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

as a means of bypassing the very sorts of abstractions and cultural structures of meaning that thinkers like Bazin, Kracauer, and Deleuze cite as sources of separation from “the thing itself.” Discussing the relationship between reality and representation in a 2010 interview, Reygadas shows an awareness of film theory and defines his conception of cinema: We know that the piece of paper [i.e., the photograph] is not José, but we know that José was actually before the camera at the point in which the picture was taken … In this sense, cinema is the art of reality, the medium in which reality’s beauty is captured, where you can film marble or a face, or record someone’s voice, a sunset, the innate beauty of what you’re contemplating. (Castillo 2010, 74) This reality and its “innate beauty” is positioned as reachable only outside of pre-existing frameworks of interpretation, and accessed through experience rather than through conceptual thought: “What I’m interested in … are those brief moments in which the truth is experienced. The truth is never absolute; it’s approached almost tangentially. Declaring a philosophical, religious, or social truth will turn it into dogma and will therefore prevent it from being experienced as real …” (Castillo 2010, 72–3). He associates this experience of truth with a concrete way of seeing “things themselves,” thus again following Bazin and Kracauer: “When adults look at a tree, they generally limit themselves to identifying it by its foliage. One rarely pays attention to the gaps between the leaves, to the irregularities of the bark, to the shadows cast. Yet that is observation: to look with love, as children know how to do” (Regnier 2003). As though to further underscore the extent to which such moments exist independently of narrative he notes, “I never remember the plots of [Tarkovsky’s] films … What I do remember is the camera’s movement, the sounds of a saw up in the hills; I perfectly remember the textures of the pool and those other things that were really happening” (Castillo 2010, 74). Despite these valorizations of non-narrative meaning, Reygadas’s plots are far from inconsequential, as they clearly articulate concepts commonly associated with the cinema of being (self-transcendence, the reunion of the alienated subject with pure being) in narrative terms. Any experience of the “thing itself” is thus likely to be set up and pre-interpreted for the viewer according to a set of conceptual terms introduced on the narrative level. Even more interestingly, however, his plots illustrate the difficulty of achieving any transcendence (and hence any pure cinema of being), demonstrating how a consciousness of history reveals the escape from human subjectivity and reunion with the universe of pure being itself as ideologically-embedded and hence false and unsatisfactory. Reygadas’s films thus do not disavow history and take the shortest path to a successful cinema of being, but rather continually grapple with it.



CARLOS REYGADAS

239

The reason why this grappling must take place to begin with is because Reygadas’s narratives attach material that intransigently insists upon its historical character to the concept of self-transcendence (and thus to the cinema of being and art more broadly), primarily through their staging of cross-class and cross-racial desires. Of course this is hardly unique, and we could indeed argue that the works that operate according to the logic of Rancière’s aesthetic regime (and twentieth-century modernism especially), insofar as they often express a desire for pure being or objecthood from an “alienated” Western, white, and male perspective, have been marked by an affinity for and desire to appropriate the modes of being of those viewed as less alienated because more “thinglike” or “outside” of history (non-Westerners, racial/ethnic others, women). In Reygadas’s case, pure being is clearly correlated with the indigenous Mexican, who stands, the director argues, in an essential and irreconcilable opposition to the “Western” Mexican: “we are in a mixed-race country. But I think that the mixing only exists on the level of blood and culture. On a psychological level or, more deeply, a cosmological one, I feel that there are Westerners, and there are those who are not Westerners” (Sotinel 2005). He repeatedly describes non-Westerners as “pure,” and refers to the main actor of Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005), Marcos Hernández, as such: “I liked being with Marcos and not with Ferretes [who plays the protagonist in Japón (2002)] because Ferretes is an intellectual and Marcos is pure force” (Badt and Reygadas 2006, 23). As we would expect, this “purity” is also clearly linked to nature, a nature from which the Westerner is hopelessly separated by his “rationalism”: referring to the domineering attitude of Juan, the bourgeois protagonist of Post Tenebras Lux (2012), he explains, That’s also a Western way of thinking, which by definition implies superiority. Since rationalism exploded over two hundred years ago in Europe … it’s why colonialism existed, why Indians were wiped out in so many places. That’s why Africa was destroyed, and why people are so unhappy in the Western world. This separation from the natural world will always cause suffering, and [is] why fascism will reemerge again and again. (Koehler 2013, 14) Even a cursory reading of all of Reygadas’s published interviews makes it abundantly clear that he espouses a worldview in which the other can only be defined in opposition to the Westerner, and in which her primary function is to somehow “cure” the Western malady through her purity. Everything and everyone is cast in accordance with the desire of the neurotic, alienated Westerner, for whom colonialism and the “destruction of Africa” are attributable to the same “rationalism” that supposedly lies behind his neurosis, rather than to any material forces.

240

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

While Reygadas’s films usually situate the other as nothing more than a projected ideal who offers the Westerner solace from his own alienation, they often call into question or contradict this operation. Because the pure state of being or subjectivity assigned to the non-Westerner is so closely identified with the cinema of being itself, the films illustrate the way in which the desire expressed by that cinema runs up against historical blocks, insofar as it cannot liquidate the realities of class, race, colonialism, imperialism, and economic oppression from its own operation; history resists its attachment to pure being and illustrates the ideological character of the latter and indeed any desire for it. Reygadas’s films play out a frustration with and an attempt to reconcile this problem. The alignment of the other with both self-transcendence and a certain idea of cinema is most clearly evident in his first feature, Japón. The film also, however, displays a counter-movement that calls the viability of this alignment (and the cinema of being itself) into question, demonstrating at least a partial recognition of the extent to which the idealization of the other is nothing more than another act of domination on the part of the Westerner, and a corresponding awareness that history forbids a reduction to pure being. The film thus carries within itself a kind of internal critique that will be grappled with more fully in the subsequent features. On the surface level, Japón’s narrative seems to offer a straightforward scenario in which an alienated bourgeois intellectual is saved by his other, who embodies a purer form of being and a closeness with nature: the unnamed protagonist, a painter, leaves his urban home and travels to an isolated valley in the north of Mexico, where he plans to kill himself. He instead remains alive, largely thanks to his relationship (culminating in sexual intercourse) with the elderly indigenous woman with whom he lives, Ascen (short for Ascención, and therefore a clear reference to spiritual salvation, which she herself explains lest we miss the connotation). Ascen’s organic connection with nature is expressed not only through her clear embodiment of the “earth mother” figure (she is a wizened, heavyset woman), and her acceptance of a primitive, carnal spirituality, but also through her home and the role it plays in the narrative: her seemingly ancient dwelling is threatened by her more clearly Westernized nephew (he wears a baseball cap and blue jeans), who wishes to dismantle it and take the stones elsewhere. The man attempts to prevent this from happening but is rebuffed by Ascen, who leaves with her nephew and dies in an accident whose aftermath is depicted in the film’s final shot. This narrative seems to conform to the alignment of terms that we would expect: the artist-intellectual finds new life through the intervention of the other, who brings him closer to nature, to “things themselves.” Reygadas’s comments on the film support this interpretation, but also underscore the extent to which this is a narrative of salvation: “the basic idea is that of the redemption myth of the western world, of Jesus Christ dying to save



CARLOS REYGADAS

241

us. I think this woman is an incarnation of this myth: she dies to save one guy” (Matheou 2003, 11). What remains unclear here, however, is why precisely Ascen has to die; the man’s death has been averted and hers lacks any narrative motivation (as its accidental character suggests). Indeed, it is Ascen’s death at the end of the film which, despite providing the film with its conclusion as well as one of its bravura aesthetic moments, seems to have most puzzled commentators (Epplin 2012, 294; Podalsky 2012, 169). We are presented with what seems to be an act of redemption via sacrifice, but no clear sense of whether or not this act has been successful or what sort of logic underlies it. There is, however, perhaps some logic to this sacrifice if we think about it in terms of the film’s discourse on the cinema of being and on art more broadly. As mentioned above, the man is an artist, and we see him paint in the film. This is, it would seem, his raison d’être, yet clearly it is in some way unsatisfactory, given his decision to commit suicide. The reasons behind the failure of his art are suggested by the painting we see in the film, which although recognizable as a face, is covered in thick gobs of paint and colors that seem to block both the gaze of the figure depicted and our ability to look at it. This is, in short, an art of alienation. Ascen’s death, meanwhile, provides the film with its formal climax in the shot mentioned above, a moment in which we are clearly cued, given both its placement within the text, its Tarkovskian form, and its spiritual connotations, to associate the cinema of being with some form of transcendence. Ascen’s death allows this cinema to burst forth, as though replacing the moribund art of non-being represented by modernist painting: the emergence of full meaning and of the cinema of being is quite literally predicated upon her dead body, as though vampirically feeding off of the vitality that she represents. If we read this as a death that in fact produces nothing more than the splendor of cinema itself, a bravura aesthetic moment, we could see it as vapid cynicism, as a gesture that drains its markedly transcendental forms of any meaning (and thus reveals their inherent lack of meaning, their dependence upon narrative situation) through its own thematic incoherence. But the counter-movement or internal critique that runs throughout the film suggests that this is also a moment in which the cinema of being grapples with its bad conscience, offers up evidence of its own errors, and thus expresses an uncertainty as to whether or not it can any longer believe in its own claims to transcendence. There are several moments in the film that seem to me to show an awareness of the problems with aligning an idealized other with transcendence and a return to pure being, and to cast doubt upon any cinema that would attempt to carry out this alignment. First, there is the sex scene, which Paul Julian Smith criticizes for its supposed exploitation of Magdalena Flores, who plays Ascen (Smith 2003, 50). The problem with this charge is that this reading seems to be built into the film: the man forces Ascen into an elaborate mise-en-scène, carefully positioning her before the

242

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 13.1  Painting as art of alienation.

Source: Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) © Tartan Video USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Hubert Bals Fund, Solaris Film, Istituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE).

act of intercourse, with the unmistakable gestures of the director manipulating his Bressonian model. This action, of course, clearly aligns him with Reygadas, who has spoken about the “total control” he exercises over his actors (Sotinel 2005). The idea that Reygadas is engaging in self-criticism, and thus undercutting the surface, “redemption” scenario of the film is further suggested by a scene in which the narrative fiction is broken, and the men in the nephew’s party get drunk and complain that they are not being paid adequately (“They don’t give us much, the people from the film”). This scene could easily be read as a rebuke to the director’s desires and projections, revealed as fantasy and thrown back in his face by the performers he seeks to control, replacing his fantasy class relations with real ones, yet Reygadas masochistically opts to include this punishment within his fiction. The nephew and his friends and their stark contrast with the idealized Ascen introduce a sense of historical reality that is lacking elsewhere in the film: it is the nephew who represents history here, the impoverished indigenous man who has little concern for the bourgeois fascination with nature and purity, and who would prefer to make a better life for himself by dismantling the symbolic house that stands at the center of the narrative. Finally, Ascen herself challenges the man’s hostility toward the nephew: she argues that he needs the stones more than she does, and that she doesn’t mind giving up her home, to which the man condescendingly responds, “You haven’t a clue what you want.” She responds, “Shut up, please,” and turns her back. In at least three instances, then, the film displays on a narrative level the contradiction between the man’s desire and Ascen and her nephew’s ways of resisting that desire, all of which also function as a rebuff to Reygadas’s desires, or even perhaps those of the cinema of being itself. On a formal level, meanwhile, the film’s contradiction and undoing of itself are manifested in the asymmetry of its two most ostentatious sequences.



CARLOS REYGADAS

243

The first takes place after the man’s second abortive suicide attempt: he raises a gun to his head, but then collapses on the ground next to a dead horse, as heavy rain (no doubt a symbol of cleansing and redemption) falls. In a series of dissolves, the camera rises higher and higher above his and the horse’s bodies, both of which become smaller in the distance as though to suggest that he has finally achieved his desire for a reunification with pure being. This scene, then, would represent a moment of success for the cinema of being, in which upward motion and a purely natural (flora and fauna, with no trace of the man-made) pro-filmic content, free of all action or tension, connotes transcendence. Here death is both escapable (the man does not literally die) and symbolically represents an entry into a way of being that would make one more thing or animal-like (insofar as we see nature enveloping the two bodies of the man and the horse as though they were one indifferent mass of being). The final scene, in contrast, contains only horizontal movement, and depicts a dead body surrounded by signs of the unnatural (train tracks, the wreckage of the accident, power lines); the camera is quite literally grounded by the train tracks, as though prevented from taking its expected flight (which would add the connotation of a more meaningful death, an effective sacrifice). Once again, it is as though the acknowledgment of Ascen’s status as a projection of class fantasy must be atoned for by an undoing, a counter-movement, in which the weight of history and its refusal to allow for the kinds of soaring spiritual heights depicted in the earlier scene prohibits what might otherwise be a moment of thematic and formal transcendence. One need not think that this meaning is intentional; we might say instead that this final sequence and its ambiguity constitute a kind of nodal point at which the tensions in the film, its desire, and its undercutting and critique of that desire manifest themselves in a single shot. On one hand, Ascen’s death seems to be positioned as a sacrificial offering for the renewal of art, as cinema replaces painting, but on another, it is acknowledged as something more like a murder, a display of the crime the director himself has committed by trying to replace history with an object that will respond to his own desires, and even the death of the cinema of being that has been presumptuously sought. While I will not be able to attend to Reygadas’s subsequent films in as much detail as I have treated Japón, each one clearly revolves around the same tension between history and the cinema of being, articulates this conflict in terms of class and ethnicity, and takes a different approach to resolving it. Reygadas’s comments on Battle in Heaven, almost certainly the film in which this tension is most clearly resolved in favor of the historical side, suggest an attempt to free himself from the fantastical projections of Japón and to return to the concreteness of history: “the conflicts change from Japón’s existential crisis, which is all in the protagonist’s mind, to a social crisis in Battle in Heaven. It’s still dealing with an internal conflict, but here the causes are in society, not just in Marcos’ head” (James 2005, 30). Here

244

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 13.2  The camera (and the soul) remain grounded.

Source: Japón (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) © Tartan Video USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Hubert Bals Fund, Solaris Film, Istituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE).

the protagonist, Marcos, is an indigenous man, but one who is (despite Reygadas’s comments cited above about the “purity” of the actor who plays him) no longer idealized as Ascen was. As Cynthia Tompkins notes, “While Marcos and his wife could be identified phenotypically as sharing indigenous traits, in Mexico they would be considered part of the lumpen-proletariat as ladinos—assimilated descendents from indigenous peoples” (Tompkins 2013, 174). They live in Mexico City, where Marcos (in actuality a chauffeur for Reygadas’s father) works as a chauffeur for a general and his wife sells plastic clocks in the subway. As Tompkins’s characterization would lead us to expect, Marcos is far more like the man in Japón than like Ascen. Like him, he rejects religion (referring to pilgrims at one point as “sheep” and initially refusing his wife’s insistence that he take part in a pilgrimage), but also rejects the explicitly political ideal of a reconciled collective here identified with the Mexican nation. Unlike in the rather abstract world of Japón—in which the idea of a unified collective surfaces only implicitly, if at all, given the film’s preference to think in metaphysical rather than political terms—here we see numerous signs of nation: Marcos’s other job is to take part in the raising and lowering of the flag each day in the Zócalo, while another key scene depicts him watching a soccer match on television, with commentary that frames the game itself as a symbol of national unity (“It’s good for Mexican football, and it’s good for Mexico”). Marcos masturbates while watching the game, as though to suggest its status as an empty, infertile experience, and with apparent sarcasm, repeats twice the words of a victorious player: “This is a fantasy.” Marcos, despite his very different background, seems to experience the same alienation that plagued the protagonist of Japón, but here any possibility of escaping that alienation appears even more remote due to his clear rootedness within a historical world. Nation and organized religion are rejected, but so is that “experience of truth” that Reygadas differentiates from any of the forms (nationalist,



CARLOS REYGADAS

245

religious) that attempt to contain it. The moment of the film that would seem to most clearly offer the opportunity for such truth to emerge, in which Marcos ascends a mist-covered mountain (suggestive of the volcano in Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), but also a kind of intrusion of the world of Japón into this film) and looks down at the landscape below, yields no results and ends with him covering his eyes, as though to suggest the impotence not only of his own vision but also of the beautiful vista that Reygadas offers us. Here again, however, potential transcendence also takes the shape of erotic union, with the class and gender positions reversed: after an ill-fated attempt at kidnapping, which has ended with the child’s death, Marcos seeks solace from the general’s daughter, Ana, who has a secret life as a prostitute, and develops an erotic fixation upon her. While she indulges him and sleeps with him, she urges him to turn himself in for his crime immediately after their intercourse. In short, she cannot fulfill his desire for redemption, far more unambiguously than Ascen could not fulfill the man’s in Japón; cross-class erotic desires and a projection of reconciliation upon them are clearly thwarted. The only moments of self-transcendence here are situated as fantasy: in the film’s opening sequence, we see Ana fellating Marcos, in an image of cross-class reconciliation. The film’s concluding shot doubles the opening, but adds a declaration of love between the two. What is clear here is that this can only occur in a non-space separate from the film’s diegetic world: the two figures stand in a completely featureless white room, as though to suggest that this is a fantasy external to the historical determinants that prevent Marcos’s self-transcendence within the rest of the film. The possibility that it is the weight of history that prevents this transcendence is further underscored by one of the film’s key scenes, which displays an explicit undoing or failure of the cinema of being: as Ana and Marcos have intercourse, the camera moves through the window of their room (recalling Antonioni’s The Passenger [1975]). As in Japón, upward camera movement suggests the flight of an ascending soul, but as it leaves the room, the camera finds not an open sky but rather a pair of laborers placing an antenna on the building’s roof, a series of glass skyscrapers, and the windows of drab apartment buildings. The stuff of daily life, in all its inescapable ugliness and concreteness, not to mention its clear reflection of a stratified class structure, blocks the orgasmic flight of self-transcendence. Concluding a single movement, the camera returns through the window where it finds the couple, who hardly seem satisfied (Ana has a disconcerted expression on her face and Marcos appears catatonic). It is here, it seems to me, that the film renders its most clearly negative verdict upon the cinema of being: it recalls the sex scene between Alexander and Maria in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Offret, 1986), cited by de Luca as an analogue to Reygadas’s coupling of the erotic and the spiritual in Japón (2010). In

246

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 13.3  The failure of sex as self-transcendence and cross-class reconciliation. Source: Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas, 2005) © Tartan Video USA, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Tarantula, Arte France Cinema, Universidad de Guadalajara, ZDF/ Arte.

Tarkovsky, the act of erotic union, like cinema itself, is still believed in as a force that allows one to rise upward, quite literally, while in Reygadas this movement is foreclosed. Reygadas’s own words about the scene support this reading: “they can even actually have sex. But, notwithstanding that, after all—and maybe this is why we go out on the terrace and we show objectivity and, let’s say, macro stuff instead of micro—when we come back it’s obvious that there’s always going to be a massive barrier between them” (Le Cain 2006). The sweeping away of the historical determinants that erect this barrier is only possible in an empty space like the one we find in the bookends. Otherwise, one finds only alienated labor, inequality, and the crippling force of a law dictated by the ruling class, pronounced by Ana as she urges Marcos to turn himself in after their disappointing tryst. Whereas Battle in Heaven calls both the possibility of any selftranscendence and the cinema of being itself into doubt, placing them in a battle with history that they cannot possibly win, Silent Light (Stellet Licht, 2007) marks the triumphant return of both. The film begins with a shot that is perhaps more closely identifiable with the aesthetics of the cinema of being than any other in Reygadas’s works: a time-lapse image of a varicolored sunrise, which ends with a gentle camera movement that suggests a disincarnate, non-human subjectivity that is part of the same substance as that which it perceives. This is a deeply Epsteinian moment, in which the “intelligence of the machine” is on full display, and in which it reveals to the spectator what would have never been perceptible through



CARLOS REYGADAS

247

the naked eye. As we might expect, this “miraculous” orientation is also clear on the level of narrative: it is only in Silent Light that Reygadas presents us with an unambiguously successful miracle, which replays the conclusion of Dreyer’s Ordet (1955). This aesthetic and narrative shift, however, requires a total abandonment of the historical grounding that characterized Battle in Heaven. Reygadas’s comments on the film make it clear that its difference from its predecessor depends entirely upon its confinement to a seemingly self-enclosed, ahistorical world, essentially homogeneous and free of any ethnic, class, or political divisions. The film is set within Mexico’s Mennonite community, but does not include any material that would situate that community within the larger context of the nation and its history. As Reygadas puts it, “I wanted something as timeless and placeless as possible … I also chose the Mennonites because they’re a uniform society ” (Romney 2008, 43). Elsewhere he adds, “They are archetypes … This way, I could concentrate on the essential: the love story” (Badt 2007). The extent to which this return to “the essential” necessitated an elimination of historical specificity is revealed by the fact that it is only in interviews that Reygadas discloses the material situation of the Mennonites and their relationship to other Mexicans: “living next to [the Mennonites] there are Mexicans with land and some government aid, and the Mexicans live in the dirt and the Mennonites have all the land and machinery they need and their houses are full of flowers” (Romney 2008, 44). This would seem to represent a clear step backwards, in which “the essential” is once again reduced to a kind of projection that is contingent upon the bracketing of history, yet even here Reygadas seems to show some awareness of the contradictions, likening the film to “fairytales or myth” (Romney 2008, 43). What makes this contradiction (in which the “essential” is also a “fairytale”) particularly interesting is the way in which it undermines the premises of the cinema of being itself. It is not so much that we cannot believe that the miracle occurs in the film, but rather that we cannot believe that the world in which it happens is our own. This, of course, defeats the entire purpose of a cinema that seeks to give us access to the splendor of the real, to physical reality in all of its unmediated presence. Of course, this does not mean that we cannot suspend disbelief and appreciate Reygadas’s imagining of a world in which the historical blockages to a being that shines forth in its purity can be eradicated, but that appreciation itself is here contradicted by our awareness of the extent to which this is indeed a fantasy. If the cinema of being is allowed to re-emerge, it does so at a clear cost: the tension with the real and the weight of history that keep the other films from being more than exercises in aesthetics are missing here, as though hidden from our view by the beautiful but blinding rays of the sunrise in the opening shot. Reygadas’s most recent feature, Post Tenebras Lux (2012), re-introduces historical elements while combining the narrative structures of Japón

248

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and Battle in Heaven. A bourgeois named Juan has gone to live in rural Mexico, presumably to deal with personal “demons” that are here clearly associated with the “fallenness” of the Westerner; as Reygadas puts it, “He’s a ‘Western Mexican.’ Western Mexicans tend to have a chronic dissatisfaction with life and see life from a disconnected point of view” (Koehler 2013, 12). The class/ethnic other appears here as an indigenous laborer named Seven who suffers from the same problems (addiction, alienation from nature, estrangement from family) that plague Juan. As in Battle, both the bourgeois and the indigenous man die: Juan catches Seven robbing his house and is shot by him, and Seven later commits suicide out of guilt. While the Westerner/non-Westerner dichotomy can no longer be upheld here (not because it is no longer believed in or de-essentialized, but because the non-Westerner has been irremediably “infected,” a scenario we find in Pasolini as well), it is replaced by another: this conflict is trumped by the two men’s similarity in their treatment of women, which can all too easily be seen as a kind of inevitable, atavistic, male sickness. The only solution is the death of the patriarchs (metaphorically illustrated through Seven’s spectacular self-decapitation), who will be replaced by their wives. Death is explicitly linked with the redemption of the cinema of being here in that the most conventionally beautiful images of the film, those implying a unity with nature and a transcendence of human subjectivity, seem to come from the perspective of a dead (or nearly dead) body lying on the ground (one thinks of the point-of-view shots from the coffin in Dreyer’s Vampyr [1932]): the upside-down image of the trees surrounding Juan’s house that follows his shooting gives way to a memory of his childhood in which the camera is positioned in a boat, looking up at the reeds around it (thus equating the “innocent vision” of childhood, depicted in the film’s opening scenes as Juan’s daughter looks at the flora and fauna around her, with the vision of a dead man). Although neither shot is literally from the perspective of a dead body (Juan has not yet died), the prostrate perspective of both certainly suggests the physical position of a corpse. This association of the low-angle shot with death is further underscored after Seven’s suicide, at which point we see images of cows feeding on grass watered by the dead man’s blood (a clear image of reunion with nature) from what would be the perspective of his corpse, followed by another upward shot recalling those that occur after Juan’s shooting. If the mechanism of human sacrifice was thwarted by history in Japón, here it is successful: reconciliation and self-transcendence are purchased at the price of death, while the banalities of history are left to the women. This is another sort of bargain for the life of the cinema of being, in which the price is not an eradication of history, as in Silent Light, but rather a kind of self-sacrificial atonement. The “beautiful image” can live provided that one takes responsibility for historical wrongs: Juan chooses not to identify his murderer, and even sends for Seven’s family in hopes



CARLOS REYGADAS

249

FIGURE 13.4  A corpse-eye view of nature.

Source: Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012) © Strand Releasing, No Dream Cinema, Mantarraya Producciones, Le Pacte, Arte France Cinéma, Fondo para la Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad, The Match Factory, Ticoman, Topkapi Films.

of reuniting him with them, and dies in peace, while Seven, once again rejected by his estranged wife, kills himself as though to atone both for his murder of Juan and for his mistreatment of her. But of course this transaction is false. These are acts of masochism that bring pleasure through the imagining of self-annihilation, but which ultimately reaffirm the very subjectivity that they seek to disavow: a unity with nature is achieved, the art cinema is allowed to live on through a false masochistic and sacrificial death, without acknowledging that this form itself is inextricable from the same consciousness that supposedly has to die for it to be produced. Here again, though Reygadas seems aware of the untenability of the transaction that has been carried out. Commenting on Juan’s death, he states, “it’s not about what happens to him … you and I are just dust … And at the same time, everything we know is ourselves, and we have to be at the center of everything” (Barker 2013). In other words, it is only through our own (historical) subjectivities that we can imagine their annihilation. Whereas Japón and Battle in Heaven call the cinema of being into question and find its aims thwarted by the weight of history, Silent Light

250

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

and Post Tenebras Lux attempt to bargain for its life. The fact that these bargains are even attempted, given the author’s awareness of their untenability, suggests a bad faith or at least a willful disavowal. Yet so long as one recognizes their impossibility and the persistence of the desire to which they respond, they also end up radically altering the cinema of being in a way that is not altogether false. On one hand, we can no longer believe in the power of this cinema because it no longer believes in itself, attempting to make deals to preserve its vitality. All the same, it retains a certain power and continues to offer, albeit in a compromised and equivocal form, the aesthetic pleasures of the cinema of being: a glimpse of the vitality of nature, a striving toward our own transcendence, and a compelling re-viewing of the world around us. In Reygadas, though, these pleasures are accompanied by a consciousness of their own cost. Given the extent to which they undercut such pleasures as soon as they arise (in the first two films) or transparently buy them back at a price that threatens to drain them of their power (in the second two), Reygadas’s films are not simply a duplicitous attempt to breathe life into a dead form, but rather the transformation of the cinema of being into something that contains within it its own opposite: it does not connect us with the essence of the real, with a “redeemed physical reality” (Kracauer) or a “matter equal to spirit” (Epstein), but rather insists that its desire for transcendence and any pleasure that results from its attempts to fulfill that desire be accompanied by a painful recognition of its impossibility and its situation within the irreducibly historical forms of subjectivity that it seeks to move beyond. It insists that any Icarian flight toward the self-evident brilliance of the sun, the supposedly pure source of every image imprinted on the film strip but also potentially blinding, be accompanied by the pain of the body crashing back to earth, not because it fails to reach its celestial destination (since Reygadas does not seek an otherworldly spiritual transcendence, but rather the reunion with that irreducible substance of being sought by the likes of Epstein and Deleuze), but because the weight of history—in the form of class, ethnic, and gender divisions, the legacies of colonialism, but also in any form of human subjectivity whatsoever—drags it down. It offers a temporary self-transcendence that, like the moment of orgasmic unity between Marcos and Ana in Battle in Heaven, refuses to allow us to experience it without the painful and even shameful return of self-awareness and awareness of history that must always follow it. On one hand, we might say that Reygadas’s films reveal the art cinema—or at least certain strands of it—to be no more than what some have long said it is: a kind of bourgeois narcotic that simply substitutes “higher” pleasures for those offered by the big-budget blockbuster, but is equally escapist and politically suspect. Yet at the same time, they mute the narcotic effects through their failure to fully obscure their historical placement: this is a drug that insists on a hangover, that extracts a price for the pleasure



CARLOS REYGADAS

251

it provides, and thus reminds us that there is no escape, to recall Fredric Jameson, from a history that hurts.

Works cited Badt, Karin. 2007. “Silent Light or Absolute Miracle: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas at Cannes 2007,” Bright Lights Film Journal. Available online: http:// brightlightsfilm.com/silent-light-absolute-miracle-interview-carlos-reygadascannes-2007 (accessed June 10, 2015). Badt, Karin Luisa and Carlos Reygadas. 2006. “No Slave to Realism: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas,” Cinéaste 31 (3): 21–3. Barker, David. 2013. “‘I’ve Never Understood a Traditional Screenplay’: Carlos Reygadas on Post Tenebras Lux,” Filmmakermagazine.com. Available online: http://filmmakermagazine.com/66943-ive-never-understood-a-traditionalscreenplay-carlos-reygadas-on-post-tenebras-lux/#.VnLrc79GSuI (accessed June 20, 2015). Bazin, André. 2005. What is Cinema?, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castillo, José. 2010. “Carlos Reygadas,” Bomb 111: 70–7. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Epplin, Craig. 2012. “Sacrifice and Recognition in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón,” Mexican Studies 28 (2): 287–305. Epstein, Jean. 1988a. “The Senses 1(b),” in Richard Abel (ed. and trans.), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, Vol. 1, 241–6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Epstein, Jean. 1988b. “On Certain Characteristics of Photgénie,” in Richard Abel (ed. and trans.), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, Vol. 1, 314–18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hershfield, Joanne. 2014. “Nation and Post-Nationalism: The Contemporary Modernist Films of Carlos Reygadas,” Transnational Cinemas 5 (1): 28–40. James, Nick. 2005. “Angels and Demons,” Sight and Sound 15 (11): 30–3. Koehler, Robert. 2013. “The Impossible Becomes Reality: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas, Cinéaste 38 (3): 10–15. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Le Cain, Maximilian. 2006. “Battle in Heaven: An Interview with Carlos Reygadas,” Senses of Cinema 38. Available online: http://sensesofcinema. com/2006/feature-articles/reygadas (accessed June 20, 2015). Luca, Tiago de. 2010. “Carnal Spirituality: The Films of Carlos Reygadas,” Senses of Cinema 55. Available online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/featurearticles/carnal-spirituality-the-films-of-carlos-reygadas-2 (accessed June 10, 2015). Matheou, Demetrios. 2003. “A Good Place to Die,” Sight and Sound 13 (2): 10–12.

252

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Niessen, Niels. 2011. “Miraculous Realism: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Carlos Reygadas’ Stellet Licht,” Discourse 33 (1): 27–54. Penn, Sheldon. 2013. “The Time-Image in Carlos Reygadas’ Stellet Licht: A Cinema of Immanence,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90 (7): 1159–81. Podalsky, Laura. 2012. “Landscapes of Subjectivity in Contemporary Mexican Cinema,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 9 (1–2): 161–82. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg. Regnier, Isabelle. 2003. “Carlos Reygadas: la vie sans décor,” Le Monde, January 20. Romney, Jonathan. 2008. “The Sheltering Sky,” Sight and Sound 18 (1): 42–4. Smith, Paul Julian. 2003. “Japón.” Sight and Sound 13 (3): 49–50. Sotinel, Thomas. 2005. “Je ne laisse pas les acteurs apporter des pensées: Carlos Reygadas, réalisateur,” Le Monde, October 26. Tompkins, Cynthia. 2013. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press.

14 The art of encounter and (self-) fabulation: Eduardo Coutinho’s cinema of bodies and words Consuelo Lins (trans. Leslie Damasceno)

Eduardo Coutinho: Documentary choices and political clarity The early 2000s proved both a crucial and hopeful period for Brazilian audiovisual production: in those nascent moments of the twenty-first century, Brazilian film production at long last entered a period of stability, definitively signaling the end of the acute crisis and financial turmoil that had characterized it since the early 1990s.1 This stability, a product of the benefits provided by technological advances as well as the positive effects of incentive policies, enabled gradual growth in film production and an exponential increase in film festivals held in various regions of the country, which in turn led to a stronger and increased presence of Brazilian films in commercial movie theaters. Audiovisual production further intensified in 2003 as the rise of the Workers’ Party under the leadership of Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva led to the development of additional investment opportunities and incentive plans for the private sector, all of which were geared toward capitalizing on the commercial possibilities of Brazilian cinema at home and abroad.

254

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Amid the expansion of audiovisual production throughout this period, the documentary—held in high regard as a field comprised of diversified practices and talent—developed significantly and took on a particularly Brazilian distinction. The filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho served as a fundamental figure in this regard, and his work contributed greatly to the solidification, invigoration, and enhancement of the documentary field in Brazil. His work provided continuous material for reflection, debate, and critical production on national films and Brazilian social, cultural, and political realities. In the last fifteen years of his life, Eduardo Coutinho produced a new film almost annually, a productive rhythm accompanied by a kind of ritual with the release of each new documentary. With each new film he made a point of defending his straightforward, low-cost approach to documentary—a very healthy attitude considering the country’s historically financially stressed film environment. Often speaking out against the myths surrounding the “art” of the documentary, Coutinho refused to imbue the documentary practice with an aura that might suggest an exclusive relationship between itself and the enlightened spirit of the privileged few. He simplified the filming process, insisting that it is possible to shoot and experiment without spending a lot of money, the only true requisites being a common desire to make a film, the use of natural light, and cheap techno­ logies—a philosophy that resonated particularly with younger generations. His fecund and liberated thinking rendered the cinema an increasingly impure art, open to the world, to difference, to the imponderable, and to the present. Now hailed as the most important Brazilian filmmaker of the last thirty years, his documentaries allow us to better understand the elaborate and innumerable intricacies at the heart of Brazilian life. Coutinho’s oeuvre includes works concerned with recent history as well as films that deliberately avoid openly engaging with any specific political context in order to better capture the immediacy and truth of the lives of his interviewees. For the “present moment” of his films, situations and “characters” must be understood in a broader sense, and not as the instantaneous present of actuality, instead one of remembrance or evocation, dense with memories and the possibility of becoming. Reflecting upon his career, one can identify a gradual shift in his methodology tending toward an increased focus on the daily use of language across the varied strata of Brazil’s population. Over the course of his career Coutinho’s interest in the vernacular overtook the core of his films. In his cinema, language is an object of dispute: a set of rules that can humiliate people, or impose silence upon them, yet can also be deployed as a skill that allows speakers to find new ways of creating and signifying freedom for themselves by way of their use of speech. This shift does not mean to imply that his films became any less political over time, but rather that the very notion of the political acquired new connotations through his exploration of the vernacular.



EDUARDO COUTINHO

255

FIGURE 14.1  Eduardo Coutinho on the set of Babilônia 2000. Source: Photograph © Zeca Guimarães.

This shift occurred as Coutinho’s aesthetic choices evolved from an interest in the dialogue between an attuned, intuitive, and respectful take on the political moment toward a quiet insistence on a non-dogmatic political clarity. His profound interest in language can be traced back to the lessons he first learned in his 1984 breakthrough film, Cabra Marcado para Morrer (Twenty Years Later). The project originally begun in 1964, centered upon a group of peasants, until filming was interrupted that very year by a military coup. Filming resumed in 1979 and the film was eventually fully realized and released twenty years after its inception. Cabra Marcado para Morrer documents both the trajectory of the anonymous individual peasants who suffered terribly at the hands of the military dictatorship as well as Coutinho’s own political and aesthetic shift from the conception of cinema as an instrument of social transformation to a political tool that treats film as a way of understanding and questioning the world. It is the filmmaker’s re-encounter with the peasants who had participated in the first Cabra seventeen years earlier that brings significance to these painful collective memories, which would have otherwise slipped into the recesses of time—unnoticed and forgotten. The reorganization of historical material and memories in this film is so complex and interesting precisely because it is inextricably linked to the restructuring of the “material” of the documentary tradition itself. It is indeed a film that illustrates the critical changes in the relationship between documentary, politics, and the history of Brazil.

256

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Going against the grain of what he called “general and pre-conceived ideas,” in this documentary Coutinho sticks to showing the everyday practices of the peasants, and to listening to what they say about the past, and how they have lived over the years. He identifies variations, inflections, and subtleties as a way of revealing that the trajectories of these “anonymous” individuals are not homogenous and that the image of the “peasant” idealized by leftist movements—and by Coutinho himself—in the 1960s never actually existed. Instead of portraying the peasants as “psychosocial types,” he depicts multiple experiences united under the shared social struggles that marked the 1960s, and differentiates between them by highlighting various circumstances within those conflicts which led to the ultimately divergent pathways undertaken by these individuals. This approach to politics is integral to the director’s insistence that the filming process is one that produces events, characters, and testimonies. Thus, he doesn’t film a given reality, but rather a reality produced in direct contact with the camera. In so doing, his films provide original diagnoses of different situations in Brazil, so complex that they do not lose any sense of relevance as time goes by. On the contrary, they acquire new inflections, accentuations, and rhythms. This is certainly the case in Peões (Metalworkers, 2003), a documentary filmed over the course of the presidential campaign that eventually carried Lula to power in 2003. In this film, Coutinho interviewed workers from the industrial area of São Paulo, the place where Lula grew up, and where he emerged as a leader of the big strikes in the late 1970s. Coutinho’s filmed conversations with metallurgical companions of former president Lula historicizes and presentifies a political culture they acquired inside the factories, in demonstrations; a culture that gave birth to a strong and independent new unionism in Brazil, and constituted the basis for the formation of the Workers’ Party in 1981. Lula’s ascent to the presidential office can be seen as an outgrowth of this culture and in turn as a hopeful possible beginning for a new and distinct leftist political narrative in Brazil. However, the film also shows how the changes in the working conditions of the post-industrial, “light capitalism”2 contributed to Lula’s uncoupling from the political culture that formed him. Peões invites us into this culture, one that brought countless benefits to Brazil but at the same time presents us with the unambiguous descent, fragmentation, and disappearance of that very same culture. Thus the film’s already gloomy milieu is intensified by the deep crisis and political retreat of a national project that once seemed to promise the elevation and transformation of Brazil’s social and economic structures. Each of Coutinho’s films embodies a similar complexity precisely because they do not start with fixed ideas regarding concrete situations and specific characters. Even though his films focus on slums and impoverished communities, when the filmmaker enters the harsh conditions of his



EDUARDO COUTINHO

257

interviewees’ lives—little by little the images and the sounds he selects find a tone that causes this harshness to recede into the background, allowing the true focus to remain upon his subjects. His camera captures and focuses on the main interests present in a universal daily life: difficulties, little sources of joy, fears, love, friends, education, concern for one’s children. It is an approach based not on the assumption that the lives of the lower classes are hopeless but one that takes a more humane point of view: fundamentally without pity, interested in how those with less get by on a daily basis, however that may be. This is an approach that revitalizes itself continually when confronted with the severest of realities: his films portray life in the midst of obvious degradation and show how and why we can continue to live and love in this Brazil, a Brazil submerged by corruption, individualism, and indifference. Nevertheless, if Coutinho made films that deconstruct the notion that people’s lives are fundamentally terrible, he does not neglect to reveal the uncomfortable and, at times, intolerable dimensions of their situations. The filmmaker does not resort to a cause-effect or problem-solution structure, which would allow the viewer to tolerate and withstand anything represented on screen: what is unacceptable in the image does not undergo any reduction. No moral support is given to the viewer, who is forced to recover his ability to think in the face of the intolerable.

“Possible cinema” Despite the unanimous critical acclaim that Cabra Marcado (1984) received and its popularity with the audience within Brazil, Coutinho refused to follow the path of “professional cinema,” working instead for a non-governmental organization, making quickly produced, little-seen videos intended to promote various social movements. In addition, he didn’t want to make fiction films—which the success of Cabra Marcado would have allowed him to do; neither did he consider making a documentary as laborious and long as Cabra as the funding opportunities of the early 1990s severely limited the opportunities for such projects. Coutinho wanted to make films with small crews, on “minor” themes, in poor communities—an unheard of proposal in Brazilian cinema at that time. He needed to put into practice the paramount lesson he had learnt in the course of shooting Cabra Marcado: the most important things in a documentary are the encounter, the speech, and the transformation of the characters right there, before the camera. Intuitively, impulsively, and perhaps because he could not do otherwise, the director managed to be loyal to his own idea of what a documentary should be, and how it should come together.

258

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Coutinho worked hard to find new ways of adapting his ethos to the filming process. Video technology appeared to him to be a solution, if only perhaps a temporary one. Thus, he decided in the mid-1980s to work with video, as opposed to film, a choice that would only later become dominant among filmmakers from the late 1990s onwards. In doing so he chose a “possible cinema,” and similar attitude to the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who used to say that “It is not so much about making a film rather than another one, but to make the possible films where we are”3 (Godard 1985, 386). It is this “possible cinema” that inserted itself more definitively into the universe of slums and peripheral urban areas as an issue for documentary production from the mid-80s onward, and in videos Coutinho made for social movements.4 Based on this experience he filmed two great documentaries in the late 1990s, in the Rio de Janeiro slums (Santo Forte [The Mighty Spirit, 1999] and Babilônia 2000 [2001]). He is also one of the first filmmakers to train their camera on individuals belonging to the low middle strata of the population (Edifício Master, 2002), who were otherwise rarely filmed by Brazilian documentarians. “Who is the most despised human being on earth?” Coutinho asked in the early 2000s. It is the person from the middle class. The poor, the excluded, the proletarian are the salt of the earth for Christians and for revolutionaries. The middle class is an absolute zero—nobody is interested in it. It is the most helpless of categories, devoid of any historical interest because it can not change the world.5 Precisely for these reasons, the filmmaker chose a middle-class building in the center of Copacabana beach as one of his documentary locations. In the slums, the basic difficulty of surviving is such that residents simply do not have time to dwell on existential miseries. In Edifício Master, the experience of loneliness, the insignificance and the loss of a sense to existence erupt more radically into the everyday. The result is a film that often feels claustrophobic, but despite this, it never fails to indicate fissures and microresistance, even in a universe so enclosed. The filmmaker’s trajectory stakes his work on the spoken word as no one else has, enunciated in conversations between Coutinho and the people he filmed, observed by the cinematic apparatus—the filmmaker’s body on one side of a camera, the body of another real person on the other. The frontal image, the direct look into the camera, the explicit interaction. From this basic dispositif, 6 Coutinho explored the expressive abilities of any one person, the testimonies of the characters, the self-enactments, the body and facial expressions at the time of speech, the modulations of the Portuguese language, the intonation, the strength of orality: in short, language in practice, in action.



EDUARDO COUTINHO

259

Provocatively, Coutinho used to say that this filmic economy was his way of being “the least artist[ic] possible.” I would argue that the “least” that Coutinho was referring to is actually a form of minimalist art, a particular kind of authorship that subtracted everything else deemed inessential to his films. While shooting, this meant the construction of devices that allowed him to elicit the expressive abilities of each and every person. In the editing process, he respected the characteristics that had been captured by the camera without adding external elements to the filmed universe: an exercise in elimination that required a huge effort and an extremely active and laborious intent to think, rethink, and discuss what was being produced, the opposite of any passivity or submission before the real. The trajectory of his documentary career also includes a gradual movement toward subtraction and shifting, or dislocation, with more radical changes at times, such as in Santo Forte, released in 1999, and Jogo de Cena (Playing), released in 2007. From film to film, Coutinho abandoned certain procedures, eliminating elements such as voice-over narration, typical or illustrative images, archival footage, soundtrack, effects of any kind. He strove toward an almost absolute synchronicity of image and sound: if a character was talking, his face would never cut to footage illustrating something he was saying. As Coutinho put it, these are “speaking bodies, people with innards and an inner life.” For the director, the facial expressions and body movements that interviewees made to express themselves were as important as their speech. Thus, even though the filmmaker’s method was based on a seemingly simple shooting mode, essentially formed through conversation, he always knew how to reinvent his cinema, with just a small arsenal of technical and aesthetic procedures. Every one of his films questions the very making of a documentary, raising issues regarding the possibilities of documentary, its limits and potentialities, the relationship with the “other” and the viewer. It is precisely this reflective dimension, so impressive in this artistic trajectory, that demonstrated, among other things, a tacit dialogue between all his films—each new work benefiting from the debate and accumulated reflections surrounding the previous one.7 With his death, in 2014, putting an end to his work—opening up new meanings and appropriations—it is possible to see his cinema as a conjuncture of films that forged an important stability over the 2000s, enabling other documentary productions to develop in different directions—even as, and perhaps because, Coutinho made public, in films8 and interviews, the crises that he, himself, experienced in filming.

260

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Cinema as the art of encounter Santo Forte (1999) was the beginning of Coutinho’s most productive phase and his return to commercial exhibition. If there had been no Santo Forte, Coutinho would be remembered for having directed a great movie—Cabra Marcado para Morrer—and a few other videos that hardly anyone saw: “A footnote in a book of cinema. In 1997 I no longer existed as a filmmaker,” in the director’s own words. He would go on to make nine more films before his death, all essentially centered upon the situation of the encounter, and the narratives of the filmed subjects. Five were shot in real geographic locations: Santo Forte and Babilônia 2000 in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas; Edifício Master in a building in Copacabana; Peões in the industrial region of greater São Paulo; and O Fim e o Princípio (The End and the Beginning, 2005) in a village in the interior of Paraíba, northeastern Brazil. Jogo de Cena explored a new style and was shot in a closed environment, utilizing mostly scenic spaces, devoid of links to the home or belongings of those who were interviewed; Jogo de Cena and As Canções (Songs, 2011) were shot on a theater stage; Moscou (Moscow, 2009) in a rehearsal hangar; and Um Dia na Vida (A Day in the Life, 2010) inside a studio. This collection of films maps out fundamental issues of Brazilian society as they relate to the lower classes, which serve today as a guide for thinking about the past fifteen years of Brazilian history. From the slums of Rio de Janeiro to a lost village in the middle of the northeast, to a middle-class building, to the largest industrial region in the country, Coutinho takes on themes that were dear to the documentary tradition of the 1960s, but in a new key. Instead of looking for “psychosocial types” or “exemplary characters” who would express a way of life and a way of thinking about an entire community (the peasant, the slum dweller (favelado), the religious believer, the middle class, the factory worker), he films multiple characters and tries to capture the tiny movements, the smallest deviations, the minor accidents. The “psychosocial types” who haunt the documentaries of the 1960s no longer exist, if they ever did. It is precisely these stereotypes that are shattered film after film in Coutinho’s cinema, showing the multiplicity and differences behind them. This mode of filmmaking approaches one of the characteristics of modern political cinema, according to the formulation of Gilles Deleuze, which is that “the people are missing,” which does not mean they do not exist but that “the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute” (Deleuze 1989, 217). Coutinho’s cinema features many different peoples, all minorities, reinventing themselves through speech, through language, through storytelling (“fabulations”).9 According to Deleuze, “It is in this way that third



EDUARDO COUTINHO

261

world cinema is a cinema of minorities, because the people exist only in the condition of minority, which is why they are missing” (1989, 220). In almost all of his films Coutinho used real people as his starting point, but what he wanted to do was to construct something between talking and listening that belonged neither to the respondent nor to the interviewer. It is an act of telling in which the real becomes a component of a fabulation, where those interviewed formulate some ideas, tell stories, and invent themselves. And as we learn about them, they also learn something about their own lives. It is a process in which a productive “collision” occurs between the person and a persona that is being created through the act of speaking. Based primarily on the testimonies of eleven residents of a Rio slum discussing their religious experiences, and containing less than five minutes of “pure” image (Coutinho’s term, designating shots where there are no people talking), Santo Forte radicalizes the commitment of film to the “spoken word.” The act of filming takes on an almost mystical dimension for the director: “It is a unique event, there was no before, nor was there any after. I do not care if it seems metaphysical. I have to believe it to have the will to film” (quoted in Couto and Araújo 1999). In the encounter with the other, it’s all or nothing—thus, the need for the use of video is legitimized, so that speech need not be cut on account of film roll limitations. If religion was thought of in Brazilian films from the 1960s exclusively as the “opium of the people,” Santo Forte presents multiple ways of viewing and experiencing the religious practices of Brazil, whether Umbanda, Catholic, or Evangelical. The characters weave beliefs, saints, angels, demons, and African entities together with historical characters into narratives that help them to “explain” the often precarious situations in which they live. “I was a very bad queen of Egypt and today I am paying for this” says one of the characters in the film. In this sense, these religions do indeed include an “opium of the people” dimension, but one that is integrated into a complex reality in which it is not possible to separate life and belief totally, nor overlook the escapism that provides relief for an otherwise unbearably arduous live. From Santo Forte on, Coutinho refines his method of approaching his interviewees, eliciting increasingly robust testimonies, by allowing those interviewed the time necessary to formulate ideas about their lives. Always empathetic, he examines carefully, and non-judgmentally, the point of view of his subjects, without voiding the difference between those on both sides of the camera. An example of his supreme impartiality can be seen in an interview featured in Edifício Master. At one point, Maria Pia, a Spanish maid, who emigrated to Brazil alone at seventeen, defends the allegedly indefensible: There is no poverty [in Brazil], that’s just in people’s heads, it’s bullshit … You only need to want to work, man! I’ve been dealing with the poor for forty years, they lie, you have no idea what they are doing …

262

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Coutinho makes small gestures, prodding the lead characters slightly so that they elaborate upon their points of view, but he does not pass any comment on what is said. What matters in his films is the worldview, the particular point of view the interviewee adapts toward life and the self-reflection that emerges through their relationship with the filmmaker. Maria Pia is not in the film just to make such a statement; she also talks about her children, the efforts and rewards of a lifetime spent raising and caring for them all, about how she saved her minimum wage salary to return to Spain. In other words, the film offers a moving, complex, and contradictory image of her. For Coutinho, these contradictions help the viewer better understand Brazil: a maid exploited throughout her life defends her boss and thinks all poor are lazy. What good would it do to explain the “truth” to her, telling her that poverty in Brazil exists, or, indeed, to make a film with a specific and clear political message? Such films, Coutinho seems to suggest, have been done, and they did not change the world or the thoughts of anyone, at least not in the transformative revolutionary sense that had characterized previous beliefs in cinema practices. Thus, Coutinho’s method insures a fully-active, relational dimension with those interviewed, far removed from any supposed neutrality or rejection or indictment on the author’s part. Rather, it invokes a unique and extremely difficult relationship between the latter’s point of view and that of the people he interviews. The director positions himself neither above nor below them, but in an intense narrative negotiation in which they also

FIGURE 14.2  Maria Pia in Edifício Master. Source: Eduardo Coutinho, 2002 © Videofilmes.



EDUARDO COUTINHO

263

have their own strengths.10 It is not for us spectators to judge, but to try to understand the reasons that led Maria Pia to think as she does, without being complicit with her ideas. And to understand that if we were in her place and had her life story, we also might be and think as she does. It is while making Santo Forte that Coutinho realized the potential of filming in one set place, a specific space—a slum, a building, or a village. For Coutinho, to work within a community’s physical boundaries signifies sticking with something essentially concrete, to create his own limits, to invent his own cinematic artifice. This is not without risks: the enclosure may simply not be conducive to a film or the director might not find a way to utilize it; after all, people can refuse to talk. However, this decision imparts a feeling of fate, or density to his material inasmuch as it determines what will be filmed. It is a principle that allows escape from abstractions or preconceived ideas about the chosen universe: rather than seeking out situations or testimonials of violence or religion in various Rio de Janeiro favelas, the director delimits a field to see what goes on in that space. Such a principle establishes a different relationship with the present, with history and memory, avoiding typing or folklore. Filming in a demarcated space, Coutinho enables a vision that evokes the “general” but does not represent it, does not exemplify generality, but speaks to us intensively about Brazil nonetheless.

Cinema as the art of self-fabulation In Jogo de Cena, Coutinho intensifies his aesthetic shift toward subtraction by moving away from his tendency to root films in a concrete community and by drastically cutting away the geographical, social, economic, and architectural backdrop that contextualized and held his characters together in his previous films. In this documentary and in As Canções, the actual process of filming provides the only common link across such distinct biographies. Everything is directed toward the performance11 itself, to the self-formulation of the characters on stage: the existence and strength of the films depend exclusively on their bodies in scenic space, the way they narrate their personal stories, how they express the events—dramatic, tragic, comic, or ordinary—of their lives. It is solely through what they say that the viewer can eventually establish connections between a particular history and the social background in which they are involved. However, in Jogo de Cena, it is not only the subtraction of the social context that makes it the most complex film of the director’s last phase, on a par with Santo Forte and Cabra Marcado para Morrer. Coutinho found the subjects for his film by issuing a classified ad in a Rio newspaper inviting people to participate in a documentary and talk about the same

264

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

themes present in almost all his films: personal relationships, children, work, everyday life. Issues Coutinho found worthy of investigation as they could be shared by anyone willing to speak about their own life experiences. This time, however, the director invited actresses to act out the stories told by “real” women, thus playing with the distinctions between what is staged and what is “real.” Three well-known Brazilian actresses allow the Brazilian viewer to identify who is who at these moments; nonetheless, in some sequences, a short-circuiting occurs between actress and character. As far as the unknown actresses are concerned, the short circuit is permanent: anonymous women narrating intimate moments from their lives before Coutinho’s camera acquire the force of truth, immediately reaffirming the viewer’s belief in the documentary image. But flashes of stories previously narrated at the beginning return in short phrases, slowly leading the viewer to question what he/she sees in the film: are we witnessing a real person telling their story or an unknown actress narrating someone else’s story? By forcing the viewer to oscillate between moments of belief and disbelief, Jogo de Cena calls into question not only the “authenticity” of the film itself but also that of the director’s previous documentaries. When it was released in 2007, the film provoked awe, fascination, and bewilderment, yielding an intense and immediate critical response: its impact is still felt today throughout the landscape of Brazilian cinema. Coutinho always denied that he plotted out his cinematic inventions prior to the filming process. His decision to film “a scene” in an “enclosed” documentary environment as opposed to the “world” as he had done previously may be linked to his increasingly fragile health in his later years which kept him from thinking about movies in a way that would have demanded great physical effort. However, we could suggest as an alternative hypothesis that the filmmaker realized that it was possible to understand the social and cultural contexts of the characters solely through their own speech, by paying attention to the words and intonation they used, in both a comprehensive as well as an intimate and personal way. His own experience in many films showed him that the particular speech of any given character has already transited through a common social field and everything the character says has been affected in some way by his/her particular social conditions and historical context. These are individual stories on which are inscribed—in “form” and “content”—happiness, freedom, the reactions of the Brazilian lower classes, and also unimaginable amounts of suffering. Those narratives remind us that speech is always of a social nature; singular, no doubt, but personal and collective at the same time. In any case, in Coutinho’s last four films, various layers of his cinema are present in unprecedented rearrangements. In a sense, it appears that Coutinho makes “essays” from his own work, intensifying the reflexive movement of his artistic career. In Moscou, he reverts entirely to the stage, and films professional actors in a closed rehearsal of Chekhov’s



EDUARDO COUTINHO

265

play Three Sisters. Um Dia na Vida is limited to one ordinary day of Brazilian broadcast television and highlights the audiovisual media culture that in many ways pervades the conversations of his interviewed subjects. Whereas the musical performances of people interviewed had incidentally emerged from their testimonial processes in previous films, in As Canções these performances now become the film’s very motive, the justification for bringing people before the camera. It is as if his previous films had been transformed into a large audiovisual archive—as well as his methods and procedures—where he could select, ad infinitum, particular elements to investigate and re-organize into new filmic experiments.

Last Conversations The material shot by Coutinho for what would become his last film was edited by Jordana Berg, his film editor since Santo Forte, finalized by producer and filmmaker João Salles, and released under the title Últimas Conversas (Last Conversations, 2015). It is much more a film about rather than by Eduardo Coutinho, who had died tragically a few months earlier, murdered by his own son. We see footage of conversations between the director and students from Rio’s public high schools. In the initial scenes of the film, in the course of an interview between the filmmaker and Jordana Berg, on the documentary set, Coutinho describes the profound crisis that he experienced whilst making this film. Perhaps it is the sequence that best reveals the director’s state of mind at the time. In that conversation, Coutinho expressed his anguish over the material he had recorded up until that point. He considered teenagers excessively “armed,” impenetrable, and reflected back on the idea that he should have made a movie with children— a project he was unable to realize because of the complications arising from the need for parental approval for the interviews. Perhaps influenced by Walter Benjamin, who identified the potentialities of language in childhood, Coutinho wanted to get close to the child’s openness to the world, peering into, or scrutinizing children’s language, a kind of “infancy of language,” a time when the senses are still unconventional, when expression has not yet been codified. A self-taught and intuitive linguist, Coutinho deeply believed that it is through language that we constitute ourselves as subjects. A belief he put into practice, film after film, in contact with the world and through the tireless exploration of the different ways of speaking and storytelling of those he filmed. However, this insistence in the last months of his life on finding a “childhood language”—to capture in conversations with children one original moment where everything is still possible—remained only partially idealized and uncertain. Without doubt, his own films show us

266

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

just how the “childhood” language persists in all of us, old people, adults, children, although we may not have direct access to it.12 This “infancy of language” emerges in many ways—as it often did in his films, a result of his openness, his curiosity, and the kind of contact and listening he puts on screen. An exemplary scene can be found in Babilônia 2000: a woman known in the favela as Janis Joplin, shot from the highest point of the hill, with Copacabana Beach and the Sugar Loaf in the background, sings Joplin’s famous hit, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Her English is entirely made up, from beginning to end, but the conviction with which she belts out the words makes us believe that this is indeed English, the oldest, the most original, perhaps the first language from which all others sprang. Through this use of a made-up language, the singer—an ex-hippie who had lost her son Siddhartha and her husband to the drug trade—expresses in a nutshell what happens to the Portuguese language in Coutinho’s films about the poor. In the face of precarious lives penetrated by incredible violence, we are confronted by the force of words which invent meanings, create voca­bulary, and mix terms of different origins: words that attempt to write their own grammar. We encounter people who intuitively revel in and explore the ability of words to mean different things from those that are expected, where what is at stake is a return to the invention and the pleasure of the spoken word.

FIGURE 14.3  Fátima, interviewed by Coutinho, ahead of singing a Janis Joplin hit in Babilônia 2000. Source: Photograph © Zeca Guimarães.



EDUARDO COUTINHO

267

In this sense, perhaps it was less a matter for Coutinho of looking for a “childhood language,” and more a case of being inspired by children’s curiosity and openness to delve into the world—a position he takes up in every film of his documentary career. As he observed in an interview in 2008: “The truly great listener is an eight-year old boy who asks “Why?” … He’s the great questioner because nothing is guaranteed” (quoted in Blejman 2008). Coutinho was the greatest of listeners in all his films, with the exception of Últimas Conversas, a sad testimony of how debilitated the old master had become. However, despite everything—poor health, personal problems, doubts over his film—in Últimas Conversas Coutinho does not fail to give signs of élan vital in his interactions with teenagers, almost all black, almost all poor, starting life and yet already having so many painful memories. For this filmmaker skilled in eliciting the stories of others, shooting was the only possible way of affirming life: he revitalized himself through contact with his subjects, before the camera, together with his crew. His seductive, grumpy humor, optimistic pessimism, and his ability to force his audience to envision alternative ways of seeing and thinking about Brazil are in many ways present in these last conversations. From now on, we have to make these connections and form these ideas without him. Eduardo Coutinho’s films are what remain of him, and they are among the most important ever produced in the history of Brazilian cinema.

Notes 1

In the early 1990s, Brazilian cinema almost disappeared after the dissolution of Embrafilme, the state film production and distribution company, during Collor de Mello’s government. Only three national films were shown in movie theaters in 1992.

2

Capitalismo pesado, translated as “hard capitalismo” and capitalismo leve or “light capitalismo” are notions that the sociologist Zymunt Bauman illustrated in his book Modernidade liquida, first published in English as Liquid Modernity by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd in 2000.

3

«Il ne s’agit pas tellement de faire un film plutôt qu’un autre, mais de faire les films possibles là où on est.»

4

Eduardo Coutinho worked from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s for CECIP (Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular), a non-government organization dedicated to producing video documentaries for the independent social movements’ circuit. From Babilônia 2000 on and until his death, all his films were produced by the filmmaker and producer João Moreira Salles, through Videofilmes.

268

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

5

All Coutinho quotes not followed by specific references come from conversations I taped with him during research for my book O cinema de Eduardo Coutinho.

6

I use dispositif here in reference to the most recent formulation of critic and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, who updates a notion so dear to a segment of French cinema criticism of the 1970s. Rather than the totalizing concept of “Cinema as dispositif,” the artifice used in documentary filming is specific. It is not a case of something that occurs in every film in a similar form, structurally related to cinema as a whole, but rather something that is created in each work, immanent, contingent on the circumstances of its filming, and subject to real pressures.

7

Many of the reflections contained in this chapter come from texts written in collaboration with Cláudia Mesquita (Mesquita, Cláudia and Consuelo Lins. “O fim e o princípio: entre o mundo e a cena,” Novos Estudos CE. 2008).

8

Beth Formaggini’s Apartamento 608 is an excellent documentary about the making of Coutinho’s Edifício Master (2002). As the film’s producer, Formaggini closely followed the three weeks of research into the building and its occupants, thus producing a valuable “document” on the director’s method.

9

It is Gilles Deleuze who initially returns to Henri Bergson’s concept of “fabulation” as an approach to the films of Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault. This is a very relevant concept in considering the kind of speech/conversations we find in Eduardo Coutinho’s films and in many other contemporary documentaries. Perhaps this is why the term is in circulation today in many Brazilian texts on documentary, albeit without reference to Deleuze’s original usage. The word “fabulation” has been translated in Cinema 2, The Time-Image as “story-telling.”

10 Mikhail Bakhtin defines this kind of artistic procedure, frequently employed in Coutinho’s work, as “polyphonic,” a concept he arrived at via his analysis of Dostoevsky’s work. In this new artistic model of the world, as defined by Bakhtin, the author is no longer the center of the world, and the work does not express solely his viewpoint or conception of the world (Bakhtin, Problemas da poética de Dostoiésvski, trans. Paulo Bezerra [Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2008]). 11 Mariana Baltar develops this notion regarding Coutinho’s films in a number of articles, among them “Weeping reality: melodramatic imagination in contemporary Brazilian documentary” (in Darlene Sadler [ed], Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos and Entertainment [Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009], 130–8). 12 Inspired by Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben develops at length the relationships between infancy, language and history in Infancy and History, Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso, 1993).



EDUARDO COUTINHO

269

Works cited Apartamento 608. Documentary/Web. Beth Formaggini. Available online: https:// vimeo.com/95307836 (accessed May 1, 2015). Baltar, Mariana. 2009. “Weeping Reality: Melodramatic Imagination in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary,” in Darlene Sadler (ed.), Latin American Melodrama. Passion, Pathos and Entertainment, 130–8. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Modernidade líquida. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Blejman, Mariano. April 23, 2008, “Interview with Eduardo Coutinho.” Available online: http://www.ihu.unisinos.br/noticias/noticias-anteriores/13387-alinguagem-e-mais-que-o-autor-entrevista-com-eduardo-coutinho (accessed June 10, 2015). BRAP (2014): 49–63. Available online: http://novosestudos.uol.com.br/v1/ contents/view/1565 (accessed May 31, 2015). Comolli, Jean-Louis. 2004. “Sous le risque du réel,” in Voir et pouvoir: L’innocence perdue: cinéma, télévision, fiction, documentaire, 507–17. Paris: Verdier. Couto, José Geraldo and Inácio Araújo. 1999. “Interview with Eduardo Coutinho,” Folha de São Paulo, Nov. 28. Available online: http://www1.folha. uol.com.br/fsp/mais/fs2811199915.htm (accessesd May 15, 2015). Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Formaggini, Beth. 2014. Apartamento 608. Documentary/Web. Available online: https://vimeo.com/95307836 (accessed May 1, 2015). Godard, Jean-Luc. 1985. “Faire les films possibles là où on est,” in Les années vidéo (1975–1980), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, 382–6. Paris: Les Cahiers du Cinéma-Éditions de l’Étoile. Lins, Consuelo. 2004. O cinema de Eduardo Coutinho: cinema, televisão e vídeo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Lins, Consuelo and Cláudia Mesquita. 2008. Filmar o real: sobre o documentário brasileiro contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor Ltda. Available online: http://www.zahar.com.br/livro/filmar-o-real (accessed May 15, 2015).

15 Shareable cinema: The politics of Abbas Kiarostami Nico Baumbach

One of the most celebrated auteurs to emerge on the international scene in the last few decades, Abbas Kiarostami has nonetheless frequently been treated by admirers and detractors alike as an art house or festival filmmaker whose cultural capital is predicated on a refusal to engage with the politics of his native country, Iran, in favor of a cinema that is frequently read as either broadly humanist or oblique and formalist. The goal of this chapter is to reveal Kiarostami as a deeply political filmmaker, however, one who may allow us to think differently about what it means to call films political in the twenty-first century. To take only one, albeit extreme, example of the criticism leveled at Kiarostami, in an article entitled “Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema,” Azadeh Farahmand, accuses Kiarostami of engaging in “consensual self-censorship” and “sanitized politics.” According to this critic, the viewer of Kiarostami’s films “can maintain his distance and remain uninvolved, be fascinated, securely appreciative of the exotic locales, as though viewing an oriental rug, whose history he does not need to untangle” (Farahmand 2002, 101). What is of interest about this critique is that it takes for granted a conception of political cinema that Kiarostami’s cinema challenges. Farahmand is concerned about a passive spectator, who is “distant,” “uninvolved.” The importance of Kiarostami’s work lies in how it rethinks the relationship between spectator and screen and challenges the binary between active and passive spectators in favor of an egalitarian conception of cinema.

272

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Kiarostami ended a short piece he wrote for the centenary of cinema in 1995 with the words, “for one hundred years cinema has belonged to the filmmaker. Let us hope that now the time has come to implicate the audience in the second century.”1 This may sound like yet another call for active spectators, but Kiarostami has also frequently made it clear that he has no contempt for so-called passive audiences. He has gone so far as to say that he has no problem with a spectator of one of his films falling asleep while watching it, even suggesting that it can be a kind of compliment to the film itself. As he has put it, I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don’t like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don’t like in movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power, and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater.2 What does it mean to “implicate the audience” if that audience can also fall asleep? If Kiarostami has contempt for anything in contemporary mainstream cinema, it is the logic of what I will call, with a nod to Gilles Deleuze, “the cinema of control”—the demand for a certain kind of activity that he calls taking the viewer hostage, whether through provoking, moralizing, or instructing. This type of activity is at odds with other kinds of activities that include not only sleeping, but also responses from spectators that are comparable to those of the filmmakers and people in the film. With this in mind, I want to turn to Jacques Rancière to help think about the audience’s relationship to the film in Kiarostami’s work as one that we shouldn’t frame in terms of activity or passivity, but rather equality. Following Rancière, I propose that we consider the politics of cinema not in terms of what is typically grasped as political content, such as films that tell stories about the machinations of government or the pursuit and exploitation of power, or in terms of how a particular film can be credited with calculable political effects by raising awareness or inciting a call to action, but rather in the ways that cinema can reorganize collective modes of experience and give form to a non-existent equality (Rancière 2004a, 10).3 For Rancière, the axiom of equality is the basic political principle. Equality is to be presumed, taken as axiomatic, not seen as a goal (Rancière 1991,



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

273

138). It opens up a gap between what does and does not exist between actual inequality and virtual equality. Key to the question of equality is that it does not require a choice between distance and immanence, on the one hand, or activity and passivity, on the other. For Kiarostami, as for Rancière, the spectator’s distance from the film is not a problem to be overcome, nor in Brechtian fashion is it something that needs to be activated to make him/her self-conscious and aware that the film is a representation. Distance is a normal part of the viewing experience. According to Rancière, cinema and other forms of art are not to be confused with political action but cinema has a politics, paradoxically, by virtue of its very distance from the realm of what is normally understood by political action. By suspending how sensory modes are shared and divided and the rules and organization of common sense and experience, art can offer resources to political imagination and projects of emancipation. It shares with politics an interest in rearranging the terrain of the seeable, sayable, and doable, of making visible or conceivable a new framework of sensory experience in favor of equality, of affirming or inscribing capacity and possibility where it is usually denied (Rancière 2004b, 63). The cinema of equality is in opposition to the cinema of control, which tells the viewer what he/she is meant to understand and how he/she is meant to feel. Let me suggest that equality in cinema can be affirmed across three levels: 1) the place of enunciation that is most often associated with the filmmaker or auteur function, but can also be associated with the camera as such, an indifferent machine that registers traces of the visible and audible world; 2) the filmed subjects—people or objects, sometimes called actors or stars; 3) the spectators or audience, both individually and as a collective. Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing into the second decade of the twenty-first century, Kiarostami has created what I am calling a shareable cinema, which has attempted to construct forms of equality between the filmmaker, the filmed subjects, and the spectator. He has, perhaps more than any other filmmaker working today, provided cinematic ways of thinking through what it might mean in the twenty-first century to take seriously Walter Benjamin’s now eighty-year-old claim that “every person has an entitlement to be reproduced” (Benjamin 2002, 114). In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin proposes that the distinctions between amateur and expert, consumer and producer are breaking down. Using the example of letters to the editor in daily newspapers, he suggests that the reader “as an expert … gains access to authorship” (Benjamin 2002, 114). Expertise, according to Benjamin, is also inherent to the spectatorship of film, an art form that is understood immediately by the masses without the class requirements and

274

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

higher education that are needed for the appreciation of a now waning experience of beautiful semblance in the bourgeois work of art. This claim that anyone and everyone is entitled to be reproduced was at odds with most common understandings of what it meant to be in a film. Leaning either on the old theatrical tradition of professional acting or the emerging discourse of celebrity, being in a film meant in 1935, as it still usually does, being an actor or a star. In contrast, Benjamin looked to Soviet cinema for his model that he insisted was in some sense inherent to the transformations in sense perception brought about by capitalist modernity. According to Benjamin, “Some of the actors taking part in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves—and primarily in their own work process. In western Europe today, the capitalist exploitation of film obstructs the human being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced” (Benjamin 2002, 114). We might notice here a slippage from author to subject (from our first to our second term) in the analogy of the letter to the editor with the worker portrayed on film. The letter to the editor implies that anyone can be an author, whereas the worker portrayed on film is not himself/herself a filmmaker. Nonetheless, it is a slippage that Benjamin saw as intrinsic to the new art of technological reproducibility in which the image of the artist/author genius is no longer an appropriate criteria of evaluation. It’s a slippage that is important for Kiarostami’s films as well. For Benjamin, the human body on screen also had a claim to authorship of the film as it made possible the capacity for self-representation or, as it he put it, “a productive use of one’s own alienation” (Benjamin 2002, 113). This, I believe, is Kiarostami’s goal—offering ways of making films that posit cinema as available to everyone not just as spectators but as filmmakers and as bodies on screen for “a productive use of one’s own alienation.” For Kiarostami the process of staging equality through filmic operations is not about re-establishing a lost social bond but about interrupting the ways that sensory experience is divided and shared. In other words, this is not a bland form of humanism as it is, like Rancière’s conception of politics, in opposition to consensus. As Rancière has proposed, political equality and true forms of democracy cannot be seen as intrinsic to forms of technology and they are categorically divisive or litigious, not inclusive or consensual (Rancière 1998, ix–x). Equality in Kiarostami’s films is not posed as a property of new forms of production, reception, and distribution; rather it must be constructed and in the process pose the question of what it means to produce, receive, and distribute moving images as equals without repeating the familiar critiques of power or appealing to apolitical forms of consensus and inclusion. For this purpose, he advocates what he calls “a half-created or unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience” (Kiarostami 1995). This may sound in many ways like a continuation of



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

275

André Bazin’s aesthetics of ambiguity, and while Kiarostami’s use of long takes certainly owes something to this tradition and its associations with neorealism, it is not based on the same realist premises. Indeed, the use of ellipses and indirection to elicit an active spectator may sound more like a familiar modernist or formalist trope frequently seen as in opposition to Bazinian realism. But for Kiarostami, the unfinished film is not premised on a break in which the passive spectator is made active through an estrangement effect that produces a moment of awareness. As Rancière suggests, this modernist logic is anti-egalitarian. When a filmmaker like a professor sees it as his/her goal to create active or more knowledgeable spectators or students, he/she reinstates the very gap that he/she is trying to erase, on the assumption that the spectators or students are passive or unaware to begin with (Rancière 2007, 271). Kiarostami’s unfinished films do not use ambiguity with the pretense of being closer to natural perception. Nor does he ask for participation or involvement from spectators as part of a new ethos of community or to spark knowledge or awareness. Rather, he wishes to divide the audience. For Kiarostami, the equality between filmmaker and spectator is assumed a priori, which means that the response of the audience is not assumed a priori. Kiarostami frames it in explicitly political terms: “I don’t think an ordinary spectator is less deserving than a filmmaker … My belief is more in a form of art that creates differences, a divergence among people, rather than a convergence with everyone in agreement … Engaging in war against great powers has to be done with a certain weakness, a lacking” (Nancy 2001, 89–90). Therefore, if the spectator is lacking in any way it must be because the filmmaker is also lacking. So to inscribe the spectator in the film, to take the film away from the master-filmmaker and give the cinema back to the audience, Kiarostami must also inscribe the filmmaker in the film. Many of his films feature a filmmaker character, sometimes Kiarostami himself (Homework [Mashgh-e Shab, 1989], Close-Up [Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990]), sometimes an actor playing a filmmaker who shares explicit traits with Kiarostami (Life and Nothing More… [Zendegi va digar hich, 1992], Through the Olive Trees [Zire darakhatan zeyton, 1994]), sometimes just a bourgeois figure, an outsider, or an intellectual who observes and appears to function as a stand-in for the filmmaker (Taste of Cherry [Ta’m e guilass, 1997], The Wind Will Carry Us [Bad ma ra khahad bord, 1999], Certified Copy [Copie conforme, 2010]). But this is never the heroic or humble filmmaker offering a gift to the audience for nothing in return but frequently an immodest figure who, in varying degrees, imposes his/her will on others as it suits him/her and who is also a spectator in a world he/she doesn’t understand. His films tell us not only that everyone has a right be filmed, but also that filming can be a kind of violation—with deep gender and class implications. The figure of Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us is perhaps the clearest

276

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

example of this—an urban educated man who travels to a rural community where he waits for a woman to die so he can, against the wishes of the community, photograph the mourning ritual. The filmmaker stand-in in all these films desires control, which is why he must become both a filmed subject and a spectator. A second figure that repeats in many of Kiarostami’s films and can be considered in partial opposition to the figure of the filmmaker or member of the bourgeois class is the child. The child, in turn, is always another kind of stand-in for the spectator and potential filmmaker. Kiarostami’s career began in the early 1970s before the Iranian Revolution, working for the film division of the Institute of Intellectual Development for Childhood and Young Adults, but both the focus on children as well as the interest in the relation between cinema and pedagogy have persisted throughout his career. His international reputation, as well as that of Iranian film more generally, reached its greatest heights in the 1990s well into the Khomeini era; following this, many of the Western articles on what has been dubbed the Iranian New Wave have wondered how this humanist cinema emerged out of a country often thought to be a nation of religious fundamentalists if not terrorists. This admiring but patronizing attitude toward Iranian cinema has its corollary in a more critical approach. It has been claimed that the focus on children in Iranian film has been a way of both skirting the censors within Iran while giving a public face of innocence to an oppressive regime for the benefit of international audiences. This should remind us that, before it is a formal principle, it might be said that Kiarostami’s films are “unfinished” for a very concrete reason: the restrictive conditions of making films within the Islamic Republic. These restrictions are especially pronounced in relation to how women and sexuality can be filmed. In Iran even before the Revolution, the cinema was often taken as an emblem of the West and the corruption of the Shah’s regime. Theaters were torched in the months leading up to the Revolution and in Khomeini’s first public statement after the Revolution he addressed cinema directly. Echoing Plato’s Republic, he denounced the old cinema’s corruption of the youth, which he opposed to the value of an educational cinema: We are not opposed to the cinema, to radio, or to television; what we oppose is vice and the use of the media to keep our young people in a state of backwardness and dissipate their energies … The cinema is a modern invention that ought to be used for the sake of educating the people, but, as you know, it was used instead to corrupt our youth. (Khomeini 1981, 248) For Iran, the new cinema had to be in strict adherence to Islamicate values and codes, which meant following a new system of modesty (hejab) in contrast to the old Pahlavi-era cinema of idolatry (taqut).4



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

277

Given these conditions, it may be claimed that Kiarostami’s use of children merely makes a virtue of necessity, or worse yet, justifies the logic of state censorship. But the child in his films is not, as is so familiar in the history of middlebrow art cinema, a figure of innocence or a site of sentimental projection. On the contrary, he/she is what Deleuze calls a “forger” or “fabulator” (1989, 173). The use of children may in some cases be seen as a way of evading explicitly political content, but the children in Kiarostami’s films are themselves evaders and this they share with the filmmaker. They are both inside and outside the logic of society, testing the limits of often ambiguous cultural codes and expectations. And this for Kiarostami directly implicates the child with both the filmmaker and the spectator. The spectator like the filmmaker is someone whose capacity is made possible by his/her very incapacity. Kiarostami treats his films as Benjamin once imagined them, as a series of tests and his characters such as the child protagonists, whether of Bread and Alley (Nan va Koutcheh, 1970), The Experience (Tadjrebeh, 1973), The Traveller (Mossafer, 1974), A Suit for the Wedding (Lebassi Baraye Arossi, 1976), or Where is the Friend’s Home (Khane-ye doust kodjast?, 1987), must in turn undergo repeated tests, evading and falsifying imposed restrictions. Jean-Luc Nancy has called Kiarostami’s films “an affirmation of cinema by cinema” (2001, 10). To affirm cinema by way of cinema, to affirm its potential for inscribing equality, means that the auteur function, as Vertov once suggested, has to relinquish the role of master or pedagogue. Instead the auteur becomes more like a “mediator” as Deleuze describes it. A mediator, according to Deleuze, is what allows someone to get outside his/ her own discourse and falsify it through an other to create a new form of community through a new distribution of the visible, sayable, and doable (1995, 125–6). To make this more concrete, I’d like to look at Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-Up. Close-Up is an unlikely title for a film by a filmmaker whose mise-en-scène is most obviously distinctive for maintaining distance through long shots especially in those moments when we might anticipate or desire a close-up. The static, 6-minute long shot that ends Through the Olive Trees is exemplary in this regard—we can make out the figure we know to be Hossein, the young non-actor first seen in Life and Nothing More, winding through the olive grove to catch up with Tahereh, the young woman who has, until this moment, repeatedly rejected him; we see him reach her, they seem to be talking, then he turns around and heads back the way he came, but the scene is shot from above at such a great distance that we can only imagine whether she has accepted or rejected his advances. Joan Copjec has described Kiarostami’s cinema as “reserved,” and in this respect at least, we could say that it reflects the official ideology of modesty in Iranian culture (2006, 29). The close-up, on the other hand, is traditionally associated with the star, either with the iconic face (as a site of projection) or with the optical

278

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

point of view (as a site of identification). For this reason, in Iranian cinema, the close-up risked intimacy and a betrayal of the system of modesty. It could evoke the idolatry of Western cinema, especially the display of women’s bodies, or the relay of looks that, at least as far back as Kuleshov, has been known to connote desire. Eisenstein preferred the term “large shot” because he claimed that the close-up, as the term came to popular use through D. W. Griffith, was a “narrowly representational” concept. The large shot, in contrast, “designated” or “signified” but did not “show” or “present” (Eisenstein 1963, 243). But ironically while Eisenstein’s vocabulary separates his use of the large shot from the representational logic of spatial and temporal continuity so too, as Warhol well understood, does the close-up of the star as the fetish of the disembodied face always exceeds the need for the close-up within a film’s narrative economy. Kiarostami’s title Close-up refers to both these functions—the close-up as way of fetishizing the star and as providing significance—their interconnection and divergence. The close-up in Close-Up means the possibility of film to allow people and objects to speak, to give significance to what is seen on screen, evoking the educational value of a post–revolutionary cinema; at the same time, it signals the desire for stardom, the shameful desires of an immodest cinema of idolatry, which the film shows has its own political or utopian dimension. Close-Up tells the true story of the court case of a man, Hossein Sabzian (playing himself), who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf for reasons that are being contested within the film. Sabzian using the name of the famous director (a former revolutionary known, unlike Kiarostami, as a filmmaker with explicitly political aspirations) told a family, the Ahankhahs, that he wanted to make a film about them and over the course of several visits to the family’s home under the guise of planning the film with them, borrowed a small sum of money that he never returned; but while the family argues that Sabzian intended to rob them, Sabzian suggests that he was inspired only by “an interest in cinema.” According to Sabzian, he wished to be the person he pretended to be and follow through on the plans for the film only he lacked the means to do so. This “interest in cinema” is precisely what allowed the family to be taken in (particularly the youngest son who is the least forgiving of Sabzian) and it is also what makes both Sabzian and the family participate in Kiarostami’s film despite their potentially shameful roles. There is shame attached to their roles not only because Sabzain must acknowledge being a liar and the family must acknowledge being his gullible victims, but because any “interest in cinema” is readily interpreted as shameful in Iran. Kiarostami’s film becomes, in effect, the very film whose impossibility is the cause of the drama that we are viewing. It allows the Ahankhahs to be in a film as they desired and Sabzian gets to be a star, but also like the filmmaker he wanted to be, he becomes a kind of mediator, the occasion for a film about the real lives of the Ahankhahs and himself.



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

279

We see Kiarostami explain to Sabzian that he is setting up two cameras in the court—one 35mm camera to film the proceedings from a distance and a 16mm “close-up” camera which Kiarostami tells Sabzian is for him to explain things that people may find hard to understand. This camera captures Sabzian making speeches testifying to his own benign motives, which spurs the younger son to accuse him of acting. The close-up, of course, is also Sabzian’s chance to be a star. Actor and star, Sabzian also evokes the shameful dimension of the cinephile as freak or weirdo, the conman who makes us uncomfortable because he is not a worker in the proper sense. Not only does his plan for a film not work, but in addition to an “interest in cinema,” Sabzian, divorced and living with his mother, shares one other crucial trait with the son in the family he conned: unemployment. If, for Benjamin and Vertov, productive labor was the very condition of a claim on cinema, for Kiarostami, in contrast, an “interest in cinema” is shown to be a supplement for the failure to work properly in a society filled with contradictions. In a sense, Sabzian, in Close-Up, though in his mid-thirties, fulfills the role normally given to the child in Kiarostami’s films. He creates through unproductive labor a film that does not exist. As he says at one point, he identifies with the child hero of Kiarostami’s 1974 film The Traveler who pretended to take pictures of people with a camera with no film to collect money to go see a soccer game that he finally misses because he falls asleep. Kiarostami finds a way to affirm cinema through a series of substitutions and failures, through what Deleuze calls “the power of the false.” When Kiarostami first interviews Sabzian he asks in what way he could help and Sabzian suggests that like Makhmalbaf, “you could express our suffering in your films.” It is this “our” that lies at the heart of the film. To what extent is Sabzian’s suffering that of the anonymous spectator? To what extent does the film Kiarostami has made effectively substitute for one by Makhmalbaf, or for the film Sabzian wished to make, or the one desired by the Ahankhah son who also wants to make and be in films? What would it mean to take seriously the Italian neorealist screenwriter Zavattini’s claim quoted by Kiarostami in his film essay 10 on Ten (2004), that “the first person who passes by could be a subject for your film”?5 Close-Up is often cited for the ways it blurs the distinction between fiction and documentary and since its subject is cinema itself, it tends to be described by phrases like “a hall of mirrors,” an example of, if not modernist reflexivity, then postmodern indeterminacy between the simulacrum and the real. But as Jean-Luc Nancy rightly points out, Kiarostami is not interested in a critical unveiling of cinematic conventions and his films are not fruitfully understood in terms of mise-en-abyme (Nancy 2001, 10). Kiarostami’s films are not films about film in the modernist sense of reflexivity or intransitivity nor are they precisely Brechtian films that expose the mechanism and produce awareness. On the contrary, they are about

280

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

the very possibility of making cinema shareable. And what is shareable in cinema must finally suspend not only the division of labor that separates filmmaker and spectator but also the distinction between the charismatic star and the ordinary person from the street, the documentary subject. It must be a sharing among equals. Sabzian is finally both a singular character and a universal one because he demands an impossible equality between author, spectator, and filmed subject. To make a cinema shareable, to follow through on the idea of equality between the filmmaker, his subjects, and the audience, Kiarostami inscribed filmmakers in his films as a way of turning the filmmaker into subject and spectator. But the discovery of digital video suggested the possibility of radically subtracting the filmmaker. Following his use of video for “notes” in preparation for Taste of Cherry that were also used in a coda to the film, Kiarostami shot the entirety of ABC Africa (2001) on video. He explained during interviews at the time of the film’s release how it allowed him to do away with the position of the filmmaker as master. He then made two more films with digital video cameras, Ten (Dah, 2002) and Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003), in which directorial mastery was subtracted in a new way. Ten eliminated the presence of the director for the recording of the film itself. Made up of ten sequences shot entirely from within a single automobile driven by the actress Mania Akbari—each sequence was recorded by two immobile cameras attached to the dashboard of the car, one aimed at the driver’s seat, the other on the passenger’s side. Five, on the other hand, not only has no camera movement, but also no dialogue and no characters in the traditional sense, only people seen from a distance, driftwood, ducks, water, and weather.6 There is a great deal more to be said about these two remarkable (and very different) films, but what I wish to focus on for the purposes of this chapter is Kiarostami’s need to supplement them with films to explain what was left out of them. While Kiarostami severely limited the tools through which a filmmaker might orient a viewer toward the meaning of the images in these films, the director’s voice returns front and center in the pedagogical essay films 10 on Ten and Around Five (2005), which involve Kiarostami discussing aspects of Ten and Five respectively. I point this out not as a criticism, but merely to indicate a paradoxical dimension of Kiarostami’s shareable cinema. The desire to make films that allow the audience to engage on their own terms has driven Kiarostami to an increasing self-effacement of his own role and what may be considered an increasingly minimalist cinema (of which Five remains his most extreme example within a feature film).7 But the more “unfinished” the film is, the more danger there is that the audience will not meet it half way. The commentary in the supplementary films helps fill in what the films leave out. The master’s voice returns in these “master classes” to ensure the legibility of “the unfinished film,” the film without a master. In Shirin (2008) we find yet another permutation on the substitution



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

281

of filmmaker, audience, and subjects, and a new use for the close-up in Kiarostami’s cinema. Shirin is entirely composed of spectators as subjects. We watch 114 actresses presumably viewing a film for which we hear only the sound. This use of sound as the link between an absent image and a gaze is the organizing principle of the film shot entirely in close-ups. Kiarostami did not make his own essay film to accompany Shirin, but he has made no secret of how the film was made—the women were all filmed individually watching only a piece of paper next to the camera—and this backstory, which necessarily transforms how the film is viewed, is no doubt familiar to many of those who see the film (Jaggi 2009). Shirin, then, is less an anthropology of cinema spectators and more like Warhol’s “screen tests” recontextualized so that a series of isolated figures of study come to thematize the shared viewing experience. We are spectators viewing spectators who are mediated by an image we do not see. The “film” itself is the off-screen space. The missing reverse shot includes not only the images of a film whose soundtrack we hear, but also the camera that films these women, and finally, ourselves, the spectators who have watched, are watching, and will see the film. Spectator, filmmaker, and filmed subjects all converge in the absent reverse shot. Another significant difference with Warhol’s screen tests is that Kiarostami’s method ensures that the filmed subject never looks directly into the camera. Even though both the actual and virtual objects of spectatorship of the women we see on screen are denied us (i.e. both the piece of paper beside the camera and the film we presume to be projected on the movie screen whose soundtrack we hear), the women do not appear to look back at us through direct address breaking the fourth wall; rather, they appear absorbed, studying something that cannot be us because it is off to the side. Denis Diderot, as glossed by Michael Fried, claimed that the dramatis personae in a painting should be absorbed “in their actions and states of mind. A personage so absorbed appeared unconscious and oblivious of everything but the object of his or her absorption, as if to all intents and purposes there was nothing and no one else in the world” (Fried 1992, 7). By bringing together a multiplicity of absorbed figures to compose the experience of film spectatorship, Kiarostami is offering film as a way of thinking autonomous individuals in a virtual community, a relation of a non-relation. The beginning of his manifesto on the unfinished film is relevant here: Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on the screen better. Then I looked a little closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats and saw that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and be alone. They were both with others and distant from them. (Kiarostami 1995)

282

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

But we have not examined a detail that makes all the difference. Like Ten, Kiarostami’s dramatis personae in Shirin are almost exclusively women.8 Until Ten, women make few appearances in Kiarostami’s films due in large part to the restrictions as to how they could be filmed. But while Ten, like Close-up and many of his other films, used mostly non-actors, Shirin explores the aura of the actress or star. For the first time, he has made a film filled with Iranian movie stars, but he has cast them all as spectators. (Similarly, this is his first film of a popular story filled with familiar plot twists, melodrama, sex, and violence, but we do not see any of it.) Following the system of modesty the women are all in headscarves (including the one identifiable face for Western audiences, French actress Juliette Binoche) that serve not to hide but rather to frame their faces. The images of spectators in Shirin do not provide a defamiliarizing contrast to the glamor we typically see on screen. Rather, these affection-images are lit and framed as portraits in time and movement of well-known actresses and thereby give to the figure of the spectator the aura of the face of the female star. The display of a range of emotions, a kind of taxonomy of affects (amusement, sadness, surprise, boredom) which is at least partially severed from the stimuli, then is not quite readable as the reflexive response mechanisms of the “ordinary” cinema spectator but feels performative. The twelfth-century epic Persian poem Khosrow and Shirin by Nezami Ganjavi is adapted for the film’s soundtrack, which confronts us with an evocative soundscape composed of what we might call, adapting Deleuze, affective-sounds: a female chorus of mournful wailing, dripping water, galloping horses, swords piercing flesh, and dialogue spoken with a haunted sense of desperation. Knowing that the faces were not recorded responding to what we hear does not eliminate the audio equivalent of the Kuleshoveffect (in which we read the sound we are hearing as in the same space as the image) but it merely verifies the gap that is already there between what we see and what we hear, a gap that Deleuze traces back to the “rupture of the sensory-motor schema” that occurred after World War II. Indeed, Shirin is like a literal rendering of Deleuze’s conception of the protagonist who has become a seer or spectator rather than one capable of driving the action. Nezami’s version of the story bears some strong similarities with the roughly contemporaneous legend of Tristan and Isolde that Denis de Rougemont, and Lacan following him, have taken as a foundational text in the construction of the modern concept of romantic love in the West though, as Rougemont argues, its origins in Christian heresy are imbricated with Arabic and Persian connections. According to Rougemont, love as it has come to be understood through the “Tristan myth” is premised on its impossibility and more specifically on the idealization of the woman as unattainable other (Rougemont 1983, 74). Khosrow and Shirin fits Rougemont’s prototype of the story in which the lovers’ union is perpetually thwarted by society and circumstances as if the obstacles to love are its very



ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

283

conditions of possibility. (Until, that is, the “final obstacle,” death.) On the other hand, if there is a central difference between the typical version of Tristan and Isolde as described by Rougemont and the story of Khosrow and Shirin as heard in Kiarostami’s film, it is in the comparative role of the female and male figures; for whereas the male Tristan is the protagonist of Tristan and Isolde, Shirin herself, as Kiarostami’s shortened title indicates, is the hero of his off-screen film within a film. According to Kiarostami, he chose the story because Nezrami “portrayed women as being capable and self-reliant. Such personalities are rarely seen [in literature and films] even today” (Khodaei 2009). It is a story of love preserved through words and images despite the series of circumstances that perpetually thwart or prolong the possibility of physical intimacy. Shirin falls in love with Khosrow after viewing a painting of him and then he later manages to gaze on her body while bathing, but their union is continually deferred. The fetishized image of the body of woman is, of course, taboo in Iran but here is offered in its absence and relayed through the gaze not of the man, who is also offscreen, but the women who seem to be viewing the film. Joan Copjec, focusing on The Wind Will Carry Us, offers the following insight: The question Kiarostami’s reserved cinema raises is this: how can there be any modesty, any shame, for women… if they are prohibited by custom, costume, or legal restrictions from appearing, from entering public space and engaging in the relations they choose? The system of modesty … obliged all Iranian filmmakers to limit themselves to exterior spaces. What makes the cinema of Kiarostami uniquely interesting is the way he introduces interiority, privacy, into this all-exterior world, into the public spaces he almost exclusively films. (Copjec 2006, 29) The movie theater like the car is a heterotopic space, both public and private, exterior and interior. The women in the film are both stars and spectators, objects of voyeurism and voyeurs themselves. Kiarostami’s pedagogy consists of aesthetic operations that are not concerned with unveiling appearances but in showing how they are not equal to themselves by blurring the distinctions between the spectator, filmmaker, and subjects on screen. In this way, the logic of what Lacan calls ex-timacy, the mark of the inside on the outside, becomes a way of imagining something other than the system of modesty that inhibits women’s access to appearance as well as its opposite and logical corollary, the woman as restricted to the logic of appearance, i.e. what is perceived as the Western model of cinema. I have argued that we should address the politics of cinema through this question of equality. But what about the viewers who find Kiarostami’s

284

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

films difficult or inaccessible or elitist? This is the unavoidable risk of resisting the cinema of control and points to the gap between the actual audience and the virtual audience of his films. The audience for his films does not yet exist because his films do not address a particular audience, either Western or Iranian, male or female, but rather anyone who has an “interest in cinema” as suspending the various identities that entail appropriate responses commensurate with his/her sexuality, gender, race, religion or place in the production of global capital, both cultural and financial. This is not due to the absence of history or cultural specificity; on the contrary, it is as a response to the constraints of laws and cultural expectations that Kiarostami’s films refuse a single reading and allow for different responses depending on different cultural backgrounds and identities. His most recent feature films made as international co-productions in Italy and Japan in languages the director himself does not speak continue his cinema of displacement in which we are forced to rethink our assumptions and judgments about character and place. Deleuze once suggested that Paul Klee’s formula—“the people are missing”—should be the guiding axiom of political cinema. Kiarostami’s shareable cinema imagines an audience that it trusts to make and be in its own films, a virtual not actual collectivity of equals, which means an audience, like the one depicted in Shirin, that does not yet exist.

Notes 1

This unpublished text was distributed at a Q&A with Kiarostami following a screening of The Wind Will Carry Us at New York University.

2

Excerpted from Interview extra on DVD for Taste of Cherry, Criterion Collection.

3

In this essay, Rancière is talking explicitly about literature, but this way of thinking about what makes artistic practices political can also be found in his writings on cinema and other arts.

4

For the most detailed and useful English language account of how cinema was transformed during the period following the Revolution, see Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

5

See Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten.

6

Also known as Five: Dedicated to Ozu and shown both as a feature film and as an installation, my preference is for Five as a feature film. A narrative film of sorts made up of five witty and deeply suspenseful minimalist dramas, but without what normally counts as story, Five remains perhaps Kiarostami’s most neglected and misunderstood film by critics.

7

Five seems less out of character when seen in the context of shorts like The Birth of Light (Tavalod-e Nur, 1997) or installations like The Sleepers (2001).



8

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

285

Ten does, of course, include Amin, the young son of the driver, Mania, and in Shirin male spectators, while never shown in close-up, can be seen in the background.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter. 2002. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings Vol. 3 1935–1938, trans. Edmond Jephcott and Harry Zohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copjec, Joan. 2006. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema,” Filzofski Vestnik 27 (2): 11–29. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1963. Film Form and the Film Sense, Jay Leyda (ed. and trans.). Cleveland, OH: Meridian. Farahmand, Azadeh. 2002. “Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema,” in Richard Tapper (ed.), New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, 77–85. New York: I.B. Tauris. Fried, Michael. 1992. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jaggi, Maya. 2009. “A Life in Cinema,” The Guardian, June 13. Available online: http://www.theguardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/13/abbas-kiarostami-film (accessed December 17, 2015). Khodaei, Khatereh. 2009. “Shirin as Described by Abbas Kiarostami,” Offscreen 13 (1). Available online: http://offscreen.com/view/shirin_kiarostami (accessed December 15, 2015). Khomeini, Ruhollah. 1981. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press. Kiarostami, Abbas. 1995. “An Unfinished Cinema.” Available online: http://www. dvdbeaver.com/film/articles/an_unfinished_cinema.htm (accessed December 17, 2015). Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L’évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami. Brussels: Yves Gevaert. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1998. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004a. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques. 2004b. “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33 (1): 63. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum (March): 271. Rougemont, Denis de. 1983. Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

16 Migration and contemporary Indian cinema: A consideration of Anurag Kashyap and la politique des auteurs in the times of globalization Kaushik Bhaumik

This chapter will examine the career of Anurag Kashyap, a leading film director of contemporary Indian cinema. Kashyap is one of the few in a new generation of directors to have been hailed specifically as an auteur in Indian film critical circles, a relentless experimenter with film form who nevertheless stamps his films with his signature directorial style as well as a defined set of existential preoccupations. Moreover, he is also one of the better-known directors from India in world cinema circles. His films find worldwide audiences by utilizing world genre cinema as well as other more experimental filmic conventions in vogue in global cinema today. His reputation in global film circles has been steadily on the rise. In 2013, the French government conferred the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres on Kashyap in appreciation of his contribution to the world of cinema. This award came in the wake of Kashyap’s regular presence as participant as well as promoter of Indian cinema at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2012 his two-part magnum opus The Gangs of Wasseypur depicting the history of two generations of a coal Mafia family in the Indian state of Bihar screened at Cannes, and in 2013 Ugly was selected for the Director’s Fortnight.

288

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Moreover, films produced by the various production companies Kashyap helms had been regulars at Cannes and other international film festivals. In just a few years he has emerged as a prominent figure in the pantheon of contemporary global cinema auteurs. Besides gaining critical global acclaim, Kashyap has collaborated with some leading figures of contemporary world cinema. He has had a longstanding working relationship with Danny Boyle ever since the latter shot Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in Mumbai.1 Kashyap and Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanovic have done a pas de deux, producing one another’s films—Tanovic having co-produced Ritesh Batra’s critically acclaimed Lunchbox (Dabba, 2013) and Kashyap turning producer for Tanovic’s latest film Tigers (2014), which was shot in India. Outside of the global stardom of actors from the Bombay film industry, Kashyap’s is the bestknown face of Indian cinema on the global film stage. He has served as jury member at a number of international film festivals and is seen at leading global film events in the capacity of director as well as a powerful player in the film commerce scene.

The rise of Kashyap Kashyap came to Mumbai in the early 1990s after graduating in Delhi to pursue a career in film. Initially he came to the home city of the largest film industry in the world to try his luck as an actor. However, after having struggled through on meager means for a few years, a chance encounter with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) convinced him that he could write for film. In the years that followed Kashyap wrote scripts for a number of television and film projects being done by upcoming filmmakers of his own generation. In 1998, Kashyap struck gold by writing the script for Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, a gangster film about the Mumbai underworld that was an instant commercial and critical success. The film quickly attained cult status and was hailed as a tour de force of cinematic bravura and auteurial verve. Shortly thereafter, he made his first film, the short Last Train to Mahakali (1999).2 In 2000, Kashyap made his first full-length feature Paanch about a rock band whose members take to crime and murder. The film initially ran into censorship problems because of its unapologetic tone toward drugs, sex, and crime and then became entangled in producer problems, consequently the film remains unreleased in India to this day, in spite of successful runs on foreign markets and critical acclaim at various film festivals.3 However, pirated versions of the film have been available online, and hard copies have also been circulated by fans and Kashyap himself. After making Paanch, Kashyap went back to film writing. A



ANURAG KASHYAP

289

couple of projected directorial ventures bombed and he finally returned to filmmaking in 2004. When Kashyap did come back to directing, he ran into yet another series of censorship issues that led to the non-release of his second directorial venture as well. The film in question is Black Friday, which deals with real-life events of the 1993 Mumbai bombings of key public buildings and sites of the city by an alleged group of Muslim gangsters and Pakistani intelligence agents that left many dead in their wake. Needless to say the frank depiction of the events with real-life characters mentioned by name ensured that the censors banned the film as being too sensitive for the times.4 The film was, however, nominated for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. After the non-release of Black Friday, Kashyap went back to writing yet again, only to re-emerge in 2007. That year saw Black Friday finally released to widespread critical acclaim and immediately established the director as a pioneer of a new kind of critical cinema, bold in its formal experimentation as well as its writing. In 2007 he also made No Smoking, an adaptation of a story by Stephen King about the vicissitudes of a corporate executive trying to give up smoking in order to save his marriage. The film was a commercial and critical failure but has since attained cult status for its striking visual design that converted Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, into a Kafkaesque labyrinth through which the hero journeys to reach a rehabilitation center. The film was also notable for the “cool,” science-fiction look Kashyap endowed the film with through the use of television screens, haptic sensory gadgets, and various scopic technologies.5 If No Smoking inaugurated an experimental, postmodern visual and narrative turn in Kashyap’s cinema, then such an innovative approach to cinema was strengthened in Kashyap’s next venture Dev.D (2009), a contemporary adaptation of the classic of Indian literature Devdas by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, already adapted many times throughout the history of Indian cinema. The novel and the film adaptations have had a cult status in Indian society indicating the core of tragic love at the center of Indic cultures. In the story, the romance between hero and heroine is impeded by social strictures that then drive the hero to an early death through suicidal bouts of alcoholism. Kashyap’s 2009 adaptation of the classic updates the story for contemporary times and provides the director with his first all-India commercial success. The film was praised for its cool visuals, innovative editing, as well as for an experimental soundscape. At various points in the film Kashyap satirizes contemporary Bollywood mainstream cinema, plunges into philosophical contemplation about mobile phone technologies via depiction of a sex video message scandal, creates a mise-en-scène for a Delhi brothel invoking Blade Runner (1982), pays homage to the Lone Ranger films of the Hollywood of the 1970s and, in the end, to Satyajit Ray.

290

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

The year 2009 also saw the release of Gulaal, a political thriller set in a fictive princely state of India that dealt with the all-round corruption of Indian caste feudal society. Kashyap had begun work on the film after Paanch and was allowed to complete and release it in 2009 only because he could bargain on it riding on the success of Dev.D. That year Kashyap also turned producer. The first film produced under the banner of Anurag Kashyap Films (AKFPL), Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, was picked for the Un Certain Regard section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Since then AKFPL has produced a number of films, almost all of them made by firsttime filmmakers, with varying degrees of commercial and critical success. Kashyap has meanwhile gone on to become part of another production company, Phantom Films, which he runs along with filmmakers Motwane and Vikas Bahl and producer Madhu Mantena. Phantom Films too focuses mostly on first-time filmmakers. Some of the films produced have been formidable critical and commercial successes (Motwane’s Lootera [2013], Bahl’s Queen [2014], Navdeep Singh’s NH 10 [2015], and Harshavardhan Kulkarni’s Hunterrr [2015]). Thus in just a decade Anurag Kashyap made a remarkable journey from the margins of Indian cinema to cultic obscurity to being one of the most acclaimed auteurs of contemporary Indian cinema as well as a powerful producer of new talents, both reputations extending beyond India to the global film scene. Indeed, it may be said that it is Kashyap’s cinema that has endowed Indian cinema with global respect, beyond the fame it had already attained globally through the success of mainstream Bombay cinema (or “Bollywood”) during the 2000s. Kashyap has had to work extremely hard to carve out this niche for himself in Indian cinema. His achievement is even more remarkable considering that he was an outsider to the industry to begin with, a migrant cinephile arriving in Mumbai, hoping to make it in a film world that functioned mainly through the clout of existing film families who controlled all aspects of the industry. And it is Kashyap’s personal struggles as a migrant-filmmaker in the current global economy that will be taken up in the following sections as the cornerstone of his brand of la politique des auteurs.

Kashyap, migration and la politique des auteurs I: The films Kashyap is above all an extremely personal filmmaker. All his films have some kind of relationship with his life experiences, personal and social. This is an aspect of his work that is invoked anecdotally but is seldom addressed when considering the deeper layers of personal experience informing his work. Indeed, evaluations of Kashyap as auteur have emphasized his



ANURAG KASHYAP

291

skills as a scripter of his own films, his experimentation with all aspects of film form, his gritty style of presentation of filmic material and the surface themes of his work such as noirish, dystopic urbanism, a surreal postmodern imagination, visceral violence played up through a heightening of the sensory dimensions of his films, an innovative emplacement of new media platforms within the mise-en-scène to capture the contemporary, his narratives of troubled masculinity, and so on. All of this is very relevant when reading Kashyap’s directorial signature through an analysis of the oeuvre of a filmmaker (as per the prescriptions of the various avatars of auteur theory). One reads his films for matters of expression/mise-en-scène and for repeated themes or preoccupation across works/motifs.6 But as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has argued, the task of sounding out auteurial presence across a cinematic oeuvre has to get beyond the surface, that is, to look beyond what the film throws at us as very obvious continuities across the body of work. The task is, therefore, to go beyond superficial signs of auteurial continuity and probe the depths of the oeuvre for the definitive motifs and preoccupations that compose it (cited in Wollen 2009, 457). Taking up Nowell-Smith’s caveat about techniques of auteur theory and routing it through the personal within Kashyap’s body of films, it may be argued that central to his cinema is the experience of the migrant in contemporary global urban complexes. This migrant of Kashyap’s films is not the classical migrant of modernity who moves from one fixed position, say, the countryside, to another fixed location, the city. Instead this migrant’s fate is to be perpetually in motion across multiple locations in the global flows of labor and capital, something that has an immediate referential reality with the manner in which Indian labor has gone virally global within the subcontinent and abroad since the economic liberalization of the 1990s. It follows from here that many of the stylistic signposts through which Kashyap’s work has been conventionally characterized could stem from a cinema defined by the expressive vicissitudes of a body (here male, given Kashyap’s gender) perpetually in motion between various material cultures-sensory confusion that needs a gritty and sensorially visceral style of filmmaking marked above all by violent eruptions of affect, dystopic urbanism, troubled masculinities, an integral usage of new media communication networks to maintain professional and personal relationships, etc. That is to say that the very personal migratory experiences of the director frame at very deep levels of sensory and figurative articulation the more generic characteristics of his films. It would be useful now to turn to Kashyap’s films to delineate the manner in which the logics of migration gird his work foundationally. All the main characters in Kashyap’s films are migrants to Indian metro cities (or thereabouts). One can divide Kashyap’s films into two distinct suites of work—one involving young migrants from the affluent middle classes and the perilous lives their naïve, sensory apparatuses lead in conditions such pampered sensorium is not trained for; the other involving the

292

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

lives of gangster careers of subaltern migrants who at some point in their lives migrate from their homelands in the north Indian countryside to Mumbai. The first set of films consists of Paanch, Gulaal, No Smoking, and Dev.D, the second of Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur. The youngsters forming the rock band in his first feature Paanch come to Mumbai from various parts of India and spend their time slumming it out while seeking a career in the music industry that, like the Hindi film industry, is based out of the city. The film is structured around sensory, metaphorical slippages between at least two senses of the term migration—youthful distraction and bodily unease in unhomely spaces. The restless energies that mark the dissipation of attention, lives, and energies leading to a spiraling down into violence is framed within restless movements of bodies through passages that could be their living space, the cramped up recording scenarios, or movements through the crowded or narrow roads of the cities. Music, drugs, banter, and sex are sensory passages to fill the empty spaces of their lives. Moreover, the very socio-sensory armature that the bodies inhabit is perpetually migrating—the traffic on the street, the trajectories of pedestrian walk, and the textures of media that form the organic backdrop for the story being told. Kashyap conveys the paranoid instability of migratory senses directly through the use of flickering and unstable lighting matched with a grungy sound design and dialogue driven by cynical slang. These features when presented through tight gritty editing lead to the scoring of the cinematic fabric with a sense of lives migrating away from one another in sensory tension bottled up in claustrophobic spaces that bodies recentlycome-to-the-city occupy. What is remarkable is that through the employment of such enunciatory strategies Kashyap layers story, movement, and mise-en-scène one upon the other to create a visceral sense of the body-in-migration and in doing so produces a cinema whose overall movement frame becomes mobile and frenetic. This places us within a sense of what Virilio calls the “integral accident” that is omnipresent in the hyper-mediated universes we inhabit today. In more conventional terms, Kashyap’s cinema is about the inevitable emergence of the sense of evil in the migrant’s life in today’s global conditions.7 Substance abuse and overwrought senses that are nowhere-at-home spiraling toward decadent ends very centrally mark the logics of No Smoking and Dev.D, depicting addiction to cigarettes and alcoholism respectively. In both films, central protagonists seek release from their addictions and sensory unease by roaming the streets of the cities they inhabit, Mumbai in the case of No Smoking and Delhi for Dev.D. In both films they meet sinister characters, denizens of the murky underbelly of cities who exercise the pull of the deep waters on their fragile senses, threatening to take them down into oblivion. Pimp and petty criminal Chunibabu encourages Dev to dissipate himself further and Guru Sealdahwale, a Tantric practitioner



ANURAG KASHYAP

293

of the occult arts, instead of curing K of his addiction, ends up making him more paranoid than before. The occult is central to Gulaal which sees a dysfunctional, geeky youngster get caught in the sinister machination of local feudal forces when he seeks to redress the violence directed at him by his college seniors by way of ragging. In this film, we see a relay of sinister figures—some already formed and others who are made sinister during the course of the film—who wreak havoc on the lives of migrants who come into their worlds. All these figures are in line with Luke, the rock band leader of Paanch, who, in a manner reminiscent of Tyler Durden’s handiwork in Fight Club (1999), toys with the insecurities of his band members leading to murder and mayhem. Such figures manipulate the lives of migrant bodies who are not responsible for the violent complexities of the society they have entered and in some senses are the fantasy objects of the senses of the migrant who is always expecting doom at every corner of a world he/she is foreign to. While middle-class bodies dissipate in the nightmares of their “innocent” senses when migrating into contemporary urban scenarios, Kashyap’s films dealing with subaltern migrants inevitably places them one way or another in the world of the organized crime underworld of Mumbai, invariably ending in their deaths. In both films under scrutiny, Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur, Kashyap places the subaltern migrant body literally in transit between regional homeland and Mumbai. Black Friday begins in Mumbai but soon moves into off-India spaces such as Dubai and Pakistan by way of internal references within the film and in an embodied way by veering off mid-narrative into a long sequence set in north India, the homeland to which one of the suspects of terror flees to from Mumbai. Gangs of Wasseypur is an epic saga of real-life, coal Mafia family feuds in the Indian state of Bihar spanning generations as well as the circumstances that take Mafiosi from Bihar to Mumbai. The film ends with the erstwhile in-power segment of the family moving to Mumbai as a consequence of the way in which internecine feuds back in Bihar turf them out of their home territory. Things could change for the better in Mumbai away from the center of violence … or the migrant could become the starting point for a new line of Mafia in town. If some kind of psychologism is at work underlying the febrile, unstable frame of Kashyap’s films about young migrants lost in Indian metro cities, then the visceral and flamboyant violence that marks the explosive scene of his subaltern gangster film comes straight from martial male egos locking horns on either side of the feudal power divide in the Indian countryside. Gangs of Wasseypur is a spectacle in the performative excess of the competition for power amongst feudal elements where such competition is fought, danced, sung, smart-talked, and romanced over by everyone in sight. But Kashyap frames the creation of an atmosphere of relentless violence within an original violence that has ejected people from their lands and instilled

294

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

deep reserves of fear and anger as well as the stubborn zeal to territorialize at all costs to avenge the original displacement of the senses by violence. If the middle-class migrant to the city, in Kashyap’s films, slips down the slope of sensory insecurity toward decadence due to a lethal confrontation of their impatience to make it in the world with the anomie the city imposes on them, then the subaltern migrant tries to master this insecurity through the gun and more often than not fails and dies. The spectacle of such an upsurge of the senses in migration-in-violence is then orchestrated, in Kashyap’s cinema, through the epic action scales of Bombay film tradition, replete with song and dance, to update the migratory logics of Bombay film tradition itself as well as global cinematic conventions that are today migrating across many cinemas as a result of global media flows.8 If, as Miriam Hansen has argued, much of cinema’s energies came from an intersection between its global circulation and global migrations of labor into the metropoles of the world through the twentieth century, leading to a vernacular modernism, then the same can be acknowledged in the case of Kashyap’s stylish auteur cinema that articulates in its critical success a vision of contemporary global conditions that is felt publicly, a new form of vernacular modernity therefore.9 However, one would have to replace the utopian tones of Hansen’s evaluation of cinema, modernization, and urbanism with avowedly dystopic ones that we perceive not only in Kashyap’s cinema but also seem to dominate much of world cinema’s output today. Kashyap’s cinema is more a symptom of what art theorist T. J. Demos, in his work on contemporary global art (2013), calls “crisis globalization,” which he defines as “an era of growing economic inequality, one facing the increasing influx of migrants and refugees into the North as they seek decent standards of living and escape from repressive regimes, widespread poverty, and zones of conflict” (2013, xiii). Demos then goes on to invoke Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the bare life (2013, xiii–xv) to speak of the “migrant image” in contemporary art practices that seeks to convey abject life rendered so by a stripping of political and basic human rights by contemporary modes of global governance. In invoking Agamben’s positing of the refugee or the migrant, the migrant’s bare life, as the true ground for thinking politics in our times, Demos provides us with a contemporary frame to think through the politique des auteurs for Kashyap’s cinema. Film after film Kashyap presents the migrant’s body as degraded by domestic, social, economic, and political violence in a brutally competitive world where the stakes of survival have become very high. While Demos following Agamben reads the politique des auteurs in global art today with respect to the “refugee” or “migrant” in terms of the global macropolitical and the macroeconomic, Kashyap’s films have the virtue of going beyond the explicitly political to enumerate situations where the migrant might be reduced to bare life through forms of violence that are micropolitical.



ANURAG KASHYAP

295

A nuancing of the ideology of migration underlying Kashyap’s cinema might begin by positing that, more often than not, the migrant in Kashyap’s films is a shape-shifter in flight across all given identity categories, brief becomings that then dissolve to show up the emptiness of the hope for such categories to save the migrant by endowing him/her with an identity that will redeem their lives. Kashyap’s films show the virtual sensorium of contemporary India as being mainly composed of experiences of vast numbers of bodies in migratory flux. These bodies are distressed by the insecurities of displacement as well as by the vicious competition for survival in an increasingly market-driven world. Such insecurities force these bodies to take on multiple identities, as they move from one work context to another. Their unmoored sensory lives, constantly spent in crowds, make them take on the personalities of various elements of the crowd by osmotic mimicry of behaviors around them to give spectacular venting of performative desires—as heterogeneous in its sensory coloration as the crowd itself. Lives in India are not easily definable in terms of class and culture (as belonging to a particular identity niche). They are led between things in a densely packed urbanized terrain—between classes, between genders, between personalities, between work roles, and so on. The sensory flux of displacement in migration merely plays up this indeterminacy at higher frequencies and intensities. Thus, in Dev.D, upon his return from England, prosperous country bumpkin Dev starts to become like Chunibabu, the pimp and pusher. In No Smoking K wants everyone around him to smoke. The whole of Gulaal is a hall of mirrors where everyone starts to become one another as the film progresses, and so on. Scenes and presences migrate from one body to another in the tensions of displacement with immaterial and haptically immediate ways more often than not facilitated by the cutting edge of contemporary new media technologies. What might be more interesting to think through is that, given the intensely personal nature of Kashyap’s cinema, all the characters in his films are placed on the fault-line across which the director and the worlds he has lived in are perpetually threatening to merge with one another. While Gulaal might reference Kashyap’s own experience of sexual abuse by feudal, upper-caste boys in a boarding school, and No Smoking and Dev.D by his experience of substance abuse and the darker times when his films were not getting released, the gangster films too are a possible horizon of becoming, or at least a fantasy of becoming for middle-class characters/ Kashyap in his films.10 In Gulaal boys from affluent backgrounds become gangsters, in Paanch middle-class rocksters (who could be stand-ins for cinephiles in collectives like the ones Kashyap was inhabiting when the film was made) turn to gangster-like behavior.11 Kashyap’s first claim to fame, his script for Satya, depicted the life of a middle-class young man who becomes a key member of a Mumbai Mafia gang. Maybe, Kashyap the

296

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

abject migrant, Kashyap the countercultural cinephile/auteur, Kashyap the folk gangster, and Kashyap the corporate man are all part of the same piece in a virtual universe of slipping imaginations. Indeed, the slippages between middle-class, genre cult cinephilia and gangster cultures become even juicier when we consider the fact that the urban myth of Satya has been a huge hit amongst the Mafia of Mumbai. Thus, Kashyap’s politique des auteurs as filmmaker is first framed by a general context of the sensory vicissitudes of the migrant body, which is then further qualified by the body being placed on the tension line between being-on-the-verge-of-becoming and a real becoming-somethingelse-around-you, helped along by material pilfered from the global media garbage that surrounds migrant lives today. This protean quality of the contemporary migrant figure plays, as we shall see, a definitive role in framing another aspect of Kashyap’s status as global auteur, that of Kashyap as film entrepreneur.

Kashyap, migration and la politique des auteurs II: The business The framing of Kashyap’s films within the current political economy of global migrations allows for a reconciliation of that bugbear of debates in auteur theory centering around the terms “expressionism” and “ideology.”12 Moreover, the filmic articulation of the contemporary political one is a sensory one, viscerally direct, making the gap between expression and ideology imperceptible. However, recent considerations of the auteur in the context of global cinema have further nuanced the idea of film authorship in new directions. One of the new directions that auteur theory has taken is the consideration of the film auteur as entrepreneur. Rosanna Maule’s study of a crop of filmmakers making films in the times of globalization and the European Union (2008) tries to go beyond intellectual and aesthetic definitions of film author as auteur to subsume the auteur within a more expansive horizon of film authorship that focuses on contemporary global auteurs negotiating the flux of global capital in ways different from the traditional frameworks of funding of auteurial cinema in the past. She underlines a new framework for film authorship that employs a layered presence of which being-auteur could be just one layer. Another layer could be auteurs turning producers for their own and other filmmakers’ films to find a stable production context for their careers as well as an enhancement of their reputation as film author through production work. Needless to say, Maule’s opening up of the idea of film authorship to practices such as film production fits very well with Kashyap’s multifaceted global presence in contemporary cinema.



ANURAG KASHYAP

297

Having covered Kashyap’s career as filmmaker-auteur in the previous section, I now turn to his career as a film entrepreneur on the global stage. Yet again the trope of migration will be key to the understanding of certain crucial career moves Kashyap has made that, on the face of things, might seem patently contradictory and even undermining of his status as an auteur. Recently, Kashyap has raised eyebrows amongst cinephile circles with his move toward the high end of corporate capital in the Bombay film industry through his partnership with Dharma Film Productions helmed by mainstream Bollywood filmmaker Karan Johar, a figure whom Kashyap had derided publicly at the beginning of his career. Given his earlier rant and Kashyap’s reputation as a cutting-edge auteur on the fringe of the mainstream industry, Kashyap’s choice of Dharma to produce his most expensive film to date, Bombay Velvet, a film about the Mafia in the Bombay of the 1960s, does seem to be at odds with his personal politique d’auteur.13 However, upon closer perusal Kashyap’s recent move seems to bring to a head contradictions already present in making Bollywood a postliberalization global film industry. Kashyap had already partaken of corporate financing in his production of Dev.D by UTV, a production company that was nevertheless seen as promoting innovative cinema within the mainstream. The film was produced under the UTV Spotboy program, which had been created to accommodate films that straddle the mainstream and art house divide. As a mark of its commitment to promoting a global film culture in India, UTV also runs a World Movies channel, ironically showing films of the very kind that has inspired Kashyap. Following Dev.D, Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur was produced by corporate production house Viacom 18, which is also seen as committed to off-beat cinema within the mainstream. Indeed, Kayshap’s first few films were also financed by fringe corporate capital coming from the advertising sector. Thus the problem seems to be not so much that Kashyap resorted to corporate finance, as that he participated in a particular intersection between corporate finance and the hugely successful mainstream cinema that Dharma represents to public commonsense. To cut through the thicket of hair-splitting judgments about the positionality of Kashyap as auteur between mainstream and margin it might be more profitable to instead focus on Thomas Frank’s crucial study (1997) of the confusion of values created on the cultural front with the revamping of corporate capitalism toward the cultural cool through the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the media sector. Frank’s argument is a simple one— much of countercultural music or cinema of this period would not have been possible if the corporation itself had not gone cool. A new generation of corporate executives brought their creativity and lifestyle aspirations into the corporation in order to conquer the cool in cultural production, an

298

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

event that a TV series such as Madmen documents. Such a development, therefore, conjoined corporate and consumer cultures to a new personality, that of the cool individual. The underlying drift of Frank’s argument is that the new corporation would not have been possible without the corporate personality being already there in the body public, indeed as a significant mass personality even, something that was borne out most literally by the phenomenon of the counterculture going corporate through the 1970s and 1980s. It may be argued that Kashyap’s filmic cool, moving across various logics of corporate capital right through high-end, mainstream corporate capital might be indicative of something along the lines of what Frank is describing. The great virtue of Frank’s study is to open up the counterculture and the corporation to one another as being mutually implicated rather than as being seen as a binary straddling either side of the good-evil divide. Indeed, to take Frank’s argument to a logical conclusion, the contemporary corporation is as socially alienated as the counterculture is and might, therefore, be ranged against itself. In this context, it might be interesting to note that one of the strongest constituencies of Kashyap’s cult following, well versed in the trends of world cinema and film theory, comes from prime institutions of professional excellence such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the Film and Television Institute of Indian (FTII), the National Institute of Design (NID), the National School of Drama (NSD), and the leading media institutions and universities with a reputation for cutting-edge social sciences and humanities (and now, at last, film studies as well …). All these institutions, in turn, produce the cutting edge of high-end labor for the contemporary media industries. They are composed of migrant students who then go on to become migrants of the global corporate economy. The coolness of Kashyap’s film style is undoubtedly attractive to such populations of youngsters who are culturally and intellectually ambitious as well as now increasingly forced to stay in touch with the global cool as part of their professional competence. They are cinephiles who love the same kind of cinema Kashyap references and is inspired by. A seamless loop opens up between Kashyap and cinephiles taking in global film history as well as his own films. More importantly, today’s upper-end corporate culture in India defines its own cultural urban cool through the very same folk and small-town slang of urban migrant labor that is to be found in Kashyap’s cinema. The use of such slang as urban cool runs across the memes IIT graduates post on the Web, in the designs that pass-outs from NID come up with, in the style of dramatics at NSD, and so on. Over time, with the absorption of such professionals into the corporations, such slang becomes a subcultural badge of honor for contemporary corporate culture in India. Such tendencies within the corporation are an indication of the complex cultural lives



ANURAG KASHYAP

299

of migrant workers, unmoored from singular cultural homes, able to be composed by a multiplicity of media experiences ranging from folk-ethnic to urban, but countercultural to the conservative norms of Indian society. Furthermore, alienation in migrant desire in a ruthlessly competitive context of work/performing desire becomes, as depicted in Kashyap’s cinema of loneliness, the context for flamboyant, frame-shattering performance coded by the diverse hues of the crowd that even middle-class Indian youth inhabits today. Such performance is almost invariably tilted toward slang, the countercultural, and, very often, the subaltern, a tendency that reveals the contradictions of work conditions where the cool defines the substance of corporate competition as well as resistance to its violence (in much the same way as slang functions within subcultural/underworld societies).14 This is to say, Kashyap’s life and the lives of Indian cinephiles going corporate today have followed very similar trajectories of cinephilia and life experiences in migrations through the global economy between the corporation and other forms of cultural and political economies. It is not surprising, therefore, that Kashyap has always enjoyed some kind of corporate funding throughout his career. However, while earlier Kashyap’s funds came from corporate capital that sought countercultural credentials against the mainstream, the partnership with Dharma Productions might be a Kashyap move in line with a fundamental re-articulation that the relationship between corporation and culture in India is undergoing as we speak. Kashyap’s partnership with Dharma happened at the precise moment when the older production companies of the Bombay industry turned toward financing upcoming, young auteurial cinema alongside their blockbuster productions. There is a definite trend toward tempering their reputation as providers of mainstream fare with an edgier profile in line with global auteurial cinema. What we might, therefore, be witnessing in all this is the conquest of the Indian corporation by cool. That is, it is possible that mainstream Bollywood cinema earlier defined by conservative, mercantile cultural values is now becoming global corporate precisely by going cool. The recent trend of old-timer, traditional production houses filling up their production rosters with first-time, innovative filmmakers making off-beat films is probably a turn of traditional mercantilism toward the cool according to contemporary corporate wisdom-buzz that might demand being antimainstream—the definitive requirement for a corporation to be competitive in today’s media world, simply because the workforce that peoples corporations and the media consumers they serve are all going cool. What needs to be noted here is that much of this youthful auteurial cinema for the older, traditional production houses is coming from migrant filmmakers to the Bombay film industry, who are bringing the edginess of their life experiences into their films. Kashyap’s marginal experience of a decade ago is now becoming the norm for Bombay film production.

300

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

The turn of older production houses toward corporatization and cool cinema simultaneously could be seen as the conquest of counterculture by corporations but, if, as mentioned earlier, Frank’s work can be extended to posit a fundamental self-alienation of the corporation-going-countercultural, something that the contemporary undermining of corporations by the new, cool, global new media might bear witness to, then the reading of Kashyap’s auteurial cool, entering what was earlier Bollywood mainstream, would start to take on different meanings. To Frank’s definition of the corporation by counterculture we can now add the nuance of this counterculture being defined by coming to terms with the alienation that migration produces in the contemporary worker in the media industry taking in cinephile, auteur, and corporation at once. Being at the cutting edge of media corporatism in India, Bollywood’s turn toward the global auteur Kashyap may show up a fundamental shift in corporate ideologies in India as being the significant thing to look at rather than debate the ethics of Kashyap’s entrepreneurial moves. That is to say, Kashyap’s recent foray into high-end corporate capital might mark a more decisive break for media corporatism in India toward an ambiguous future in the flux of global capitalism than for Kashyap’s ideological stance toward filmmaking. It may be said that finally the politique des auteurs confronts the logic of its own successes—when auteurism begins to define the mainstream of cinema, thus placing it in tension with corporate ideologies that seek to control that mainstream. Indeed, Maule’s going “beyond auteurism” might miss this possibility of auteurism as a moment of crisis for corporate ideologies and vice versa. By way of a conclusion, it might be interesting to carry out a two-step exercise. First, to follow the slippages that begin to develop between the cultures of the Mafia, corporations, and film industries such as Bombay’s or Hollywood’s, made up of singular, migrant, male workers drawn from across the globe and the corporate cult of lonely single men around films such as Taxi Driver that depict an existentially burdened, lonely, subaltern male figure isolated in the city, believing he is being exploited by a ruthless superego, and given to fits of explosive violence—a film that has been absolutely crucial to the history of global cinema today (a study of the global career of this film leading up to contemporary cinephilia and auteurism is severely overdue). Second, to bring such slippages to bear on the character of the cult of the auteur built by lonely male cinephiles around male filmmakers and B-films dealing with the masculine troubles of drifters, migrants, and gangsters watched in multiplex-size chambers catering not for communities but the individual. Only then might we be able to make sense of the contradictions a global film auteur such as Kashyap (and corporations, gangsters, cinephiles, etc.) and the auteur theory itself, straddling the cultural economy of our times, defined by the loneliness of migration more than ever before.



ANURAG KASHYAP

301

Notes 1

Danny Boyle has publicly cited the mise-en-scène of Slumdog Millionaire as having been inspired by Black Friday (a film Kashyap directed) and Satya (a film Kashyap scripted). Boyle returned the favor by lending Kashyap a still photo camera that could shoot up to 11 fps when he was shooting his 2009 feature Dev.D in which Kashyap pays homage to the famous rummagingaround-in-the-commode sequence from Boyle’s Trainspotting.

2

For a riveting account of the Media Classic film and media collective in Mumbai that Kashyap became a part of on his arrival in Bombay see Lalitha Gopalan “Bombay Noir,” in Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson (eds), A Companion to Film Noir, 496–511 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 501–4.

3

Paanch was shown to the public at the Osian’s-Cinefan Film Festival in 2003 for the first time. This was possible because film festivals in India have the license to show uncensored films.

4

For a discussion of Black Friday in the context of an atmosphere of terror, conspiracy, and surveillance see Mazumdar “Terrorism, conspiracy and surveillance in Bombay’s urban cinema,” Social Research 78 (1) (2011): 149–55.

5

For a detailed discussion of No Smoking in this vein see Ranjani Mazumdar “Friction, Collision and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema,” in Gyan Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 170–80.

6

For a useful overview of the various debates around auteur theory see John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

7

The “integral accident” in the lives of young people prone to obsessive self-destructive drives in Kashyap’s film is not unlike the catastrophic, youthful imagination depicted in a film such as Donnie Darko (2001). For a reading of Donnie Darko, via Paul Virilio, that could be usefully referenced for Kashyap’s films such as Paanch see Mitch Goodwin, “Machine Vision: The Neo-Gothic Narrative of Millennial Technoculture.” Unpublished paper, presented at Umbrella Studio, September 17, 2014.

8

For the absolute centrality of the experience of migration for the sensory ideologies of Bombay cinema from its foundational moments and its current new media forms see Bhaumik (2012a).

9

See Miriam Hansen (1994) for cinema and migration and Miriam Hansen (1999) “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema and Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6 (2): 59–77 for the global migrations of cinema.

10 For Kashyap speaking about the autobiographical elements in No Smoking watch YouTube video “Anurag Kashyap on No Smoking! (Part-1)”, available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjJAL5emp74 (accessed June 1, 2015).

302

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

11 For an analysis of Gulaal, see Bhaumik (2012b), 27–9. 12 See, for example, Stephen Heath, “Comment on the ‘The Idea of Authorship,’” in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981), 214–20. 13 For an interview with Kashyap and Johar during the production of Bombay Velvet see Priyanka Srivastava (2014), “Foes-turned friends Anurag Kashyap and Karan Johar open up about their online feud,” Mail Online, February 5. Available online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article2552423/Foes-turned-friends-Anurag-Kashyap-Karan-Johar-open-online-feud. html (acessed July 31, 2015). 14 For a remarkable study of cool, slang, and the music of underworld corporatism see Gail Holst, The Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-Culture-Love, Sorrow and Hashish (Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 1992).

Works cited Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2012a. “Film and Migration, South Asia,” in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2012b. “The Persistence of Rajasthan in Indian Cinema: One Region, So Many Views,” The Journal of the Moving Image 9: 13–39. Demos, T. J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of the Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Maule, Rosanna. 2008. Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy, and Spain since the 1980s. Bristol: Intellect Books. Wollen, Peter. 2009. “The Auteur Theory,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 455–70. New York: Oxford University Press.

17 Space and time in the land of the end of history Marco Grosoli

As of 2015, the stupendous output of Filipino director Lavrente Diaz totaled over fifty hours of film. To dissect such an overwhelming body of work would require more than these few pages, and in fact, might not even fit the scope of a monograph. Drawing from the only open philosophical reference Diaz has made publicly this chapter will limit itself to highlighting a peculiar intersection between philosophy and history/politics informing a large part of his cinema, and will use it to skim the surface of some of his films, not to provide a comprehensive overview of Diaz’s cinema, but rather to signal a direction that other researchers will hopefully follow as they too delve deeper into his work—one of the richest, most textured and layered in contemporary cinema. Three films in particular will be considered: Century of Birthing (Siglo ng pagluluwal, 2011), i.e. Diaz’s most deliberate attempt to lay bare his aesthetics and philosophy of film; Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino, 2004), which deals with the historical curse his country, ravaged for centuries by military invasions, dictatorships, various colonialist and imperialist dominations and other plagues, has never seemed able to fully recover from; From What Is Before (Mula sa kung ano ang noon, 2014), again a very specifically Filipino take on the early years of the Marcos dictatorship, whose scope nonetheless extends to the broader condition of postmodernity as such.

304

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

A brief biographical sketch Lavrente Indico Diaz was born in Dayu Paglas (Mindanao, southern Philippines) in 1958. After completing a degree in Economics, embarking upon an unsuccessful music career, and later receiving the prestigious Palanca Memorial Award for Literature, he moved to Manila with his family. While struggling as a journalist and TV author, he attended scriptwriting workshops by Ricky Lee (who wrote several scripts for Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and other directors of Philippine cinema’s Second Golden Age), and attended the Mowelfund Film Institute, where he gained experience in practical filmmaking and shot his first shorts. In 1992, he moved to New York, where he continued to write articles for a living and connected with the local independent film crowd. After two years, he began shooting in 16mm Evolution of a Filipino Family (Evolution), an incredibly troubled production he would only bring to completion in 2004.1 In 1997, he returned to Manila, where Regal Films company hired him to shoot three ultra-low-budget, fairly unremarkable (and heavily recut by the company) “pito-pito” films (“seven-seven”: seven days of shooting, seven of post-production). They were “ostensibly genre pictures, but embrace a peculiarly Filipino mix of the lurid, political and religious” (Garcia 2000, 53), and they featured some of Diaz’s later themes: “a country that has been abused and raped, a nation with a hollow center, the search for moral sustenance” (Garcia 2000, 55). Unhappy with the commercial film industry, Diaz managed the transition to independent film with the five-hour-long Batang West Side (2001), shot in 35mm in Jersey City (New Jersey). It marks the first token of “Diazian style” as we now know it. Despite his move to independent cinema, he did make one last Regal film in 2002, the dystopian, political science fiction Hesus, rebolusyunaryo, his last film shot in color with the exception of Norte, The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan, 2013). The early 2000s proved a turning point for both Diaz, and filmmakers of various sorts. The digital takeover and its extreme flexibility enabled directors to keep budgets low, thereby making total creative control much easier to attain. Concurrently this time period saw a surge in independent Filipino filmmakers, such as Khavn de la Cruz or John Torres amongst many others. Around this time Diaz himself gave up expensive 16mm and finished Evolution in digital. A mixture of 16mm, digital, video, and archival footage, the eleven-hour final cut of Evolution premiered in Manila in December 2004 (after the Toronto Film Festival had shown a nine-hour version), and was later included in many other international film festivals beginning with Rotterdam, January 2005. Without digital, an eleven-hour film could never cost as little as US$40,000. Due to the resourceful, economically aware, and aesthetically



LAV DIAZ

305

focused use of the digital, Hernandez (2014, 65–71) regards Evolution as the very dividing line between the two eras of digital cinema in the Philippines (2014, 12): the period of introduction (1999–2004) and the period of mature innovation (2005–9). By keeping his budgets astonishingly low (and his crews accordingly small), Diaz makes his films with complete autonomy, yet because of their length, their circulation is mostly limited to festivals and similar venues. Venice screened the 540-minute Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadaanan sa banwaan ninga mga engkanto, 2007) and 450-minute Melancholia (2008) in the “Orizzonti” sidebar (where they both received prizes), as well as 360-minute Century of Birthing out of competition. However, Diaz’s worldwide popularity dramatically increased only after the presentation of the four-hour Norte in a 2013 Cannes sidebar (“Un Certain Regard”). The following year, 2014, he made his debut in a major competition (Locarno) with From What Is Before (338 minutes), and took away first prize.

Time or space? Century of Birthing follows the story of Homer, a filmmaker (ostensibly inspired by real-life Diaz himself) unable to finish editing one of his films. When asked “What is cinema?” by an interviewer, Homer replies “[W]e go back to what Martin Heidegger said: do we, in our time, have an answer to the question of the real meaning of the word ‘being’?” Shortly after Homer references the opening of Heidegger’s Being and Time, he says: “Cinema will go back to the past, the present, the future … now!” Homer’s personal definition repeats almost verbatim what the philosopher described as the unity of the three ek-stases characterizing Dasein’s temporality: cinema as Dasein, in that it enacts the primordial “process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases” (1962, 65, 329). Thereby, past, present, and future are all grouped together by the “now,” whose leveling-off engenders the “vulgar,” inauthentic notion of time as a mere sequence of “nows.” The overall plot functions as a Heideggerian allegory about the work of art, involving three women. One, a friend of Homer’s, is pregnant, but has an abortion by forcing the fetus out with a piece of metal. Another, the leading character in Homer’s film, is a former nun asking an ex-convict to get her pregnant—but then she stabs herself in order to ensure a mis­carriage. The third is a follower of a fundamentalist cult, who is raped by a photographer (in a nod to Ishmael Bernal’s Himala, 1982) and subsequently expelled by the cult, as it only admits virgins. After wandering for days in despair, in the last scene she gives birth to a child (the photographer’s) actively assisted by Homer, whom she has just met, as he too is

306

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

walking around aimlessly, having left his editing room, unable to solve the conundrum posed by his film. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger distinguishes between world and earth. The former is “that always-nonobjectual to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep us transported into being. Wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, wherever we take them over or abandon them, wherever they go unrecognized or are brought once more into question, there the world worlds” (1936, 23). The latter is “that into which the work sets itself back, and thereby allows to come forth, … the coming-forth-concealing [Hervorkommend-Bergende] … that which cannot be forced, that which is effortless and untiring. On and in the earth, historical man founds his dwelling in the world” (1936, 24). In Diaz’s vision, “world” is the film that Homer is trying to edit and to which the second woman belongs, viz. the narrative articulation (meant to bring forth the essence of that footage) of a temporality whose spontaneous flow is found unfolding in the “real life” to which the first woman belongs and that stands here for “earth.” Cinema and “real life” cannot be separated, just as “world” and “earth” cannot be. Only the third woman gives birth to a baby, the other two both miscarry: she lies at the intersection of the other two. Many features depict her cult as fundamentally theatrical: everybody speaks with great emphasis within the limits of a rigid, spatial confinement (the commune); guru Father Tiburcio (“a great theater artist,” says a follower) is shown doing his make-up and putting on a wig in front of a mirror; a “teleology of salvation” is frequently insisted upon: followers state that Tiburcio “will bring us to a new era” and sing “We will all go to the Father’s House.” Unlike the second woman, who stands for cinema only insofar as she is one character in Homer’s film-within-the-film, as apart from (Century of Birthing’s) “real life,” only the third woman truly is cinema because she is theater raped by photography in (Century of Birthing’s) “real life”: she falls from the cult’s narrative, teleological, and theological delusions of redemption, while differing from the second woman’s attempt to deliberately attain redemption by means of failing (that is, by quitting her nunnery and mating with a former convict only to get pregnant). In Heidegger, the ontological and the ontic are articulated together by a disjunction ruled by contingency; whereas Tiburcio’s cult misses this articulation because it overlooks disjunction (i.e. it tries to straightforwardly redeem the ontic into the ontological), the second woman, while accepting that disjunction by choosing the ontic against the ontological, damnation against redemption, fails all the same as she overlooks contingency. Conversely, the third woman’s fall is not deliberate like the second one’s, but ensues from the traumatic irruption of the unexpected and unwanted from the outside (the rape). Contingency also saves Homer, in that only the accidental encounter with the third woman, outside his editing room, makes him a



LAV DIAZ

307

FIGURE 17.1  A clearing.

Source: Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz, 2011) © Sine Olivia.

“Heideggerian” artist: “a midwife” (Heidegger 1936, 52–6) of whatever presents itself in the gap between world and earth (a gap which that woman embodies). Art does not consist in “the achievement or action of a subject who sets himself a goal that he strives to achieve” (1936, 41), but in letting Being be disclosed. Contingency informs Diaz’s practice too: he does not use the digital to carry out his projects exactly as planned, but to remain open to whatever happens during the shooting and to incorporate it. In Century of Birthing, the final storm was not in the script: Diaz decided to film it and keep it as soon as he saw it break. Similarly unscripted scenes with a farming cooperative were filmed and added after Diaz met those peasants by chance during the shooting. An adjective Diaz frequently employs in interviews, “organic,” aptly designates this process of incorporation of accidental contingency enabled by the lightness and versatility of the digital (Guarneri 2013). This allegory could be detailed much further, but this is not our point here. Rather, it should be noted that the final encounter between Homer and the third woman occurs in a flat, grassy, empty area that can only be described as “a clearing.” This outdoor encounter not only contrasts with the woods, the urban spaces, the interiors, and every other place shown in the film, but also highlights that in order to achieve their goals (a delivery; artistry), both characters had to leave behind their spatial confinement (the commune; the editing room) as well as their temporal, teleological goals (otherworldly redemption; his film’s editing). The clearing is thus the quintessential place as outlined by Heidegger in his “Art and Space”: “place always opens a region in which it gathers the things in their

308

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

belonging together” (1969, 6). Therein, Heidegger returns to his theory of art but, compared to his 1936 treatise, space now plays a much bigger role. For instance, in the following passage, pointing among other things to a disjunction between ontological and ontic like that attained by the third woman by blurring the borders between redemption and damnation, the emphasis is now less on the truth-disclosing gap between world and earth (directly ensuing from the preponderance conceded to temporality and Dasein) and more on the spatial openness (“clearing”) enabling the disclosure of truth. Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for man’s settling and dwelling. When thought in its own special character, clearing-away is the release of places toward which the fate of dwelling man turns in the preserve of the home or in the brokenness of homelessness or in complete indifference to the two. Clearing-away is release of the places at which a god appears, the places from which the gods have disappeared, the places at which the appearances of the godly tarries long. In each case, clearing-away brings forth locality preparing for dwelling. (Heidegger 1969, 6) According to Alejandro Vallega (2003, 177–82), “Art and Space” is only one of the many factors suggesting that despite Being and Time’s stubborn emphasis on temporality as a primordial horizon of Being (so much so that spatiality is essentially subordinated to it), Heidegger implicitly bestowed a great importance on spatiality, a concept he failed to properly come to terms with (2003, 113–30). “Although Heidegger maintains in Part I of Being and Time that Dasein’s being-in-the-world is characteristically spatial, when he attempts to rethink the phenomena of spatiality and interpret it in terms of temporality he falls into a transcendental articulation that pushes spatiality away from the question of being” (2003, 123). Particularly in his later years, Heidegger directly or indirectly acknowledged that “[t]he attempt in Being and Time, section 70, to trace back [zurückführen] Dasein’s spatiality from temporality is untenable” (Vallega’s translation [in Vallega 2003, 126], from Heidegger’s 1962 [1927] “Zeit und Sein”), but already a number of parts in Being and Time, such as the one on “clearing” (Lichtung) (Vallega 2003, 125) seemingly hint at spatiality being for him at least no less primordial than temporality, although Heidegger later shied away from and withdrew this insight. By supplementing Homer’s speech on cinema as Dasein with images pointing towards a clearing and at the spatial roots of truth’s disclosure, Diaz seems to embrace Heidegger’s temporal ontology, while at the same time restoring the role of spatiality that the philosopher overlooked. This point is not only philosophical and aesthetic, but also downright postcolonial.



LAV DIAZ

309

I am applying the theory that we Malays, we Filipinos, are not governed by the concept of time. We are governed by the concept of space. We don’t believe in time. If you live in the country, you see Filipinos hang out. They are not very productive. That is very Malay. It is all about space and nature. If we were governed by time, we would be very progressive and productive. … In the Philippine archipelago, nature provided everything, until the concept of property came with the Spanish colonizers. Then the capitalist order took control. I have developed my aesthetic framework around the idea that we Filipinos are governed by nature. The concept of time was introduced to us when the Spaniards came. We had to do oracion at six o’clock, start work at seven. Before it was free, it was Malay. (Diaz, interviewed in Baumgärtel 2007) If one sets Homer’s definition of cinema as Dasein in nature against the background of Diaz’s cinematic praxis as corroborated by the quotation above, one is tempted to place Diaz amongst those who claim that Heidegger’s attempts to overcome Western metaphysics bumped into a dead end. That is to say, what seemingly underpins Diaz’s perspective is the implicit premise that Dasein’s subordination of spatiality to time may be inherently unfit to actually accomplish that overcoming, leaving Heidegger ultimately trapped in the progressive historicity he was nonetheless critical of. In contrast therewith, by restoring the pre-eminence of spatiality, Diaz aims to undermine Western temporal metaphysics, and thereby the very premises of colonial domination. Before going further into this issue, we should inspect the tangible qualities that determine his relationship to and views of space and time: Diaz’s style.

Diaz’s cinematic form Formal differences notwithstanding (most notably as regards lighting patterns), most of Diaz’s post-Batang films share several common traits. Diaz’s long takes are very often static, (extreme) long shots whose angles reveal conspicuous compositional care without being deliberately “pictorial.” Therein, action unfolds without cuts. The risk of theatricality inherent in such an arrangement is avoided by (amongst other things) constant interaction between characters and environment, often achieved thanks to the depth of field. Typically, in Diaz’s shots characters appear in the far back of the frame, walk toward the camera, carry out some action and/or dialogue, and laterally exit the frame (long) before the cut. If a space needs “x” minutes to be traversed by a character, then the shot lasts “x” minutes, as long as it takes. Hence the unusual length of these films.

310

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Diaz’s cinema is soundly, if paradoxically, action-based. On the rare occasions when the camera moves, it mostly follows a character or embodies their subjective, ocular perception. Otherwise, Diaz’s long shots are the site where actions (dialogs or else) unfold according to a palpable articulateness. Even when nothing seems to happen and people are shown merely walking, working, talking, or just standing or sitting, if one watches closely (and the viewer’s eyes certainly have plenty of time to wander around), there is nothing shapeless in that “plain” passing of time: pace is carefully organized, and so is mise-en-scène, the staging of bodies, and objects in space. There is no shortage of beginning-middle-end structures, yet they are not constrained by any rigidly dramaturgic scheme. They are just left to unfold according to a time of their own. Indeed, Diaz’s cinema goes “back to the past, the present, the future … now!” but those three ek-stases of time, in the guise of beginning-middleend, are clustered together in a “now” whose form is eminently spatial, i.e. the long take circumscribing in advance the area wherein recognizably articulated action takes place. To be sure, Diaz’s cinema relies on a painstaking temporalization of every fiber appearing onscreen, but it refuses the economic imperatives of dramaturgy, the optimization of resources to keep the viewer awake. Instead, it chooses another framework: space. By anchoring the material at hand in space, Diaz lets it open up in such a way as to disclose its internal rhythm, thanks to a “directorial midwifery” not unlike Homer’s, his alter-ego. A rigid, top-down imposition of dramaturgy would “overworld the world” and neglect the earth, whose latent shape must be, sculpture-like, eased out instead. I’ve shot roughly forty or fifty percent of [Heremias] already. Right now, I’m watching and studying the footage. I don’t know how long it’s going to be but it’s definitely going to be long. Again, this is not deliberate. The story is evolving; the characters are growing; new threads are appearing; doors are opening. I can’t do anything about it; I have become a slave to this organic process. (Diaz, interviewed in Tioseco 2006) Diaz fleshes his material out into “an exceptionally multi-faceted narrative” (Huber 2005), over-textured like a novel rather than dramaturgically verticalized like a play. Diaz’s narratives rely less on linear cause-effect sequences (on the contrary, many long takes appear as autonomous blocks of time-space) than they do on a “horizontal” (that is, spatial) series of correspondences, parallelisms, and rhymes between elements scattered at great distance from each other all over the monumental screening time. Thus the viewer faces a spatialized “now” and a plot interwoven, as it were, out of sight and beyond reach, aside from any regular narrative linearization.



LAV DIAZ

311

Yet this refusal of standard dramaturgy is not meant to keep the spectator at a distance: the novelistic/“organic” process of fleshing out is meant to provide characters and situations with enough consistency for the audience to feel them close. I avoid close-ups when treating the characters. … My philosophy is I do not want to manipulate the audience’s emotions. … I want them to enter my film the way they enter their normal milieus. That is why I do not use a score to supplement, reinforce or heighten an already emotional situation. This is Hollywood’s paradigm of drama, where resonance is manipulated and pathos is contrived. … [Filmmaking] is a process that would culminate in an eventual dynamic between the film and the viewer, and the viewer and the world. … I want the audience to see the truth and to discover their truths by experiencing the realities that I am presenting or re-presenting. I respect the audience’s capacity to understand, think, be open to a broader view of life, embrace different milieus, cultures, new principles and philosophies; … to be simply immersed in what they are watching.2 (Diaz, interviewed in Wee 2005) It is again cinema as Dasein. “Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being. Thus as Being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others” (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 26, 123). By recreating our human, primordial temporality, cinema puts us in touch with Others, viz. those on the screen sharing our own human, primordial temporality. As we have seen, the temporality at issue is detoured toward spatiality; the long take as such clearly enhances the spectator’s relative illusion and shares not only the characters’ time, but also their space. Moreover, “Being towards Others is ontologically different from Being towards Things which are present-at-hand” (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 26, 124); this is why spectators should not be manipulated and treated like “equipments” (in Heidegger’s jargon). “The entity which is ‘other’ has itself the same kind of Being as Dasein. In Being with and towards Others, there is thus a relationship of Being [Seinsverhaltnis] from Dasein to Dasein” (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 26, 124): the spectator should thus be put in the position of feeling what the philosopher calls “solicitude” for the Other onscreen. In Melancholia, three intellectuals remain devastated in the aftermath of the loss of a friend, Renato, who died ten years previously in a violent insurrection that took place between themselves, their village, and the army. To overcome this trauma, Julian, Alberta (Renato’s partner), and Rina head to a remote location, assume different identities (a pimp, a prostitute, a nun), and take part in a therapeutic, reality soap opera without cameras (except Diaz’s, not exactly unused to reality-soap-like “real time”). The past proving too painful and cumbersome to overcome, the characters abort

312

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

their mission and return to Manila and to their true identities, remaining there until further tragedies consume them. Rina commits suicide, Julian ends up wandering aimlessly, saying “I am not Julian,” while Alberta chooses to care for Hannah, an actual prostitute. Julian is stuck in Dasein as temporal ek-stase, that is, as perpetual sticking out of oneself, while Alberta, by feeling solicitude about Hannah’s condition, is more receptive to one of Dasein’s most straightforwardly spatial aspects:3 Mitdasein, Being-With. In general, for Diaz, the Other one is supposed to feel solicitude for is, once more, a postcolonial Other: In the film’s central death scene [in Evolution], I want the audience to experience the afflictions of my people who have been agonising for so long—under the Spaniards for more than 300 years, under the Americans for almost 100 years till now, under the Japanese for four years, and then under Marcos for more than 20 years till now too. I want people to experience our agony. That is the death scene of the Filipinos. (Diaz, interviewed in Wee 2005) After that twenty-minute long take, showing nothing but Kadyo’s agony, the corpse of that character is dragged away “in a sequence that replicates Spoliarium (1884), the grand masterpiece of Filipino painter Juan Luna” (Bertolin 2005) affirming slaves’ pride against the oppressors by depicting carcasses of ancient Roman gladiators being dragged away from the arena after the fight.

An anti-postmodern historical novel Evolution follows Kadyo’s family, the Gallardos, approximately from 1971 to 1987, a time frame that bookends Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship as Martial Law was proclaimed in 1972, and in 1986 his presidency was overthrown. Archival footage of these and other salient historical events of that period occasionally interrupt Evolution’s non-linear, fictional thread, frequently jumping back and forth in time to portray the lives of the Gallardos, marked by hard work in the fields and in the mines, by tragedies, and by the diasporic displacement of most of its members over the years. In the early 1970s, young Reynaldo kills his surrogate mother’s murderers and becomes a fugitive, while his uncle Kadyo goes to prison for arms trafficking with the rebels; Kadyo’s intentions, however, were entirely apolitical, and were motivated solely by his desire to support his family. All of the Gallardos live their lives completely apart from history, absorbed in their daily occupations, farming or mining; their concerns are not at all political, but personal (like sending the younger daughter to



LAV DIAZ

313

school). Kadyo is the only Gallardo (very loosely) related to the broader History, as otherwise the two—the Gallardos and History—are depicted as totally unrelated. The crucial exception is Kadyo’s death. Kadyo happens to be killed next to the farmers’ rally in Mendiola Street, on January 22, 1987, when government forces opened fire on the protesters. This connection (enhanced by an unusually tight parallel montage between the two) suggests that the Mendiola Massacre stands for the definitive loss of hope: even after Marcos’s departure, with no overt colonialist/imperialist oppressor in sight, the old problems persisted. It is the moment when the Philippines’ longstanding doom stops being historical and begins to appear as permanent, innate, inherent, irreparable. Because the two main threads intersect only at that point, Evolution is a paradoxical historical novel: on the one hand, it shows the life of the people as utterly exiled from History, resting upon the rhythms of nature, of peasantry, and of work in close connection with the earth from time immemorial; on the other hand, it historically situates precisely this non-historical exile from History. The triumph of U.S.-backed Marcos, who paved the way for globalization-driven neocolonialism following in the footsteps of the colonialist and imperialist powers that ravaged the archipelago for centuries, could only be beyond Marcos, i.e. Mendiola Massacre: precisely because the dictator was no longer around, it sealed the Philippines’ oppression as beyond historical reach. That was, as it were, the country’s official entrance into the postmodern hell of the end of History. Not incidentally, The End of History was the subheading of a 2013 film whose title, Norte, referred to the place in which the film was shot, the northern region where Marcos began his rise to power. “Norte is the place where the history of the Philippines ended, when Marcos destroyed us” (Diaz, interviewed in Guarneri 2013). Diaz’s point, though, is that History as such does not belong to the original Filipino horizon. The “Malay time” of our previous quotation is not historical time. Malay peoples relied on space (that is, on nature, as it was generous enough to immediately, effortlessly provide for their sustenance), whereas time and History, most notably in the guise of a teleological, Christian-inflected conception of History oriented toward a future redemption, had been imported by the Spaniards. In the wake of several past attempts by Filipino popular culture to appropriate and subvert the teleological framework of redemption (Ileto 1979), Diaz shows the Gallardos in their exile from History and (equally temporal) narrative. By disregarding the imperative of shaping a story “economically” so that it runs at every instant toward its teleological resolution, and devoting instead dozens of minutes to people quietly farming their land, mining, walking to reach the mining camp, cooking, eating, resting, and so on, Diaz lets his films overflow the customary two-hour format pigeonholing film as a brief, restful distraction from a productive working life, and shows the Filipino/Malay temporal condition as immersed in space rather than progressing in time.

314

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Yet one should beware of mistaking this Filipino/Malay space-governed time for a kind of original heaven that at some point was forever lost. Such a narrative would still correspond to a postmodern nostalgia for some utopian premodernity. This stance is openly dismissed by “A Tale of Two Mothers,” a short by an imaginary filmmaker called Taga Timog (Tagalog for “From the South”—like Diaz’s Mindanao region) that is shown in the very last scene of Evolution. Nearly ten hours of screen time after Reynaldo’s surrogate mother was shown finding his baby in the garbage, this short depicts Reynaldo’s actual mother laying him down in the garbage. Reynaldo’s true mother does not belong to the same film as him, but to a film-within-the-film: an insurmountable distance keeps the origin afar. The moment when the origin is loss is thus never shown, except at a different level, in a different film altogether; and so the origin can be restored only insofar as it is invented. It follows that here the origin does not precede its loss, but is retroactively posited by it. The origin is nowhere to be found, except in the aftermath of its own loss: it is only projected back by traumatic colonial/imperial/neocolonial abuses. This is why Diaz does not try to “visualize” or “represent” Filipino/Malay space-governed time in its alleged pre-modern plenitude, but rather locates it precisely where it should not be, i.e. after its own loss. Thereby, Diaz’s cinema eschews the postmodern, nostalgic utopia it would otherwise seem to flirt with. Likewise, it eschews orientalization by a peculiar “self-­ orientalization,” i.e. by taking on the pre-modern purity the West wants to project on the East, only to undermine it by displacing this Filipino/ Malay space-governed time within postmodernity itself and its own hegemonic spatiality. It can be argued, then, that Evolution enacts a sort of persistence of modernism within postmodernism not only because of its several modernist formal features (black-and-white, jumbled temporal structure, heterogeneity of the filmic material support, self-reflexivity, and so on and so forth), but also because it subtly “spaces out” pre-modern and postmodern spatialities. Diaz’s point is that people are not in touch with this spatiality that still informs their lives. Rather than propounding to fight post-historical postmodernity with a return to an inherently non-Filipino/Malay historicity, Diaz fights the postmodern preponderance of space with space, by grasping the Filipino/Malay “retroactively original” spatiality (or space-governed temporality) that lingers in their way of living even, and particularly, after a different lifestyle was imposed on them. The Gallardos are quelled by cheap, escapist entertainment as radio soap operas blind them to the harsh conditions of their lives, i.e. by teleological, melodramatic “narrativizations” of a properly Filipino anti-teleological, anti-historical fatalism. But Diaz “rapes theatricality with photography” and depicts, right after showing the family avidly listening to the radio, unconcerned radio actors playing out those same radio dramas in front of their microphones. Time (that is,



LAV DIAZ

315

a teleological, melodramatic narrative) is “corrected” by space. It is no wonder that filmmaker Lino Brocka (1939–91) is featured in Evolution in a fake documentary-within-the-film: Brocka similarly dismantled Marcos’s temporal, teleological rhetoric of developmental redemption of the country, by means of melodramas taking advantage of urban space to show the country’s actual poverty (Tolentino 2014, 85–116). This fake documentary is watched by Kadyo when he, after failing to put his life together in Manila once discharged from prison, is assigned to kill the filmmaker, whom the regime hates. Kadyo refuses to comply, and is murdered. His death seals the impossibility of historical salvation—but all is not lost. Something can still be done, namely to make people aware of the spatialized time they live in—not a postmodern one, relying on a post-historical, ideological illusion of simultaneity (whose flipside is the teleological perspective still implied in the exploitative dramas/narratives that the Gallardos like so much, holding simultaneity/happiness as an unattainable goal indefinitely lying ahead), but rather the archaic, pre-modern, space-­ governed Filipino/Malay time that somehow still persists. In order to portray the latter on screen, Diaz indulges in an art of staging, whose palpable choreographic quality bestows extension to spatiality, thereby dispelling the illusion of simultaneity. And by imagining Marcos’s regime as actually feeling threatened by Brocka’s cinema (something definitely unlikely to occur in real life), Evolution maintains that a cinematic aesthetic effectively capable of rethinking spatiality is a utopian answer to history’s postmodern, post-historical immobility. Filipinos must take their suffering in their own hands, rather than delegate it to radio/melodramas transfiguring it into vain hopes; they must be rendered aware of the ancient, space-governed Filipino/Malay time they were originally disrupted from and still live in the shadow of. The story of Reynaldo (whose abandonment is shown in “A Tale of Two Mothers”) is also one of Diaz’s recurrent nods to Sisa,4 a female character from José Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere losing her mind after losing her sons: a metaphor for the nation as irretrievably lost origin. The statue of Rizal, the ultimate Filipino patriot, comes to life twice in Evolution, suggesting that temporal redemption lies in its own negation, as much as time is nestled into unmoving space, and modernism persists within postmodernism. As From What Is Before will show with even greater clarity, the ambiguity wherewith Diaz’s cinema situates itself in relation to postmodernity looks somewhat deliberate. The role spatiality, historicity, and the irretrievable loss of origin play in his films is not without verging on postmodernism—but a closer inspection would reveal it as something fundamentally different.

316

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Before the conspiracy From What Is Before, set in a remote village shortly before, during, and after Marcos’s 1972 proclamation of Martial Law, would fit well in Fredric Jameson’s groundbreaking collection The Geopolitical Aesthetic, while also demonstrating that there has been a lot of water under the bridge since its 1992 release. Whereas Tahimik Kidlat’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977), the Filipino entry in the book (186–213), still rested upon a certain “shuttling” between First and Third World, more than three decades of globalization later the boundaries between the two have been perverted to such an extent that Diaz’s latest opus does not even need to articulate a distance between First and Third World. The vicissitudes of a small Filipino village immediately relate to the postmodern “global village,” as Diaz chose to employ the narrative form of the conspiratorial plot which in Jameson’s book especially characterized First World, postmodern, cinematic narratives. Jameson argued that the conspiratorial plots informing many postmodern films epitomize the postmodern difficulty to totalize. They are characterized on the one hand by the failure to provide their efforts of totalization with an acceptable narrative closure, and on the other hand by purely spatial “closure-effects” mutely hinting at a totalization that cannot be reconstructed through narrative anyway. The globalized totality that the story is unable to convey, environment and places embody immediately. In From What Is Before, the village is shaken by a strange phenomenon: people and animals start to die inexplicably, and huts burn down just as mysteriously. What occurs next is the villagers’ inability to make sense of these events, namely to reach a “narrative closure” of sorts. At some point, however, the military establishment (which plotted those events in order to confuse people) arrives, takes advantage of the ensuing chaos, blames the communist rebels for it, and upon that pretext takes the village by force. In other words, the conspiracy abusively takes over thanks to people’s inability to totalize. What is more, this inability is literally due to the villagers’ lack of being-with: the reason why they are not able to make sense of what is happening is that most characters have secrets they do not share with others. The regime takes advantage precisely of this lack of cohesion: “the conspiracy wins … not because it has some special form of ‘power’ that the victims lack, but simply because it is collective and the victims, taken one by one in their isolation, are not” (Jameson 1992, 66). There is little doubt that From What Is Before allegorizes a global world that escapes totalization. The first scenes portray the village as an archaic Eden of sorts, immersed in ancient rituals and, most significantly, autochtonous commerce: a local woman is shown walking around and selling villagers the products of the village itself. Everything starts to collapse when a peddler enters the village, eventually turning out to be an infiltrator sent



LAV DIAZ

317

by the regime. Here the historical frame revolving around Marcos’s dictatorship (which, as we have seen, Diaz had already referred to as “the end of History”) stretches out to include globalization itself. However, From What Is Before is no First World conspiratorial narrative, in that Diaz subverts the very purpose of its spatial “closure-effect.” The latter is none other than the very connectedness that the villagers lack, as embodied by the spatial dimension, i.e. by the visual harmony of the mise en scène, by the great emphasis on places—in short, by the shapely, choreographic quality of the staging of bodies and things in space. Most notably, the recurrent use of the stunningly scenic rock on the shore, a place where characters routinely hide to spy on one another, confirms their connectedness inherent in their very separateness. The purpose of this “closure-effect” does not lie in hinting at a totality that the narrative could not reconstruct, but rather at a utopian social totality that could have been, and that might have prevented an abusive, conspiratorial, totalitarian totalization from taking over. Yet Diaz is not pointing with reactionary nostalgia at some pre-modern “organic community.” The entire narrative arc of one particular character, a poet coming back to his native village, is blatantly meant to suggest that this is not the way to go. Rather, in the last dialogue involving the poet, what emerges is that one should look back at the origin by firmly maintaining its inaccessibility. Not incidentally, the idyllic, pre-1972 village shown in the first scenes is depicted almost exclusively by emphasizing its archaic features (ancient collective rituals, lack of technology, and so on and so forth), so much so that it could be said to indifferently belong to

FIGURE 17.2  Spying on one another.

Source: From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014) © Sine Olivia Philipinas.

318

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

any historical time frame—possibly even a pre-colonial one. One would be tempted to label this non-historical nonchalance as postmodernist, if the rest of the film did not follow a direction postmodernism cannot follow, namely a historical genealogy of its own inception. Because what is at stake is not the return to a traditional, organic community, From What Is Before is not exclusively about the Philippines. All Diaz’s films are about the Philippines, but Diaz never wanted to tackle only his country. In trying to understand the struggles of Hanzel, or Mijares, or Kadyo, or Heremias, or Puring, or Hilda, or Hesus, one cannot help but embrace the Filipino struggle, too, or the Philippine struggle, or, ultimately, humanity’s struggle. Like I said, my works are very particular about the Filipino because that’s my culture. But I don’t make films for Filipinos. I make films for cinema, as art is all encompassing. There are no borders. (Diaz, interviewed in Ramani 2007) The historical paralysis of the Philippines resonates with the historical paralysis (the “end of History”) into which postmodernity has thrown the whole of humanity. By adopting and subverting the quintessentially postmodern narrative form of the conspiratorial tale, From What Is Before, while never ceasing to be about a very specific Filipino historical tragedy, is also about the broader, globalized, postmodern, post-historical tyranny of space—that is, of spatialization of time as contemporary, accomplished simultaneity (the definition itself of globalization, or perhaps of the ideology thereof), as opposed to what for Diaz is space-governed Filipino/ Malay time, i.e. a spatiality to be conceived as behind our back and, as such, unattainable, leaving us with nothing but the hemorrhage of time. As per Homer’s definition, we never cease to see the shadow of past, present, and future, articulated together in the spatialized “now” of the long take.

Conclusion The hero of Batang West Side, the film inaugurating “Diazian style,” is a Filipino detective investigating the murder of a Jersey City Filipino youngster. The whodunit remains unsolved: shortly before the ending, he drops his investigation and meets Taga Timog, the imaginary filmmaker who will later be featured in Evolution. After seeing his documentaries, the detective decides to deliver a monologue in front of Taga’s (and Diaz’s) camera, where he confesses to having fled the Philippines, changed his name, and undergone plastic surgery after having been a brutal torturer on the payroll of Marcos’s regime. Cinema self-reflexively shows up, and



LAV DIAZ

319

the burning, repressed depths of Subjectivity and History return: it is hard to imagine a less postmodern kind of self-reflexivity. A globalized, post-metropolitan urban space, looking more like a shapeless and endless, de-industrialized suburb than an actual city, Jersey City itself looks suspended between postmodernism and modernism: one single street (West Side Avenue) insistently recurs as the blatant pivot of the film’s geography; the proximity itself between Jersey City and New York City, one of the quintessential modernist metropolises, points to modernism being never very far away. Diaz’s films themselves are to a large extent monuments to the persistence of modernism within postmodernity. Without the digital, their own production would be simply inconceivable—and yet they display an unmistakable, old-school cinematic sensibility (Evolution even goes as far as to include several 16mm scenes). Despite the enormous length of his films, though, Diaz’s cinema should not be mistaken for a mere rehabilitation of temporality “against” the postmodern preponderance of space. Even if one buys the analogy sketched by Diaz himself in Century of Birthing between cinema and Heidegger’s Dasein, upon closer inspection his films show that their temporality is “governed by the concept of space,” to borrow the turn of phrase he himself chose to describe the “Filipino/Malay time” he wants to evoke in his works. The latter refers to the original, space-governed temporality of his people before the introduction of a temporal, teleological (and thus capitalist) framework by Spanish colonizers. So the very act of bending temporality away from teleological narratives and toward space by means of mise en scène is meant to be a historical and political statement about a return to the origins, impossible and necessary at one and the same time. What is more, by letting his works largely overflow the standard length films are normally supposed to comply with, Diaz bends temporality toward one of the most genuinely spatial aspects of Dasein, namely Being-with. Diaz intends to make the audience feel closer, even almost physically closer, to his characters by making it share their own temporality, and more generally to put the audience, whatever its nationality, in close touch with the tragedy of the Philippines, marked seemingly beyond redemption by centuries of historical adversities. This “stagnating exile” from (progress-oriented) History characterizing his country is fittingly rendered in his films by a horizontal, emphatically non-teleological and non-progressive temporality. Because of the latter, one is also tempted to read Diaz’s claims that by tackling the Filipino struggle, he really aims to tackle the struggle of all humanity, as referring particularly to postmodern humanity, haunted by the nightmare of the end of History, and of the absolute triumph of spatiality. Indeed, for all of his insistence on the Filipino specificity, it is hard to maintain that Diaz’s cinema sets the Filipino difference against some First

320

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

World “norm.” Rather, it seemingly aligns itself with Fredric Jameson’s insight (2010, 454–5) that the right way to conceive of difference and identity in our postmodern, globalized world is not “difference vs. identity,” but rather the old Hegelian identity between identity and non-identity. Diaz does not contrast the postmodern triumph of space with a “Filipino time,” substantially different from the spatialized time imposed by Western capitalism,5 but rather with a Filipino space, i.e. the already mentioned space-governed Filipino/Malay time. The latter spatiality, unlike the postmodern one (which ideologically presents itself as actually accomplished simultaneity), is irretrievably behind our backs: we only access it by way of its absence, i.e. by the hemorrhagic overflow of time. Ultimately, Diaz wants to raise awareness of this non-postmodern spatiality as the only possible ground for some alternative to the postmodern status quo. This alternative does not exactly consist of a utopian return to a pre-modern Eden doomed to clash against its own impossibility, but rather in a perhaps no less utopian (though in a different sense) attempt to establish an emotional connection between those beings inhabiting the space-governed time of the exile from (progress-oriented) History. That is to say, all those who share a very human inaccessibility to an original spatiality that is present here and now only in the form of its absence—regardless of their nations and backgrounds, as well as of their being flesh-and-bones persons, or just characters sharing with the audience a relatively conspicuous slice of time.

Notes 1

A detailed account of its production can be found in Alexis A. Tioseco (2006), “Brief notes on the long journey of Ebolusyon,” Criticine, January 30. Available online: http://criticine.com/interview_article. php?id=21&pageid=1139148986 (accessed June 18, 2015).

2

Here, André Bazin’s distinction between “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality” (“The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Hugh Gray [ed. and trans.], What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 24 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004]) inevitably comes to mind. Whereas the first ones bring forth emotion by manipulating the viewer (chiefly through montage insofar as it is used in a non-descriptive way, i.e. as a tool to signify), in the films by the directors of the second kind emotion is engendered by letting action unfold seemingly by itself, in a seemingly autonomous, unadulterated way, normally by refusing to employ montage effects (which does not mean that montage is not used at all, but rather that it is used just to describe a space, rather than to signify something in particular).

3

Its spatiality was definitely not unknown to Heidegger, but just downsized and, as usual, subordinated to the temporal one in Being and Time.



LAV DIAZ

321

4

In his writings about Diaz’s films (all available in his blog http:// criticafterdark.blogspot.co.uk), film critic Noel Vera has pointed out all these references to Rizal’s Sisa with great precision.

5

For instance, the Filipino fantastic cinematic narratives that Bliss Cua Lim has identified in Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) as carrying along “immiscible” (her word) temporalities (i.e. temporalities that do not fit the framework of the homogeneous time imposed by Western capitalism).

Works cited Baumgärtel, Tilman. 2007. “Lav Diaz: Digital is Liberation Theology,” Greencine, September 7. Available online: https://www.greencine.com/central/lavdiaz (accessed June 20, 2015). Bertolin, Paolo. 2005. “(On) Time: Lav’s (R)Evolution,” Ekran. Available online: http://ulan-shiela.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/ebolusyon-ng-isang-pamilyangpilipino.html (accessed June 22, 2015). Garcia, Roger. 2000. “The Art of Pito-Pito,” Film Comment 36 (4): 53–5. Guarneri, Michael. 2013. “Militant Elegy. A Conversation with Lav Diaz,” La Furia Umana 17. Available online: http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/29archive/lfu-17/16-michael-guarneri-militant-elegy-a-conversation-with-lav-diaz (accessed June 20, 2015). Heidegger, Martin. 1936. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (eds and trans.), Off the Beaten Track, 1–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. 1962 (1927). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1969. “Art and Space,” trans. Charles H. Seibert, Man and World 9 (1973): 3–8. Hernandez, Eloisa May P. 2014. Digital Cinema in the Philippines: 1999–2009. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Huber, Christoph. 2005. “(R)Evolution of Concrete,” Ekran. Available online: http://ulan-shiela.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/ebolusyon-ng-isang-pamilyangpilipino.html (accessed June 21, 2015). Ileto, Reynaldo Clemeña. 1979. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines 1840–1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2010. Valences of the Dialectics. London: Verso. Ramani, Vinita. 2007. “A Dialogue in Progress—Social/Personal Memory before Heremias,” Kino! 1. Available online: http://www.e-kino.si/2007/no-1/preboji/ dialogue-in-progress (accessed June 22, 2015). Tioseco, Alexis A. 2006. “A Conversation with Lav Diaz,” Criticine, January 30. Available online: http://criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=21&pageid= 1139146638 (accessed June 21, 2015).

322

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Tolentino, Rolando B. 2014. Contestable Nation-Space: Cinema, Cultural Politics, and Transnationalism in the Marcos-Brocka Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Vallega, Alejandro A. 2003. Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds. University Park: Pennsylvania State University. Wee, Brandon. 2005. “The Decade of Living Dangerously: A Chronicle from Lav Diaz,” Senses of Cinema 34 (February). Available online: http://sensesofcinema. com/2005/filipino-cinema/lav_diaz (accessed June 21, 2015).

18 Revisiting Jia Zhangke: Individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy in contemporary Chinese independent cinema Victor Fan

Most international film festivals and their audiences treat Jia Zhangke as an auteur: a filmmaker whose body of works demonstrates a logical consistency, stylistic unity, and thematic continuity. In spite of that, film scholars in Mainland China, Europe, and North America rarely discuss him and his works in those terms. The appellation zuozhe dianying (auteurist cinema) was used in Chinese film criticism during the first half of the 1990s to discuss directors including Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke, who worked outside the state-regulated film production and distribution system. Yet the term was dropped completely by 1999 as these filmmakers unanimously expressed their preference to be called duli yingren (independent filmmakers).1 Hence, if we discuss Jia in auteurist terms, we must understand that the idea of the cinematic auteur cannot be divorced from the dual meaning of being “independent” in both the production and distribution conditions of these films, and the larger sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1989. Being “independent,” as Jason McGrath argues, was made possible by the emergence of the concept of zizhuquan (autonomy). This concept emerged with the promise of free market capitalism, which was reintroduced

324

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

under state regulation with the gaige kaifang (reform and open) policy in 1978 and intensified by Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992. According to this promise, individuals are supposed to exercise their own free choices, which not only have economic, but also sociopolitical impacts. Individual autonomy often clashes with the ongoing policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to hexie (harmonize) dissimilar private opinions through film and media. For McGrath, free market capitalism deterritorializes the boundaries between the private and the public, the self and the other. As a result, society gradually shifts “from integration (yitihua) to differentiation (fenhua) and singularization (yiyuanhua) to pluralization (duoyuanhua)” (McGrath 2008, 34, 48). As Xiaobin Yang argues, for Chinese scholars, their understanding of deterritorialization is based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizophrenia: a display of a “collage of fragmentary ruins of anarchical, heterogeneous elements.” For them, such anarchic energy allows individuals to assume a sense of autonomy that has the power to gradually dismantle the state’s paranoia: its attempt to “impose a centralized, unified system upon disparate elements” (Yang 2000, 397 n.21). The ideas of geren (individual), zhuguanxing (subjectivity), and zizhuquan (autonomy), terms frequently used to define Chinese independent cinema and authorship, have yet to be adequately theorized––albeit substantially discussed––in established creative debate and scholarship. To a certain degree, such under-theorization is not a result of carelessness on the part of filmmakers and scholars; rather, these concepts are regarded almost as axiomatic in the ideological infrastructure of free market economy and humanism. The assumed understanding of these terms has thus far ensured the rare scrutiny of their meaning. In this chapter, I argue that understanding auteurism and applying its terms to Jia and his works require an active rethinking of what individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy mean both in the production and sociopolitical contexts of independent Chinese cinema and in the postsocialist modernity of the past two decades. I do so by, first, mapping out the intellectual and critical discourse pertaining to Chinese independent cinema and Jia. I then use Gilbert Simondon’s theory of deindividuation and desubjectivization as necessary conditions that open up the potentiality for reindividuation and resubjectivization to reconfigure our understanding of the forms of humanism and auteurism upon which our impression of Jia as an auteur is founded. Finally, I examine Jia’s most extensively discussed films in the existing scholarship, Xiao Wu (1997) and A Touch of Sin (Tianzhuding, 2014), and propose that throughout his career his films examine how deindividuated and desubjectivized lives come to accept their own deindividuation and desubjectivization under free market capitalism, not as a form of liberation, but as a potentiality that can––though not yet––offer a new way of understanding one’s condition of existence.



JIA ZHANGKE

325

Individuality, autonomy, and subjectivity in Chinese independent cinema Concepts such as individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy were discussed among Chinese independent filmmakers and scholars during the 1990s. In fact, the term geren dianying (personal film) was first popularized around 1989–90 and describes films that used personal views as a way to witness, (re)present, comment, or critique the lived realities of those occupying socially marginalized positions, or to offer personalized memories of traumas that allowed viewers to rethink and reconfigure the grand narratives of recent history. For example, Zhang Yuan’s Mama (1990) interweaves a fictional account of a single mother who struggles to raise her mentally-challenged child, with documentary footage of mentallychallenged children trapped in a school that deprives them of individual dignity. Both the fictional and documentary footage were shot with a fast, black-and-white film stock in natural lighting, which produced a granular texture, serving as a constant reminder to the viewers of the materiality of the image. Such tactile quality maintains an objective distance between the viewers and the image, and also enables the viewers to experience the “feel” and “touch,” the coarseness and murkiness of the image as though it were their lived memory. Meanwhile, Wu Wenguang’s Bumming Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing: Zuihou de mengxiangzhe, 1990) uses a style akin to cinéma vérité. He positions the viewers in the xianchang (situatedness) of five artists from different regions, who stayed and worked in Beijing without residential registration after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, thus offering individual documents of their lived realities.2 These personal films engage the viewers in a cinematographic experience in which the self and the other, the subjective and the objective, are renegotiated. As Yingjin Zhang argues, as soon as the term “personal film” emerged, filmmakers began to question the positionalities, the filmed characters, and the viewers. For instance, Wu calls his creative process huidao zizhen (returning to one’s reality). For Zhang, this “new position is not an official position (government), not a popular or folk position (minjian), not a people’s position (renmin), not an intellectual’s position (enlightenment), not an underground position (marginality), not even an oppositional position (rebellion), but simply an individual’s position––‘I would speak of myself rather than my position’” (Zhang 2006, 9, 11, 31). For example, in 1966: My Time in the Red Guards (1966: Wo de hongweibing shidai, 1990), five cultural workers and Wu talk directly to the camera about their personal memories of their participation in the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In the film, there is a constant negotiation between the positionality of the director, those of the cultural workers he interviewed, those of the viewers’ vis-à-vis the

326

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

camera’s, and that of the grand narrative of the Cultural Revolution to which everyone in this filmic experience inevitably relates. The zizhen (one’s reality) is therefore not a subjective position as opposed to the other’s, but an active deconstruction of one’s subjective position, which is always multiply occupied by the others’. The multiplicity of one’s subjectivity, however, should not be mistaken for the collective. As Chen Mo and Zhiwei Xiao argue, in the Qingnian zuopin yantao hui (Symposium on films by young filmmakers), organized by the academic journal Dianying yishu (Film Art) in November 1999, several commentators used the term wowo zhuyi (“me-me’ism”) to discuss independent films. For them, independent cinema “rejects the fifth generation’s embrace of the mainstream value of privileging meta-history at the expense of the individual subjectivity,” best understood not as a form of “egocentrism, but as a defiance of the hegemony of collectivism” (2006, 148).3 It is tempting to consider the emergence of the self in independent cinema as a knee-jerk reaction against Maoist collectivism (1949–76). As Paul Pickowicz observes, although the independent artists in Bumming Beijing struggle with their lives without any legal status, and in their search for a creative direction after the Tiananmen crackdown, they seem to embrace their sense of loss and alienation as a form of pleasure or capitalist decadence. Following the lead of Ci Jiwei, in whose view “hedonistic excesses of the present” is the “logical result of failed Maoist asceticism,”4 Pickowicz argues, “many post-Mao youth consciously or unconsciously took Maoist caricatures of global modernity at face value and embraced the caricatures as their own modern values” (2006, 18–19). In this sense, although Jia critiques these caricatures of capitalist modernity in many of his films including Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2002), The World (Shijie, 2004), and A Touch of Sin, the characters under scrutiny are ultimately drawn to these capitalist caricatures because they are incapable of knowing––and as such, neither resisting nor critiquing––what these pleasures really are, when they come face to face with the ruins of socialist modernity.5

Postsocialist modernity and Jia Zhangke The idea that Chinese independent films foreground postsocialist subjectivity becomes the dominant thread in the criticism of Jia Zhangke’s early works.6 In the analyses offered by Michael Berry and Xiaopin Lin, for instance, Jia’s Hometown Trilogy––Xiao Wu, Platform (Zhantai, 2000), and Unknown Pleasures––are seen as metonyms of the way Mainland China copes with the collapse of socialist modernity and the unknowable



JIA ZHANGKE

327

and irresistible pleasure and trauma of capitalist modernity: individual subjectivity fails to emerge (in Xiao Wu), remains contained within the comfort of the xiaokang (moderately prosperous) family (in Platform), or becomes powerless as individual autonomy turns out to be synonymous with money (in Unknown Pleasures). But then, what characterizes the production conditions of the Chinese independent filmmakers––including Jia’s––and their filmic interventions is not a simplistic enjoyment of individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy, or a frustration of their belated arrival; rather, the creative trajectories of these filmmakers and their films instantiate an ongoing process in which individuation and deindividuation, subjectivization and desubjectivization are not polar opposites. Instead, they appear simultaneously as socialist modernity has not yet completely disappeared, while postosocialist modernity has yet to fully arrive. These films conduct such negotiation not by grafting an individual subjectivity (e.g. of the filmmaker) onto a narrative, but by situating the individual subjectivities of the filmmakers, alongside those of the characters and the viewers’, through the tactile presence of the camera and the distance it maintains with the reality it captures. These films thus provide moments in which all the participating parties in the filmic experience can revisit their intersubjectival relationships. As McGrath argues (2008, 25–8), such liminal temporality between two modes of modernity––socialist and postsocialist––is best contextualized within the sociopolitical conditions in which concepts of individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy emerged. During the 1980s, as a result of the reform and open policy, the reintroduction of free market capitalism in the urban areas persuaded cultural producers and intellectuals that individuals who make free decisions in material consumption are making sociopolitical decisions. In the wenhua re (cultural heat) debate (1980–9), where Chinese intellectuals and the general public participated in a widespread discussion of the impact of the market economy, there was a genuine belief that capitalism would come hand-in-hand with political democratization. For McGrath, such a debate came to a halt after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, when economic liberalization was divorced from political democratization, and then confirmed in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour. As a result, while the public discourse was preoccupied with the ever-expanding neoliberal economy, intellectuals were split into two camps. On the one hand, some scholars observed a cultural crisis, as the abandonment of socialist ideology and the failure to introduce political democracy through economic emancipation left a void in society’s hexin jiazhi (core values), zhongji jiazhi (ultimate values), or zhongji guanhuai (ultimate concerns). These ultimate values, for Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s, could be thought of as a renwen jingshen (humanist spirit). Ultimate values, however, are not definable in collective terms. Rather, individuals who believe in their existence must actively search for them. For these

328

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

scholars, one’s desire to seek and one’s faith in such core values instantiate the humanist spirit. On the other hand, those who disagree with the humanist spirit camp, led by writer Wang Shuo, insist that as one exercises free choices in a market economy, one also makes a moral decision that contributes to the larger social formation. For them, there are neither ultimate values nor a humanist spirit underlying these individual choices (McGrath 2008, 28–55). Both the humanist camp and the Wang Shuo camp share the common underlying assumption that the current sociopolitical conditions are characterized by a “spiritual” absence. Such an absence, as I mentioned earlier, was certainly left by the broken promises of the Maoist era to deliver socialist modernity. However, it is indeed part and parcel of the mechanism of modernity itself: the desire to consume and the illusion of free choices always take form around an absence, a void the consumers and free individuals aimed to pursue in the first place. In fact, the active pursuit of this absence motivates consumption and consolidates one’s faith in the free market economy and its political impact.7 McGrath calls this “postsocialist modernity,” as it is a form of global modernity that takes place after the collapse of socialist modernity, and yet it occupies a temporality between a socialist modernity that is both “not yet” and “has already failed,” a modernity that has yet to be materialized and cannot possibly “be”––as it is, ultimately, a void.8 McGrath’s understanding of the sociopolitical conditions of Mainland China since the 1990s helps us understand the difference between the reception of Jia’s cinema in Euro-American scholarship and its Chinese counterpart. As Michael Berry and Lin argue respectively, Jia’s work is characterized by ennui, as individuals left behind by material modernity find themselves trapped in the postindustrial xiancheng (county towns). This can be understood as a frustration of one’s desire to catch up with capitalist modernity that has, allegedly, already arrived in the urban regions, and as an uneasiness characterized by the perpetual sense of haunting left over from the Maoist past, which calls into question one’s living conditions. The presupposition in this line of critique is that such ennui is the result of the incommensurability between a rapidly disappearing socialist modernity and the belated arrival of capitalist modernity in these regions, as if full economic liberalization would deliver an ultimate reconciliation. For these scholars, Jia seems to suggest that values such as individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy should be privileged. Such a position seems to stand against state intervention, and, for that reason, Jia is often received by Euro-American film scholars and festival audiences as a politically oppositional filmmaker. Chinese film critics, however, read the works of Jia and his cohorts almost in the opposite manner. For them, the works of Jia and his cohorts are symptomatic of China’s cultural crisis, and they offer a politically



JIA ZHANGKE

329

conservative and humanist solution to existing social problems. Rather than standing in opposition against the government, these films conform to a populist imagination of how the excesses of capitalism should be addressed. For Dai Jinhua, Chinese independent cinema deconstructs the grand narratives of the socialist past. Yet such a project of deconstruction is often conducted without any ideological ground. Complex as eighties Chinese culture is, it is still subject to integration into “modernity,” on the basis of a common desire for progress, social democracy, and national prosperity, and by virtue of its resistance to historical inertia and the stronghold of mainstream ideology. In the nineties, however, the following elements feed a different sociocultural situation: the ambiguous ideology of the post-Cold War era; the implosion and diffusion of mainstream ideology; global capitalism’s tidal force and the resistance of nationalisms and nativisms; the penetration and impact of global capital on local cultural industries; culture’s increasing commercialization in global and local culture markets; and the active role local intellectuals, besieged by postmodern and postcolonial discourse, have undertaken in their writing. The Nineties Chinese culture is in fact becoming a unique space, open to crisscrossing perspectives: it is a city of mirrors. (Dai 2002, 71–2) For Dai (2002, 95), on a positive note, the multiplicity of ideologies and sociopolitical views affirm the cultural plurality and vibrancy of the 1990s. However, in a negative sense, Chinese independent cinema has yet to find and offer an effective response or intervention. These “mirrors,” on one level, reflect those problems located in the intersections of these crisscrossing political perspectives and social conditions. But on another level, these problems, filtered through the filmmakers’ individual subjectivities, become merely their own narcissistic images. In the end, what these filmmakers claim to be objective realities are merely their own self-images, and what they claim to be their selves are the mere reflections of the social problems they claim to suffer from. Meanwhile, Jin Yan argues that the films of Jia are fundamentally modernist in their jingshen suqiu (spiritual quest), yet anti-modern in their social values. For her, Jia’s works demonstrate a “quest for geti jiazhi (individual values), promulgate gexing jingshen (personal spirit), and desire for freedom and independence” (2009, 173). These are best considered as the core values of lixiang zhuyi (idealism) and rendao zhuyi (humanism), ideas that Jia skillfully explores by capturing the diverse social, political, and cultural changes and processes in their jishi xing (immediate presence). For Jin (2009, 173, 175), Jia’s films exemplify how contemporary cinema can locate the ultimate concerns of humanism and the government’s notion

330

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

of a xiaokang economy by making available those contingencies where humanity is captured, corporeally sensed, and experienced.

Deindividuation and desubjectivization: Autonomy in postocialist modernity It is true that in the endings of many of Jia’s films, the protagonists are either reined in by the law (Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures), or settle down into a form of petit bourgeois life (Xiao Shan Going Home [Xiao Shan huijia, 1995); Platform; and 24 City [Ershisi cheng, 2008]). However, I would not go so far as to say that Jia’s sociopolitical view is in line with the government’s policy of a xiaokang economy. What many of Jia’s characters negotiate with themselves is the intricate relationship between individuation and deindividuation, subjectivization and desubjectivization. These individuals become aware of their subjectivities, yet they find themselves unable to make any personal decisions (autonomy). At the same time, before one can imagine a way to exercise autonomy, one must come to the realization that individuation is a form of preindividuation and subjectivization is a form of desubjectivization. In a way, Jia’s process of becoming an auteur is also best understood along those lines. The “individual” is so fundamental in humanism and to the discourse of cinematic auteurism that it is often treated as the point de départ of one’s argument. In Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958), Gilbert Simondon argues that the philosophical notion of being, which is taken as the starting point of critical inquiries in both the humanities and sciences, assumes that existence is already individuated. This common underlying assumption falls short of asking how being comes to be individuated, and if the process of individuation has ever come to an end. For Simondon, if individuation is indeed an ongoing process, there is no being, but only a process of becoming. Each stage of individuation is in itself a potentiality for deindividuation, as ontogenetically connected energies (e.g. generated by substances, members of a society, animals, or objects) produce a set of critical points––irregularities that set themselves apart from the “norm.” In this sense, “I” come to identify myself, or become subjectivized, as the critical points that constitute “I” individuate themselves from other ontogenetically connected energies. Yet this process of individuation and subjectivization does not sever myself from other ontogentically connected “beings”; rather, it produces other possibilities by which I relate to them, possibilities that can only be actualized through a process of deindividuation and desubjectivization.9 Simondon’s theory forms the basis of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. For Foucault, modern state power convinces us that we are



JIA ZHANGKE

331

individual subjects. Yet it does so by directly managing, regulating, and executing our biological lives as deindividuated and desubjectivized objects (Foucault 1976, 177–9). Likewise, Simondon’s ideas also form the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s juridical theory. On one level, sovereign authority is vested in a desubjectivized figure (homo sacer, a sacred or severed man), which exercises “the power [outside the law] to take life or let live” (Foucault 1976, 178).10 On another level, those who are managed by the sovereign are desubjectivized as homines sacri, i.e. deindividuated, bare lives that can be ostracized from the political community and killed outside the law.11 Yet, for Agamben, before individuals can take control of the process of desubjectivization, they must actively denounce their own political (de)subjectivity and become animals on their own terms. The result is a suspension of the difference between subjectivization and desubjectivization, which renders the state’s power to desubjectivize lives meaningless (Vacarme 2004, 115–24). In cinema studies, as André Bazin and Jean-Louis Comolli argue respectively, auteurist film theory often holds two contradictory assumptions. First, an individual is taken as a starting point of criticism, whose status transcends their works and the social, political, economic, and industrial conditions in which they are situated. In this sense, an individual work is measured against this idealized individual and their supposedly unified and coherent body of works. Second, this idealized individual, understood as a genius who exceeds the summation of their works, is nonetheless constructed by film critics based on the films they have made.12 For Bazin, an auteur is made out of a network of sociopolitical discourses and practices, as a filmmaker individuates him/herself throughout the course of his/her career. From a historical perspective, the construction of an auteur as a personification of his/her works and time is in fact symptomatic of society’s desire to project its own image onto a transcendental figure. By individuating this figure, we assert a filmmaker’s subjectivity and autonomy, yet such an act of assertion desubjectivizes us as individuals by letting the auteur speak for our imaginary collective vision. The process of individuation and deindividuation is often featured in Jia’s interviews. In a discussion with Michael Berry, for instance, Jia attributes the oppressive elements in his films to a sense of loneliness which began with the economic reforms in 1978 and resulted in many people beginning to recognize and pay attention to their personal desires: I have no doubt that in the 1960s and 1970s the Chinese people were often very lonely, but at the time they didn’t know what loneliness meant. People then also had feelings of loneliness and desperation but they would never feel that those were natural human emotions. Only once our minds were liberated and we started paying attention to ourselves as individuals and began to read Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and other

332

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

forms of western thought and philosophy did we begin to understand ourselves, and with that came a kind of loneliness and desperation. (Jia, in Berry 2009, 126–7) It would be too simplistic to argue that the reintroduction of European philosophy during the reforms and open era liberated the minds of the Chinese intellectuals. Rather, the transition from socialism to free market capitalism activated an awareness of one’s subjectivity, as neither the state nor the party played the role of its symbolic substitute (for an individual’s lack) any longer. The disappearance of the old, symbolic substitute requires an individuated subject to rethink its positionality in relation to other members of the society, and seek new symbolic substitutes (e.g. financial power or material pleasure). For the young intellectuals, European philosophy provided the vocabulary to articulate this “new” lack. The point is that socialist modernity and postsocialist modernity maintain one common strand within their respective mechanisms: political desubjectivization. These processes are exemplified in Jia’s films in two ways: representational and affective. For example, the film Xiao Wu is about Xiaowu (Wang Hongwei), a pickpocket who returns to his hometown Fenyang (which happens to be Jia’s hometown) and realizes that his buddy, a reformed pickpocket of the 1980s, Jin Xiaoyong (Hao Hongjian) has become a model businessman. As a local celebrity, Xiaoyong distances himself from Xiaowu and their shared criminal past, although this is complicated by the fact that Xiaoyong’s “legitimate” businesses are in fact karaoke bars that offer sexual services. Shortly after the film begins, Xiaowu realizes that he is not invited to Xiaoyong’s wedding. Feeling rejected, Xiaowu seeks refuge in a romantic relationship with a bar hostess in Xiaoyong’s employment, Meimei (Zuo Baitao). In the end, Xiaoyong refuses to accept Xiaowu’s wedding gift, a gesture intended to definitively end their friendship, Meimei leaves Xiaowu in order to marry a wealthy businessman in the neighboring city Taiyuan, and even Xiaowu’s father disowns him. Eventually, Xiaowu is arrested and, in the memorable final scene, Xiaowu is handcuffed to a pole and forced to squat down on the street. As the camera observes his undignified position in a long shot, passers-by begin to gather around him and look at him as if he were an animal. In the end, Xiaowu gets up, and the camera assumes Xiaowu’s position, panning sporadically around him, relaying the passers-by’s gaze directly to the spectators (see Figure 18.1). For Michael Berry, Xiaowu exemplifies the generation of young people who grew up immediately after the Cultural Revolution with a belief in collective values and camaraderie. For example, a tattoo on Xiaowu’s forearm bears the second half of a couplet you nan tongdang ([brothers] bear their hardship together), whereas Xiaoyong bears the first half you fu tongxiang ([brothers] share their good fortune with each other)––a maxim



JIA ZHANGKE

333

FIGURE 18.1  The camera relays the passers-by’s gaze at Xiaowu to the spectators. Source: From Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.

he fails to follow. After spending a decade as a petty thief in a semisocialist and semicapitalist system in the 1980s, Xiaowu finds himself incapable of surviving the advent of high capitalism in the 1990s, alienated by a society mediated by popular media (television and popular music), and abandoned by his friend, lover, parents, and, eventually, further displaced as the whole town is rapidly demolished and rebuilt.13 In fact, while detained at the police station, Xiaowu sees news on the television. When asked how they feel about his arrest by an anchor, various townspeople unanimously denounce Xiaowu as a pest to the community. Xiaopin Lin argues that this process of alienation and abandonment takes place via a gift-exchange economy. As sworn brothers, Xiaowu promised Xiaoyong a wedding gift (a pile of one-hundred-dollar bills) when they were friends. Although Xiaowu knows that he is not invited to the wedding, he steals a large number of wallets at the risk of alerting the local police (which he does) in order to put together the promised gift for Xiaoyong, and the two meet. In an uncomfortably long take in which Xiaowu and Xiaoyong smoke a cigarette, Xiaowu gives Xiaoyong his wedding gift, only for Xiaoyong to reject it (see Figure 18.2). Xiaowu realizes that Xiaoyong now considers him shameful, and no longer a friend. At the end of the

334

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

FIGURE 18.2  Xiaowu brings Jin a gift, only to be rejected.

Source: Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.

scene, Xiaowu leaves the gift on Xiaoyong’s table, in an attempt to remind him of his own tattoo––the promise to share their hardship and wealth. This rejected gift is then symbolically transferred and substituted. In the scene that follows, we realize that Xiaowu has stolen a lighter from Xiaoyong that plays an electronic version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” as a keepsake of their broken friendship. Later on, Xiaowu offers Meimei a hot water bottle as he visits her on a day when she has a stomach cramp. In order to thank him, Meimei sings a song called “Xinyu” (“Raining Heart”) for him. When she asks him to sing for her in return, Xiaowu is too shy to sing. Instead, he takes out the lighter and plays “Für Elise” for her. After that, Xiaowu visits a public bath, where he sings “Raining Heart” in the middle of an empty pool, followed by a scene in a karaoke bar in which we see Xiaowu finally singing with Meimei. Meimei’s gifts of song (first singing a song for Xiaowu, and then enabling Xiaowu to sing a song––signifying his self-certainty and imaginary autonomy) are then reciprocated when Xiaowu purchases a ring for her. However, this gift is rejected, as Meimei abandons Xiaowu and elopes with her client from Taiyuan. Eventually, Xiaowu visits his parents and gives the ring to his mother, only to find out the next day that his mother has given the ring to Xiaowu’s sister-in-law.



JIA ZHANGKE

335

For Lin (2005, 191–7), the repeated failure of the gift economy signals the failure of the old, socialist gift economy based on friendship and humanistic values, and the failure of Xiaowu to grasp a new gift economy based on monetary power. To push Lin’s argument further, initially the transition from socialist modernity to postsocialist modernity is indeed accompanied by the characters’ belief that they have individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy. In the opening scene, for example, Xiaowu boards a bus. As the conductor asks him to buy a ticket, Xiaowu claims that he is a police officer (thus, he can ride a bus for free). When the conductor leaves him, the camera stays on a medium close-up of Xiaowu, where he betrays a self-satisfied smirk. After a brief cutaway shot of the bus’s exterior rear mirror, the camera cuts to a close-up of Xiaowu’s hand picking the pocket of the passenger beside him. This self-congratulatory sense of victory and act of confidence are performed, interestingly, under the gaze of a miniature portrait of Mao hung around the bus’s rear mirror, thus suggesting that Xiaowu’s sense of individuality and subjectivity is made possible by the death and embalmment of socialism, at a time when the emblem of the socialist past is transformed into a kitsch object. However, this sense of individuality and subjectivity do not guarantee autonomy. On the contrary, they are immediately threatened by the advent of postsocialist modernity. As Xiaowu wanders through the city, one hears public announcements of the county’s new policy to revive the criminal law––as required by the new capitalist wenming (civilized social order)–– which reminds us that under postsocialist modernity, Xiaowu is once again deindividuated and desubjectivized under state power. In the 1980s, socialism deindividuated and desubjectivized people like Xiaowu and Xiaoyong with the potentiality for reindividuation and resubjectivization through larger sociopolitical changes (e.g. reform and open), and through friendship and camaraderie––arguably, remnants of socialist modernity. Postsocialist modernity in the 1990s maintains Xiaowu and Xiaoyong’s state of deindividuation and desubjectivization, first by dismantling the illusion of friendship and camaraderie, then by rendering Xiaowu incapable of forming a romantic relationship with Meimei, and eventually by severing him from all forms of connection with his family and community. In this sense, socialist modernity and postsocialist modernity both share a common mechanism: deindividuation and desubjectization. On the affective level, Chris Berry (2008, 252–3) argues that the film’s use of long takes shifts the viewers’ attention from movement to the subjective experience of time itself (durée), thus achieving close to what Deleuze’s timeimage. Jia’s time-image, I argue, allows the spectators to approach affective reality itself. On the one hand, these long takes, conducted primarily in long shots, position the spectators at a distance from the physical reality they depict. On the other hand, the image actively engages the spectators

336

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

by generating an affective response from an embodied experience of time in its pure immanence––as though the passage of time and one’s subjectivity are both suspended in the spectator’s act of contemplation.14 After his visit to Meimei’s living quarter, for instance, Xiaowu visits a public bath. In an incredibly long take, we see Xiaowu, stark naked, entering the pool area. He walks back and forth among three pools to test the temperatures of their water. After splashing some water onto his legs, he walks toward the right of frame. The camera pans right to follow Xiaowu until he reaches the other end of the pool. Then, he turns around and settles down in the middle of the pool. As he soaks himself in the pool, singing “Raining Heart,” his voice resonates around the room, and then the camera pans up and reveals a high concrete wall. It eventually settles on a long shot of the wall with a window on the right of the frame. The light from outside highlights the steam that rises from the pool, suggesting that it might carry his voice all the way outside and into the open air. This long take conveys neither enjoyment nor frustration. Rather, one experiences the passage of time until, lost in the depth of time, the viewing subject and the viewed object become one (see Figure 18.3). For filmmaker and scholar Zhang Xianmin (2005, 40–3), what the spectators witness is Xiaowu as a

FIGURE 18.3  Xiaowu’s voice is carried by the steam out to the “world.”

Source: Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) © Hu Tong Communications, Radiant Advertising Company.



JIA ZHANGKE

337

pure animal, a deindividuated and desubjectivized body, which shocks the spectators’ sensoria at first, but then gradually allows them to experience and come to sense their own desubjectivized and animal state of existence through an affective resonance between the spectators and the image. In fact, Jia argues that in Xiao Wu his main concern is the “affect brought about by the human biological life” (Jia and Hou 2007, 1). The oft-cited ending of the film, in which Xiaowu––and, by extension, the spectators––is watched liked an animal, serves as a reminder of the deindividuated and desubjectivized condition under postsocialist modernity. Jia is in fact fascinated with human beings’ deindividuated and desubjectivized state throughout his career. And in A Touch of Sin, Jia’s characters seem to take one step further by initiating what Walter Benjamin would call “divine violence”: an act of violence that suspends and puts into question the existing juridical order, enacted by someone who fully recognizes their own mere existence (or aniamlity) under the violence of the law, in order to restore divine justice.15 The term “divine” is best understood in Greco-Judaic terms, that a pure life, unbound by any words of law, stands face-to-face against nature. A Touch of Sin is composed of four stories based on real incidents where individuals, frustrated by social marginalization and hopelessness in their respective conditions, commit homicide or suicide as protests against the law. These include Dahai (Jiang Wu), a coalminer in Shanxi who is discontent with the corruption of his boss Shengli and all those villagers who work for him, commits a mass killing of the entire corporate management. Like Xiaowu and Xiaoyong in Xioa Wu, Dahai and Shengli were classmates during the Cultural Revolution, but while Dahai remained a coalminer, Shengli bought the coalmine from the state inexpensively and developed it into a multi-million venture. The second story is about a young man (Wang Baoqiang) who robs and kills rich people with a sense that he is taking back what he deserves. The third story is about Xiaoyu (Zhao Tao), a receptionist in a sauna in Yichang and a mistress of factory owner Zhang Youliang. She kills two corrupt county officials after being sexually assaulted by them. And the final story is about Xiaohui (Luo Lanshan), a young migrant worker from Hunan who keeps changing jobs in Dongguan. Having seen his love, a nightclub hostess, offering sexual services to her client in front of him, and being abandoned by his friend and family, Xiaohui commits suicide by jumping off his dormitory building. The story of Xiaoyu is the centerpiece of the entire film, from which both the Chinese and English titles are derived. The English title of the film A Touch of Sin is taken from King Hu’s wuxia classic Xianü (A Touch of Zen, 1969), yet the Chinese title of the film is Tian zhuding (fate determined by heaven), a phrase we hear as Xiaoyu walks on a deserted street in a suburb of Yichang, towards the sauna where she works. There, a van with gaudy décor is parked in an empty lot, and a man standing

338

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

next to it cries out, “Come and see the snake lady and ask her anything. Fate is determined by heaven.” Regarding the King Hu reference, this entire segment indeed portrays Xiaoyu as a xianü (female warrior). In the beginning, Xiaoyu meets Youliang at a highway rest stop. As she realizes that Youliang failed to break up with his wife, Xiaoyu gives him an ultimatum, proclaiming that she must determine her own future. After she saw Youliang off at the train station, the film cuts to a sequence of long shots with shallow focus, framing Xiaoyu with her backpack in a mediumshot distance in the foreground against an out-of-focus background, thus alluding her to a self-determined female warrior who walks from place to place in search for justice. When Xiaoyu is assaulted by one of the county officials, the film cuts to a close-up of her hand holding a penknife. It then pans left as she slashes the official’s stomach. Then, the camera pans right to frame her face in a close-up, with her arm stretched out to the left-offrame in a style akin to that of the female warrior films in the 1960s and 1970s. Like King Hu’s xianü, Xiaoyu commits homicide not simply for “restoring” justice. By the end of the film, after the Xiaohui sequence, Xiaoyu appears in Shanxi, the hometown of Dahai, and seeks a job in Shengli’s factory. Before the credit sequence, the film shows Xiaoyu watching a street performance of a Shanxi opera Extradition of Su San, in which the judge asks Su San, “Ni ke zhi zui?” (Do you understand your zui?). The film then cuts to a close-up of Xiaoyu lowering her head, as though she were the accused. The word zui, in compliance to the film’s English title, is translated as “sin,” yet it is closer to the meaning of “guilt,” defined in Buddhist terms not as a violation of the law, but a responsibility one must bear as a result of what one did in one’s past, or one’s previous incarnation. The tragic dimension of the concept of zui is that one could have done nothing in one’s lifetime to deserve an accusation or punishment. In this sense, one bears one’s guilt as one stands face-toface against one’s karmic past, or a larger social or cosmological order. By seeing Xiaoyu being questioned by the judge, a spectator who is aware of the meaning of zui is prompted to ask “He zui zhi you?” (What guilt does she/do I have?). The film then cuts to a long shot of the crowd looking directly into the camera lens, as though each desubjectivized individual is questioning the spectator as the bearer of the gaze (the authority that desubjectivizes and deindividuates them) with the same retort: “What guilt do I have?” And by extension, one needs to ask, “By whose authority one is judged guilty?”



JIA ZHANGKE

339

Conclusion Applying the concept of auteurism to Jia Zhangke and his work requires an active rethinking of what individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy mean in the sociopolitical conditions of postsocialist China since 1989. From a critical perspective, Jia continues to individuate himself as an auteur by offering his viewers new perspectives on our desubjectivized and deindividuated states under global postsocialist modernity, and he does so by suggesting that autonomy does not come from larger social changes. However, as a desubjectivized life determined to actively suspend the difference between subjectivity and desubjectivity, individuality and deindividuality, the state’s power to desubjectivize and deindividuate life is called into question. In this sense, Jia’s films do not challenge the boundary between subjectivity and desubjectivity, or offer any hope or solution. Rather, they suggest a possible way by which one can begin to render the state’s power to desubjectivize and deindividuate lives aimless, and from which a new potentiality can be––even though not yet––imagined. As he claims on a Beijing subway billboard: “Ten years ago, I tried to use cinema to change the world; now I use the world to change the cinema.”16 On the one hand, one might regard his statement as a creative sellout, as he no longer believes that cinema has the power to change human lives. On the other hand, his statement indicates that perhaps a fully individuated auteur is one who stops believing that they can change the world in order to assert their own individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy. Rather, he can take his own deindividuation into his own hands and, as a cinematic auteur, can rethink and reimagine his positionality within the larger cinematic apparatus and the (de)individuating praxes that instantiate it. In this sense, Jia is best understood not as an author in the classical Euro-American sense of the word, but as one individual amongst many others, who calls into question the positionality of a film’s authorship by making visible the plurality and multiplicity of authorship and authority.

Notes 1

Chen and Xiao 2006, 147–8.

2

See Luke Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

3

See also Qu Chunjing (2003), “Dianying wenxian jiazhi yu yishu pinwei: tan xinshengdai dianying de chengbai” (“Film’s Documentary and Artistic Values: New Born Generation Film’s Success and Failure”), in Chen Xihe and Shi Chuan (eds), Duoyuan yujing zhong de xinshengdai dianying (Newborn

340

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Generation Films in Multiple Contexts: Essays on Chinese Newborn Generation Film) (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe), 192. 4

The Ci quote is taken from Paul Pickowicz’s “Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China,” where, he summarizes the theses of Ci Jiwei’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (particularly, in the case of the present quote, 2006, 134–67).

5

Berry 2008, 103–4.

6

See, for example, Berry 2008; see also Lin 2005, 186–209.

7

See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

8

McGrath 2008, 13–15, 55–8.

9

Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (2015); Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

10 Foucault’s emphasis. 11 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]). 12 André Bazin, 1985 [1957], “On the politique des auteurs,” trans. Peter Graham, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s––Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 248–58; Jean-Louis Comolli et al., “Twenty Years on: A Discussion about American Cinema and the politique des auteurs,” trans. Diana Matias, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s––New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 198. 13 See Michael Berry 2009, 30–9. 14 For the concept of approaching reality, see Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 15 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 277–300. 16 I thank John Berra for this information.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence,” in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books. Berry, Chris. 2008. “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By,” in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus II, 250–7. London: BFI and Palgrave Macmillan. Berry, Michael. 2009. Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures: Jai Zhangke’s “Hometown Trilogy.” London: BFI and Palgrave Macmillan. Chen, Mo and Zhiwei Xiao. 2006. “Chinese Underground Films: Critical Views



JIA ZHANGKE

341

from China,” in Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, 143–60. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Ci, Jiwei. 1994. Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press. Dai, Jinhua. 2002. “A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films,” trans. Yiman Wang, in Jing Wang and Tani Barlow (eds), Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, 71–98. New York: Verso. Foucault, Michel. 2002 [1976]. Histoire de la sexualité: 1. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Jia, Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien. 2007. “Jia Zhangke duitan Hou Xiaoxiang: xiangxin shenme jiu gai pai shenme” (“Conversation between Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien: If You Believe It, Shoot It”), in Ouyang Jianghe (ed.), Zhongguo duli dianying (On the Edge: Chinese Independent Cinema), 1–6. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, Jin, Yan. 2009. “‘Diliudai’ yu ‘diliudai’ zhihou––Zhongguo dangdai xinqingnian dianying de jingshen tujing” (“Sixth Generation and Post-Sixth Generation: The Spiritual Schema of China’s New Youth Cinema”), in Ding Yaping (ed.), Kuawenhua yujing de Zhongguo dianying: dangdai dianying yishu huigu yu zhanwang (Trans-Cultural and Trans-Linguistic-Terrain Chinese Cinema: Retrospective and Future of Contemporary Cinematic Art), 172–82. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe. Lin, Xiaopin. 2005. “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy: A Journey across the Ruins of Post-Mao China,” in Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (eds), Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, 186–209. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lü, Xinyu. 2003. Jilu Zhongguo: Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong (Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China). Beijing: Sanlian shudian. McGrath, Jason. 2008. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press. Pickowicz, Paul. 2006. “Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China,” in Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent, 1–22. Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield. Qu, Chunjing. 2003. “Dianying wenxian jiazhi yu yishu pinwei: tan xinshengdai dianying de chengbai” (“Film’s Documentary and Artistic Values: New Born Generation Film’s Success and Failure”). In Chen Xihe and Shi Chuan. Duoyuan yujing zhong de xinshengdai dianying (Newborn Generation Films in Multiple Contexts: Essays on Chinese Newborn Generation Film). Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 189–200. Robinson, Luke. 2013. Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Simondon, Gilbert. 2015 (1958). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Éditions Aubier. Vacarme. 2004. “‘I am Sure You are More Pessimistic Than I am …’: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben,” trans. Jason Smith, Rethinking Marxism 16 (2) (April): 115–24.

342

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Yang, Xiaobin. 2000. “Whence and Whither the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng: Historical Subjectivity and Literary Subjectivity in Modern China,” in Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (eds), Postmodernism and China, 399–442. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zhang, Xianmin. 2005. Kanbujian de yingxiang (Invisible Image). Shanghai: Sanlian shudian. Zhang, Yingjin. 2006. “My Camera Doesn’t Lie?: Truth, Subjectivity, and Audience in Chinese Independent Film and Video,” in Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent, 23–46. Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Wooster Press.

19 Kurosawa Kiyoshi, dis/continuity, and the ghostly ethics of meaning and auteurship Aaron Gerow

The auteur and trickster Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s work, particularly films such as Pulse (Kairo, 2001) and Retribution (Sakebi, 2007), has largely been discussed through the horror genre (White 2007; McRoy 2008; Kinoshita 2009; Posadas 2014), but many of his films revolve around detective-like figures. The lead characters in Cure (Kyua, 1997), Charisma (Karisuma, 2000), and Retribution are actual police detectives, but other works like Guard from the Underground (Jigoku no keibiin, 1990), The Revenge: A Visit from Fate (Fukushū: Unmei no hōmonsha, 1996), Serpent’s Path (Hebi no michi, 1997), Pulse, Loft (2006), Penance (Shokuzai, 2012), and Real (Riaru, 2013) feature characters investigating a problem to determine its truth and thus its solution, often attempting to achieve justice or revenge. The detective theme traverses a number of genres—horror, thrillers, gangster movies, mysteries—and need not appear in every film. Yet the fact that detective fiction has been described as inherently self-reflexive, in which the detective, like any reader, must successfully interpret texts and signs in order to construct a narrative and solve the crime (Hühn 1987; Sweeney 1990; Pyrhönen 1999), implies that the recurrence of the detective in

344

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Kurosawa’s cinema may indicate its own concern with the problem of interpretation. The figure of the detective may also relate to the status of the auteur, but in a different way, one that might follow S. E. Sweeney’s suggestion that at “the metadiegetic level … the criminal is the author of a crime that the detective must interpret” (Sweeney 1990, 8). What if we take the model of the detective story to consider Kurosawa’s cinema as less the product of a conscious thematics or worldview than as an incident, a crime—against meaning? against cinema?—that calls for a solution, but one that involves the problem of detecting, of looking itself. Perhaps the auteur here is like the murderer in many classic detective stories: to use Robert Champigny’s term, the “trickster” (1977, 45), who plays with the detective/reader even as the crime is committed. Mamiya in Cure, the descendant of the man beside the camera in the Meiji film, could after all resemble the director, using flickering lights to direct his audience. There is a context in Japan for considering the film auteur in this fashion. The concept of the auteur is currently in crisis, even though one can find from the late 1920s examples of auteurist studies in Japanese criticism (e.g. Kishi Matsuo) and of directors declaring artistic independence from the studios (Kinugasa Teinosuke). However, there is the perception that a new media ecology, signified by a post-Fordist mode of horizontal integration wherein Japanese television networks dominate major film production and film becomes merely another content in the media mix (Lukacs 2010; Steinberg 2012), has inflicted its version of auteurism (or lack thereof) on cinema. It is not unusual to hear complaints that the director’s name is being downplayed, if not eliminated, from advertising.1 Coupled with the decline of art house venues and the critical infrastructure that supports such films, the long tradition of Japanese film auteurs can be thought to be suffering a slow death. The attack on auteurism, however, is also evident on the conceptual front. Working in the line of Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” critics such as Hasumi Shigehiko have complicated existing notions of authorial identity. While publishing one of the most influential books on Ozu Yasujirō in 1983, Hasumi began by critiquing those who believed they could identify the “Ozuesque” precisely “because no one is looking at Ozu Yasujirō’s films. The ‘Ozuesque’ is nothing but a game unrelated to cinema that is only possible after our eyes kill the image on screen” (Hasumi 1992, 11). This was not a complete rejection of auteurism, but it criticized traditional auteurism for placing logocentric language over a cinematic image that was thought to undermine identity and categorization. In order to free Ozu Yasujirō from the tacit arrangement of being “Ozuesque,” we must continue looking at his films … The instant that interpretation starts, people will no longer be able to cease disposing of



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

345

their eyes. We must place our bodies on the focal point of these images mutually reflecting each other, and there experience the vanishing of our selves. “Nothingness” is not something depicted in a single film; it is the experience of being able to live within looking. (Hasumi 1992, 258) Hasumi was arguably the most influential thinker on cinema in Japan from the 1970s to the 1990s, and one of Kurosawa’s teachers at Rikkyō University. The new model of the auteur was Hasumi’s version of Ozu, the auteur who was not “Ozu,” but who could still be discussed as uniquely foregrounding the impossibility of describing cinema. Kitano Takeshi became the contemporary version of this postmodern auteur. As I discussed in my book on him, Kitano was certainly placed under traditional auteurist rubrics, but he himself often collaborated with post-Hasumi criticism by performing auteurship that could not be captured by auteurist criticism, undermining each iteration of the Kitanoesque by doing the opposite in his next film. Kitano, in effect, became a super auteur, one who surpassed all other auteurs to the degree he alone could transcend the confines of auteurist definition (Gerow 2007). Kurosawa works within these industrial and critical conditions. Beginning in pink films, he initially participated in Director’s Company, an ill-fated attempt by ten directors to take control of production, but then ended up suing Itami Jūzō and Tōhō over the director’s share of video revenue for Sweet Home (Suwīto Hōmu, 1989), a court case he lost. As if being punished for that, Kurosawa was mostly confined to making films for video release until Cure. Subsequently marked as an auteur, he moved between art and genre film, but with domestic investment in art films drying up Kurosawa did not release any theatrical films between 2008 and 2013. Since 2012, he has had to work in a complicated terrain, shooting for television (Penance) and making a major studio genre film (Real), an idol movie (Seventh Code, 2014), a ghost romance (Journey to the Shore [Kishibe no tabi, 2015]), and a French production (Woman in the Silver Plate, 2015). At the same time, Kurosawa has also been aligned with post-auteurist discourse. One of the early accounts of his work was penned by Shinozaki Makoto, a younger Rikkyō graduate who became a director in his own right (Okaeri [1995]) and a professor at Rikkyō. In 1992, he wrote a piece on Kurosawa for Cahiers du Cinéma Japon that began with the declaration: “Kurosawa Kiyoshi is in no way a valuable film auteur that continues to shoot individualistic films” (Makoto 1992, 168). Far from rejecting Kurosawa as a film artist, Shinozaki in Hasumian fashion criticizes all for attempting to describe Kurosawa’s cinema and thus forgetting that “people can only be absolutely powerless in the face of cinema” (1992, 170). Kurosawa himself, in interviews, has also professed an aversion to

346

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

auteurist discourse, trying to avoid reading it (Kurosawa 2015). Actually working as Kitano’s colleague when the latter served as a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts between 2005 and 2008, Kurosawa has in some ways followed the example of Kitano’s auteurism by announcing a continuing desire to move away from his own established territories and break new ground (Kurosawa 2003). Shinozaki prefers to term Kurosawa a “trickster” or “swindler” (petenshi) (Shinozaki 1992, 171), but he also calls Kurosawa a “dendōshi” or missionary, the term that is also used by Sakuma to describe Mamiya in Cure. If Mamiya is a form of a director, what could Kurosawa be proselytizing, particularly about cinema, meaning, and authorship? Given Mamiya’s own emptiness—dare I say, with Kurosawa’s own preoccupation with ghosts, his form of ghostliness—can viewing Kurosawa as a ghostly auteur, a different trickster behind the cinema playing the doubleness of ambiguity against the singularity of meaning, provide us with insight in how to negotiate media ecology during the supposed end of cinema and the birth of the digital age in Japan, especially against the background of Japan’s place as a nation in a globalized world? Kurosawa, I will argue, uses the ghostliness of cinema to explore an ethics of looking, a reparative gaze that negotiates a space in the current geography of media and nations.

Interpretation and dis/continuity First, let us investigate the issue of meaning, in particular the hypothesis that Kurosawa, like Mamiya the missionary, is spreading a message. Consider a scene toward the start of Kurosawa’s Barren Illusion (Ōinaru gen’ei, 1999). Returning home, the lead character Haru sits down and just suddenly begins to fade out, only to return a few seconds later. This is not a ghost movie like Séance (Kōrei, 1999) or Retribution. At best, one could say it is an art film that, imagining an apocalypse like Charisma, Pulse, or Retribution, allegorically explores the precariousness of existence and identity, visually depicting the uncertainty of being what the hero of License to Live (Ningen gōkaku, 1998) just talks about. But the question is what such a reading involves. It may describe a character and his uncertain ontology but its very words treat this character as continuous—the Haru before he fades out and the Haru after he fades back in are the same character (note the cut in that occurs when he fades out adds further discontinuity to the scene). This may seem obvious, but the scene itself pursues the issue of performing interpretation. Previous to this, Haru had twice encountered the phrase “Kiero,” a slang term that, while generally meaning “Get lost!,” literally means “Disappear!” The first time was when he is in the bar and overhears a man use the word to his girlfriend; the second is just before



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

347

he returns home, when a group of punks yell “Kiero” when it seems he had witnessed them stealing a safe. Haru is therefore not simply disappearing because of his lightness of being, he is acting on an understanding of a word, though one that forgets its multiple meanings. Perhaps it is a mistaken interpretation, but it foregrounds the act of reading and questions any interpretation we have. Reading his act as an interpretation of the previous scene, however, implies some continuity between them. That seems like a logical assumption, but such continuity is not always a given in Kurosawa’s work. Recall the character of Mamiya in Cure, who is defined by discontinuity. The first time he appears in the film, in a long take on Shirasato Beach, the continuity of the shot underlines his inability to hold an idea from moment to moment. This is later explained by another continuity—the condition of amnesia— but that continuity is itself discontinuous, given the multiple times in the film (such as when he remembers “Fujiwara of Headquarters”) when he clearly has a memory. That may also be explained by his “power” to enter into others, which he suggests in his conversation with the doctor, but that interpretation may not serve as an “answer” if one turns Mamiya’s oft-repeated question “Who are you?” on Mamiya himself. That question not only queries being and identity, but is itself a manifestation of discontinuity through its incessant repetition, through its insistence that there is no continuity that obviates the need to repeat the question. How then to declare who Mamiya is? To state such singular knowledge is to ignore the complexity of the question “Who are you?”—addressed as much to the audience as to those in the diegesis—in the same way “Fujiwara of Headquarters” does (the man who is most forcefully critiqued through that question). Kurosawa’s films, however, have tempted many to answer such questions. Their abstractness has invited allegorical interpretations in particular: one scholar, for instance, insists that “the density of cultural memory of Hiroshima in Pulse is the essential highway into reading the film” (Petrovic 2013, 144); another views Kurosawa’s films as “ecological critique” grounded “in banal images of the everyday, with pervasive images of nature corrupted, technologically dominated, organically tainted or circumvented” (Palmer 2010, 221–2). One need not cite directorial intention (though Kurosawa has said, for instance, that he never thought of Hiroshima when making Pulse [Kurosawa 2015]) to see such interpretations as presuming a continuity of meaning inside and outside the borders of the text. Dilapidated buildings, for instance, are presumed in an ecocritical account to be signs of human degradation, without considering how at times they may operate in Kurosawa as an object of desire or aesthetic fascination. Some read the poisonous jellyfish on the narrative level in Bright Future as “a gathering plague” (Palmer 2010, 222), even though on the figurative level their color renders them the most vibrant existence in this nearly monochrome film. The problem is not simply that such reasoning may beg the question, but

348

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

that it ignores other valences lurking in the text, making singular connections between levels of discourse or between sign and meaning both unjustified and contradictory to textual practices that may oppose them. Kurosawa’s works in fact make an issue of such connections on the level of narrative and cinematic form. In Fujisaki Kō’s words, they “suspend the answer,” leaving the transitions up in the air or “sliding them to the side” (2001, 40, 42). Consider how Cure offers basic narrative information about Mamiya. Consider his name. That is initially provided by the name sewn into his coat. He is only named, therefore, through association, through an interpretation that connects coat, name, and person through a metonymic relation. Other associations—such as the name on the dissertation—may add to this interpretation, but the fact he never answers to the name inserts a gap, a persistent doubt over naming (as well as, in this case, over authorship). What about his “crimes”? The film gradually, from case to case, reveals more of his conversation with each “victim,” but even in the doctor’s case— the only instance when something that could possibly be called hypnosis is visible—there is no hint of commands or satsujin kyōsa, the crime Takabe wants to charge him with. Again, it is mere association that links him to the murders these people commit. The common interpretation is that Mamiya extracts the repressed feelings within his subjects through hypnosis, who then act upon their hatreds. The schoolteacher hated his wife, the doctor truly resented the male gender. Yet neither says that—the teacher vehemently denies it and it is Mamiya who says that of the doctor. Such narratives are projections by others within the diegesis. It is true that the police patrolman speaks about killing the other officer because he disliked him, but the word he uses in the end is deshō, a sentence ending expression that asserts uncertainty or probability (as in, “I probably disliked him”), and thus the possibility of another interpretation. His is not necessarily a statement of fact, but a speculation, an attempt, like the viewer’s, to retrospectively make a connection and construct a continuous narrative of cause and effect between two seemingly contiguous moments. Even Baryon Posadas’s very good article on Kurosawa and Retribution, which resonates with some of my arguments here and elsewhere (Gerow 2002, 2012), makes questionable leaps in this regard. Rightly arguing that “their crimes remain illegible precisely because they are unable to ascribe exceptional motives to their actions,” he nevertheless concludes that therefore “Kurosawa locates the problem of crime not in the individual killings but elsewhere, in the larger social relations constitutive of them” (Posadas 2014, 440). The lack of clear internal motivations, however, does not necessarily mean that external conditions are the sole remaining explanation. Offering such a symptomatic reading may be a problem if the prime symptom being spotlighted may be the compulsion to pursue such singular readings. This is particularly conspicuous in Kurosawa’s ways of connecting shots. In general, Kurosawa is known for paring down his narratives via editing,



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

349

eliminating much that comes between events and using editing to suggest narrative trajectories. In an interview, he stressed the strength of editing, its ability to establish connections even over significant gaps, but he also registered concern over its power (Kurosawa 2015). His editing pursues a dual strategy of experimenting with what juxtapositions of shots can produce while simultaneously challenging those connections. One series of shots in Cure poses this question. Takabe, angry that his mentally-ill wife Fumie has forgotten to cook the steak she has served him, throws it against the wall. There is then a cut to a close-up of Takabe, his face in shadow; a medium close-up of Fumie asleep with a camera movement to the travel pamphlets and the bags she has packed; then a long shot of Takabe at the bedroom door with Fumie asleep in the foreground. Suddenly there is a shot of a hand reaching for a knife and then a cut to Takabe and Fumie riding in the back of an old bus with clouds visible through the windows. The cut to the knife is jarring, not only because one wonders whether Takabe is going to kill his wife, but also because it is boldly self-referential, the cutting instrument itself emphasizing the violent discontinuity of editing. The next shot reveals Fumie safe on the bus. During a talk at Yale in 2006, Kurosawa explained that here he was experimenting with the possibility of the cinematic image enunciating a negative: “Takabe did not kill his wife.” But with the unreality of the bus’s background (clouds passing as if the bus is in flight) and the mystery of Fumie’s subsequent death, this cut is also a rupture in the film’s ontology, asking how much of what happens subsequently “really” happened. Even the run-down hospital at the end, which is first established through montage as part of Sakuma’s reflection or hallucination, only to, again through editing, be the space Takabe moves to after learning of Sakuma’s death—transitioned through another unreal bus shot—is impossible to establish as real or illusory within the diegesis. Adding the Meiji film with the off-screen figure making an X, Cure emphasizes cutting in cinema, the space not only outside the frame but also between shots. It is as if montage is a ghostly presence, suggesting connections and knowledge, while disrupting them at the same time. They are like those transitional shots in Kurosawa’s films of characters moving between spaces, often in vehicles, that, like the bus in Cure, are rendered absurd through “unrealistic” rear-screen projection. Moving from scene to scene, from shot to shot, is ontologically ambiguous; Kurosawa uses the powers of montage to render it problematic. Shot A next to Shot B is not just “A ∴ B” but also “A ⊥ B” at the same time. Kurosawa has repeatedly used a certain technique to play with and complicate editing. One example of this is in Retribution, when Yoshioka hugs Harue after finding out she is dead, the editing cutting back and forth between close-ups of their faces as they hug, only to then cut several times to a medium shot of Yoshioka hugging empty space. The discontinuity here can be jarring, as the editing emphasizes co-presence, while the detached

350

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

shot undermines it.2 Another example is when Harue meets her Reaper in Pulse. Starting with the equivalent of shot-reverse-shots, presenting Harue looking at a computer screen and the image on screen showing her as viewed from the door behind her, it then switches to camera pans between the screen and her from behind heading toward the door reproducing the shot-reverse-shots structure. Eventually the film cuts between close-up, eye-level images of her looking at the camera and higher-angle medium shots of her confronting and embracing nothing. The film thus takes one of the basic editing structures and explores its permutations, using the two different media and their different ontologies to not only complicate continuity (the pretense, explored in suture theory [Dayan 1974], that cutting between two angles can somehow constitute a singular narrating subject), but also to foreground the presence of what in classical editing is hidden in that structure: the camera. The high-angle shot at the end underlines that this is a present ghost that cannot be presented, in part because it is impossible for a camera to show itself as another gazes into its lens. Editing then creates and hides this gazing presence, this ghost, which the full shot then rejects, existing less through the leaps of editing than in the gaps between editing and the full shot. Kurosawa is also a director of the long take, which can function through its Bazinian spatial and temporal integrity. Yet, as with Mamiya at the beach, that integrity can function to emphasize discontinuity. His long takes often exist to work with and against the editing. The long takes in Charisma, for instance, dizzingly moving between one camp and another, emphasize less spatial unity than disunity; they underline that the forest itself was from the start only established through Kurosawa’s ambiguous cuts, making it impossible to determine, in this supposedly ecocritical film, whether there is even a forest here, or whether, in a story where debates about cutting down a tree are founded on tendentious assertions of cause and effect, cutting/ editing is itself the only causality, juxtaposition the only forest. Systems such as the forest, or in fact any of the larger systems in his films, from apocalyptic infections in Barren Illusion, Pulse, or Retribution, to reality itself in Real, are often undermined at the same time they are asserted, as if they exist in parentheses or under erasure. Even gravity, which is visualized through falling bodies in Cure, Pulse, or Retribution, is complicated by bodies that become black stains or dust that blows away in the wind. The jarring fall from the roof of the doctor in Retribution should be seen in tandem with the flight of the ghost from the balcony in the same film. When I saw Retribution at the Tokyo FilmEx festival in 2006, many laughed at the latter scene, and I do not think that was inappropriate. Genre in fact is one of the main systems Kurosawa both asserts and renders absurd, often through discontinuity between filmic elements, such as the excessive music appended at the end of Loft, which renders it unclear whether that film is a horror film or a comedy. The nonsensical



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

351

or the absurd (kōtōmukei, in Japanese) is one aspect of Kurosawa’s work that he inherits in part from Godard—and is thus very visible in early Godard-influenced work like Kandagawa Pervert Wars (Kandagawa inran sensō, 1983) and The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (Do-re-mi-fa musume no chi ga sawagu, 1985)—but it is also a primary means by which Kurosawa’s cinema problematizes systematicity, categorization, and meaning without necessarily rejecting them. On the one hand, he is likely following Hasumi’s use of stupidity to critique systemic thought, one influenced by Deleuze. As Ryan Cook has explained it, to Hasumi “[t]hought both determines and is determined by systems of its own, and is thus in the absurd position of being able to say nothing about systems that is not systemic. However, rather than confronting this absurdity, systemic thought attempts to forget it” (2010, 135). Hasumi’s solution is precisely for thought to confront this absurdity by realizing its own “stupidity”: to Cook, “in acknowledging this impairment, and indeed in making disability the general condition of film experience, Hasumi finds a perverse strategy for actually empowering the eye against systemicity: to see in cinema nothing but impossibilities is to turn systems against themselves and to bring cinematic absurdity to the fore” (2010, 136). Kurosawa, on the other hand, is not simply a deconstructionist filmmaker undermining meaning. Bodies are still shockingly governed by gravity; the spatial and temporal integrity of long takes co-exists with the warping of space-time through editing. Kurosawa is ultimately not a director of discontinuity or of continuity, but of the space between them, of what I would call dis/continuity. Chika Kinoshita has analyzed how Loft, for instance, does not fit easily within either the discovery plot of classic horror, in which attaining knowledge of the monster is key to defeating it, or even the failed discovery plots of J-horror films, which are based on the idea, expressed by the screenwriter Konaka Chiaki, that “horror stories with clear causal explanations are not scary after all … After all, terror is absurd” (quoted in Kinoshita 2009, 112). Working in between showing and not showing, explaining and not explaining, Kurosawa’s cinema is often engaged with dualities, embodied narratively in early works such as Kandagawa Pervert Wars about two forces in conflict and by films like Séance and Doppelganger (2003) featuring actual doppelgangers; or visualized by his experiments with multiple cameras (one attached to the other, producing cuts between slight changes in camera angle) in Loft or by split screens in Bright Future and Doppelganger. His films do not just shift or inhabit the space between these different perspectives, but, as with the split screens, can sometimes inhabit them simultaneously. As B. Kite puts it, “when confronted with a binary ‘either/or’ Kurosawa opts for an impossible both” (Kite 2008, 45–6). This is core to the ambivalence and ambiguity many sense in his work.

352

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Paranoia and ghostly interpretation Such pairs and dualities complicate not only identity, but also perspective, narrative, and subjectivity. Much of Kurosawa’s cinema can be seen as self-reflexive (Tsuneishi 2001; Gerow 2012), and often features characters who attempt to impose singular systems, primarily through unambiguous interpretation and often with self-destructive results. Cure centralizes this issue by making its main character, Takabe, a detective whose job it is to make such interpretations. He tells Sakuma that his goal is to explain things in words, but Sakuma responds that crime often has no clear meaning— that it resists singular interpretation—and later warns him not to “get in too deep” (fukairi suru na). Takabe’s instability is not unlike those of other characters who pursue solutions. Miyashita in Serpent’s Path almost psychotically clings to Niijima’s various interpretations of who killed his daughter. Yabuike in Charisma acts practically like the detective in Red Harvest by effectively creating a new Charisma purely through his act of labeling it Charisma, in part so that he can set the various forces in the story against each other once again. In some cases, the problematic interpreter is a spectator. The question in Pulse, “Would you like to meet a ghost?,” is essentially that posed by any horror film. That characters answer that question in the affirmative, even to the point of creating their own dark, closed space so as to see that ghost, underlines how much films such as Pulse interrogate spectatorship. Given that, like Mamiya, none of the ghosts in Pulse kill—individuals all kill themselves in a world where the continuity or discontinuity between death and life is in question—one can argue that the problem is precisely the desire to see a ghost, or even, more fundamentally to interpret, to project singular systems of genre, meaning, or theory. They, one could perhaps say, wish to impose a boundary between live and death instead of accepting both in dis/continuity. If death is a virus in Pulse, the virus is in part the desire to see and to generate certain meaning from that. Posadas offers an intriguing interpretation of Retribution as a narrative of revenge against looking in the age of late capitalism. Following Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production, he describes how spectatorship can act “in the service of the social relations necessary for the reproduction of capitalist modernity.” The ghost of the woman in the red dress, who seems to compel those who looked at her in the window of the old sanitarium to commit murder, seeks retribution for this “crime of looking … the complicity of the film spectators the general logic of violence … built into capitalist social relations through the very desire to see” (2014, 452). Posadas interestingly then relates this to strategies in Kurosawa’s cinema for complicating looking, including the use of what I call “the detached style,” in which long takes and sparse analytical editing work to avoid the imposition of meaning on the other (Gerow 2007).



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

353

Given the ambivalence of Kurosawa’s cinema, however, we must consider another economy of looking that may exist alongside or under this interpretation. The woman in the sanatorium is less an object of specularization in capitalism, than a victim of an economy of sight that forgets and refuses to look at what is no longer useful. Those who look at her are less the spectators who, in Beller’s conception, serve as the workforce producing the visual economy, than unruly workers who were looking where they were not supposed to. In a sense, they are the opposite of Posadas’s spectators, ones who are already breaking through the habitual and systemic forms of sight that regulate meaning and othering. They are closer to Hasumi’s spectators, the ones who are actually looking at cinema, but this is perhaps where Kurosawa deviates from his teacher. As I have argued elsewhere, Hasumi’s deconstruction of cinema can have the effect of recreating the critic—the critical viewer—as an entity divorced from politics and history who, in the true presence/present of cinema, can look at Ozu and Hou Hsiao-Hsien and ignore the neocolonial problems of a Japanese looking at films of a former colony.3 In this, Hasumi is the critic version of Kitano the super auteur, but also product of a Japanese postmodernism that deconstructed identity as a means of declaring that only Japan was truly postmodern. Kurosawa’s other economy of looking, however, questions not just violence and capitalist exploitation, but the ethics and responsibility even in cases of such oppositional looking. Spectators cannot be absolved easily even if they are supposedly looking correctly. In this regard, I think Kurosawa is closer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ethics of looking than Hasumi’s celebration of nonsense via Deleuze. For Nancy, “Looking is regarding and consequently respecting … . In the end, looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering” (2001, 38). For Kurosawa, this constitutes not just taking responsibility for one’s looking—for having a regard for those regarded— but also subjecting one’s readings of the other to tests that complicate the ability to master meaning, that enable one to see that one is not seeing. Another avenue for considering Kurosawa’s regard is Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of paranoia, which investigates the problems in the pursuit of theory evident even in allies such as Judith Butler (Sedgwick 2003, 123–51). If Loft is, as Kendall Heitzman has argued, about the anxiety of influence (Heitzman 2009), then perhaps Kurosawa films are also about the anxiety, or even the paranoia of interpretation. Characters such as Miyashita, Takabe, Hayasaki (in Doppelganger), and Harue (in Pulse) pursue accounts that resemble Sedgwick’s definition of paranoia: their speculations are anticipatory, seeking explanations that will eliminate surprise (in this case, further crimes or deaths); they are reflexive, as the world they seek to know is modeled on the rationalism of the explanations they use; their theories are strong, expansive to the point of occasionally hypothesizing the end of the world (we are invited to do the same with Niijima’s formulae, which

354

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

pretend to account for the universe itself); they are focused on negative effects (on crime, viruses, death, apocalypse); and they have faith in exposure, as if the simple revelation of Mamiya’s technique, explaining it as cause and effect, is sufficient to control its affects. We can certainly see parallels in critical accounts of Kurosawa’s cinema which are seemingly compelled to read it as genre, as allegory, or as social symptom, while at the same time often considering it as a self-reflexive project that purportedly combats the effects of genre, vision, or cinema by exposing their machinations (for example, Hughes 2012). Kurosawa’s short film 2001 Cinema and Travel (2001 Eiga to tabi, 2001) visually enacts this form of paranoid interpretation: a series of urban images he shot abroad before 9/11— including some of planes flying near buildings—were edited after 9/11 and offer spectators the possibility to pursue paranoid constructions of reality as ubiquitous disaster. Kurosawa’s films explore alternatives to this paranoia first in terms of interpretation, and second in terms of auteurship. Kurosawa does not reject explanation or interpretation per se, even announcing in the official pamphlet for Bright Future, for instance, his willingness to have characters make such statements (Kurosawa 2003). Interpretations offered by characters in his films are rarely completely false, they just co-exist in discontinuity with other meanings. Ghosts in Kurosawa are not continuity, but rather discontinuity or more precisely dis/continuity, being neither visible nor invisible but both or neither at the same time. Discontinuity of the image is often the sign of the ghostly, and not only as in Pulse when glitches in the digital image signify a ghostly presence: the mutated dots on Harue’s computer are themselves a diagram of the ghostly. Working from Kurosawa’s own statement that cinema itself is frightening (Kurosawa 2001), which others have taken up to argue that in films like Cure it is cinema not Mamiya or the ghosts that is terrifying (Abe 2000; Posadas 2014), one can conclude that the motion picture image itself is ghostly in his cinema (Gerow 2012). This does not merely refer to the many figures in mirrors or behind curtains that are there and not there. When Harue in Pulse points to the multiple computer screens showing the lonely souls on the internet, her statement, “What’s the difference between them and ghosts?,” does not merely point to the ghostliness of the referent (some are in fact now ghosts), but to the fact that images themselves, being both there and not there, the referent and not the referent, are inherently fantastic, in Todorov’s sense of the term. As Kurosawa wrote, cinema is “what cannot possibly appear in images, but that said, it is also something that cannot be achieved if your eyes are closed” (Kurosawa 2001, 60). Kurosawa thus not only evokes the ghostliness of the simulacra, but also asserts a cinema that less depicts ghosts than is itself a ghost, requiring different forms of looking. Opening up to a ghostly cinema is itself to become a ghost by looking/ reading like a ghost. Instead of an interpretation of ghosts, Kurosawa



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

355

provides a ghost of interpretation. This might be aligned with the “other mode of seeing” Akira Lippit describes in his masterful interpretation of Cure (2005, 155), but it also brings us close to the weak, reparative reading that Sedgwick proposes. Harue’s original program in Pulse, where the dots cannot get too close but also not too far, is emblematic of a certain Kurosawa ethics—fukairi suru na!—that becomes multi-layered when the dots become discontinuous. Such a stance toward seeing, interpretation, even theory, accepts surprise, does not demand mimicry in the other, opposes the viral effects of strong theory, and, most importantly, argues the importance of not seeking, of non-exposure, or, more precisely, of a ghostly exposure. While Kurosawa’s work is notorious for being gloomy, it takes pleasure in the absurd, and finds positive repair in discovering a bright future in the darkness before one (Bright Future) or in the unseen end of performance after a troubled tale of performing family, nation, and even Ozu (in Tokyo Sonata [2008]). Certainly I myself could be charged with being paranoid about finding the meaning of Kurosawa’s work and creating an auteur who, through cause and effect, creates these images. But perhaps Kurosawa resists that, not by rejecting the concept of the author, but by rendering it ghostly as well. In an interview, Kurosawa denied a specific auteurist project and claimed he simply shot films as the medium would require (Kurosawa 2015). This is close to Shinozaki’s notion of Kurosawa as a missionary, a figure who does not create, but just transmits the cinema. This itself may sound somewhat passé, an expression of cinephilia and medium specificity in an age of the death of cinema and the reign of mixed media. His roots in Hasumi and thus Deleuze may also seem old fashioned, still pursuing deconstruction in the age of post-postmodernism. The danger of such an impression is not only that it can reinforce orientalist accounts of Asia as always backward, especially theoretically, but that it ignores the problems of temporality and nation in Kurosawa’s work. This pastness could be better aligned with Kurosawa’s own repeated concern with signs of the past (ruins, old technologies, repressed histories) as well as with narratives centered on attempts to revive the past or take revenge on behalf of the past. When asked about these narratives in an interview, Kurosawa strongly objected to efforts to narrativize the past, especially the practice of explaining characters through past actions or events (Kurosawa 2015). His cinema has always been open to experiment and new technologies, from the use of digital in Bright Future to special effects monsters in Real. His conception of temporality, then, both in his narratives and as a filmmaker, refuses to align past and present in a cause and effect relationship. Posadas rightly utilizes Derrida to explain how the specter in Kurosawa marks “a radical alterity that resists easy temporalization, with the effect of calling into question the presumed stability of the present” (2014, 447). Utilizing this to discuss not only Kurosawa’s

356

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

ghosts, but also his cinema and authorship, one can see his location both in cinema and the digital, in the position of a traditional auteur and outside it, as another form of dis/continuity, of an auteurship as spectership that avoids paranoia by having a regard for the regarded, rendering the time of paranoia (the anticipation, the mimicry, the repetition) out of joint and the enunciation of meaning weak and spectral, looking at one’s look. Rather than declare the end of cinema, it envisions its ghostly dis/continuity in and alongside new media. Yet this is not just “time out of joint” in Derrida’s sense, but also time that is haunted by the national politics of the past. One can find in Kurosawa’s films suggestions of repressed, alternative histories, such as of the phantasmagoric, mesmeristic aspects of early or even pre-cinematic culture in Cure, or of the urban modernity of seclusion and confinement in Retribution, both of which are more “present” than something else less present that haunts not only Kurosawa’s work but, I would argue, that of many of his contemporaries. In Barren Illusion, a film where the lead characters reject the future by choosing infertility, Miki heads to the airport to leave the country, but after showing her documents at the counter is simply ignored and has to return home. This is but one of many images in recent Japanese film of Japanese unable to escape Japan (others are evident in Kitano, Miike Takashi, and Aoyama Shinji, to name a few); however here the border is invisible, unspoken. This scene is repeated in Real, when Koichi travels to a municipal office and asks questions of a clerk who, while acknowledging Koichi’s presence, simply ignores him. As the traveling subject is seen but not seen, what becomes visible is an invisible operation of power that restricts both movement and knowledge, instituting borders. Real reminds us that this operation is that of the nation, of the state. Yet surely, one might think, this non-present entity is also passé. In an age of globalism, of transnational flows of capital and labor, where the nation itself has been accused of being out of date, representations of such impregnable borders can seem more to reify the nation than critique it. Surely that must especially be the case in a Japan where, after many years of refusing to see the past, the nation has been re-envisioned and performed on the international stage. The ghost of the nation is now in plain sight, no longer a specter but a real threat. Kurosawa’s response to this contemporary conjuncture is to expose neither the truth of the nation (its artifice or emptiness) nor what is hidden behind its present performance (its real past crimes). It is to insist on its existence as doppelganger, as dis/continuous. Yabuike’s intervention in Charisma’s narrative of struggles over property and territory is not to find the criminal or adjudicate justice (the right or just sovereign), but to move and regard, in Nancy’s sense, refusing the either/or through a stance that sees and recognizes both. The resulting conflagration is inherently ambiguous, both recalling a nuclear past and evincing the critical power of



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

357

such dis/continuous vision, especially against a postwar nation based on the enforcement of choices, on a select way of looking at things. Perhaps Kurosawa is, like Mamiya, a missionary, a dendōshi (伝道師) in Japanese, the characters of which emphasize transmission, movement, transfer, association, and connection. But as Shinozaki says, he is a dendōshi who professes he does not know the cinema that he transmits, and thus who remains a trickster who preaches cinema while never pretending to master it (1992, 172). In effect, he preaches the dis/continuity of transmission, the ghostliness of meaning. When Charisma asks us to restore the rules of the world, it is advocating neither the law of the sovereign nor the order of nature, but rather an ethics of looking that does not order one cinema or meaning but moves between two or more. The nation or even cinema, those supposed relics of the past, become neither past not present, neither present nor absent, visible or invisible, but impossibly both, in/ visible, destroyed and mourned and returned to haunting by a mode of detection that itself is both trickster and well regarded because it regards well. The challenge in this cinema of and about theory and interpretation is how to become ghostly detectives. In Kurosawa’s terms, this means not just treating him and his films as ghosts, but exploring forms of spectatorship and interpretation that are themselves ghostly. In Charisma as in Retribution, those ways of looking may only result in destruction or further haunting, since no one in a global, neoliberal regime of ubiquitous media knows all the rules. But in that lack of knowledge, in that inability to see, Kurosawa asks us to think how to “live within looking,” an ethics that must involve both regard and reparation.

Notes 1

See, for instance, the conversation between the indie filmmakers Matsumura Hiroyuki, Funahashi Atsushi, and Izuchi Kishū, “Orutanatibu shinema sengen,” Eiga Geijutsu. Available online: http://eigageijutsu.com/ article/131787116.html (accessed July 15, 2015). Matsumura talks of a “situation in which films that might list the actors names but don’t mention the director on the poster are flooding the market.”

2

In my interview (Kurosawa 2015), Kurosawa related the resistance of a French actor to a similar scene he shot in Woman in the Silver Plate. Presuming continuity, the actor expected the full shot to still show the woman, who would then fade away on screen.

3

I discuss this in a forthcoming piece “Ozu to Asia via Hasumi” in the anthology, The Ozuesque: Ozu and His Influence, Jinhee Choi (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

358

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

Works cited Abe, Kashō. 2000. Nihon eiga ga sonzaisuru. Tokyo: Seidosha, 121–4. Champigny, Robert. 1977. What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cook, Ryan. 2010. “An Impaired Eye: Hasumi Shigehiko on Cinema as Stupidity,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22: 135–6. Dayan, Daniel. 1974. “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28 (1): 22–31. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx. London: Routledge. Fujisaki, Kō. 2001. “Eiga wa sen no me o motsu: Kurosawa Kiyoshi ron,” in Kurosawa Kiyoshi, yūwakusuru shinema, 40–68. Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Āto Sentā. Gerow, Aaron. 2002. “The Empty Return: Circularity and Repetition in Recent Japanese Horror Films,” Minikomi 64: 19–24. Gerow, Aaron. 2007. Kitano Takeshi. London: BFI. Gerow, Aaron. 2012. “Kurosawa Kiyoshi,” in John Berra (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2, 45–7. London: Intellect. Hasumi, Shigehiko. 1992. Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Heitzmann, Kendall. 2009. “The Anxiety of Influence in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft.” Paper presented at the Josai International University Media Studies Department Media Workshop, Tokyo, Japan, May 23. Hughes, Kit. 2012. “Ailing Screens, Viral Videos: Cinema’s Digital Ghosts in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Pulse,’” Film Criticism 36 (2): 22–42. Hühn, Peter. 1987. “The Detective as Reader,” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (3): 451–66. Kinoshita, Chika. 2009. “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-horror,” in Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (eds), Horror to the Extreme, 103–22. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kite, B. 2008. “A Kurosawa Kiyoshi Kit,” in Michael Atkinson (ed.), Exile Cinema, 41–8. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. 2001. Eiga wa osoroshii. Tokyo: Seidosha. Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. 2003. “Kurosawa Kiyoshi Akarui mirai o kataru,” Akarui mirai (official theater pamphlet). Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. 2015. Interview by Aaron Gerow on July 7. Lippit, Akira. 2005. Atomic Light (Electric Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lukacs, Gabriella. 2010. Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McRoy, Jay. 2008. Nightmare Japan. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L’évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami. Brussels: Yves Gevaert. Palmer, Tim. 2010. “The Rules of the World: Japanese Ecocinema and Kiyoshi Kurosawa,” in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (ed.), Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, 207–44. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Petrovic, Peter. 2013. “‘Help Me’: Interrogating Capitalism, the Specter of



Kurosawa Kiyoshi

359

Hiroshima, and the Architectual Uncanny in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse,” in Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson (eds), The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film, 137–53. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Posadas, Baryon Tensor. 2014. “Fantasies of the End of the World: The Politics of Repetition in the Films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 22 (2): 429–60. Available online: https://muse.jhu.edu (accessed July 16, 2015). Pyrhönen, Heta. 1999. Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shinozaki, Makoto. 1992. “Seinaru peten-shi, kōya o iku,” Cahiers du Cinéma Japon 3: 166–73. Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sweeney, S. E. 1990. “Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity,” in Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds), The Cunning Craft, 1–14. Macomb: Western Illinois University. Tsuneishi, Fumiko. 2001. “Kurosawa Kiyoshi, heimenron,” in Kurosawa Kiyoshi, yūwakusuru shinema, 6–12. Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Āto Sentā. White, Jerry. 2007. The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.

20 A generational spectrum of global Korean auteurs: Political matrix and ethical potential Seung-hoon Jeong

The “386” generation as collective auteur In order to conduct a case study on how twenty-first century cinema has contributed to the development of political sensitivity in a local setting of immanent globality, I consider four contemporary South Korean auteurs: Park Chan-wook (b. 1963), Kim Ki-duk (b. 1960), Lee Chang-dong (b. 1954), and Bong Joon-ho (b. 1969). Establishing their worldwide fame throughout the millennial boom of Korean cinema, these directors have displayed various yet related tendencies of the so-called “386” generation—Korea’s most politically active generation that led the left-leaning, anti-dictatorship student movement in the 1980s.1 Kim, once a factory worker and a street artist in France, did not follow the normal course of education, and Lee, who is a little older, does not technically fit in this generation, but their politico-cultural contemporaneity with Park and Bong is something that other auteurs such as Hong Sang-soo and Im Kwon-taek do not share, something that would be lost on foreign audiences lacking insight into the South Korean context. On various levels, the films of our four auteurs have in common subtle historical references to specifically “386” issues. These include democratization (Lee), human rights (Park/ Lee), American imperialism (Bong), the division of the two Koreas (Kim/ Park), and class conflict (all four). Besides, the four men have often made

362

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

public their engagement with political parties and actual issues: Park and Bong with the Labor Party and the protest against Korea’s involvement in the Iraq War; Lee served as the Minister of Culture in liberal President Roh Moo-hyun’s cabinet; Kim in publicly supporting Roh’s successor Moon Jae-in, etc. Historical strata of political locality fundamentally orientate both the works and lives of these directors. However, political agendas have overall been subdued and displaced behind universally appealing aesthetics in post-Cold War Korean cinema. Partly disillusioned by the collapse of communism as an alternative ideology, part of the 386 generation adapted to Korea’s fast globalization in cultural fields that opened ever-more profitable (and “capital-infused”) opportunities. This shift brought about visible growth in the film industry and artistry, even at the international level. All the while, overt political narratives receded into the background. Instead, an increase in allegorical narratives was witnessed, as well as a symptomatic adjustment in political positioning on the part of authors on a wide spectrum of globalized expressions. What matters is, then, not the 386 auteurs’ politics per se, but “the political” immanent in their cinematic authorship, in all its aesthetic diversity. Our auteurs stage a variety of pointed ethical dilemmas in disguised political settings, offering different entry points into the nation’s moral, biopolitical, psychoanalytic matrix of power and justice, desire and abjection—perhaps the most decisive parameter of the generation’s mindset. It is tempting to identify their specificities in their synchronic linkage with each other, rather than in each one’s diachronic lineage to past auteurs. Mapping these common specificities will then reveal a pluralist plane of politico-ethical positions regarding today’s Korean society. A diachronic approach may also be possible on another level, where the hidden dynamics of this plane itself is betrayed. This can be achieved by arranging its conceptual cores, structural stalemates, and symptomatic potentialities in a philosophical narrative of sorts. It is here that we will get a sense of the evolution of the “386 auteur” without an “s.”

A political matrix: Parapractical violence in double bind Let me begin with what is perhaps the most famous Korean film in the West, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003). Though set in contemporary Korea, it tells the quasi-mythical story of a middle-aged man, Oh Dae-su, who is kidnapped and imprisoned in a room for fifteen years without any explanation, then released only to undergo even harsher turns of fate. While trying to find his tormentors and understand their motives, driven by a monstrous thirst for vengeance, he falls in love and has sex with



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

363

a woman, who turns out to be his daughter. To add insult to injury, this incest was part of the vengeful plot of his captor, Lee Woo-jin, an old boy of Dae-su’s high school. In flashbacks, we learn that Dae-su had accidentally played witness and divulged Woo-jin’s incestuous love affair with his sister, leading to her phantom pregnancy and death by suicide. Confronted with Woo-jin’s hidden trauma, Dae-su cuts out his tongue to atone for carelessly spreading the rumor, and to compel Woo-jin to not tell Dae-su’s daughter that he is indeed her father. Oldboy plays like an old Greek tragedy, the name “Oh Dae-su” sounding much like “Oe-di-pus.” So what is the new spin on the age-old story to be found here? This highly aestheticized, a-temporal, global epic includes one scene that conspicuously refers to actual reality: the TV news compilation of historical events from 1988 to 2002 shown in Dae-su’s cell. These include, amongst others, the detention of Korea’s last dictator, and the elections of two liberal presidents (one being the aforementioned Roh). This one-minute montage efficiently compresses the fifteen years of Dae-su’s imprisonment, but the implication is that the very official history updated with the national father figures and sociopolitical upheavals has no relation to, and no influence whatsoever on, his private persecution, in a private prison, by his private father figure. The latter enacts justice as private revenge, including the incestuous romance prohibited in the Symbolic order (including the legal system). In other words, what is abducted is ultimately the social big Other which, despite its democratization (and all that concerned the 386’s civil society), may be incapable of addressing the traumatic Real beyond normal reality. A resentful Woo-jin, the subject of subjective justice and subversive desire, directly holds his private trial where he can exact power. He, the past victim, now becomes a cruel tormentor, a self-appointed judge, an angry god whose oracle unimaginably victimizes Dae-su, the past (unwitting) tormentor, standing as the enunciator of words, on the side of social norms and thus the unwitting representative of normal law. Power hierarchy is reversed in this exceptional state of judgment. Likewise, after undergoing the nightmarish confinement, Dae-su does not go to the police (and cannot, since he is now pursued as the murderer of his wife), but instead goes on his own private investigation, his own revenge project outside the bounds of the law. In fact, this disregard for public authority is pervasive in Korean cinema, resonating with the Korean people’s long-engrained distrust of governments and legal institutions. There is, however, a twist to this political allegory. Let’s go back to the primal scene, the original sin, i.e. Dae-su’s hidden gaze at the “mirror stage”—Woo-jin’s incestuous love reflected, an image of lost paradise, doomed to be shattered like the looking glass in which it is reflected. This nostalgic past is dated July 1979, the point just before the assassination of Korea’s dictator Park Chung-hee, and the turmoil caused by the military coup that ensued, including the infamous Gwangju Massacre

364

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

of pro-democratic protesters, quickly followed by another dictatorship. Interestingly, although the last dictatorship period of 1980–7 (the period of the 386’s political formation) is totally absent in the film, its terribly oppressive, capitalist state power is present in the forms of arbitrary and irrational incarceration, brutal torture, hired gangs, and a panopticon-like surveillance system run by Woo-jin, now living in a luxurious penthouse. The conspicuous absence of the 1980s in Oldboy thus conveys the persistence of its memory which is neither forgotten nor overcome by 386s, just as the two old boys remain stuck in their traumatic past. Put another way, this haunting double bind of history is re-presented only through absence within the full presence of the delocalized diegesis, only obliquely sensed in the “ab-scene” guise of apparent a-historicity. Thomas Elasser’s notion of “parapraxis” may work here (Elsaesser 2013, 94–114): the paradoxical practice of simulation as dissimulation; the metonymic indication of the unrepresentable by the void amongst the presented; the unconscious process whereby the film both avoids and encounters the traumatic Real that is repressed yet returns through the Imaginary phantasm. In this sense Oldboy’s “privatization of the public sphere” conducted in the “state of exception” to the legal system evokes and even resembles the state of emergency that had been historically enacted in 1980s South Korea. Just as the coups, martial law, and torture and killing of dissidents suspended civil law under the politics of fear and tyranny, so Woo-jin becomes a supra-legal “sovereign” whose power deprives Dae-su of any sociopolitical subjectivity. This normal citizen is then degraded to a quasianimal “bare life” stripped of legal rights, like the homo sacer, which Giorgio Agamben defines as cast out of the civil order, who may thus be killed with impunity without there being any need for a judicial process. Not coincidentally, Dae-su abases himself when he begs Woo-jin: “I’ll be your dog, please forgive me!” Barking on all-fours, shaking his hip (tail), and licking the master’s feet literalizes this abject metamorphosis. Of note here is the relativity of sovereignty and naked life, as the protagonist has also become “Mr. Vengeance” in his own extralegal desire to find and kill the antagonist. Dehumanized, he becomes a monster who devours a live octopus and shouts out at his private, big Other (right before imploring him, cf. the line above): “Son of a bitch! I’ll chew your corpse if you tell my daughter the truth!” The law of man is replaced by the animal’s law: the survival game of killing or being killed, right down to the food chain— preying or being preyed upon. Biopolitically, the sovereign and homo sacer are two symmetrical correlatives. For the sovereign, “all men are potentially homines sacri,” who operate in an “inclusive exclusion” as the referent of the sovereign’s decision (Agamben 1998, 84–5). The expulsion of extralegal bare life is integral to the exertion of supralegal sovereignty, thus integrated in the same power structure. This exceptional state underlies the legal system, able to suspend



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

365

it when potential sovereignty is actualized by stigmatizing someone as homo sacer in case of emergency, in the name of communal security, justice, etc. The removal of homo sacer then restores normal law, to which the sovereign figure is also subject. Thus, the exception is the structural kernel of the norm, and the animal law is the foundational core of the human law. One may recall here Walter Benjamin’s critique of law as double violence (gewalt: force of authority): “lawmaking violence” ignores laws to achieve unsanctioned ends and constitute a new law for domination. The latter, once established, executes “law-preserving violence” for sanctioned ends to sustain its order (Benjamin 1978, 284–5). The point is that lawmaking violence does not disappear but resides within law-preserving violence as potential to transcend it, thereby maintaining it. No normality of law is possible without its dialectic potential for self-destructive transcendence. Capital punishment, for example, is not merely a law-preserving action to a crime but the highest violence over life and death that fearsomely reaffirms the self-making of law, which indicates the inherent nature of “something rotten in law” (Benjamin 1978, 286), maybe because it transgresses the sanctity of life as universal law. More paradoxically, although animality is embodied in naturalized killing without its cultural codification as murder, this loss of humanity rather endows the sovereign figure with such transcendental power as normal citizens (potential homini sacri) cannot have and cannot help but obey. He is thus less than human, yet more than human. It is by losing his humanity, through killing bare lives, turning both himself and others into a state of brutal animality, that the sovereign killer paradoxically attains an unreachable divinity of sorts. We sense here the risky potential of lawmaking violence, which temporarily holds but ultimately restores or reforms the law, to partake in Benjamin’s other notion, “divine violence”: pure destruction of the law based on a justice that is unknowable, that only God decides upon. The two men’s vengeance in Oldboy is pursued like such law-destroying violence, driven by their “an eye for an eye” version of divine justice that normal law cannot accept or redeem, with no new law planned to be set up at a later stage (Woo-jin simply kills himself in the end). This is more (regressively) radical than Benjamin’s progressive vision of leftist revolution as divine violence, which inevitably turns into lawmaking so as to construct a new order. The two other films of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy are variations on this radical problem. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot, 2002), a fired worker and his former boss, illegal dealers of organs, and a group of anarchists are all caught up in a vicious circle of vengeful violence which they inflict upon each other. In Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005), families of a murderer’s victims kill him together during a sort of collective private trial, led and paid for by the heroine who was wrongfully jailed for thirteen years in the murderer’s stead. When the big Other—society or god—does not help, one directly

366

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

commits pseudo-divine violence as subjective justice, acquiring divinity through “animality with bloody hands.” But this divinity is relativized when retaliation is triggered for another’s subjective justice. So that vicious cycles of violence only grow in a ceaseless state of exception, as if perpetuating the war of all (self-convicted sovereigns) against all (potential bare lives). Justice is restored by one and rejected by another, endlessly, without there ever being an ultimate justice.2 This dynamic deadlock, like the globalized trap of terror and war on terror, is deeply localized in Korean cinema under the guise of pathological behaviors. Kim Ki-duk’s One on One (Il-dae-il, 2014) shows a man kidnap, imprison, and torture the killers of his daughter. He does so with his “Shadow” terrorist group organized out of social nonpersons, disguised as the police, soldiers, the U.S. military, a gang, National Intelligence Service agents, etc., i.e. all those who have been ruling Korea and killing “democracy” (Minju in Korean, which is also the name of the protagonist’s daughter, who died in May, the month of the aforementioned 1980 massacre, and of the death of President Roh in 2009). Again, revenge performs the reversal of power hierarchy by using violence in a private prison, while escaping yet tailing, mimicking, and threatening the system, i.e. “shadowing” it in every sense of the word. But the group members withdraw from this wheel of violence one by one, which suggests both the impotence of the populace (slave morality) and the impasse of extremism (suicidal terrorism)—negative and active nihilisms I shall return to. Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang, 1999), a timereversing chronicle of a broken man, ends up positioning his “age of innocence” in 1979 like Oldboy. During his military service in 1980, he happens to kill a civilian girl during the Gwangju Massacre, and throughout the decade afterwards, he works as a policeman torturing anti-government students. This fall of a pure soul (or his rise to a mini-sovereign status) does not simply tell that a perpetrator of violence is also a victim of the violent regime. After the trauma of 1980, the protagonist lives in a “normalized state of exception” inscribed in the regime itself to the extent that violence is embodied as his personal habitus, sustaining his life on a daily micropolitical level, from which only death liberates him. Similarly, the police in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok, 2003), though sincerely struggling for social justice, habitually exude such violence as both the 1980s modus operandi and modus vivendi when pursuing a serial killer through violent interrogations of suspects. The endless game of hide-and-seek between the all-present authorities and the never-identified criminal only reinforces law enforcement and the outlaw’s force at one and the same time, in their distorted mirror stage of negative interdependence. Hardly political at face value, the film still brings back the exceptional atmosphere that became the norm for Korean society under dictatorship, now positioning us on the government’s side.



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

367

Bong’s The Host (Gwoemul, 2006) deserves particular attention in this regard. Here, memories of the invisible murderer turn into the imaginary— a spectacular Thing, a science fiction allegory for the 1980s. The early scene, in which the protagonist’s daughter is seen, terrified, with the monster rushing at her in the background, overlaps with the image of a 1980s college girl protesting on the street, about to be killed by brutal riot police. In both cases, the father’s (and our) viewpoint is that of powerless bystanders. The film indeed resonates with 386 déjà vu. The family’s fight against the monster to save the little girl is resolute but ridiculous, armed as they are with Molotov cocktails and iron pipes—there too summoning 1980s protests imagery. The protagonists go underground and join forces with the homeless, working individually yet collectively like a motley crew of amateur dissidents and desperate militants. The monster, born from toxic chemicals dumped into the Han River by the American military, undoubtedly appears like a metonymic avatar of the Korean military regime subjugated to the neocolonial U.S. power. But the allegory is less simple than it might seem. The monster as embodiment of state power is also its abject byproduct whose uncanny return ends up threatening governmental authority. Interestingly, the government does not really try to get rid of it, but only barricades the creature’s hideaway in order to confine it there, thereby prolonging the state of emergency in order to strengthen its control over the citizens. The stigmatization of the monster as the “host” of a lethal virus thus enables supralegal sovereignty and its biopolitics of fear, which by the same token internally needs such an external enemy, in an antagonistic symbiosis of sorts. Not coincidentally, the container of the “Agent Yellow” gas used for quelling protests looks like the monster. Protesters resist the state rather than the creature, shouting not “Kill it” but “Let us be free!” In other words, it is the regime itself that parasitically depends on the monster-host, all the more since there turns out to be “no virus”—just as South Korea has been a “para-site” of North Korea whose threat, virtually unrealizable, justifies the domestic “routinization” of power abuse and human rights violations; just as the United States led the global reign of terror by “para-si(gh)ting” Iraq as the host of (absent) weapons of mass destruction. The monster thus functions as a “true fiction,” whose unfalsifiability (since it doesn’t exist) rather makes it a “sublime object of ideology” (and thus all the more effective). The film’s “host” conceals not a virus but the fact that there is no virus, yet this concealment of nothing to conceal, the veiling of nothingness, endows it with the aura of fearsome power, which is appropriated by the system. The latter is constituted through the effort to exclude it while keeping it integrated as a structural counterpart, a secret collaborator that causes the desire for self-sustainability. We find here the second allegory of the Thing: it is the externalized core of the Symbolic order; an absolute bare life that

368

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

paradoxically should not be killed, in order for the regime to maintain sovereignty over potential bare lives. This double allegory is not self-contradictory but symptomatic of the Real: the 1980s power structure as a whole. This is why the family fights both the monster (explicitly) and the authorities (implicitly). This is why, although the monster is a spectacular reduction of the Real to be clearly identified and finally terminated, the protagonist gets wind of the undead Real, which seemingly returns in the end with no externally singularized form. This ending leaves the film “unsutured” into the convention of humanistic family drama, making it a parapractical trace of the traumatic Real that could not be fully represented otherwise, despite its spectacularization (but one, it should be noted, only fragmentarily sensed in that fantasy). Indeed, the Real is the totality of numerous political consequences that have conditioned Korean society, that could however be experienced only through heterogeneous, sporadic effects in reality. The unfathomable, unprecedented CGI (computer-generated imagery) monster, a non-existent referent, is a (digital) index of the durational 1980s whose effects continue to be released into the river of history, as in the 2000 case of the U.S. army’s discharge of toxic chemicals into the Han. The imagination of the fictive monster based on this incident thus turns us back to memories of the monstrous past. But far from being nostalgic, the past is transformed in a science fiction setting, yet one that is still very realistic, as if pursuing the monster was an attempt to retrace the past from the present perspective, so as to open a new future. The typical 386 dialectics is implied here, fusing the political nature of the 1980s with 1990s cultural sensibility, through the 2000s global technology. However, the 386-driven renaissance of Korean cinema might have led to an impasse in this historical imagination. Symptomatic are not only the vicious cycle of violence, but also its break. Bong’s far more futuristic science fiction blockbuster Snowpiercer (Seolgungnyeolcha, 2013), though fully globalized in funding, casting, making, and screening, most overtly epitomizes the 1980s political spirit and dilemma. A “supertrain,” the last shelter for post-apocalyptic survivors, endlessly hurtles around the world in a new ice age, in order not to be frozen. But what is more catastrophic than the nature of the outside is the culture of the inside: the dystopian class division. Here, the “scum,” horribly exploited in the tail car, revolt against the ruling class of the front cars in order to break free and take over the engine, i.e. power. This proletarian revolution, however, turns out to have been programmed by the divine train owner in order to keep in balance the biopolitical ecosystem of the train/world, by periodically reducing the population of the tail car passengers, like “revolutions” in The Matrix series. In fact, the oppressed are not a wage-earning working class, but surplus laborers whose sole purpose is in fact to produce small children who will work as replacement parts of the engine; the leader



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

369

of the revolution is destined to inherit the sovereign position in order to perpetuate the autopoietic system’s self-sustainability. Allegorically, the engine of global capitalism running this multi-racial Ark absorbs any revolutionary force in order to reinforce itself with pseudo-divine violence. The latter solely fulfills a goal of law-preservation, but one more powerful than any counter-violence that merely serves as a structural pretext to shake off annoying bare lives, or, at best, to rejuvenate sovereignty. The uprising’s leader, welcomed to the desert of this Real, finally chooses to go to the other extreme by detonating the whole train: not to change the world, but to exit it; not to stay “on the rails” of progress, in whatever direction, but to stop it, to escape it. This termination of post-catastrophic redemption by another catastrophe may embody true divine violence on the hopeless status quo. This notion is often found in Benjamin’s messianic mysticism, but Slavoj Žižek identifies it in historical events such as the French and the Soviet revolutions, along with the imaginable suspension of the law of neoliberal globalization. For him, divine violence occurs not as a god’s intervention, deus ex machina, but out of the human will to justice as divinely unknown yet necessarily desirable, while gods are seen as rather impotently silent, instead of being big Others giving orders. It is neither an exceptional state sovereignty underlying the law, nor the anarchic explosion of pure violence. Rather, it only contingently reveals the “concrete universality” of what is to come through holes in the established order (Žižek 2008, 178–205). Alain Badiou’s (2012) notion of “Event” is not that different. It breaks the “Being” of the current state and state-governed reality to bring out the “truth” of life, whose irreducible singularity could not be communicated in the capitalist calculation of symmetrical give and take. An Event is just “given,” like catastrophe, but a potentially positive one that deranges the Symbolic and opens the Real of unknown futures immanent in the present. As a chance encounter with unpredictable rupture, it enters the void, the “beyond-the-law” of situations. However, such schizophrenic subversion is easily framed as anarchic destruction that must be stopped, quickly loses its momentum, and remains a chaotic-then-rigidified spasm of the global multitude (as in the case of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement). Even if it pulls down the status quo, as noted before, law-destroying violence entails lawmaking violence in a loop, just as historical revolutions often ended up establishing horrible state regimes, which in turn were to be destroyed later on. Now, a dialectic fusion of these two aspects underlies the stalemate of our post-historical age: no revolution is possible in that any revolution would reproduce the capitalist class system as universal nature, inevitable providence. This is a double bind: neither submission nor resistance is positive. But another double bind occurs after the rejection of the first one, i.e. choosing divine violence with no “after,” an ultimate revolution without “revolution in

370

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

history.” Snowpiercer thus ends with the two last survivors, an Asian girl and a black kid, facing a polar bear on the snowy “tabula rasa” of the world, like a dog on the “ground zero” at the post-apocalyptic ending of Dogville (2003). Projecting a hopeful solidarity or romantic nomadism upon these multi-ethnic, posthuman orphans is, if anything, a mere fantasy. The extreme imagination of catastrophe prevalent in global cinema in fact indicates the dead end of imagination, the failure of imagining a new better community. The splendid visualization of destruction is a parapractical symptom of what should have, but could not be constructed. It is indeed easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism as has often been said. An alternative community remains unthinkable even for the leftist critics, thus constituting a negative “u-topia,” or the negative vision of “no utopia.” Conversely, for Fredric Jameson (2004), this negativity of our imprisonment in a non-utopian present teaches us “negative dialectics”: the negation of the negative status quo does not necessarily lead to a positive synthesis, but rather serves as a warning criticism of all different alternatives, if any, which can negate each other, thereby debunking any imagined resolution for all-encompassing systems as ideological illusion. This critical potential is crucial. But then, is there no alternative to the impasse of dystopian vision or such an ideology test, no possibility of envisioning communal life, if not in the name of utopia, then in that of any collective community?

Ethical potential: Abject agency in performative atopia With this question in mind, let me first generalize what has been discussed in terms of “abjection.” Julia Kristeva psychoanalyzes the “abject” as what is rejected or excluded from oneself but not yet a separate thing, thus thrown in a state of limbo between subject and object, neither alive nor dead (Kristeva 1982, 1–18). So is the monster in The Host, born out of waste, resembling an aborted fetus: a dark, damp body with a vaginalike mouth that devours people and spits out excreta like the filthy drain it inhabits, it embodies the “monstrous-feminine” (Creed 1993): the negative imagery of the uterine causing horror, the maternal body that a child must cut off and reject in order to form its individual identity. By extension, in view of growing academic attention to “social abjection,” we can identify a narrative pattern in most of the 386 auteurs’ films: protagonists symbolically die at the beginning by being cast out of their normal life, job, or family, often through a traumatic event. Their sociopolitical subjectivity with legal rights is suspended; their bare life is vulnerably exposed to lethal violence. The rest of the narrative shows how they survive in such a



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

371

state of abjection, leading a symbolic postmortem life as the undead. They struggle to regain lost subjectivity by returning to their community or take revenge on it, while mirroring its monstrosity in the double bind of violence and more violence until their physical, catastrophic, ultimate death. Their “abjectivity” is therefore bracketed by double death—symbolic and real— similar to the “zone between life and death” (or two deaths) where Jacques Lacan locates Antigone (Lacan 1997, 270–83). This tendency indeed resonates with biopolitical global phenomena. Systems of inclusion based on neoliberal capitalism, transnational multiculturalism, and network technology still generate unavoidable byproducts as symptoms of exclusion, such as illegal migration, economic crisis, and terroristic catastrophe. In other words, abjectivity is a mode of global subjectivity; its antagonistic tension with the dominant order is inevitable. What Korean cinema shows is their local variations: the development of a new town entails abjection from the family bond and romance (Lee’s Green Fish (Chorok mulkogi, 1997), the International Monetary Fund crisis turns a mid-life crisis into madness (Peppermint Candy), the polarization of class structure reaches a tipping point (Snowpiercer), the disabled resort to the illegal organ trade and anarchy for survival (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), an abject loan shark exploits the poor in debt (Kim’s Pieta [2012]), affective laborers become capitalistic vampires sucking the blood of others (Park’s Thirst [Bakjwi, 2009]), and so on. Our auteurs’ themes are formed accordingly: the loss and recovery of ordinary life that social minorities undergo in Lee; ideological systems that class and legal conflicts debunk in Bong; vengeance and judgment driven by out-law desire in Park; and the sin and salvation of animalistic ghost figures in Kim. What is typical is that the struggle of the abject involves the process of fulfilling a given task, so that abjectivity has “agency” at its core: the causative force to activate actions, the capacity to act despite the uncertainty of effects. Its genre-specific forms are spy, crime, disaster films where secret agents and action heroes often face abjection from their institutional agency, but the peculiar case of normal people becoming “abject agents” beyond the genre formula is prevalent in the four auteurs under scrutiny here. It is crucial, insofar as agency accounts for the temporary “reassemblage” of subjectivity in unpredictable crises of abjection better than the traditional notion of identity or any a priori essence. In other words, abject agents have the potential to change their subjectivity. Though the result is often tragic, (self-)imposed missions such as vengeance, rescue, justice, and resistance enable them to solve epistemological puzzles or undergo existential adventures while their pathological obsessions rather serve a function of constructive pressure. Abject agency thus makes them more than themselves, exceptional to themselves. It is through this exceptionality immanent in them that they enter the state of exception to normal law. At this point we can address the protagonists’ deadlock in view of the

372

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

mechanism of desire. The Symbolic power relation and class system remain stable when mobilized by broad Hegelian dynamics: the master’s desire based on a perpetual lack keeps failing, thereby prodding the slave’s fight for recognition by offering metonymic objects to fill it. But the BenjaminAgamben line of thought lets us suppose that the master’s power may have originated as sovereignty over bare life through lawmaking violence. The master-slave dialectic then appears as the Symbolic structuration of the sovereign-homo sacer dyad by reducing lawmaking to law-preserving violence. Conversely, the state of exception reactivates the repressed yet supralegal Real, so that the master and the slave turn into the sovereign and the abject, with their hierarchy often reversed as we just saw. In any event Lacanian desire lurks in the background: the illusion of oneness between the subject and the Other (master-sovereign), i.e. phallic jouissance. Its normal structure only makes all subjects repetitively frustrated, while leaving one transcendent exception supposed to reach total fulfillment—which is as inaccessible in reality as it was in the case of courtly love. However, this jouissance itself is a constructed fantasy, just as sovereignty can be subjectively claimed by any abjects who are then trapped in the loop of a violent, now out-law power game. Moreover, abject agency outside the Symbolic is motivated through the Imaginary attachment to the (lost) object of desire. In this regard Oldboy mixes two myths: Dae-soo, like Oedipus, embodies the power of language with the will to knowledge and punishes his sin on the side of the law, ambiguously retrieving the same phallic jouissance in the end; Woo-jin, like Antigone, rather abolishes the law in his ethical melancholia for his sister that can only turn into a mourning ritual at the completion of the vengeance plot, which itself works like her fifteen-year-long fantastic elevation to the state of a sublime object. This Imaginary content that Woo-jin joins in death by killing himself still anchors his ethical act in the myth of oneness, its utopian desire and dystopian failure. But when he finishes the vengeance and quits the Other’s law to fully embrace the traumatic Real, i.e. the absolute absence of his object of desire, his raison d’être also disintegrates. The mourning for his lost love leads him not to the Symbolic but to the paradoxical reunion with her, jouissance in death: the second, real death. That the only autonomous act freed from the biopolitical circuit is to choose death is quite a dilemma, which nonetheless has ethical potential. In Thirst, a priest and a housemaid repeat religious and domestic “affective labor” without redemption, in a curious setting of multicultural elements mixed together as rootless simulacra (hanbok, enka, mahjong, vodka, Bach, Catholicism, Africa …). The vampire virus infection from a global network then liberates them from their daily yoke toward the jouissance of bloodsucking, a classical allegory for the bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat. This allegory is updated, as their mutual transfusion, unfettered greed for blood, mergers and acquisitions of corporeal capital now



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

373

evoke global financial capitalism—auto-proliferating, monopolistic, and predatory beyond any regulation. Abandoning their parental figures, the vampires no longer pursue the impossible satisfaction of “desire” to fill the lack in the Other, but purely enjoy the immediate pleasure of “drive” by encircling different contents (people) of the autonomous object cause of desire (blood) with the Other itself lacking. Their animalistic sovereignty over bare lives only obeys the law of the jungle, the natural economy that normalizes this exceptional state as she asks: “Is it a sin for a fox to prey upon a hen?” However, he finally demands they make an ethical break with the evil addiction of killing people by killing themselves. Self-excluded from the church, he still may not deny the potential sanctity of bare life. The parasitic vampire still seeks a para-site of divinity after the site of God disappears behind the site of animality. While in Oldboy the exit from the Other only leads a meaningless life to end, in Thirst the suicide is an existential decision of free will to accept the burden of responsibility and the fate of death, i.e. ethical amor fati. We may find here humanity redeemed from divine animality for Park, the formerly Catholic auteur. The same goes for many of Kim’s films with religious motifs such as Moebius (Moebiuseu, 2013), Samaritan Girl (Samaria, 2004), and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom, 2003). His Christianity or Buddhism should be understood less as a gate to a utopia and rather as a parapractical backdrop of the “a-topian” question: where to save abject humanity if such a traditional Other seemingly fails to do so? When this failure, i.e. the fatalistic failure of desire for oneness with the Other, is veiled, the slave morality works: the desire will be fulfilled through the postmortem salvation, following the faithful atonement for our (original) sin in our doomed life endured in resignation. This “negative nihilism,” after the death of God, turns into “passive nihilism”: with no Other’s orientation, one only seeks apathetic comfort in detached security to enjoy small, secular others for individual pleasures. For Nietzsche, this decadent individualism should be overcome by “active nihilism” that takes the risk of creating new values with the will-to-power, destroying the status quo—as typically seen among radical activists and even suicidal terrorists who dare sacrifice their life for a big cause (Critchley 2013, 4–6). We can remap these nihilisms in psychoanalytic ethics. While negative nihilism is governed by desire, passive nihilism is governed in turn by the drive whose instant satisfaction and rebirth best characterize the consumerist addi(c)tion to capitalist substitutes for the object of desire that still evokes the Other as the postmodern Symbolic. But there is another type of drive: the death drive, which transgresses this circuit of pleasure toward jouissance as achieved only by negation; the free will to death that rejects any Symbolic semblants of the Other (Lacan 1997, 205–17). Active nihilism, then, presents two dangers: either pursuing desire in supralegal sovereignty, including by even killing others, or following the death drive

374

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

to destroy the law by killing oneself. While each case has its own cause of ethical justice in its own dilemma, the second one has more potential for a positive turn, a “positive nihilism” of existentialist amor fati that affirms not death but the eternal return of life. Kim’s abject figures are often left alone with the task of having to go on with life in a world with no Other, where suicide seems like the easier solution. Lee’s two films highlight the question of “to be or not to be,” but in a more realistic mode, with the Other still present nonetheless. In Secret Sunshine (Milyang, 2007), a widow starts over in her deceased husband’s hometown, only to be confronted with an even greater tragedy, when her young son is kidnapped and murdered. At first she seeks help from the church in healing this traumatic abjection. But she turns away from God when she finds out He has forgiven the murderer, even before she could forgive him herself. This religious fable is based on a short story allegorizing the way in which the victims of the 1980 massacre are forced by the regime into reconciliation with their very attackers. Forgiveness, here, means nothing but fictive reintegration into the Other when the Real trauma is still stuck in the mud of no redemption. In the film, this Other is redoubled; the crime is punished in the Symbolic legal system, but the sin can only be forgiven through God. The problem is that the Symbolic rather serves as a platform for the killer’s self-proclaimed salvation, allegedly accepted by God, thereby depriving the mother of the sole possibility of sovereign power, in this instance not for killing, but for saving the other’s life. In other words, a state of exception is still necessary even to do good, which turns out to be co-opted by the law. Her consequent revenge on God, through harming church members and herself, implies her claiming for herself an exceptional state to enact her own justice, which only leads to madness. In the end, however, she returns to her mundane world where the law and God still coexist, neither having been destroyed. The question, then, is “how to go on with life?” The protagonist of Poetry (Shi, 2010) is on the side of the assailant. An old woman with pronounced aesthetic tastes (her name Mi-ja means “beautiful one”) becomes aware of her teenage grandson’s involvement in a group rape of a girl, which led her to commit suicide. Despite her love for her grandchild she is reluctant to accept the assailants’ families’ offer of an easy reconciliation with the dead girl’s family by simply giving them settlement money. Now the Symbolic is split into this corrupted society and the law. In the end, she has the police arrest her grandson and disappears, leaving a poem titled “Song of Agnes” dedicated to the dead girl. It is recited in her voice-over at first, and then in the dead girl’s voice, while the screen shows the girl’s last trajectory to the site of her suicide (and supposedly Mi-ja’s as well). Mi-ja thus resorts to the law for social justice, yet understands its inability to provide ethical atonement. To this end, God’s role is taken by art. Her salvation from being a poor, old, and diseased semi-abject is first



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

375

sought in poetic beauty. But she poignantly realizes the ethical impotence of beautiful words in the Symbolic when confronted with the sublime Real. Her last poem is not merely a piece of art, but her performance of internalizing the unknown bare life through the death drive that goes beyond the logic of desire and the Symbolic mourning for its object. This embracement is a truly para-sitical ventriloquism of the abject becoming the shadow (site/ sight) of the other abject, one being “given for” the other in order to be “forgiven.” This powerful gesture characterizes the ethical heart of the 386 auteurs. Pure death drive is nonetheless negative in self-destruction and its negation of aesthetic creativity. Is there no way the latter can instead turn death drive into life force? We need to go back to Kim now, whose common motifs are notably related to the creative potential of abjectivity. His characters, as well as he himself appearing in the autobiographical Arirang (2011), are not only amateur artists playing with painting, photography, and even film, but also brilliant bricoleurs (handymen) who make whatever they need, from a coffee maker to a pistol, out of randomly available refuse and debris-like materials. That is, the abject people transform abject things into something new. Sometimes Kim’s abject agents appear to be casual workers who paradoxically appropriate characteristics that are both demanded and produced by neoliberal global systems: temporary modulation of identity, flexible adaption to situations, cognitive mapping, corporeal power, resilient self-cure, etc. There is only a thin line between globality and abjectivity. Abject agents teach themselves how to fight back against the ruling system all the more effectively as they embody its core qualities. More importantly, there is a shift in this creative abjectivity from the individual to the interpersonal level. Often homeless, Kim’s abject figures are urban nomads squatting vacant houses, doubly (but also ghostly) occupying them and even doing housework as in 3-Iron (Bin-jip, 2004). In this film, a drifter falls in love with an abused housewife, but is accused and imprisoned for housebreaking after her husband finds out about the affair. He then trains himself to ontologically change into a shadow-figure in the prison. Following his release, instead of terrifying the patriarch and society in revenge, he sneaks back into the house and becomes an invisible human “parasite” living in the husband’s house and taking food from the dining table without ever being exposed to this “host,” yet facing the wife in mute love. Her husband wonders about her silent smiles, but passes no remark as they make him feel happy anyway. In sum, the abject creates a “para-site” beside the site of patriarchal law to launch a virtuous cycle of give and take where they can feed each other physically and mentally in an asymmetrically circular “feedback” loop, without the host being aware of it. Without entirely possessing each other, the three in the love triangle are happy together in this minimal community of virtual co-belongingness. The abject

376

THE GLOBAL AUTEUR

does not try to punish the master by becoming an extralegal sovereign, obsessed with the melancholic mourning for the lost object of desire. Instead he finds a new way of being with the Symbolic without killing the Other or himself, while rearranging his relationship with the “virtual” to make a breakthrough in all the double binds of desire and drive. The death drive, if any, now turns its destructive power into alternative potential to become “undead” by circulating food as life force, a vital gift that is given back and forth between reality and its immanent para-site. Let me conclude by bringing back The Host. The monster’s shelter is also a place to nurture life as suggested in its uterine image. Just inside the drain, the young girl abducted and “abjected” by the “host” takes care of an abject boy taken, like her, by the monster. After her death, her father takes the boy home and feeds him as if to adopt him. The Korean word for “to feed” 먹이다, (meog-i-da), is a dative verb, which, in Korean, cannot be turned into a passive form; instead of eating each other, i.e. being eaten by each other, one gives another something to eat while contingently opening this circle to others in need. The verb thus forms a giving relationship between abject beings, transcending the jungle law of preying and being preyed upon that governs the monster and the humans, the system and the abjects. An alternative quasi-family based on this uncalculated gift exchange is formed beyond blood ties. Tellingly, 가족 (ga-jok), a Korean word for “family,” means the community that shares the same food, living together by eating together. This traditional notion expands through the bond between the abjects, who take the place of absent superheroes to fight the monster and redeem the sanctity of life. Abject agency embodies performativity this way. Its performance without any preformed plan experiments on unexpected relationships without dreaming of a utopian community. In this sense, it is still nihilistic. But by the same token, insofar as its undead drive enables an “atopian” relay of abject-gifts in an uninterrupted, asymmetrical, zigzag feedback without an anchor, it could be viewed as positive. This positive nihilism does not destructively activate guerrilla terrorism, but constructively actualizes potential symbiosis. It catalyzes a new biopolitial ethics of co-belongingness and solidarity amongst the abjects on the edge of global power systems. So that in spite of all the impasses the 386 Korean auteurs find themselves in time and again, we can still eagerly await their next films.

Notes 1

The term is an acronym retrospectively coined in the 1990s, referring to people who were then in their thirties, after attending university in the 1980s, and who were born in the 1960s. Also sharing a name with the by



CONTEMPORARY KOREAN AUTEURS

377

then state-of-the-art computer model, Intel’s 386, this generation marks a transitional period. They were the nation’s first poverty-free generation who benefited from the rapid economic growth driven by the military regime in the 1960s–1970s. Although they fought against the latter, they led the 1990s boom of the information technology industry and became the social leaders of the 2000s, eventually compromising with neoliberalism. As a result the term was ironically updated to “the 486,” this time with a less positive connotation. 2

All these violent aspects may evoke but also exceed the Korean cultural trait called han: namely a feeling of rancor, regret, bitterness, or helplessness, rooted in unfulfilled vengeance or unresolved resentment against injustices that are endured in resignation. In a film like Seopyeonje (1993), in which a traditional Korean singer is made blind by her father so as to sublimate her pain into artistic mastery, director Im Kwon-taek typically elicits han from feminine sufferings under patriarchy’s yoke in somewhat orientalized aesthetics, embodying the governmental catchphrase: “The most Korean is the most global.” Before long, however, the 386 auteurs reinvented the most globally Korean trait, with a relentless wheel of violently enacted justice. Instead of repressing it, they exploded han. Park and Kim in particular are noted for featuring images of unbearable cruelty and brutality on screen, leading the so-called “Asia extreme” trend, along with auteurs such as Miike Takashi, Sono Sion, Tsukamoto Shinya, Fruit Chan, etc.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2012. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London and New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence,” in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Critchley, Simon. 2013. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London and New York: Verso. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2013. German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 2004. “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review (25) (January–February): 35–54. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1997. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book VII), Jacques Alain-Miller (ed.), trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

INDEX OF NAMES

Akerman, Chantal 14–15, 17, 28 Akin, Fatih 6, 179–98 Cut, The 196–7 Edge of Heaven, The 180–2, 184, 187–93 Getürkt 180, 191, 194 Head-On 180–4, 187, 191, 193, 195 In July 191, 197 Short Sharp Shock 181, 191 Solino 181–2, 195 Anderson, Lindsay 81 Anderson, Paul Thomas 12 Anderson, Wes 34–5 Angelopoulos, Theo 13 Antonioni, Michelangelo 27, 31, 34, 44, 245 Aoyama, Shinji 356 Arnold, Andrea 17 Astruc, Alexandre 2, 44, 61–2, 64, 81 Autant-Lara, Claude 2 Bahl, Vikas 290 Balabanov, Aleksey 16, 133–48 Brother 134, 142 Brother 2 136 Cargo 200 136, 138, 146 Castle, The 147 Dead Man’s Bluff 147 Happy Days 136 Me Too... 136, 147 Morphine 138, 146 Of Freaks and Men 137–8, 145–6 River, The 147 Stoker, The 136, 142–3 Barnard, Clio 17 Barthes, Roland 3, 4, 22, 53, 344 Batra, Ritesh 288

Bazin, André 2, 3, 16, 17, 44, 45, 48, 57, 112, 167, 235–8, 275, 320, 331 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre 47 Benhabib, Seyla 38 Benjamin, Walter 157, 164, 265, 268, 273, 274, 277, 279, 337, 365, 369, 372 Bergman, Ingmar 11, 17, 31, 33–5, 44, 84, 96, 104, 108, 135, 141, 146, 151, 187, 202 Bernal, Ishmael 304–5 Bertolucci, Bernardo 31 Besson, Luc 29, 40 Beuys, Joseph 40 Bigelow, Kathryn 17 Binoche, Juliette 29, 282 Böll, Heinrich 40 Bong, Joon-ho 361–2, 366–8, 371 Host, The 367, 370, 376 Memories of Murder 366 Snowpiercer 368–9, 371 Boyle, Danny 27, 288, 301 Branco, Paolo 18 Braunberger, Pierre 34 Bresson, Robert 2, 10, 11, 14, 31, 85, 195, 235, 242 Brocka, Lino 304, 315, 322 Broodthaers, Marcel 15 Cameron, James 23, 39 Caranfil, Nae 162, 167 Asphalt Tango 167 Philanthropy 167 Sundays on Leave 162 Cassavetes, John 44, 173 Cassel, Vincent 14 Césaire, Aimé 50–1

380

Index of names

Ceylan, Nuri Bilge 10–11 Chabrol, Claude 31, 48 Cissé, Souleymane 47 Coen, Joel and Ethan 17, 119, 200 Coppola, Sophia 14 Costa, Pedro 13, 195 Cotillard, Marion 29 Coutinho, Eduardo 6, 253–69 Babilonia 2000 255, 258, 260, 266 Cabra Marcado Parra Morer 255, 257, 260, 263 As Cançoes 260, 263, 265 Um Dia na Vida 260, 265 Edificio Master 258, 260, 261, 262, 268 Jogo de Cena 259, 263, 264 Mighty Spirit, The 258 Moscou 260 O Fim e o Principio 260 Peòes 256, 260 Santo Forte 260, 261, 263 Últimas Conversas 265, 267 Crișan, Marian 167 Cronenberg, David 45 Cuarón, Alfonso 12 Damian, Anca 176 Daneliuc, Mircea 178 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc 29, 43, 167, 179 Davaa, Byambasuren 14 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 61, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, 165, 218, 230, 235, 236–8, 250, 260, 268, 272, 277, 279, 282, 284, 324, 335, 351, 353, 355 Denis, Claire 5, 17 De Palma, Brian 11, 17 Derrida, Jacques 26, 37, 38, 222, 355, 356 De Sica, Vittorio 167 Diaz, Lav 10, 16, 303–22 Batang West Side 304, 309, 318 Century of Birthing 303, 305–7, 319 Death in the Land of Encantos 305 Evolution of a Filipino Family 303–4, 312–15

From What Is Before 303, 305, 315–18 Hesus, rebolusyunaryo 304 Norte, The End of History 313 Diop Mambéty, Djibril 47 Dolan, Xavier 17 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 11, 14, 112, 141, 235–6, 247–8 Duan Jinchuan 323 Eastwood, Clint 33 El Fani, Nadia 47 Ellul, Jacques 66–7, 69, 136, 141, 145 Erice, Victor 157 Falk, Feliks 117 Farocki, Harun 28, 165 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 14, 31–6, 44, 85, 187, 190 Favreau, Jon 200 Fellini, Federico 17, 27, 31, 86, 175, 197 Ford, John 3, 22, 31, 146 Formaggini, Beth 268 Apartamento 608 268 Foucault, Michel 3, 22, 26, 37, 39, 330–1, 340 Fruit, Chan 377 Fuller, Samuel 32 Ganjavi, Nezami 282 Garrone, Matteo 27 Gerima, Haile 47 Gherman, Aleksey 10, 16, 149–57 Hard to be a God 150–5 Khrustalyov, My Car 150, 151, 152 My Friend Ivan Lapshin 151 Glazer, Jonathan 12 Glover, Danny 52 Godard, Jean-Luc 11, 13, 15, 17–18, 29, 34, 40, 48, 52, 61–78, 109, 150, 219, 258, 351 Band of Outsiders 219 Breathless 64 Contempt 72 First Name: Carmen 63



Index of names

Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage) 13, 40, 61–77 Hail Mary 72 Histoire(s) du cinéma 63, 74 JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre 75 Keep Your Right 63 King Lear 63 Message de salutations: Prix suisse/ remerciements/mort ou vif 63 Nouvelle Vague 72 Old Place, The 75–6 Gomes, Miguel 13 Gorky, Maxim 150 Grass, Günter 40 Greenaway, Peter 86, 96, 109, 219 Griffith, David Wark 17, 138, 181, 278 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 89 Habermas, Jürgen 38, 67 Haneke, Michael 16, 27, 29, 34, 36, 41, 96, 108, 133–48 Amour 134, 138, 141, 143, 145, 147 Benny’s Video 134, 135, 136, 146 Caché 134, 136, 146 Castle, The 147 Code Unknown 146 Funny Games 108, 134, 136, 138, 141, 146 Piano Teacher, The 134, 145, 146 Time of the Wolf 140 White Ribbon, The 135–6, 138, 146 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh 47, 57 Hawks, Howard 3, 33, 44 Haynes, Todd 17 Hazanavicius, Michel 29 Heidegger, Martin 10, 37, 38, 67, 69, 77, 305–9 311, 319–20 Being and Time 305, 308, 311 Herzog, Werner 33 Hitchcock, Alfred 3, 5, 17, 32, 44, 64, 66, 99, 152, 202 Holland, Agnieszka 117 Hou, Hsiao-Hsien 10, 27, 353 Iepan, Florin 169

381

Im, Kwon-taek 361, 377 Seopyeonje 377 Iñárritu, Alejandro González 12 Ivanga, Imunga 48, 57 Jarmusch, Jim 11, 17 Jude, Radu 159, 173, 176 Aferim! 176 Everybody in our Family 173 Kael, Pauline 3, 155 Kashyap, Anurag 6, 287–302 Black Friday 289, 292, 293, 301 Bombay Velvet 297 Dev.D 292, 295 Gangs of Wasseypur, The 287, 292, 293, 297 Gulaal 290, 292, 293, 295, 302 Last Train to Mahakali 288 No Smoking 289, 292, 295, 317 Paanch 288, 290, 292, 293, 295, 301 Ugly 287 Kaurismäki, Aki 34 Kiarostami, Abbas 5, 8, 15, 27, 28, 29, 43, 235, 271–85 10 on Ten 279, 280, 284 ABC Africa 280 Around Five 280 Birth of Light, The 284 Bread and Alley 277 Certified Copy 275 Close-Up 275, 277–9, 282 The Experience 277 Five Dedicated to Ozu 280, 284 Homework 275 Life and Nothing More... 275 Shirin 280–5 Sleepers, The 284 Suit for the Wedding, A 277 Taste of Cherry 275, 280, 284 Ten 280, 282, 284–5 Through the Olive Trees 275, 277 Traveller, The 277 Wind Will Carry Us, The 275, 283–4 Where is the Friend’s Home 277 Kidlat, Tahimik 316

382

Index of names

Kiefer, Anselm 40 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 5, 27, 29, 117 Kim, Ki-duk, 27, 361, 362, 366, 371, 373–5, 377 3-Iron 375 Arirang 375 Moebius 373 One on One 366 Samaritan Girl 373 Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring 373 Kitano, Takeshi 345–6, 353, 356 Kolski, Jan Jakub 117 Koterski, Marek 120 Kubrick, Stanley 12, 141 Kulkarni, Harshavardhan 290 Kurosawa, Akira 99, 112, 202 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi 6, 343–57 Barren Illusion 346, 350, 356 Bright Future 354–5 Charisma 343, 346, 350, 352, 356, 357 Cure 343–50, 352, 354–6 Doppelganger 351, 353 Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl, The 351 Guard from the Underground 343 Journey to the Shore 345 Kandagawa Pervert Wars 351 Loft 343, 350, 351, 353 Penance 343, 345 Pulse 343, 346, 347, 350, 352–5 Real 343, 345, 350, 355–6 Retribution 343, 346, 348–50, 352, 356, 357 Revenge, The 343 Séance 346, 351 Serpent’s Path 343, 352 Seventh Code 345 Sweet Home 345 Tokyo Sonata 355 Visit from Fate, A 343 Woman in the Silver Plate 345, 357 Kusturica, Emir 165, 187, 196, 197 Lang, Fritz 17 Lanthimos, Yorgos 13 Laplaine, Zéka 52

Laurent, Mélanie 14 Lee, Chang-dong 361, 362, 366, 371, 374 Green Fish 371 Peppermint Candy 366 Poetry 374 Secret Sunshine 374 Lee, Spike 233 Leigh, Mike 29 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich 150, 154 Leth, Jørgen 35, 97–8 Linklater, Richard 8, 16, 34, 199–215 Bad News Bears 200 Before Midnight 201, 208–9, 214 Before Sunrise 201, 206–7, 210, 214 Before Sunset 201, 207, 214 Boyhood 199, 201, 210–13 Dazed and Confused 200–5, 209, 210–11, 213 It’s Impossible to Plow by Reading Books 200 School of Rock 200 Slacker 200, 204, 210–11 Tape 200 Waking Life 200, 211 Loach, Ken 29 Lou, Ye 323 Lucas, George 201, 203–4 Luna, Juan 312 Lynch, David 34, 108, 195 Mangold, James 200 Mantena, Madhu 290 Marcuse, Herbert 67 Marczewski, Wojciech 117 Marker, Chris 45, 62–3 Martel, Lucretia 17 Massadian, Valérie 14 McQueen, Steve 15, 28 Mickiewicz, Adam 116, 118 Miéville, Anne-Marie 73, 75–6 Old Place, The 75–6 Miike, Takashi 356, 377 Mikhalkov, Nikita 153 Minghella, Anthony 29 Mitulescu, Cătălin 165 Mizoguchi, Kenji



Index of names

Ugetsu 194 Motwane, Vikramaditya 290 Müller, Heiner 40 Mungiu, Cristian 27, 159, 167, 169, 170–2 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 169, 170 Beyond the Hills 171–2 Tales from the Golden Age 169 West 167 Munk, Andrzej 117 Muntean, Radu 159, 164, 173 The Paper Will Be Blue, The 164 Tuesday, After Christmas 173 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 17 Nancy, Jean-Luc 5, 275, 277, 279, 353, 356 Nemescu, Cristian 167, 176 Netzer, Călin Peter 159, 167, 173 Child’s Pose 173 Medal of Honor 167 Ngangura, Mweze 47 Noé, Gaspar 12 Nolan, Christopher 13, 200 Oliveira, Manoel de 13, 18 Ophüls, Marcel 181 Ozu, Yasujiro 17, 344, 345, 353, 355 Park, Chan-wook 134, 361–3, 365, 371, 373, 377 Oldboy 362–6, 372–3 Sympathy for Lady Vengeance 365 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance 365, 371 Thirst 371, 372, 373 Pawlikowski, Paweł 18, 118, 129 Perec, Georges 31 Pintilie, Lucian 162–3, 166 Next Stop Paradise 163 Niki and Flo 163 Oak, The 162 Reconstruction 162 Too Late 163 Pița, Dan 162 Piwowski, Marek 123 Polanski, Roman 34, 119

383

Ponti, Carlo 34 Porumboiu, Corneliu 159, 164, 174, 175 12:08, East of Bucharest 164, 174 Metabolism, or When Evening Falls on Bucharest 175 Police, Adjective 174–5 Second Game, The 175 Treasure, The 175 Puiu, Cristi 159, 163, 167–9, 172–4 Aurora 174 Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The 167, 168, 173 Stuff and Dough 167 Radiguet, Raymond 2 Raimi, Sam 200 Ray, Nicholas 32 Reichardt, Kelly 17, 144 Meek’s Cutoff 144 Renner, Jeremy 14 Renoir, Jean 17, 74, 191 La Marseillaise 74 Une partie de campagne 191 Resnais, Alain 18, 45 Reygadas, Carlos 11, 179, 235–52 Battle in heaven 239, 243, 246–50 Japón 239, 240, 242–5, 247–9 Post Tenebras Lux 239, 247, 249–50 Silent Light 246–9 Richter, Gerhard 40 Rizal, José 315, 321 Rocha, Glauber 89 Roger, Jean-Henri 52 Rohmer, Eric 48, 195 Rossellini, Roberto 17, 34, 85, 235, 236, 245 Rouch, Jean 45, 268 Sanjinés, Jorge 89 Schnabel, Julian 28 Schwartzman, Jason 14 Scorsese, Martin 17, 43, 181, 195, 200, 288, 300 Sembene, Ousmane 46–7, 57, 89 Șerban, Florin 167 Serra, Albert 157

384

Index of names

Seydoux, Léa 14 Singh, Navdeep 290 Sirk, Douglas 14, 187, 190 Sissako, Abderrahmane 15, 43–60 Bamako 43, 51, 52, 54–7 Game, The 43 Heremakono: Waiting for Happiness 43, 54–5, 57 Life on Earth 43, 49, 50–2, 54, 56–7 October 43, 58 Rostov-Luanda 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57 Timbuktu 43, 55–7 Sitaru, Adrian 159, 173 Smarzowski, Wojtek 7, 18, 115–31 Dark House, The 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127–8 Earlobe 115, 118–21 Mighty Angel, The 120, 121, 123–4 Rose 121, 125, 128–9 Traffic Department 120–1, 123 Volhynia 121, 125 Wedding, The 120–3 Soderbergh, Steven 17, 34, 200 Sokurov, Alexander 10, 27–8, 39, 153, 155 Days of Eclipse 153 Faust 27–8, 155 Francofonia 27 Moloch 28 Russian Ark 28 Sorrentino, Paolo 27 Spielberg, Steven 201, 232 Sterne, Laurence 80, 82, 85–6 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris 153–4, 156 Suleiman, Elia 52 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen 33 Szumowska, Małgorzata 118 Tanovic, Danis 288 Tarantino, Quentin 8, 11, 13, 16–17, 34, 147, 200, 217–34 Death Proof 219, 230 Django Unchained 217–20, 223–32

Hateful Eight, The 219, 223 Inglourious Basterds 217, 221–2, 230 Jackie Brown 219, 232 Kill Bill 219, 221–3, 230 Pulp Fiction 147, 217, 219, 221, 223 Reservoir Dogs 217, 221, 223, 230 Tarkovsky, Andrey 10–11, 44, 86, 96, 105, 108–9, 154, 235–6, 238, 241, 245–6 Tarr, Béla 10 Tatos, Alexandru 162 Traoré, Mahama 46, 51, 55 Truffaut, François 2, 32, 44–5, 48, 85, 112, 181 Tsai, Ming-Liang 10 Tsangari, Athina Rachel 13 Tsukamoto, Shinya 377 Ujica, Andrei 165–6, 176 van der Keuken, Johan 62 Van Sant, Gus 17 van Vogt, A. E. 75–6 Varda, Agnès 62 Varma, Ram Gopal 288 Vertov, Dziga 277, 279 Vieyra, Paulin 44–6, 57 Visconti, Luchino 44 Von Trier, Lars 8, 16, 34–5, 37, 41, 95–113, 134 Antichrist 34–5, 41, 95–103, 109 Boss of It All, The 35, 98 Breaking the Waves 34 Dancer in the Dark 34 Dogville 34, 99–100, 370 Element of Crime 34 Epidemic 34 Europa 34 Five Obstructions, The 35, 97 Idiots, The 35 Manderlay 34 Melancholia 37, 41, 95–6, 98, 100–2, 104–9, 112–13 Nymphomaniac 35, 37, 41, 95–102, 108–11



Index of names

Wagner, Richard 96, 104, 105, 107, 109 Tristan and Isolde 96, 109 Wajda, Andrzej 18, 116–19, 121–2, 129 Ashes and Diamonds 122 Everything for Sale 118–19 Katyn 118 Man of Marble 117–8 Pan Tadeusz 118 Wallace, David Foster 151 Wang, Xiaoshuai 323 Warhol, Andy 15, 278, 281 Webb, Marc 200 Weerasethakul, Apitchatpong 17 Welles, Orson 3, 17, 32, 202 Wenders, Wim 28–9, 33 Winterbottom, Michael 6, 79–94 9 Songs 81–7 24 Hour Party People 80, 83–6, 88, 90–1 Butterfly Kiss 80, 84 Claim, The 80, 82–3, 86 Cock and Bull Story, A 80–6, 89, 90–1 Code 46 81–2, 85, 87–8 Emperor’s New Clothes, The 79, 80, 84, 86, 89, 92 Everyday 80, 83–6, 89 Face of an Angel, The 79, 80, 84, 90 Forget About Me 80, 84 Genova 80, 82–4 In This World 81–4, 88–9, 90–1, 93 Jude 80, 82–3, 85

385

Killer Inside Me, The 80, 82, 89–90 Look of Love, The 80, 83–4 Mighty Heart, A 80–2, 84, 88, 92 Road to Guantánamo, The 80, 82–3, 88–9 Shock Doctrine, The 80, 84, 89 Trip, The 80, 83–5, 89–91, 93 Trip to Italy, The 80, 83–5, 89–91 Trishna 80 Welcome to Sarajevo 80–2, 84–5, 89–90 With or Without You 80, 83 Wonderland 80, 83–4, 86–9 Wolf, Christa 40 Wong Kar-wai, 17 Wu, Wenguang 323, 325 Wyspianski, Stanisław 122 Zemeckis, Robert Back to the Future 201, 204 Forrest Gump 211 Zhang Yuan 323, 325 Mama 325 Zhangke, Jia 6, 179, 323–41 24 City 330 1966: My Time in the Red Guards 325 Ershisi cheng 330 Going Home 330 Platform 326–7, 330 Touch of Sin, A 326, 337 Unknown Pleasures 326–7, 330 World, The 326 Xiao Shan Going Home 330 Xiao Wu 327, 330–7

INDEX OF TERMS

abject(ivity)/abjection 7, 10, 37, 115–16, 120, 123, 128, 130–1, 138, 146, 294, 296, 362, 364, 367, 370–7 aesthetic regime 237, 239 agency/agent 3–8, 21, 23–5, 30, 36, 39, 63, 66, 86, 106, 138, 147, 153, 202, 205, 221–2, 231, 289, 362, 366–7, 370–2, 375–6 allegory 6–9, 98–9, 105, 107, 113, 130, 133, 137, 138–41, 144, 154, 162, 172–3, 180, 305, 307, 316, 346–7, 354, 362–3, 367–9, 372, 374 analytical philosophy 38 animal 72–4, 77, 143, 155, 243, 316, 330–2, 337, 364–6, 371, 373 anti-philosophy 95–6, 100–1, 111 art cinema 6, 10–15, 18, 21–3, 28, 32, 34, 43–5, 48, 52, 59, 103–5, 136, 139, 159–60, 179, 235, 249, 250, 277 atopia 370, 376 auteurism/auteur theory 1–4, 6–9, 11, 21, 23, 28, 36, 44, 46–7, 56–7, 61, 64, 79, 124, 199, 201, 207, 209, 213–14, 291, 296, 300–1, 323–4, 330–1, 339, 344–6, 355 authenticity 2–3, 33–4, 38, 82, 88, 112, 264 author-function 3, 22, 33–4 authorship/auteurship 1–5, 7–9, 17, 22–4, 29, 32, 39, 44, 46–8, 116–18, 202, 259, 273–4, 296, 324, 339, 346, 348, 356, 362 autonomy 6, 13, 24–5, 30, 32, 34, 36–9, 116–17, 152, 225–6, 229,

305, 323–5, 327–8, 330–1, 334–5, 339, 372–3 avant-garde 40 bare life 11, 294, 364, 367, 370, 372–3, 375 biopolitics 3, 8, 9, 331, 362, 364, 367–8, 371–2 camera pen 61 capitalism 6, 8, 11, 13, 15–16, 21, 89, 107, 120, 130, 135, 137–41, 144–5, 147, 199–203, 205–10, 212–14, 231, 256, 267, 297, 300, 320–1, 323–4, 327, 329, 332–3, 352–3, 369–71 catastrophe 8, 107, 369–71 censorship 26–7, 31, 124, 271, 277, 288–9 cinema of being 235, 237–43, 245–50 cinema of control 272–3, 284 cinema of cruelty 95–6, 112, 133 cinema of sensations 184, 195 cinephilia 44, 200, 296, 299–300, 355 clearing 44, 103, 307–8 close-up 58, 74, 152, 156, 184–5, 191, 275, 277–9, 281–2, 285, 311, 335, 338, 349–50 collectivism 326 colonial(ism) 239–40, 250, 303, 308–9, 312–14, 318, 329, 353, 367 communism/post-communism 7, 117, 124, 129, 139, 161 community 7–8, 11, 26, 35, 55, 101, 118, 121–2, 129–30, 138, 143, 148, 226, 247, 260, 263, 275–7,

388

Index of terms

281, 317–18, 331, 333, 335, 370–1, 375–6 consciousness 45, 70, 73, 135, 221, 238, 249, 250 constructivism 4 contingency 24, 38, 143, 247, 268, 306–7, 330, 369, 376 contract 86, 108, 206, 217–18, 223–30 corporatism/corporatization 330, 332 counterculture 298, 300 creative constraints 6, 21, 29–30, 32–3, 35–6, 38 crystal (image) 23, 139, 143, 165 Dasein 305, 308–9, 311–12, 319 deconstruction 22, 37–8, 141, 174, 220, 326, 329, 351, 353, 355 desire/drive 362–4, 367, 371–3, 375–6 desubjectivization 6, 324, 327, 330–2, 335, 337–9 dialectic(s) 7, 28, 38, 101, 108, 111, 137, 144–5, 155, 194, 365, 368–70, 372 digital (cinema)/digitization 10–15, 24, 28, 32–3, 51, 72, 79–80, 86–93, 105, 136, 143, 145, 175, 179, 211, 280, 304–5, 307, 319, 346, 354–6, 368 dis/continuity 6, 343, 346, 351–2, 354, 356–7 dispositif 62, 107, 218, 220, 223, 258, 268 documentary 6, 14, 45, 48–51, 54–5, 57, 65, 79–84, 88, 90–1, 123, 145, 166, 169, 175, 179, 200, 211, 253–60, 263–5, 267–8, 279–80, 315, 318, 325 double bind 7, 36, 146, 149, 362, 364, 369, 371, 376 double occupancy 26–8, 32, 36–7, 180–1, 189, 194 ellipse 153, 184, 188–90, 192–4, 275 Enlightenment 37, 101, 103, 155–7, 325 essay film 62–3, 77, 280–1 ethical turn 68, 196

fabulation 6, 139, 253, 260–1, 263, 268 fascism 154, 239 feminism 3, 103 game-playing 95–7, 100–1, 103–4, 108, 110–12 genealogy 99, 318 gift (exchange) 275, 332–5, 376 global auteur 1, 9, 11, 18, 26, 37–8, 134, 296, 299, 300 global cinema 10, 44, 56, 287–8, 294, 296, 300, 370 globalization 1, 5–6, 8, 24, 26–8, 32, 39, 51, 53, 56–7, 207–8, 287, 294, 296, 313, 316–18, 362, 369 griot/griauteur 47, 51, 55–6 historicity 202, 205, 309, 314–15, 364 homo sacer 331, 340, 364–5, 372 human right 15, 294, 361, 367 humanism 11, 37, 95, 111, 135, 144, 156, 274, 324, 329–30 identity 3–4, 6, 26, 32, 34, 55, 63, 65, 108–9, 118, 166–7, 179, 185, 211, 220, 284, 295, 311–12, 320, 344, 346–7, 352–3, 370–1, 375 independent cinema/film 6, 8, 23, 31–2, 35, 200, 232, 304, 323–7, 329 index/indexicality 12, 368 individuation/deindividuation 6, 324, 327, 330–1, 335, 337–9 interpretation 4, 6, 23, 40, 103, 111, 182, 194, 212, 218, 222, 238, 240, 344, 346–8, 352–5, 357 intertext(uality) 3, 76, 86, 108, 160–1, 165, 168, 175, 220 intrusion/intruder 16, 75, 133, 136–45, 147, 173, 245 irony 7, 33, 55, 100 (Italian) neorealism 7, 16, 160, 167, 195, 275, 279



Index of terms

jouissance 372–3 long take 10, 12, 71, 135, 168, 174, 275, 309–12, 318, 333, 335–6, 347, 350–2 Marxism/Marxist 3, 149, 154, 218, melancholia 37, 41, 87, 95–6, 98, 100–2, 104–7, 109, 112–13, 305, 311, 372, 376 melodrama 32, 72, 96, 103–5, 107, 112–13, 181–2, 187, 189, 195, 268, 282, 314–15 metaphysics 36, 38, 69, 96–7, 105, 107, 110, 155, 189, 244, 261, 309 migrat(ion)/emigrat(ion)/immigrat(ion) 36, 54–5, 57, 91, 129, 138, 147, 167–8, 184–5, 213–14, 261, 287, 290–301, 337, 371 mind-game 41, 112, 141, 146 mise-en-abyme 54, 160, 162–5, 168–9, 172, 174–5, 279 mise-en-scène 2, 33, 69, 72, 135, 142–4, 217, 220, 228, 241, 277, 289, 291–2, 301, 310, 317, 319 modernism/modernity/postmodernism/ postmodernity 3–4, 8, 10–11, 17, 34, 37, 95, 97, 103, 107, 111, 117, 119, 134–5, 138, 147, 150–1, 153–4, 157, 162, 187–8, 201–2, 204–6, 210, 221, 235–6, 239, 241, 267, 274–5, 279, 289, 291, 294, 301, 303, 312–16, 318–20, 326–30, 332, 335, 337, 339, 345, 352–3, 355–6, 373 montage 62, 71, 75, 165, 313, 320, 349, 363 nationalism/internationalism/ transnationalism 13, 25, 27–9, 34, 118, 121, 125, 164, 179, 191, 244, 319, 329 neoliberal(ism) 8, 11, 199–201, 204, 206, 213–14, 327, 357, 369, 371, 375, 377 New Wave 6–7, 48, 57, 63–4, 85, 159–60, 162–7, 172, 181, 195, 276, 340

389

nihilism 366, 373–4, 376, 103, 105–7, 220 non-cinema 6, 91–2 nostalgia/post-nostalgia 8, 136, 199–203, 205–6, 208–11, 213, 314, 317 off-screen 65, 70–1, 111, 135, 185–6, 191, 281, 283, 349 ontology 4, 22, 69, 70, 77, 151, 156, 160, 167, 181, 212, 308, 311, 346, 349–50, 375 Other, the (big) 311–12, 324–6, 372–6 orientalism/orientalization 26, 314, 355, 377 paranoid/paranoia 6, 34–5, 138, 292–3, 324, 352–6 parapraxis 130, 362, 368, 370, 373 para(-)site 99, 367, 373, 375–6 pareisaktos(ign) 139, 141–5, 147 pastiche 3, 10, 35, 97, 99, 147, 202–4, 211 performative self-contradiction 6, 21, 25, 36–9, 41 phenomenology 4, 11–12, 68–70, 100 political cinema 8, 15, 18, 46, 48, 139, 260, 271, 284 political unconscious/consciousness 135, 218, 220 politique des auteurs 1, 3, 16, 22, 39, 44, 53, 63, 287, 290, 294, 296, 300, 340 possible cinema 257–8 post-history 164, 210 postcolonialism 3, 25, 46, 49, 51, 308, 312, 329 power(s) of the false 139, 279 provocation 15, 95–7, 100–1, 103–5, 107–9, 111–12, 135 racism 15, 144, 232 rationalism 67, 95, 100–1, 103, 105, 107, 111–12, 224, 239, 353 real life 305–6, 315 reflexivity 7, 55, 57, 96–7, 105, 119, 130, 142, 159–60, 164, 172, 176, 279, 314, 319

390

Index of terms

romanticism 4, 100–1, 103–4, 106–7, 111 satire 95–6, 99–101, 103–5, 108, 111–12 Second Cinema 9–11, 14, 45, 48, 55, 89 self-effacement 6, 79–80, 89–90 self-exoticism 25–6 self-transcendence 238–40, 245–6, 248, 250 shareable cinema 8, 271, 273, 280, 284 sovereign/sovereignty 11, 13, 34, 130, 137, 139–41, 145, 224, 331, 340, 356–7, 364–9, 372–4, 376 spatiality 10, 308–9, 311, 314–15, 318–20 spectatorship 4, 21, 76, 97, 273, 281, 352, 357 state of exception 364, 366, 371–2, 374 structural isomorphism 161, 165 structuralism/poststructuralism 2–4, 46, 101 subaltern 25, 292–4, 299–300 subjectivity/subjectivization 6, 62–3, 70, 103, 185, 236–8, 240, 246, 248, 249–50, 319, 323–31, 335–6, 339, 352, 364, 370–1 Symbolic (order), the (in Lacan) 116, 145, 263, 367, 369, 371–2, 374–5

temporality 10, 105, 157, 200–1, 206, 211, 305–6, 308, 311, 314, 319, 327–8, 355 terror(ism) 84, 92, 153, 169, 276, 293, 301, 351, 366–7, 371, 373, 376 Third Cinema 11, 45–6, 48, 53, 89, 92 thought experiment 16, 111–12, 133, 139, 223 3D 12–13, 61, 67, 69, 71, 73 386 generation 361–4, 367–8, 370, 375–7 time-image 10, 235–6, 268, 335 timeless time 201, 205–6, 208–9, 212–13 trauma 7–8, 35, 65, 95–6, 100–4, 108, 111–12, 118, 121, 124–5, 127–8, 130, 166, 172, 212, 306, 311, 314, 325, 327, 363–4, 366, 368, 370, 372, 374 trickster 343–4, 346, 357 undead 368, 370, 376 vernacular modernism 17, 294, 301 violence (in Benjamin) 337, 365–6, 368–71 world cinema 8, 23, 34, 46, 48, 159–60, 194, 261, 287–8, 294, 298 xenos(ign) 144–5