The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art [1 ed.] 9781443868754, 9781443860536

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The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art

The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art

By

Dirk de Bruyn

The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art, by Dirk de Bruyn This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Dirk de Bruyn All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6053-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6053-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Abstract ...................................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 6 Trauma, Cinema, Feminism and Materialist Film Encounters with Caruth, Felman and Laub ............................................ 6 Towards a Trauma Cinema: Walker, Kaplan and Turim ..................... 12 Trauma Cinema (Walker) ............................................................... 12 The position of the Viewer (Kaplan) .............................................. 13 The Flashback (Turim) ................................................................... 15 Avant-Garde Film, Left Politics and Feminism ................................... 18 20s European avant-garde cinema ....................................................... 19 Structuralist film .................................................................................. 25 Peter Gidal and materialist film ........................................................... 26 The Two Avant-gardes ........................................................................ 31 The Split............................................................................................... 35 Aftermath ............................................................................................. 40 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 43 A History of the Scientific Investigation of Psychological Trauma Charcot, Freud and Janet...................................................................... 46 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) .............................................. 52 Social Context ................................................................................ 52 Dissociation .................................................................................... 54 Flashback........................................................................................ 55 Implicit and Explicit Memory ........................................................ 56 The amygdala and hippocampus .................................................... 57 Sam and Vam: A Dual Processing Model ...................................... 60 Conclusions.......................................................................................... 64

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Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 67 A Narrative of Recovery for a Materialist Practice The Two avant-gardes and the Dual processing model ....................... 68 A Background to materialist film......................................................... 71 Digital Media, Trauma and the Digital Native..................................... 73 The Technical Image, Panic Bodies and ‘New’ Media ........................ 76 Laub and Auerhahn’s knowing not knowing trauma ........................... 79 A recovery narrative ............................................................................ 81 Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 85 The Structure of Trauma, Repetition and Dissociation in Meshes of the Afternoon Background .......................................................................................... 86 The Film............................................................................................... 87 Analysis ............................................................................................... 89 1. Vertical-Horizontal..................................................................... 90 2. Splitting ...................................................................................... 93 3. Vortex and spiral ........................................................................ 95 Contested Space ................................................................................... 98 Charcot ............................................................................................... 103 Father ................................................................................................. 106 Haiti ................................................................................................... 107 Cusp ................................................................................................... 113 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 116 The Flashback’s Optical Stun The films of Robert Breer .................................................................. 117 Contexts: Why Phenomenology? ....................................................... 118 69, Chance and The Trace ................................................................. 121 The Cinema Apparatus and its Perceptual Artifacts .......................... 125 Flicker & the Single Frame ................................................................ 127 The Afterimage .................................................................................. 129 An Objective-Subjective Gap ............................................................ 130 The Flashback .................................................................................... 133 Fuji..................................................................................................... 137 The Railway Journey and a re-balancing of the Senses ..................... 140 Reprise ............................................................................................... 146

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 148 Witnessing Trauma’s Gutted Corpse Contexts: Mennipean ......................................................................... 149 Contexts: Feminism ........................................................................... 150 Disremembering, duration and looking.............................................. 153 Disremembering ........................................................................... 153 Dual Processing ............................................................................ 154 Duration........................................................................................ 155 Benning’s Looking and Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ .............................. 156 Landscape Suicide ............................................................................. 158 The Murders....................................................................................... 160 Protti- Costas...................................................................................... 161 Gein-Worden ..................................................................................... 164 Gein-Worden: Social and Cultural Responses ................................... 165 The Testimony of Ed Gein ................................................................. 167 Witnessing ......................................................................................... 171 Community, Perpetrator and Viewer ............................................ 171 The Skinning of the Deer ............................................................. 173 Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 176 Recovering the Hidden inside Found Footage Films Introduction........................................................................................ 177 Alone .................................................................................................. 179 Dreamwork and Outer Space ............................................................. 183 Manufracture and Man Ray ............................................................... 186 Gidal and The Entity .......................................................................... 188 The New Situation ............................................................................. 190 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 199 Filmography ............................................................................................ 205 References ............................................................................................... 210

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to colleagues, family and friends for their support and encouragement. I owe a particular debt to Dr. Clare Bradford, for her supportive and concise commentary that has guided me to this publication. I also wish to thank Dr. Lynn Starr for her committed and dedicated support, which instilled in me the professional discipline necessary for the task. I also wish to offer special thanks to Dr. Ann McCulloch for her critical insights and meticulous readings of drafts and Dr. David Ritchie and Dr. Rob Haysom for their timely advice. Thanks to my three sons Kees, Abram and Arie who helped keep the flame burning and all the filmmakers and colleagues who have challenged my thinking along the way, particularly Dr. Steven McIntyre. I also wish to note and thank for their guidance those editors and referees who enabled the publication of conference proceedings and book chapters on this research during this writing. This scholarship is integrated into a number of chapters: Chapter 1 (de Bruyn 2008b), Chapter 3 (de Bruyn 2007), Chapter 4 (de Bruyn 2008a, 2010), Chapter 5 (de Bruyn 2007, 2009d), Chapter 6 (de Bruyn 2009a), Chapter 7 (de Bruyn 2009b, 2011) and Conclusion (de Bruyn 2009c). I also wish to acknowledge the insights and commentary provided by Prof. Ernst Van Alphen, Al Rees and Adrian Martin to an earlier version of this work. —Dirk de Bruyn

ABSTRACT

This text examines the capacity of experimental or avant-garde film to perform and communicate traumatic experience. I identify and analyse key films from the 40s to the present that perform aspects of overwhelming experience through their approach, structure, content and perceptual impact, mapping a trajectory from analogue to digital moving image practice. I argue for the inclusion of Peter Gidal’s 70s conception of ‘materialist film’ into the new genre of ‘trauma cinema’ through its capacity to articulate unlocatability and perceptually perform disorientation and the flashback effect, all identified characteristics of digital moving image practice. The argument addresses two research questions: Can ‘materialist film’ model traumatic memory and perform the traumatic flashback? Does the capacity to articulate trauma’s unspeakability and invisibility give this practice a renewed relevance in the digital media environment of information overload? My phenomenological ‘traumatic’ reading of materialist film steps beyond Gidal’s original anti-illusionist rationale to incorporate critiques effectively mounted against it by the founders of a 70s feminist psychoanalytic counter-cinema. My contemporary re-reading further re-evaluates the Minimalist turn in painting and sculpture after the Second World War, arguing that this development is not essentialist or visionary but makes visible implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure. I further argue that the initial traumatic impact of industrialization on the body’s perceptual apparatus, traceable through the advent of cinema and train travel, is communicated by such moving image art. The development of digital technology marks a new cycle of such perceptual re-balancing for which materialist film is uniquely positioned and which it critically addresses. The historic thread outlining materialist film’s marginalised practice running through my analysis of films by Maya Deren, Robert Breer, James Benning, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky draws on historic parallels within recent neurological research into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that reclaims Pierre Janet’s previously discounted concept of dissociation. I use Chris Brewin’s dual processing model of trauma, a product of recent neurological research, to describe not only materialist film’s performance of traumatic memory and the traumatic flashback but also the process of materialist film’s subjugation and belated recall within screen studies.

INTRODUCTION

This text consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The first three chapters review both the history of experimental film and trauma research and outline the study of trauma incorporated into screen studies to this point. Identified gaps in this appropriation are then explored further through the analysis of specific films in the next four chapters. I consider the history of avant- garde cinema in the 20s, 70s and in the contemporary digital age and revisit in some detail a key moment in the 70s when both a feminist counter-cinema and a materialist or structuralist film practice takes hold. The 70s saw an explosion of independent and artist filmmaking enabled by public access to 16mm film equipment and further marked by the migration of film art out of the 60s underground into the academy. Although Michael Zryd observes that avant-garde practice has a level of continued activity in the academy (Zryd 2006: 17-42), the presence of this practice is marginal in comparison to the theoretical and public profile developed in screen studies by a 70s feminist counter-cinema. I argue for a two-fold recovery of the marginal area of experimental film. My preference for the term ‘materialist film’ for experimental cinema, initially advocated by film theorist and practitioner Peter Gidal, is clarified in Chapter 1. The initial recuperation of a materialist practice is in relation to the emergent area of ‘trauma theory’ exemplified by the work of Soshana Felman, Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth recently appropriated by feminist film theory, particularly through the genre of ‘trauma cinema’ developed by Judith Walker. To this incorporated ‘trauma theory’, I add the restored profile of Janet’s concept of dissociation and Brewin’s dual processing model of trauma from the groundswell of neurological research into trauma generated by new image scanning technologies. The second strand of recovery, contained within this extended ‘trauma theory’ framework, is for a renewed materialist practice within contemporary digital media. To this end I chart a historic narrative of recovery through specific films with a materialist pedigree, analysing the structure, content and perceptual impact of these films in relation to characteristics, concepts and approaches appropriated from ‘trauma theory’ and recent neurological research. This tactic shapes materialist film as a forgotten practice or subjugated discourse returning belatedly, like the flashback in trauma

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Introduction

itself; to visibly occupy a position of relevance in both ‘trauma cinema’ and time-based arts. As this research involves a contemporary revisiting of the rationale for materialist film and the 70s feminist criticisms of this practice I keep Michel Foucault’s insight into the historical nature of discourse in mind, that it is made up of ‘real, successive events, that it cannot be analysed outside the time in which it occurred’ (Foucault 1972: 200). This is a point E. Ann Kaplan, a key commentator on feminist independent cinema since the 70s, also makes in her recent review of global feminism in stating: ‘cultures exist within discursive frameworks that are very hard to think beyond at any specific time. The same is true for academic discursive fields such as feminist film theory’ (Kaplan 2004: 1237). This revisiting recognizes such historic specificity for the positions taken up for and against a materialist practice. But I also understand Foucault’s insight to open up the possibility for a recovered cultural value for materialist film’s unfulfilled promise in screen studies beyond the 70s. The lost visibility of materialist film does not have to define that practice’s relevance forty years on. Post-structuralism’s interest in multiple viewer positions and difference legitimizes a re-reading of materialist film from a contemporary perspective. As Lawrence Grossberg outlines: ‘The meaning of a text may depend on its formal and historical relations to other texts (its intertextuality)’ (Grossberg 1992: 40). The recovery mounted here occurs on different terms (trauma theory) and in a different context (digital media) to that from which materialist film first arose. I offer two experiences bringing aspects of trauma and experimental film practice together that assisted in formulating this writing. One is my experimental film practice in Australia that began in the late 70s (de Bruyn 1976) and continues to this day and the other involves my contact with trauma and stress in my personal and professional life. As a film artist I witnessed the drift to marginalization and subjugation of experimental film facilitated by a lack of critical writing, funding and screening opportunities in favour, successively, of an emergent national cinema, short fiction film, documentary and later the institutional embrace of ‘new’ media (see de Bruyn 2006). Though involved in a formalist cinema, I always understood this practice to have a political and social dimension informed by my migrant background speaking to and from the margins (de Bruyn 1986, 1987) and began to recognize in an emerging new media practice traces of my experimental filmmaking roots (de Bruyn 1997, 1998). Furthermore insights emerged from the early 90s related to my career as a Social Worker and personal family breakdown. A relationship between experimental film and trauma was initially suggested to me by a

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pamphlet printed by SECASA (South East Center Against Sexual Assault) that I came across in my work as a Social Worker. It outlined how traumatized victims of abuse stored memory of abuse as fragments cut-up and separated from each other, often continuously re-playing parts of that memory as intrusive thoughts, whilst the initial shock remained. This reminded me of the serial and repetitive structures often found in materialist films and the shock, panic and dissociation I lived through during my relationship break-up and my earlier experience, as a migrant child, of my father’s mental collapse. This pamphlet also introduced me to Judith Herman’s discerning practice and theory-based feminist analysis of trauma and recovery (Herman 1992), enlisted in the following chapters. On the basis of such influences I speculated on whether, for example, an interactive CD-ROM storing its information in RAM (Random Access Memory) was not a model for such traumatic memories. Like the frozen repetitions of trauma, navigation of such a CD-ROM involved repetition: unexpected events could be randomly programmed in and repeat playing did not change the material on the Interactive CD-ROM. The study of trauma is concerned with the impact of overwhelming experience on the body and on memory. Trauma’s apparently random architecture is defined through the first two chapters and takes its cue from Bessel van der Kolk who approaches traumatic stress: ‘with a blend of objective science and an awareness of the sociopolitical contexts in which trauma is embedded’ (Van der Kolk, McFarlane & Weisaeth 1996: ix). Chapter 1 reviews the current social and political discourse on trauma in screen studies. It documents the appropriation of ‘trauma theory’ concepts such as Caruth’s ‘belatedness’ and Laub and Felman’s ‘witnessing’. Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’ and research into the flashback in trauma and cinema by Maureen Turim are identified as extensions of psychoanalytically influenced 70s feminist film theory. I identify the theorists of a materialist film that sources its practice back to painting and the cinema of the 20s European avant-garde. The 70s split between the two avant-gardes, represented here by a feminist counter-cinema on the one hand and a formalist materialist film on the other, is examined in detail for its role in the dismissal of materialist film subsequently rendering it unavailable to inform the current relationship between trauma theory and screen studies. Even though the first half of my text analyses theoretical discourse, I have included some illustrative film descriptions in preparation for a second half that aims for a greater integration between theory and practice by analysing specific films. Beginning with Jean-Martin Charcot’s research into hysteria, Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of the psychological research into trauma.

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Introduction

This survey identifies the early dismissal of Janet’s concept of dissociation in favour of the psychoanalytic readings of trauma shaping the ‘trauma theory’ integrated into screen studies to this point. Recent neurological research utilizing new imaging technologies into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), implicit and explicit memory systems and the role of the amygdala and hippocampus are detailed. This research, drawing upon the interactive dual processing model of trauma developed by Brewin and others, resurrects Janet’s previously subjugated concept of ‘dissociation’. Chapter 3 integrates the reviews undertaken in Chapters 1 and 2 to discuss homologies between Brewin’s dual processing model and the avant-garde split outlined in Chapter 1. The insertion of this new neurological research into trauma’s relationship to screen studies offers the most fertile opportunity for new knowledge. This chapter sets up a recuperation of materialist film for the rest of my analysis. Succeeding chapters analyze a series of films in detail for their suitability for inclusion in Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’, through a prism of trauma incorporating contemporary neurological research. Chapter 4 analyses Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren, 1943) and connects her theoretical writing on vertical and horizontal editing structures to Brewin’s dual processing model. A historical review of the varied analyses of Meshes of the Afternoon opens another perspective on the 70s avant-garde split, as the same commentators offer conflicting textual analyses of the film. Framed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology Chapter 5 looks at a traumatic effect identified in the direct perceptual performances of Robert Breer’s abstract animation practice, focusing specifically on 69 (dir. Robert Breer, 1968) and Fuji (dir. Robert Breer, 1974). In this analysis the flashback in film and trauma converge. Chapter 6 presents Landscape Suicide (dir. James Benning, 1986) as a work meriting recognition next to the feminist experimental documentary form considered trauma cinema’s prototype. I enlist Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus to locate James Benning’s practice and describe the gutting of content in Landscape Suicide as performing Laub and Felman’s witnessing of trauma. Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky’s recent found footage films are the focus of the final Chapter 7. Again, from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I argue that in this found footage practice a psychoanalytic textual analysis, the method employed to dismiss materialist film from feminist film theory, returns as the performed subject inside these films. All these four chapters’ films link through their relationship to a materialist practice surviving the 70s as a subjugated discourse and concludes with the belated re-emergence of this practice

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within digital time-based media arts, a recall manifest in the structure of these found footage films.

CHAPTER ONE TRAUMA, CINEMA, FEMINISM AND MATERIALIST FILM

This foundation chapter surveys the established and forming relationships between trauma and film in screen studies. I record the development of the new genre of ‘trauma cinema’, the viewer’s position within it, research into the nature of the filmic flashback and work on the general traumatic nature of digital media. I trace screen studies’ appropriation of trauma theory back to a similar appropriation of psychoanalysis and French critical theory at the point of emergence of feminist film theory by Laura Mulvey and others in the 70s. The filmic flashback is tentatively traced back to a 20s European avant-garde and I further outline how this new film form responds to the traumatic impact of the First World War. It becomes apparent that the relationship between this 20s avant-garde and feminist film theory remains mute within current discourses on trauma within screen studies. The second half of this chapter explores this gap. The most direct selective claim of heritage to 20s European avantgarde cinema is made in both the US and UK by the theorists of a late 60s co-operative generated explosion of film art production, which names its exemplary formalist form ‘structuralist film’ and later ‘materialist film’. Critically, at this time, Peter Wollen’s “The Two Avant-gardes” (Wollen 1982 [1975]) asserts differences between a political and formal avantgarde, separating materialist film from feminist film theory as its feminist commentators argue against formalism in favour of a political feminist counter-cinema. I place this split in the previously stated gap in the trauma - screen studies discourse to strengthen the cautious link in the historic record between ‘trauma cinema’ and 20s European avant-garde cinema and to clarify materialist film’s absence.

Encounters with Caruth, Felman and Laub ‘Trauma theory’ formed in literature studies by Felman, Laub and Caruth introduces this new area to screen studies in the last decade (Radstone

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2008: 10). Four commentators examine aspects of the relationship between avant-garde or experimental film and trauma, all writing for two special dossiers within the journal Screen published in 2001 and 2003. Firstly, Turim draws parallels between flashback phenomenon in trauma and its use in avant-garde and mainstream cinema (Turim 1989, 2001), secondly, Thomas Elsaesser suggests an inherent traumatic position and effect for digital media (Elsaesser 2001), thirdly, Walker proposes a ‘trauma cinema’ (Walker, J 1997, 2001, 2005) whose vanguard is constituted from a feminist experimental and documentary avant-garde and fourthly, this avant-garde is identified by Kaplan as delivering the most empowering viewer position in films about trauma (Kaplan 2001, 2005). Susannah Radstone notes the key role of work influenced by US psychoanalysis from history and literary studies by Felman, Laub and Caruth in shaping the early Screen debates (Radstone 2001: 188). Those aspects of trauma theory matching Screen’s critical and theoretical history are the first incorporated within its pages. Feminist film criticism, constituted in psychoanalytic readings of melodrama and a semiotically formulated counter-cinema found its voice in Screen through the 70s when politics and cinema moved out of the street into the academy and into theory. Consequently Radstone’s expectation for ‘trauma theory’ lay in its capacity to consolidate work on displacing models of passive spectatorship: ‘Trauma could revise theories of spectatorship by considering the relations between fantasy, memory, temporality and the subject’ (Radstone 2001: 191). 70s Critical discourses in Screen successfully imported the French critical theory of semiotics, structuralism and post structuralism by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Foucault and Julia Kristeva into screen studies through contributions by Kaplan, Wollen, Mulvey, Gidal, Stephen Heath, Constance Penley, Raymond Bellour, Annette Kuhn, and others. Mulvey’s key feminist critique, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1975) is representative of these developments. Maggie Humm places personal concerns into a social political framework: ‘understanding the personal as political –how identity is constructed and represented- is the task of feminist theory’ (Humm 1997: 179). As a 70s ‘Cine-Feminist’ Claire Johnston understood the importance of referencing criticism to the prevailing power structures: ‘feminist film criticism can only emerge out of an analysis of the existing cinema’ (Kaplan 1977: 399). Technically precise semiotic and structuralist vocabularies, coupled with the psychic insights of psychoanalysis were mobilised to frame the textual analysis of Hollywood melodrama that in turn supplied the basis for a feminist ‘counter- cinema’. For Kuhn textual

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analysis renders ideology visible (Kuhn 1982: 84) while counter- cinema challenges dominant cinema (Kuhn 1982: 157). Such analysis performs Foucault’s search for historic discontinuity where, according to David Shumway, ‘he looks for ruptures, breaks, gaps, displacements, mutations, shifts interruptions, thresholds’ (Shumway 1989: 19). Lacan and Louis Althusser are used to describe how the language of cinema imparts its embedded ideology onto the spectator (Humm 1997: 20). Lacan asserts that the unconscious is structured like a language and Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ describes the production of the subject from ideology: ‘All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’ (Althusser 1997: 130). This discursive formation (Foucault) responds to the contemporary post-modernist situation by appropriating ‘trauma theory’. Trauma theory has a reputation for finding ‘a way through and beyond’ (Radstone 2007: 11) what Caruth perceives as an ‘ethical and political paralysis’ (Caruth 1991: 181) at the epistemological heart of deconstruction for which Foucault identifies a number of criticisms of structuralist practices. Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb outline these as, firstly, an inability to talk about what is repressed or not known, secondly a difficulty in explaining transitions or discontinuities between discourses and thirdly that the rules of a knowledge database may be quite different to the rules adopted for their use by different groups (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000: 8). In my analysis here concepts related to ‘trauma theory’ such as Caruth’s ‘belatedness’ and Janet’s ‘dissociation’ from the psychopathology of trauma address such gaps. The re-emergence of dissociation within recent neurological research into trauma is a major theme pursued in Chapter 2. Elsaesser places the emerging relationship between ‘trauma theory’ and post-modernity in relation to the emphatic technological shifts represented by digital media. For Elsaesser: ‘it is as if trauma appears ‘behind’ post-modernity, charting its political blockages (both critically and negatively), implicitly acknowledging but no longer having to regret, for instance, the fact that the grand narratives have been exhausted’ (Elsaesser 2001: 200). These technological shifts include a pre-occupation with surface also identified by Vilém Flusser (Flusser 2000) and a proliferation of what Elsaesser calls a ‘fake’ authenticity in documentaries (Elsaesser 2001: 197). Such ambiguity finds particular expression in the experimental autobiographical works Walker places in ‘trauma cinema’ and informs her concept of ‘disremembering’. The move from analogue to digital technologies re-shaping screen studies in the academy is described by Elsaesser’s analysis. The fragmentation and multiplication of moving

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image forms, multi- platform delivery systems, increased accessibility to the means of production and a continuous churn and acceleration of software development reflects this change. This speed, fragmentation and splitting of events are also the effects ‘trauma theory’ describes. Trauma fragments affect and splits the individual psyche, rendering it un-locatable. Trauma theory’s relationship to the analysis of sexual abuse, exemplified in Herman’s feminist text on Trauma and Recovery (Herman 1992), provides the most compelling rationale for its appropriation into screen studies. Herman makes the connection: ‘Public discussion of the common atrocities of sexual and domestic life has been made possible by the women’s movement’ (Herman 1992: 4). Sexual abuse and its denial presents as an extreme but critical issue in screen studies for a feminism concerned with the politics of scopophilia, sexual power relations and patriarchy. In the 70s Mulvey appropriated psychoanalysis ‘as a political weapon’ (Mulvey 1975: 6) to deconstruct patriarchal structures in cinema and the move into trauma theory redeploys this tactic, re-coupling strands of theory to deal, as well as sexual abuse, with the demands of a new political and technological situation. For an area of screen studies that successfully incorporated 70s feminist voices of empowerment, the appropriation of ‘trauma theory’ is a critical move worth banking on. Yet Radstone registers a note of caution for this latest adoption: ‘too enthusiastic a take-up of trauma risks displacing the important insights from film theory concerning spectatorship, mediation and fantasy’ (Radstone 2001: 191). How severe would such a displacement be? If an episteme as used by Foucault ‘is the product of certain organising principles which relate things to one another’ (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000: 17), could the introduction of trauma theory mark a shift from one episteme to another, or at least a shift in the discursive formation through which it is expressed? Or are all these differences of opinion all just part of the same discourse? Radstone’s ambivalence and the radical technological shifts Elsaesser addresses suggest epistemic conversion. If so ‘trauma theory’ might at least prove useful in articulating those discontinuities that its incorporation brings about. Traumatic events impact directly on the individual, but also the social and beyond. Kirby Farrell suggests that the ‘contagiousness’ of personal traumas can lead to a general social impact ‘when particular social conditions and historical pressures intersect’ (Farrell 1998: 12). Herman understands its witnessing as precarious: ‘to speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims’ (Herman 1992: 2). For Laub and Felman also, an encounter with traumatic events impacts both victim and witness so that ‘the encounter with the real

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Chapter One

leads to the experience of an existential crisis in all those involved’ (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv). Kristeva points to a similar effect operating on the viewer through the abject in horror film (Kristeva 1982). Could this contagious rupture perform an ‘existential crisis’ on the discursive formation itself? If this Lacanian tuche´, this break into the real, migrates from the personal into the social and enters the political and theoretical, what crisis or trauma does it deliver to those theoretical framework embracing it? Caruth explains trauma’s suffering’s repeated return. In an event’s normal processing the instant of ‘seeing’ becomes ‘knowing’; yet in trauma this instant is seen but remains unknown, returning over time repeatedly to an unknown or ‘unspeakable’ gap. Consequently Caruth identifies: ‘a larger relation to the event which extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known and is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing’ (Caruth 1997: 208). Belatedness and latency are central to Caruth’s understanding: Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimensions of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct way of seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it, that immediacy, paradoxically may take the form of belatedness (Caruth 1995: 6).

Felman and Laub outline trauma as ‘an event without a witness’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 75), focusing on the process of testimony and witnessing which, despite its fallibility, manages a direct and productive communication of its trauma. Felman and Laub’s partnership brings together acute interpreters of literary and psychoanalytic texts and gestures able to read and listen to the human narrative for its gaps and hesitations (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv). For Felman and Laub this is about ‘moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical’ (Felman & Laub 1992: xv). Their method, a synthesis of psychoanalysis and literary studies, locks unwittingly into that visual and historical space screen studies occupies. Though such a traumatic gap is more viscerally emptied and perceptually severe and not specifically credited to patriarchy, it has affinities with that feminist textual analysis previously identified by Kuhn (1982: 84). This collaboration is a de-constructive machine assembled to traverse the most extreme field of Derridian ‘différance’ where trauma’s non-traces are only recoverable through what Elsaesser identifies as ‘a different kind of hermeneutics’ (Elsaesser 2001: 196). We are displaced inside the non-

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territory of Roland Barthes’ un-locatable sign (Barthes 1981: 52-53). Performing this hermeneutics of reading unspoken truths ‘that are yet inscribed in texts’ (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv) on Radstone’s wary questioning struggles to bring into view the intertwining of trauma’s unspeakable non-traces with digital’s un-locatable future: Does it (trauma theory) answer to a new historical/cultural context in which there is ‘no there there’? And if so, whose context, precisely, is that? Or have the reconfigurations of ‘modern’ space and time performed by contemporary electronic technologies produced tectonic shifts that only “trauma” can describe (Radstone 2001: 190).

Elsaesser answers ‘yes’ to a complicity between digital media and trauma. For him the image has indeed become un-locatable within digital media. Lev Manovich also notes that both location and scale are discarded in the digital layering of imagery (Manovich 2001: 172). Elsaesser points to a rise in ‘in-authenticity’, characterised by the infiltration of the fake in documentary and the role of re-enactment there, to situate a ‘traumatic’ status for the ‘moving image in our culture as the symptom without a cause, as the event without a trace’ (Elsaesser 2001: 197). Hal Foster also hunts down such a traumatic condition in Return of the Real (Foster, H 1996); ‘this thing of trauma’, resident in Cindy Sherman’s ‘artifice of abjection’. I examine Vilém Flusser’s view that the status of the image is further traumatised by the malleable, now painterly rather than photographic digital image (Flusser 2000) in Chapter 3. Elsaesser identifies trauma theory as ‘not so much a theory of recovered memory as it is one of recovered referentiality’ (Elsaesser 2001: 201). Digital media approaches the difficulty of presenting the unpresentable via gaps, absences and traceless traces through architecture and structure. The reflexive focus for the artist here is even more about fitting elements and fragments together structurally. Is Felman and Laub’s interpretive witnessing capable of mapping a terrain transgressing accepted conventional cause and effect to morph into the logic of wormholes, time warps, parallel universes and the layering and jog shuffle of the digital editing system? This landscape invokes the space of unlocatability and postponed effect mapping Caruth’s belatedness: ‘Trauma is fully evident only in connection with another place and another time. Belatedness: neither inside or outside, neither one place or one time’ (Caruth 1995: 8).

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Chapter One

Towards a Trauma Cinema: Walker, Kaplan and Turim Both Walker and Kaplan identify a cinema for articulating trauma which Walker names ‘trauma cinema’ and whose exemplary form emanates from an independent feminist project as the voice of the creative non-victim. For Kaplan this is an independent self-reflexive personal cinema communicating trauma’s fragmentation, flashback and hallucination. Turim points to the 20s avant-garde cinema as the technical or structural source for the flashback.

Trauma Cinema (Walker) By trauma cinema I mean a group of films that deal with a world shattering event or events, whether public or personal. Furthermore, I define trauma films and videos as those that deal with traumatic events in a non-realist mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films’ narrative and stylistic regimes (Walker, J 2005: 19).

80s and 90s Feminist counter-cinema films use fragmented ordering and repeated imagery with unusual angles, rapid editing and non-synchronous sound to disrupt narrative. Walker identifies this cinema as that most capable of communicating trauma’s effects: ‘contemporary women’s experimental autobiographical documentary practice represents the vanguard of the trauma cinema form’ (Walker, J 2001), noting that these films ‘approach the past through an unusual admixture of emotional affect, metonymic symbolism and cinematic flashbacks’ (Walker, J 2001: 214). Walker’s concepts of ‘traumatic paradox’ and ‘disremembering’ frame the non-realist disturbance and fragmentation she identifies in ‘trauma cinema’. Caruth’s theory of belatedness indicates that not all aspects of a traumatic situation are available for recall. Not only is a level of uncertainty created by delayed recognition but also narrative after recall is a mixture of truth and fantasy or metaphor. Elsaesser notes that as a result of Caruth’s displaced recall, ‘trauma also suspends the categories of true or false, being in some sense performative’ (Elsaesser 2001: 199). For Walker a feminist experimental autobiographical documentary form effectively communicates this state. The ‘traumatic paradox’ stresses the contradictory nature of recall of traumatic events (Walker, J 2005: 4), its mixture of accurate and counterfeit memory, of real and fantasy events. David Payne understands this blend of mistakes, forgetting and accuracy to point to the genuine nature of the events recalled: ‘memory errors are not bothersome anomalies to be explained away or minimalised, but rather they reflect the normal processes by which we interpret the world around us’ (Payne &

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Blackwell 1998: 53). Such mistakes in remembering power an emotive force for transforming the real into metaphor. Walker coins the term ‘disremembering’ for this synthesis of embellishment and blunder (Walker, J 2005: 80). For the genre’s vanguard Walker highlights a number of feminist experimental autobiographical documentaries dealing with past traumatic events. These films use strategies ‘for representing reality obliquely, by looking to mental processes for inspiration, and by incorporating selfreflexive devices’ (Walker, J 2005: 19). The architecture and structure of such ‘narratives’ have an attraction, an ambiguous and elusive presence, communicating meaning through structure as well as content. For Walker The Ties That Bind (dir. Sue Friedrich, 1984), Daughter Rite (dir. Michelle Citron, 1978), Confessions of a Chameleon (dir. Lynn Hershman, 1986) and History and Memory (dir. Rea Tajiri, 1991) demonstrate these characteristics. For example, the soundtrack in the experimental documentary The Ties that Bind presents Friedrich’s mother’s memory of Nazi Germany counterpointed to intimate and sampled images of home life and politics in present day Chicago. For Jane Feuer in Daughter Rite: ‘the more personal it becomes, the more political it becomes’ (Feuer 1980: 13). Combining Payne’s real and metaphor mix Daughter Rite punctuates suggestive optically printed and repeating fragments of home movie footage into the conversation between two sisters relating their love-hate relationship with their mother. Super 8 home movies of a mother and daughter moving to each other is repeatedly cut short of an embrace. A rape is retold directly to the camera. Similarly to this rape, in Confessions of a Chameleon Lynn Hershman intimately talks her diary directly into the camera, recounting childhood and marriage at 15, enlisting the viewer as confidant and psychoanalyst.

The position of the Viewer (Kaplan) We are less interested in developing a new genre of trauma than in addressing what is most important about, and defining of, trauma- namely, how it marks not the cinema but the viewer (Kaplan & Wang 2004: 9).

Kaplan breaks down the viewer’s relationship to trauma into four genres. She states that melodrama is ‘able to conceal traumas too painful to confront directly’ (Kaplan 2001: 203). The trauma is contained because trauma is introduced, worked through and resolved at a distance. In the horror film the spectator may be vicariously traumatised. The joyride offers no ethical or empathic resolution. Films about torture and concentration camps can also operate in this way. News broadcasts offer

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up a cavalcade of trauma scripts on war, rape, a bushfire or aeroplane crash for voyeuristic consumption. Kaplan situates the witness as creative non-victim in a fourth modality: ‘the spectator is addressed as witness, arguable the politically most useful position’ (Kaplan 2001: 204). As examples of this fourth ‘witnessing’ modality Kaplan cites Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren, 1943), Hiroshima Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais story: Marguerite Duras, 1959) and Night Cries (dir. Tracey Moffat, 1989). With silence, lack of dialogue or closure and images intermittently breaking into her thoughts, Night Cries witnesses an Aboriginal daughter’s mixture of anger and care for her dying white mother. The daughter responds to her death at film’s end curled into foetal position. Hiroshima Mon Amour employs a subjective stream of consciousness delivery, promoting an experienced or ‘disremembered’ sense of time unhinged from ‘clock’ time. The opening sequence montages paradoxical imagery of a pristine re-built city, bodies of bombing victims, nuclear ash and the texture of a lover’s embrace. In another scene, as the heroine walks through Hiroshima at night, the French architecture associated with her dead German wartime lover’s memory returns to mix with the real, creating an ‘inexpressible’ (Susan Sontag 1986: 236) consciousness situated between metaphor and reality. Cinema in this fourth modality repeats and freezes its subject to articulate trauma’s ‘paralysis, repetition, circularity’ (Kaplan 2001: 204). Kaplan’s further analysis of Meshes of the Afternoon, a foundation work of American avant-garde cinema, as a trauma narrative (Kaplan 2005) is discussed at length in Chapter 4. For Joan Copjec such cinema’s selfreflexivity operates as a metaphor for self-awareness (Copjec 1988: 242). In shifting to issues of global feminism Kaplan sustains her non-narrative view stressing the flashback’s value for a trauma cinema: The struggle to figure trauma’s affects cinematically leads to means other than linearity or story: fragment, hallucinations, flashbacks are the modes trauma cinema characteristically adopts (Kaplan & Wang 2004: 204).

The fourth modality is similar to categories developed by other feminist writers working outside cinema. In Survival, a survey of the themes of Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood lays down four basic victim positions (Atwood 1972: 36). These are in ascending order of empowerment: deny you are a victim (1), you are a victim because of an act of fate (2), acknowledge you are a victim but refuse its inevitability (3) and be a creative non-victim (4). Kaplan’s witnessed autobiographic narrative is the articulation of the creative non-victim. Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation reinforces Kaplan’s categories,

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where at its most empowering ‘the have-nots can indeed improve their lot by handling the entire job of planning, policy-making and managing a program’ (Arnstein 1969: 223). This fourth position also suggests the selfactualised personality that sits atop Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where ‘the clear emergence of these needs rests upon satisfaction of the physiological, safety, love and esteem needs’ (Maslow 1943: 383). Performance is essential at this fourth level for Maslow: ‘a musician must make music’ (Maslow 1943: 383). The understanding that the path to empowerment leads to the creative non-victim underpins these hierarchies. Victims of trauma who travel this trajectory must re-structure a deep personal language. For Laub and Nanette Auerhahn recovery moves to empowerment from the dissociated fragment of affect to the integrated narrative of metaphor (Laub & Auerhahn 1993). Herman maps this restructure in Trauma and Recovery (1992): ‘when survivors recognise the origins of their psychological difficulties in an abusive childhood environment, they no longer need attribute them to an inherent defect in the self. Thus the way is opened to the creation of new meaning in experience and a new unstigmatized identity’ (Herman 1992: 127). Kaplan’s view that cinema performs trauma is productive: ‘Forms such as cinema may be especially appropriate to figuring the visual, aural and non-linear fragmented phenomena of trauma- to performing it’ (Kaplan 2001: 204-5). Performance, more than representation, suggests an immediate and direct engagement with the whole body. Vivian Sobchack’s shift from psychoanalysis to existential phenomenology considers: ‘the body’s radical contribution to the constitution of the film experience’ (Sobchack 1992: 25) and avoids a ‘commodity fetishism’. In Chapter 5 I examine trauma’s performance in Breer’s films through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology rather than the psychoanalysis Kaplan employs.

The Flashback (Turim) Turim’s contribution to the Screen dossier on flashbacks also uses a psychoanalytic framework, relating trauma to a Lacanian lack of being and a Freudian deep wound of the psyche (Turim 2001). This view utilizes Sigmund Freud’s views on both suppression in early childhood fantasy and war trauma’s splitting of the self. Turim enlists Caruth’s description of the traumatic flashback as an event of sudden return, repetition, and intrusive hallucination: Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic events in which the response to the events occurs in the often delayed,

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Chapter One uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena (Caruth 1996: 11).

From the margins of this and Turim’s earlier writing on the cinematic flashback and abstraction relationships are discernible between trauma, a 20s European avant-garde and new media. Turim’s cinematic flashback disturbs narrative flow, signaling a trauma’s return: ‘Violently inserted flashbacks inscribe in narratives a shattering of complacency’ (Turim 2001: 207). Turim observes: ‘Though similar abrupt flashbacks mark 1920’s avant-garde films, only in the post World War II period are they associated with the events of history and only then do they appear in films of mass distribution’ (Turim 2001: 207) presenting The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) as representative of this shift. The Pawnbroker articulates the emptied and icy existence of a New York pawnbroker and Holocaust survivor. The Holocaust scenes appear in flashback in stylized form removed from the gritty immediacy of the New York street scenes and the Harlem underclass forming the film’s milieu. I examine the 20s avant-garde nominated by Turim as a flashback form here in more detail later in this chapter which Susan McCabe describes as a Cubist cinema that ‘foregrounds the fragmentary, incohesive character of human embodiment’ (McCabe 2000: 68). The avant-garde’s non-linearity repeatedly surfaces in Turim’s texts. In Abstraction in Avant- garde Film (Turim 1978) the avant-garde is characterised as challenging both classic and modernist narrative. Here Turim again sources Lacan’s psychoanalysis, this time through Kristeva’s ‘revolution in poetic language’ (Turim 1978: 2). In the ‘Disjunction of the Modernist Flashback’ (Turim 1989: 231-45) she identifies this 20s avantgarde as early cinematic modernism describing its practice as ‘restoring some of the energy of dislocation and mimesis of thought and memory inherent in the flashback’ (Turim 1989: 189). Turim focuses on the flashback as a device used within narrative demonstrating the functioning of the wounded psyche rather than as the independent aesthetic distinguishing 20s avant-garde films. Turim recognises the psyche is: ‘often wounded or damaged either by war or by personal trauma’ (Turim 1989: 190). For Turim the flashback functions ‘to represent the mental processes to show the memory flashes and brief disjointed or distorted images which come to a character’s mind’ (Turim 1989: 190). When Turim writes that: ‘Floating temporalities do not maintain the points of reference necessary to the flashback as a device’ (Turim 1989: 246) she again measures the flashback in relation to narrative cinema. Yet it is exactly this lack of reference that marks the flashback’s traumatic credentials, Turim’s expression ‘floating temporalities’ recalling Elsaesser’s

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‘recovered referentiality’ (Elsaesser 2001: 201) and Felman and Laub’s witnessing as a strategy for discerning testimony’s gaps and hesitations (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv). In her conclusion to Flashbacks in Film Turim speculates on avantgarde practice, questioning whether the flashback form has a place on its own terms as ‘memory traces without the ordering structure of conscious recall or narrative association’ (Turim 1989: 245). She points out that: ‘Much of the diaristic work of the avant-garde, the personal film, can be seen as researching a kind of unframed flashback structure, revising the immediacy of narrative or documentary film in favor of the memory album’ (Turim 1989: 246). This describes the films of Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’ vanguard such as Daughter Rite and The Ties that Bind. Turim’s memory album evokes Manovich’s notion of database. Manovich brandishes the 20s avant-garde film Man With a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929) as exemplar for new digital media: ‘Vertov is able to achieve something that new media artists still have to learn- how to merge database and narrative into a new form’ (Manovich 2001: 243). The action of Dziga Vertov’s symphony of light and abstraction is organised around glossaries of theme and form rather than cause and effect. Movement and rhythm within the frame are critical. Framed body gesture and machine movement imply relationships between work and leisure. The camera, tripod, lens, eye, theatre and screen’s intermittent appearances bring a level of self- reference to the viewing experience unavailable in melodrama. There is an editing precision, a virtuosity of technique, in bursts of short and sharp images forming a procession of fragmentary machine impressions, emblematic of the new modern industrial experience that test and train the eye. Read through its gaps and hesitations Turim’s commentary on cinematic flashbacks permits affinities between 20s avant-garde film and trauma, connects to Elsaesser’s take on the digital media’s traumatic architecture. Speculative connections are discernible to Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’ and Manovich suggesting a further link between the 20s avantgarde and digital media practice. Through Turim’s and Walker’s psychoanalytic position there is a speculative connection available between feminism and a 20s European avant-garde whose nature and detail remains unclear. The historical events through which a 20s avantgarde cinema directly impacts 70s feminist counter-cinema are not articulated. Given the feminist influence on ‘trauma cinema’ and the clutch of evidence suggesting the importance of a 20s avant-garde in reproducing the visceral impact of the traumatic flashback in cinematic form this gap needs locating.

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Lis Rhodes uses the pun on light’s two meanings (the verbal ironically) to momentarily straddle this feminist-20s avant-garde gap in Light Reading (dir. Lis Rhodes, 1978). A spoken feminist text bookends a silent visual display of dancing letters and light, frozen moments of a look through a mirror, defaced altered stills repeat and churn, more fragmentary and dynamic but also more fluid than the syntax of Vertov’s machine staccato, closer to the kinetic animation of Hans Richter and Man Ray. The read text gives voice to woman’s experience: ‘She objected / she refused to be framed / she raised her hand / she stopped the action / she began to read / she began to re-read aloud’ (Extract from the soundtrack). Just as Turim ends Flashback in Film with speculation about the flashback as a viable form of cinema in its own right, she ends Abstraction in Avant-garde Films with a situation where feminism and a 20s avantgarde influenced film combine and overlap metaphorically in a traumatic event of loss, mourning and rebirth (Turim 1978: 131). This scene from the narrative fiction The Battle of Tokyo or The Man Who Left his Will on Film (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1970) is replete with the re-enactment and false authenticity with which Elsaesser marks digital media. Never-the-less Laub and Felman’s witnessing can help locate the real events behind its fictional facade. In this scene an abstract avant-garde film is being projected. Turim explains: ‘The images of the avant-garde film are criticized by the Leftists for not being readable as political discourse and they therefore find them to lack meaning and to be worthless trash’ (Turim 1978: 131). One member of the political collective still watches the film. It is her dead lover’s film. As she masturbates and the images project on her, she recites ‘the trauma of her recent past, the departure of her lover on the day of his death’ (Turim 1978: 131).

Avant-Garde Film, Left Politics and Feminism ‘I keep wishing I could push time backwards’ (Bernadette Protti in Sullivan 1985: 122)

In keeping with Foucault’s archaeology of ‘trying to detect the incidence of interruptions’ (Foucault 1972: 4), this Chapter shifts gears here from trauma theory’s introduction into screen studies to locating a gap in its assimilation. The challenge is to locate the historic moment or real event within the written texts of screen studies and avant-garde film barely evident metaphorically in The Battle of Tokyo (1970) and recounted at the conclusion of Turim’s Abstraction in Avant-garde Films (1978). At best a ‘trace of a trace of a trace’ of a real event is performed, approaching Elsaesser’s ‘event without a trace’ (Elsaesser 2001: 197). 80s and 90s

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feminist film practice’s relation to 20s avant-garde is alluded to but remains unspoken. I examine this gap by jog-shuttling to the 70s, ‘scene of the crime’ in Oshima’s parable, when leftist politics, avant-garde film and feminism are all in the room together. I identify materialist film as the missing link, whose commentators name it as successor to 20s avant-garde practice but which is, interestingly, strategically dismissed from the feminist project at this time. This revelation precipitates an analysis of materialist film assessing its ability to perform trauma, its pedigree for a ‘trauma cinema’ and detailing the circumstances of its dismissal. Feminist film theory’s removal of materialist film is presented as the gap in the narrative of trauma and screen studies performed metaphorically in Turim’s notation of Oshima’s The Battle of Tokyo. Artist made films enter public view to proliferate in the late 60s, facilitated by the availability of second hand 16mm film and sound equipment after the Second World War. Commentators on this work identify the 20s avant-garde cinema as technical and aesthetic precursors for the assemblage, collagic, graphic and abstract elements of new work predominately emerging out of filmmakers co-ops. Its most prominent critics, P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson, Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal, focus their attention on the formalist elements in the most challenging work. Mulvey and other cine-feminists, concurrently developing a new political feminist cinema, recognise formalism’s critical potential: ‘the answer clearly led towards formalism: foregrounding the process itself, privileging the signifier, necessarily disrupts aesthetic unity and forces the spectator’s attention on the means of production of meaning’ (Mulvey 1979: 7).

20s European avant-garde cinema For Michelson the 20s European avant-garde provides a historic continuity into this contemporary form of experimental or avant-garde film: The entire tradition of the independently made film, from Deren and Anger through Brakhage, has been developed as an extension, in American terms, of an avant-gardist position of the twenties Europe, distending the continuity, negating the tension of narrative (Michelson 1976: 175-6).

The structure of David Curtis’s book Experimental Cinema a Fifty Year Evolution (1971) demonstrates the same course, beginning with the European avant-garde and ending with the co-op movement. He underlines the importance of Hans Richter and Fernand Léger’s work. Rhythmus 21

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(dir. Hans Richter, 1921) for initiating developments in kinetic studies to which Breer contributed and Léger’s Ballet Mechanique (dir. Fernand Léger, 1924) as a precursor to developments ‘towards the physical properties of film- the ‘film as the (only) subject of film’ school’ (Curtis 1971: 155). He notes that Richter’s wartime move to America personally linked the 20s European avant-garde to a new generation of independent film artists (Curtis 1971: 50). Rhythmus 21, the length of one roll of film, is constructed from simplified cut out squares of various sizes and shades of black, grey and white that expand, jump and disappear unexpectedly in tempo and rhythm. Its elementary kinetic play of light was appropriated in Form Phases I (dir. Robert Breer, 1952). Richter used a re-printing machine to hesitate, move forward and backward his initial animations: ‘single images disappeared in the flow of images’ (Hans Richter in Russett & Starr 1976: 53). Like the flashback, Ballet Mechanique’s repetitions, with its body and object close-ups, high contrast images and rapid edited sequences deny narrative. For McCabe this cinema approaches mutilation, as it ‘reconceptualises the gestural body in time and space by both visceralizing and dissecting it’ (McCabe 2000: 68). Steven Dwoskin locates the film’s abstract form in its innovative editing strategies (Dwoskin 1975: 27). Léger’s own rationale reads like a dissociative aesthetic of shell shock and war neurosis: ‘the war had thrust me, as a soldier, into the heart of a mechanical atmosphere. In this atmosphere I discovered the beauty of the fragment’ (quoted in Stauffacher 1947: 11). Is this fragment that same ‘dissociative’ base of traumatic memory that Janet identifies in the shell shock of war? As Van der Kolk observes: according to Janet traumatic memory may consists of images, sensations, affective states, and behaviours that are invariable (Van der Kolk 1996d: 296).

Man Ray’s reduces this ‘fragment’ to an essential material level in his camera-less photographs, called rayographs or photograms, that Ray further embedded into his short films. Dwoskin highlights the importance of laboratory intervention to Ray’s creative practice (Dwoskin 1975: 178). Tscherkassky explains: ‘Man Ray placed various objects on raw film stock and exposed the shadows they cast’ (Tscherkassky 2005: 158). In his Dadaist Retour a la Raison (dir. Man Ray, 1923) Ray spread salt and pepper and pins over strips of black and white film and then exposed the filmstrip to light. He added filmed night-time fairground lights, a dancing paper mobile and images of a nude model bathed in striped light. According to Edward Small ‘Any hope for an audience to find a diegesis

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is constantly frustrated by a montage of abstract images intercut with a hanging mobile or moire patterns projected upon the torso of a nude model’ (Small, ES 1994: 31). Like Léger, Ray states his preference for the ever present fragment in describing another film Emak Bakia (trans: Leave me alone) (1926 France 19 minutes) as a ‘series of fragments, a cinepoem with a certain optical sequence make up a whole that still remain a fragment’ (Ray 1927: 40). War and its traumatic forgetting figure in Dada and Surrealism’s history. For Foster ‘traumatic shock, deadly desire and compulsive repetition’ (Foster, H 1993: xi) lie at Surrealism’s heart. Morgan Laliberte and Alex Mogelow show that Surrealist objects were designed to elicit a psychological response from the viewer (Laliberte & Mogelow 1980: 11). In post war France the cut-up figures of Surrealist collage registered the dismembered cadavers of battlefield memories and the mutilated bodies of war veterans encountered daily walking the streets of Paris. Such shock tactics counter the official rhetoric of a seamless post war reconstruction valorised at the Museum exhibitions at Paris’s military hospital Val du Grace, where Surrealism’s founders, Louis Aragon and Andre Breton met as medical interns in 1917, during the war. Amy Lyford outlines the Surrealist response to the Val du Grace exhibitions: ‘Surrealist collage was a medium that could expose and bind the disparate pieces of physical and psychic trauma into vivid objects’ (Lyford 2000). A fledgling advertising industry appropriated these techniques quickly transforming their political currency for confronting war’s trauma into a bourgeois consumerist aesthetic, prompting Aragon’s prescient lament about erasure and denial: ‘The modern today is not in the hands of the poets. It is in the hands of the cops… it is the return of the censor to the unconscious’ (Aragon 1929). Sitney’s Visionary Film historically situates an American avant-garde with Deren and Sidney Peterson as initiators and with this Surrealist 20s European avant-garde as precursor. Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Deren, 1946), that Kaplan identifies as articulating her fourth viewer position of the creative non-victim, is named a foundation text for the new American avant- garde. Sitney also identifies a Graphic Cinema from the 50s and later animated work by Jordan Belson, Harry Smith, Peter Kubelka and Breer that takes up the forgotten work of Richter’s Rhythmus 21, Léger’s Ballet Mechanique, Symphonie Diagonale (dir. Viking Eggeling, 1921), Man Ray’s Retour a la Raison and Anemic Cinema (dir. Marcel Duchamp, 1927) and maps developments into the 60s into what he contentiously names ‘structuralist’ film. Within the 20s avant-garde other films, like Entr’acte (dir. Rene Clair, 1924) and Un Chien Andalou (dir. Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, 1929),

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are categorised differently. These films despite their fragmentation are still read creatively through dream as narrative. For Small Entr’acte ‘retains enough narrativity (including a “character” whom the film follows) to at least raise the question of oneiric verisimilitude’ (Small, ES 1994: 31). The line between no narrative and marginal narrative opens up a productive dream analysis for some films and not others. Sitney includes dream and psychoanalysis in his taxonomy but British film artists and theorists Le Grice and Gidal pointedly avoid it. Sitney promotes Surrealism’s relationship to dream in his analysis of Un Chien Andalou: ‘What Dali and Bunuel achieve through their method of compiling a scenario was the liberation of their material from the demands of narrative continuity. Far from being puzzling the film achieves the clarity of a dream’ (Sitney 1979: 4). Perhaps aligned with Aragon’s spirit, Le Grice and Gidal mark marginal narrative as less radical and the indication of a more commercial entertaining avant-garde. Gidal’s anti-illusionism avoids dreams. Le Grice prefers the pre-reflective realm to an interpretative cinema (Le Grice 1977: 106). For Le Grice: ‘This ‘Surrealist’ tendency is outside my scope’ (Le Grice 1977: 33). Though he does not identify this discrepancy, the shift between Dada and Surrealism’s approach to perception, shock or dream clarifies Le Grice’s position. Where the Dadaist’s stun and irrationality is anti-art and anti-war, Surrealism’s adoption of the psychoanalytic unconscious to further unpack this absurdity separates the two movements. The disparity between Sitney and Le Grice re-plays this gap between Surrealism and Dada. For Patricia Mellencamp: ‘One constructs its subject in the name of romantic humanism and the other in the name of science and ‘materialism’’ (Mellencamp 1990: 24). This romantic humanism is on show in Sitney’s Mythopoetic reading of Stan Brakhage’s sustained practice. For Le Grice Brakhage retains a ‘Romantic’ and ‘Symbolist’ tradition also evident in Maya Deren’s work, setting it apart from structuralist film (Le Grice 1977: 87). Interestingly Le Grice senses that Brakhage comes closest to a structuralist approach in Sirius Remembered (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1959), a silent long-term meditation on the decomposing corpse of the family dog in the snow (Le Grice 1977: 89). Dog Star Man (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1961), recording the season’s cycles in the vicinity of his Rockies home, clearly represents Sitney’s Mythopoetic reading. The viewer experiences Brakhage’s struggle with nature through his determined scaling of a snow-covered mountain. Brakhage’s referential use of cinematic ‘mistakes’ such as flash frames, splices, flares, frame lines, distortion lenses and the use of a form of Rayogram in gluing material directly onto the film strip, revealing the

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technology of its making, are all evident in this visually complex multilayered silent epic. The film’s active short, gestural, repetitive camera movement constructs an internalised body-centred vision and an engaged, expressive looking that occupies the absent soundtrack’s silence. The austere black of its 30 minute prelude is punctuated by flashes of hypnagogic imagery, surrogates for Brakhage’s ‘closed eye vision’ (Small, ES 1994: 52). In Abstract Film and Beyond Le Grice situates the 20s avant-garde cinema within a historical line of questioning non-representational forms. He relates this cinematic avant-garde to Italian Futurism, the formalism of a Russian avant-garde represented by Man with a Movie Camera, and uses the ‘visual music’ of Oscar Fischinger and Len Lye’s later abstractions to bridge the gap to the explosion of post Second World War practice. This shared area with Sitney’s Visionary Film includes the American west coast graphic experiments of the 60s, Sitney’s ‘structuralist’ cinema and the new American cinema forming around Jonas Mekas’s and Sitney’s Film Culture and (later) Anthology Film Archive. Where Sitney constructs the heroic artist’s ‘mythical taxonomy’ (Mellencamp 1990: 23) around Stan Brakhage’s expansive visionary cinema, Le Grice underlines the hard-core formalism of the Austrians Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka. Where Brakhage’s arsenal of reflexive technique responds to the environment he immerses himself in, Austrian Kurt Kren enters his landscape, as in his early 3/60: Bäume im Herbst or Trees in Autumn (dir. Kurt Kren, 1960) with a predetermined map or strategy formed in relation to the material of film rather than the environment being documented, creating a more analytic rather than emotive effect. Le Grice enlists Barthes conception of structuralist activity to illuminate Kren’s formalism: ‘Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it’ (Barthes 1971 [1963]: 1128). During 1964-5 Kren also documented Otto Muehl's and Günter Brus's ‘material actions’. Le Grice situates his own work in relation to other contemporary practice from the London Filmmakers Co-operative (LFMC) by Gidal, William Raban, David Crosswaite, Annabel Nicholson and others. American film artists include Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Pat O’Neill, Michael Snow, Larry Gottheim and Breer. The link Le Grice makes between this formalist practice and the 20s avant-garde echoes Michelson and Sitney’s observations. As discussed, Turim implies a similar link, connecting her discussion of abstraction in the 20s avantgarde to an analysis of Larry Gottheim’s cinema. The 20s avant-garde and structuralist films come together in Small’s ‘genre’ of ‘experimental cinema and video’ that performs its Direct Theory by laying bare its

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apparatus and construction method: A type of film and video production that I contend does not function mainly as (fictive) popular entertainment nor as (documentary) information. Its major function is rather to theorize upon its own substance by reflecting back on its own intrinsic semiotic system(s) (Small, ES 1994: 4).

Illustrating Small’s definition, Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass (dir. Hollis Frampton, 1971), with a title referencing both a Christian church ceremony and the fuel necessary to trigger a nuclear reaction, systematically deconstructs the spoken word back into stuttered and broken phrasings. The film enacts the repetitions, accusations and recriminations of a man and woman’s relationship problems, intermittently draining their filmed on-screen face-off back to the absence of a blank black screen. For Michelson Frampton’s re-editing deflects the couple’s conflict: ‘through interception, fragmentation, repetition, its extravagant stuttering pattern of gesture and sound reinforcing the hopelessly circular pattern of this transaction’ (Michelson 1985: 162). In the film’s second half, through a formal computational formula of shortening and extending the soundtrack while images remain of equal length Frampton dislocates sound and image in outrageous sympathy with the numbing quarrel’s breakdown. Le Grice announces: ‘Between 1966 and the present time the formalist aspects of avant-garde film has exploded to become its mainstream’ (Le Grice 1977: 105). Canadian Snow’s celebrated first prize for Wavelength (dir. Michael Snow, 1967) at the International Festival for Experimental Film at Knokke-le-Zoute in 1967 signifies this shift. Wavelength’s spine is a relentless 45-minute fixed camera zoom across a New York loft from wide-angle into a photograph of an ocean wave. The background sound is an electronic sine-wave that correspondingly changes with the zoom from 50 to 19,200 cycles per second, creating nodal points of standing waves that move through the theatre with frequency changes. Different film stocks and filters change the image’s quality, its grain and intensity during the zoom’s trajectory, permitting at times a view of the street below. Sparse human action inserts into the film’s ’narrative’, often out of frame. A woman supervises two men moving a bookcase into the room, a man staggers and falls to the floor and later a woman telephones to report a dead body in the room. Throughout, inexorably, the zoom asserts its position as the film’s subject.

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Structuralist film The 20s avant-garde’s lack of narrative is understood as a precursor to the emerging formalist work for which Sitney and then Le Grice develop the term ‘structuralist’. Resourcing American practice both Michelson and Sitney outline the structural focus of these films as ‘a practice that focuses on the signifier, rather than the signified, on form ahead of content’ (Michelson 1974: 15) and that ‘the structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline’ (Sitney 2002: 348). Sitney identifies a checklist of four characteristics nearly always present: fixed camera position, flicker effect, loop printing, and screen rephotography. Le Grice expands Sitney’s definition to include processes leading to these effects: ‘I shall add to them a number of other concerns, like celluloid as material, the projection as event, duration as a concrete dimension’ (Le Grice 1977: 88). These strategies of laying the apparatus bare are acquired from Russian Formalism (Shklovsky 1969). Al Rees identifies this project in aesthetic terms: ‘structuralist film proposed that the shaping of film’s material- light, time and process – could create a new form of aesthetic pleasure, free of symbolism or narrative’ (Rees 1999: 74). One structuralist strategy recycles sequences from earlier cinema, shifting emphasis from content to perceptual effect. Bruce Conner’s meditation Crossroads (dir. Bruce Conner, 1976), presents archival footage of a Nuclear test explosion from 26 different angles. In Little Dog For Roger (dir. Le Grice, 1967) the rush of a small ebullient dog is emphasised by the film’s dance in and out of the projector gate. For Dwoskin this film ‘combines recorded image, repetition, film material, sound and the sensation of versatile movement’ (Dwoskin 1975: 179). In Berlin Horse (dir. Le Grice, 1970) the layered and coloured positive and negative repetition of a horse moving out of a barn places the viewer in a circus ringmaster’s position. Le Grice also presents these films as two screen works, where differences in projector speed and gate movement add further perceptual play. In its denial of the signified, structuralist film focuses on the material components of film and its recording and screening apparatus. For Le Grice the task is to ‘make us aware of the flux of perception through process’ (Le Grice 1977: 10). Its politics are implicit: ‘The political questions for formal cinema centre, not on issues of political content of the films, but on the political implications of the film’s language, conventions and structure’ (Le Grice 1977: 152). The London Filmmaker’s Co-op

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(LFMC) is British structuralist filmmaking’s main source. Rees explains that most of the LFMC filmmakers had come out of the art schools as Le Grice’s students (Rees 1999: 78). Their direct methods reproduce developments in painting and sculpture after the Second World War. Le Grice names Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Samuel Beckett as influencing his work (Le Grice 2001: 298). Le Grice and Gidal both produce formal films and as writers present arguments about their practice in Screen. Where Le Grice provides historical context and describes its broad outline, Gidal situates his writing in relation to the French theory brought into screen studies by Wollen and others. Rees identifies Gidal as the most extreme anti-illusionist advocate (Rees 1999: 82). Sitney concurs, noting that once Le Grice had framed structuralist film historically he largely withdrew from criticism concentrating solely on his practice (Sitney 1982: 57).

Peter Gidal and materialist film Gidal adds the term materialist to structuralist/materialist film, later solely employing the term materialist. His assessment of illusionism is blunt: ‘If the final work magically represses the procedures which in fact are there in the making, then that work is not a materialist work’ (Gidal 1976: 6). Gidal’s Room Film 1973 (dir. Peter Gidal, 1973) demonstrates Le Grice’s observation that Gidal’s films are concerned ‘with the act of looking as a critically analytic mode of perception, and with duration’ (Le Grice 1977: 114). Eschewing content, its erratic camera movement, extreme close-up and low illumination turns the viewer’s attention to the film’s and the screen’s surface. In its anti-representative haze, objects like a pot plant or a desk remain indistinguishable from their shadow. Deke Dusinberre finds ‘the film is almost relentless in its denial of tangible images’ (Dusinberre 1976: 109). In a further emphasis on structure the film is obsessively cut into 5 second sequences marked by highly visible splices and with each such section also repeated once. Dwoskin describes the experience of watching another Gidal film, the 10 or 30 minute Neck (dir. Peter Gidal, 1969) that ‘stares’ at a girls neck: ‘after a while your vision fragments and explores the image. The film grain becomes a sandstorm for a while, or else merges with the image of flesh, producing a feeling of sensuality’ (Dwoskin 1975: 175). As Le Grice points out: ‘experiences which in our everyday perception are over in an unconscious flash, in Gidal’s films become extended processes for conscious attention and structuring’ (Le Grice 1977: 130).

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Gidal’s position is available most straightforwardly in his grant applications to the British Film Institute: I would like to make a film that is at one and the same time a film in its own right and as explication of the mechanisms of its own making. Thus the film would be both about something and about itself. I have been making films that fall into this concept since 1967 (Gidal 1973: 1).

Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology (Gidal 1976) appears concurrently with Le Grice’s Abstract Film and Beyond, containing a section from Le Grice’s publication. Gidal compiles program notes and articles by and about filmmakers from both sides of the Atlantic with a self-penned introductory essay. For Gidal: ‘Narrative is an illusionistic procedure, manipulatory, mystificatory, repressive’ (Gidal 1976: 4). Duration is central to materialist film. Illustrating the repression operating in the illusory space between viewer and screen, Gidal notes the compression of cinema’s action from real time (Gidal 1976: 4). The boring bits are removed. Gidal’s practice breaks from ‘illusionist time’, foregrounding real time (Gidal 1976: 8). Gidal’s materialist film’s subject is Derrida’s field of ‘différance’: ‘The subject of the work is not the invisible artist symbolically inferred through the work’s presence, but rather the whole foregrounded fabric of the complex system of markings itself’ (Gidal 1976: 7). ‘Différance’ is revealed; presenting itself as the activity the viewer performs in the act of viewing. In this Gidal is not identifying a ‘fetishism of technique’ (Metz 1982: 74), not an activity used to deliver a particular aesthetic in Rees’s description of structuralist filmmaking, but the insistent practice of remaining critically present in the perceptual moment of viewing. Gidal acknowledges materialist film’s Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist influences, stressing a post Warholian stance—‘one ought to be by now tired of expressing the same old thing…trying to express when there is nothing to express’ (Gidal 1976: 15) so ‘to intervene crucially in film practice, the un-thought must be brought to knowledge, thought’ (Gidal 1976: 15). Referring to such memes or un-thoughts, Gidal submits that: ‘Foucault cites them as completely empty signifiers’ (Gidal 1976: 7). The extreme gutting at the core of Gidal’s practice is understood in these terms. Extending the concept of filming John Giorno sleeping for five hours in Sleep (dir. Andy Warhol, 1963), an extreme work like Andy Warhol’s silent Empire (dir. Andy Warhol, 1964) sets this position’s limits. Screened at silent speed the film lasts 8 hours and 5 minutes in ‘unprocessed’ real time. Beginning at 8.06 pm on July 25 1964 the film

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starts as a white screen while sunset gradually reveals a lit Empire State Building: ‘Andy Warhol: The Empire State Building is a star!’ (Malanga 2002: 87). An incidental seagull’s flight, lights turning on and off, shifts in image quality, its grain and contrast responding to shifts in New York’s light all play out over the film’s duration. Through extreme duration the idea of looking continuously to include not looking, challenges a perceptual apparatus wired for mainstream cinema. The LFMC emerged between 1965 and 1969 according to Rees, ‘as the co-op principle spread from New York into Europe’ (Rees 1999: 77). As ex-Factory (Warhol) artist Gidal followed this migratory path of the developing co-op movement from New York, practice in hand, settling into programming at the LFMC and co-ordinating distribution of its films across Europe. His writing on the co-op films grows beyond his own work into a densely argued position for materialist film. Apart from the leftist academia Gidal faced and interrogated, he also agitated for critical writing within the co-op community: I tried to make the co-op avant garde’s theory and practice unavoidable within the context of Screen’s film analysis, film-semiotics, and psychoanalytically tainted film theory, whilst simultaneously attempting to not let the Co-op filmmakers retain what seemed at that time a British antiintellectualism amongst film and artmakers (Gidal 1999: 19).

No doubt the influence of Gidal’s writings and materialist film’s criteria fore-grounded some films ahead of others materialising out of the co-op processing machines and its screening and distribution activities. Rees identifies the work of ‘Dwoskin, Larcher and Keen’ (Rees 1999: 78) as examples of work sidelined during this period. Chris Auty’s Time Out rhetoric confirms the ambivalent reception to Gidal’s theorising and radical practice, caught between the academy and the street: But Gidal’s films, frustrating as they may be, symbolise perfectly if extremely, one of the major movements of British Culture through the 70sthe rising tide of theory. Like a certain anxiety within Time Out itself about the theoretical perspective, the films are only reflections of a larger problem- rebellion driven back into the academic closet after years in the streets! (Auty 1980)

Mulvey, speaking out of that ‘psychoanalytically tainted film theory’ (Gidal 1999: 19) recognises the avant-garde’s opposition to the mainstream in her practice: ‘an important part of avant- garde aesthetics is negation’ (Mulvey 1979: 9). Consequently any criticism Gidal performs on Mulvey’s political counter-cinema is forced into the position of the double

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negative, of being outside the outside, of criticising criticism. For Gidal this ‘counter counter-cinema’ is ‘not a bad place to be’. Gidal’s later Materialist Film (Gidal 1989) reads like a compendium of re-gathered arguments and justifications for the materialist brand of a coop based avant-garde: ‘Without a theory and practice of radically materialist experimental film, cinema would endlessly be the “natural” reproduction of capitalist and patriarchal forms’ (Gidal 1989: xiii). These arguments also register as a critical and rigorous response, a distancing from the more explicitly political cinema advocated by Wollen and Mulvey. Ironically, the cut and paste textural collagic structure of Materialist Film (Gidal 1989) mimics one target of Gidal’s rhetoric: counter-cinema’s ‘dialectic montage between a complex of codes’ (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 104). Darren Tofts describes this strategy in relation to Gidal’s commentary on Beckett (Gidal 1986) as ‘a sustained collage of fragmented quotation’ (Tofts 1991: 89) performing Beckett’s ‘fragmentation of the unified subject’ (Tofts 1991: 87). It’s as if Gidal’s critical position reports back from inside Barthes unlocatable sign or the rigor of a Beckett play: ‘My editor has written that parts of the book are like moving into, and then out of, a benign fog. I would merely add, not so benign’ (Gidal 1989: xiv). It is a different text than Structural Film Anthology, which, apart from his introductory essay, presents more as documentation than argument. Gidal places himself in a unique individual position, constructing a polemic and theory rigorously anti-individualistic, set apart from Sitney’s individualistic projections of the heroic visionary constructed in a New York from which Gidal in his migration has displaced himself. Due to the British avoidance of the psychoanalytic and because of the sustained texts in their practice’s defence and explication by Gidal as practitioner and theorist, it is Gidal’s Marxist term of ‘materialist film’ arrived at in his later writing that is the preferred term for this formalist area of practice in my analysis, before structuralist or structuralist/materialist film. This is despite, as Ben Brewster notes, that Gidal’s rigorous qualification of ‘materialist’ shrinks his concerns and theoretical support to ‘a much smaller group of film-makers and by no means all of the work of all of them’ (Brewster 1976: 118). Gidal never mentions trauma, in the political and historic situation from which he emerged and operated Gidal considers his practice anti-illusionist. Yet Gidal pushes the theoretical envelope into ‘thinking the un-thought’ of the emptied signifier within both text and image more than any of his contemporaries, permitting me to stress more clearly the practice’s affinities with trauma pursued in this research.

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Paul Sharits flicker films illustrate Gidal’s anti-illusionist stance. For example Sharits constructs his relentless 12 minute T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G (dir. Paul Sharits, 1968) from alternating colour or black and white frames, punctuated by positive and negative single frame images of a man’s naked body often partially masked by a hand. On the soundtrack the word "destroy" incessantly repeats like a broken record, eventually losing its meaning. Gidal has written of Sharits work that ‘it seems to be about the impossibility of two systems (speech and vision) working at once’ (Gidal 1976: 94). Sharits states in manifesto-like terms: I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid, two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psych-physical subjectivities of consciousness (Sharits 1969: 13).

Gidal’s attention to this pre reflective viewing moment interrogates the perceptive realm of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: ‘One wanted a different spectator, not one who deconstructs after-the-fact, not an academicist interpretation of the world as they did at Screen and did (and do) at the BFI and later in NY at October’ (Gidal 1999: 19). With materialist film as banner, Gidal enunciates a formalist position in its most rigorous and extreme pitch: ‘No Auteurism here, merely the objective situating of a materialist practice in its own history’ (Gidal 1978). Mulvey recognises that Gidal ‘rejected all content and narrative, both in his work and as an aesthetic principle’ (Mulvey 1979: 9). Within today’s trauma theory in the context of digital media I can consider Gidal’s extreme negation as traumatic. In doing this I merely fold Gidal back on himself, reflexively reapplying his approach onto his own syntax. I add another wrinkle to Gidal’s observations on Beckett’s observations on Christ’s sparing of one of two thieves: ‘these obsessive, neurotic philosophers (noble though they may be!), trying to grasp everything and in reality setting forth tiny, limited theories which encompass little more than their own individualistic fears and hopes… ’(Gidal 1976: 94). Not only is a there an uncanny severed trace of digital’s computational yes-no binary in Christ’s ‘sparing’ but the ‘impossibility’ of grasping everything through the fragment of ‘limited theory’ re- states Walker’s ‘traumatic paradox’ in ethical terms. I have expanded on the 20s avant-garde’s traumatic credentials, documented the rise of structuralist and materialist film, detailed two of its practitioner theorists and revealed commentary connecting these practices

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to arrive at that place in the 70s where a relationship is locatable between a feminist counter-cinema and a 20s avant-garde. This ‘relationship’ is called materialist film and it is a troubled one. With the pedigree of a feminist counter-cinema as trauma cinema’s vanguard in the historic record of screen studies, the apparent anomaly of materialist film’s absence takes form in the next section through the account of this practice’s critique by feminist film theorists. With materialist film’s dismissal, outlined in detail there, I arrive at the realization that this relationship IS a gap.

The Two Avant-gardes Wollen’s influential article ‘The Two Avant-gardes’, first published in Studio International in 1975 (Wollen 1982 [1975]), focuses on ‘differences’ between a feminist counter-cinema and materialist film in some detail. Wollen’s analysis is made at a decisive moment for an emergent feminist film practice and its critical textual analysis of dominant Hollywood cinema. Partner and film collaborator Mulvey’s influential feminist text on male scopophilia in cinema performs an initiating function in these developments. At this stage Wollen and Mulvey had already collaborated on Penthesilea (dir. Peter Wollen & Laura Mulvey, 1974), which according to Rees ‘attempts to construct feminist discourses in a triangulation of Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis’ (Rees 1999: 91). Beginning with a mime of Heinrich von Kleist's play, the text driven Penthesilea explores the myth and image of the Amazonian queen. To give some indication of its content, in its second section, Wollen relates the film’s structure and intent directly to the camera as it slowly pans away. In another section Socialist and suffrage worker Jesse Ashley’s words are read by a female actor while a 1913 fiction film on woman’s suffrage is superimposed over her face. Wollen’s ‘two avant-gardes’ text splits the avant-garde in two. The first comprises non-narrative and formalist (materialist) work residing in the multi-voices and collective emphasis of the artisanal ‘co-op movement’ emerging out of the fine arts (painting, sculpture) and the second embodied a more politicised narrative practice employing psychoanalytic and Marxist ideologies in its analysis, with a relation to literary criticism, theatre and the margins of commercial cinema. One focuses on vision, perceptual processes and the image and the other emphasises the social implications of the text and language. Wollen identifies Jean-Luc Godard’s work as the contemporary exemplar of the avant-garde’s political arm. Through semiotics Wollen describes this political avant-

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garde as focusing its ‘work within the space opened up by the disjunction and dislocation of signifier and signified’ (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 98). Wollen addresses that materialist practice where, as Dusinberre describes, ‘the process of perceiving has supplanted content’ (Dusinberre 1976: 109) more dismissively: It is as if they felt that once the signifier was freed from bondage to the signified, it was certain to celebrate by doing away with the old master altogether in a fit of irresponsible ultra-leftism and utopianism. As we have seen, this was not so far wrong (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 99).

His partner verifies this second avant-garde preference: Peter Wollen traces a line of development where the demand for a new politics inseparably links problems of form and content. Going back to Eisenstein and Vertov, influenced by Brecht, re-emerging with the late work of Godard, this tradition has broken down rigid demarcations between fact and fiction and laid a foundation for experimentation with narrative (Mulvey 1979: 9).

In executing his split Wollen observes that ‘a similar split can be seen in the twenties’ (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 95) between the Cubist influenced cinema of Léger, Eggeling, Richter and Ray to ‘extend the scope of painting’ and a Russian avant-garde in which Wollen includes Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko and Vertov. Wollen’s Cubist cinema assembles those films displaying the characteristics of the flashback. The films with which Kaplan and Walker later frame ‘trauma cinema’ are more closely allied to Wollen’s second avant-garde. Jonathan Buschbaum criticises Wollen’s two avant-gardes for not engaging in specific works to support his assessment of formalist film: ‘He prefers to make global statements without adequate evidence to fully explicate his claims, let alone support their validity’ (Buchsbaum 1985: 63). For Buschbaum ‘the formalist category is excessively broad and illdefined’ (Buchsbaum 1985: 62). Alternate to Wollen, Michelson’s phenomenological reading places Vertov in the first tradition (Michelson 1984). Vertov’s place, like Deren’s, in one or other avant- garde is contested, used to support positions at odds with each other, which Wollen acknowledges. Though recognised, such ambiguities limit the dichotomy’s accuracy and impacts on its use. Wollen’s analysis contains numerous qualifications and overlap, suggesting this dissection is not in the service of the ‘pure’ scientific method of Wollen’s semiotic tone but one orchestrated at its core by more political and social imperatives operating on Wollen at the time of its writing. Such political tactics describe a

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counter-cinema’s practice, its ‘modus operandi’. Just as the second avantgarde wears its politics on its sleeve so does Wollen. The character and methodology of ‘manufacturing’ the avant-garde split is performed in the second avant-garde’s language and practice. That Wollen’s theory is practice masquerading as theory is further evident in his concluding comments and Sitney’s response to them. After presenting his argument in academic form Wollen concludes his text by identifying himself in this final moment, not as an academic, but as a filmmaker whose ‘fantasy’ is a practice constructing ‘a dialectic montage between a complex of codes’ (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 104). Sitney accuses Wollen in a pointed exchange between the two that in manufacturing this split Wollen is ‘creating an historical fiction in which he could situate his emerging career as a film-maker’ (Sitney 1982: 52). Wollen is similarly criticised by Leland Poague about ‘the influence of personal taste on critical scholarship’ and tagged as ‘a rhetorician in grammarian’s clothing’ whose intentions in the conclusion for Signs and Meaning (Wollen 1969) ‘are almost completely polemical rather than analytical’ (Poague 1975: 312). Wollen’s narrative of intertwining academic theory with personal practice is taken up by cine-feminists. His ‘fantasy’ of ‘dialectic montage’ reflects the contemporaneous literary discourse in feminist critical writing on cinema and women’s place in it, constructed out of a ‘complex of codes’ of French semiotics, psycho-analysis, structuralism and poststructuralism and later again, out of its embrace of trauma theory. Rees indicates that the journal Screen in the early 70s had been ‘in part sympathetic to the theory and rhetoric of the structural avant-garde’ (Rees 1999: 92) given a shared historic interest in Russian constructivist cinema (e.g. Vertov) as source and the perceived parallel between Screen’s project of ‘the radical reconstruction of viewing and understanding of film’ with a ‘structuralist de-construction of vision’ (Rees 1999: 93). Gidal and Le Grice (and others) consequently had access to the journal’s pages to articulate these issues. According to Rees the breaking point, upon which Wollen’s dichotomy also rests is ‘the issue of narrative, realism and representation, which Screen analysed critically but which the avant-garde rejected as primary goals for film’ (Rees 1999: 93). Wollen’s naming of this materialist avant-garde, and the articulation of its second political arm sets the stage for this break between materialist film and a political counter-cinema. It is the shaping of a feminist cinema that develops as part of Screen’s project that further asserts this split, as Buschbaum notes, during Wollen’s tenure on its editorial board (Buchsbaum 1985: 70). Within the political and social climate of the 70s this decision is irrefutable. If a feminist discourse means to address those

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inequalities in power in social and political spheres it must impact directly on these systems and the academy is one of those sites. Michelson names the work from this second avant-garde ‘that issue from the entrance of cinema into the academy’ (Michelson 1981: 3) the ‘New Talkies’ and the consequence of an assertive feminist claim on film practice: ‘originally launched- through a concerted questioning of two interdictions: that of the assertion of sexuality and that of access to the means of production and distribution’ (Michelson 1981: 4). Mulvey leads in these developments. For Mulvey Gidal’s radicalisation of the signifier is too extreme, recognising the significance of Gidal’s radical anti-narrative stance but stressing the unavoidable need to develop feminism’s public political position. The following lengthy Mulvey quote details this position: For feminist film-makers, the way these arguments elevate the signifier is important. There is a link with those elements in feminist film theory that demand a return to tabula-rasa and question how meaning is made as necessary steps toward revolutionising woman’s image in patriarchal representation. But women cannot be satisfied with an aesthetic that restricts counter-cinema to work on form alone. Feminism is bound to its politics; its experimentation cannot exclude work on content (Mulvey 1979: 9).

The Camera Obscura editorial collective’s stated project aligns with Mulvey’s but dismisses Gidal’s radical negation as not progressive: ‘an attempt to redefine political filmmaking to include the progressive aspects of formal innovation. It is not that specific formal strategies are progressive in themselves’ (Obscura 1977: 79). Collective members Penley and Janet Bergstrom present their detailed critique of the first avant-garde in Screen and Camera Obscura, in ‘The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978) and ‘The AvantGarde and its Imaginary’ (Penley 1977). Their critique of materialist film extends Wollen’s two avant-garde gap. Consequently Mulvey’s ‘recognition’ not only marks a point of departure from the first avant-garde but blurs feminism’s debt to 20s avant-garde cinema. The heritage that Turim orbits remains fogbound. Turim’s described scene from Oshima’s film are enacted here: ‘The images of the avant-garde film are criticized by the Leftists for not being readable as political discourse and they therefore find them to lack meaning and to be worthless trash’ (Turim 1978: 131).

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The Split In ‘The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories’ Penley and Bergstrom critique Michelson and Sitney’s supportive texts. They point out that Michelson and Sitney’s phenomenological position is not supported by evidence, that its canon of films is elitist and list an alternative group of films excluded from this canon, but bypass any direct analysis of avantgarde films themselves. Sitney and Michelson’s view of ‘film as analogue to consciousness’ is deconstructed. There is no issue with the quality of these re-presentations of complex films, commended as a product of ‘long hours of close work in projection rooms, at the editing table’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 119). But Michelson is queried for her failure to move out of a descriptive and promotional mode in her phenomenological assertion that mental structures are implicit in the visual language of moving images: ‘epistemological inquiry and cinematic experience converge, as it were, in reciprocal mimesis’ (Michelson 1976: 30). Michelson describes materialist film as ‘analogues of consciousness in its constitutive and reflexive modes, as though inquiry into the nature and processes of experience had found in this century’s art form, a striking, a uniquely direct presentational mode’ (Michelson 1976: 38) and undertakes an extended detailed argument about Wavelength on this matter (Michelson 1976). For Sitney ‘the great unacknowledged aspiration of the American avant-garde film has been the cinematic reproduction of the human mind’ (Sitney 1979: 405) by ‘mythologists of consciousness’ (Sitney 1979: 332). For Sitney Brakhage’s Dog Star Man describes ‘the birth of consciousness’ (Sitney 1979: 173). For Penley and Bergstrom without supporting evidence (e.g. from neurological research) the analogy founders: ‘what those mental structures are is never made explicit’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 125). But conversely, neither Wavelength nor any other film for which these assertions of ‘analogy to consciousness’ are made and queried is ever itself deconstructed, analysed or discussed by Penley and Bergstrom, implicitly favouring the critic’s ‘theory’ over of the artist’s ‘practice’. Penley and Bergstrom reproach the phenomenological tactic of description for eliminating the psychoanalytic and semiotic view that remains present in Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry’s phenomenology (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 119). David Rodowick has also criticized Gidal’s focus on the cinematic apparatus for omitting consideration of cultural institutions (Rodowick 1995: 141-2). Metz and Baudry incorporate a social dimension absent in Michelson and Sitney’s analysis: the ‘impetus to develop critical tools beyond description into an

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analysis of the aesthetic, psychical and social functioning of cinema’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 119). Baudry presents the cinematic apparatus as analogy to dream and Metz to the daydream rather than the prereflective moment. Like Flusser’s, their phenomenology reaches beyond the technical filming and screening apparatus into cinema’s social and institutional apparatus (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 118). The descriptive mode that Penley and Bergstrom assign to American avant-garde criticism finds its most acute target in Anthology Film Archive’s Essential Cinema collection of non-narrative non-commercial films that include a sprinkling of narrative works. This is a non-theorised list of selected films judged to display in exemplary ways cinema’s essence. Much like Buschbaum’s criticism of Wollen’s dichotomy, the collection is criticized for its exceptions and overlaps. Penley and Bergstrom criticise the collection as an impenetrable elite standard, defined as much by its exclusions as its inclusions. The list excludes the work of Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Marguerite Duras, Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Ackerman, Jacques Rivette, Mulvey and Wollen (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 124), in essence Wollen’s second avant-garde, ‘because they combine commercial and non-commercial aspects, narrative and non-narrative, and are constituted in different ways as political cinema, these films stand in contrast to prototypes of ‘pure cinema’’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 124). Rainer, Ackerman and Duras are named as filmmakers concerned with female representation (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 126). Lauren Rabinovitz acknowledges the importance of Foucault’s notion of ‘who speaks’ for such feminist filmmakers (Rabinovitz 1991: 32). These films ask ‘who speaks’? Asking who speaks reveals the network of power relations operating in the text. “The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary” (Penley 1977) performs a textual analysis of the writings of Le Grice (Le Grice 1977) and Gidal (Dusinberre 1976; Gidal 1989) similar to the critique mounted on the American avantgarde. Materialist film is criticised for being apolitical, devoid of fantasy and desire, as overemphasising the technical and as a predominantly male narcissist exercise. As with her later text with Bergstrom and similar to Buschbaum’s criticism that Wollen does not ‘engage with specific works in sufficient detail’ (Buchsbaum 1985: 63), Penley’s analysis is not performed on the films themselves but on the writing around them. Again Ackerman, Godard, Duras, Wollen and Mulvey are promoted as exemplars of a supported second avant-garde. Gidal and Le Grice’s removal of psychoanalysis from their critical position is evidenced in their selective appreciation of a 20s avant-garde, their anti-narrative approach and their interest in perceptual processes and

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particularly Gidal’s most extreme negation of illusion. I include Gidal and Le Grice’s responses and explications to this debate in reviewing Penley’s argument. Although the debate shifts between the terms structuralist and structuralist/materialist film, I again modify these terms in my commentary to ‘materialist film’ that Gidal settled on in his later writing for the reasons already given. Penley criticises materialist film’s avoidance of psychoanalysis as: ‘a denial of unconscious processes’ (Penley 1977: 23) Metz’s ‘authorised scopophilia, legalized voyeurism’ (Penley 1977: 13) is contrasted to materialist films that are ‘presented as near scientific investigations of scientific process’ (Penley 1977: 13) that ‘tend to suppress a knowledge of the imaginary’ (Penley 1977: 14). According to Penley this minimalist film-work ‘reorganises space, time, and signification according to the needs of his own narcissism’ (Penley 1977: 24). Le Grice emphasises that in such work ‘action on the automatic nervous system seeks to create a nervous response which is largely preconscious’ (Le Grice 1977: 106) and therefore acts before the imaginary can take hold, before the dream is constructed in the subject. He accepts the importance of Baudry and Metz’s position on the social determinations of the apparatus that both Penley and Bergstrom have made but questions whether such a psychological condition is forever fixed by the apparatus, and that part of his practice is to endeavour to effect such a change. For Le Grice cinema is not ‘inevitably locked in voyeurism, fiction and illusion’ (Le Grice 1980: 67). Materialist film is defined as stripped bare of fetishism by Gidal: ‘a film is materialist if it does not cover its apparatus of illusionism. Thus it is not a matter of antiillusionism, pure and simple, uncovered truth, but rather, a constant procedural work against attempt at producing illusionist continuum’s hegemony’ (Gidal 1989: 17). To return to the preconscious realm, illusion has to be continually dismantled and negated. As in her collaboration with Bergstrom, Penley asserts her own inclination for a political avant-garde, in line with Wollen’s polysemous cinema of ‘word, image, drama and photography’ (Rees 1999: 91) as the most effective feminist response to the ‘current’ socio-historic situation. She implies that the image’s lack of analytic or critical power requires recontextualisation by texts and the spoken word: The films of Godard have consistently taken into account this work of language on image, as have those of Straub-Huillet, and Mulvey and Wollen. These filmmakers realize that images have very little analytic power in themselves because their effects of fascination and identification are too strong. This is why there must always be a commentary on the

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Chapter One images simultaneously with the commentary of and with them. (Penley 1977: 25)

In this practice word dominates image. Penley is not about ‘advanced solutions to formalist problems’ or ‘perceptual processes’ but about working at the limits of narrative and fiction locatable in the works of Chantal Ackerman, Marguerite Duras, Yvonne Rainer and Babette Mangolte (Penley 1977: 25), the same alternative inventory to the Anthology Film Archive. Penley ends her analysis by stating that such works are marked as focusing on ‘transgressions of the symbolic paternal function that risk ending in an identification with patriarchy’ (Penley 1977: 26). Whether this risk is manifest remains unspoken. But ‘in the game of vague motives and clear associations, where the rules were unwritten but the score always kept’ (Sullivan 1985: 50) the association now ‘exists’. Penley’s patriarchal marking splits the avant-garde down gender lines, throwing at the feet of these male theorists of a male dominated practice; the ‘phallic’, patriarchy and paternalism. Quite an achievement for a critique executed from the language of the father itself, yet likely of the same didactic and polemic register as pronouncements from materialist film’s proponents that ‘there can be no radical narrative film’ (Heath 1981: 172). Gidal’s response to Penley’s ‘identification with patriarchy’ is an extreme purging boding well for a counter-reading of materialist film as performing traumatic memory but may itself be rhetoric given Dwoskin’s ‘sensual’ reading of Gidal’s film Neck. Gidal asserts that he has no men or women in his films (De Lauretis & Heath 1980: 169) framing his work as an extreme negation of gender politics: ‘I consider the possibilities of the not-mother, not-father (looking or not)’ (quoted in Heath 1978: 97). Penley concludes her textual analysis of materialist film: ‘we must now begin to consider the possibilities and consequences of the mother returning the look’ (Penley 1977: 26). For Gidal the mother looking back is no radical transformation: ‘The difference inverted is also the difference maintained’ (quoted in Heath 1978: 98). The playing of this gender card produces collateral damage. Contemporary work somehow contradicting these two camps’ criteria is traumatically placed ‘outside the outside’ and denied access. Le Grice dismisses and undervalues the Austrian film Total (dir. Marc Adrian, 1964-1968) (see de Bruyn 1999: 153) in relation to Kurt Kren’s work (Le Grice 1977: 104). Total with its brutal focus on the body via a considerable formal aesthetic predates similar ‘trauma cinema’ works and influences the current Austrian found footage practice discussed in Chapter 7. An important strategy that Adrian develops in this film, acquired through Arnulf

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Rainer’s ‘Overpaintings’, is the erasure, obliteration or fogging of the head and face in the full body shots of his protagonist, a technique now used in television news to digitally scramble the identity of perpetrators and victims whose anonymity requires protection for safety or legal reasons. Lis Rhodes’ structuralist film Light Reading, a work that develops a specific feminist materialist practice, though recognised by Gidal (Gidal 1989: 65-73) becomes invisible in Penley’s critique. It is a measure of this face-off that Penley rejects an article on this film by Nancy Woods for Camera Obscura and that it is Gidal who points this out publically (Gidal 1989: 163-4). These political moves obscure real complexities and ambiguities. Women’s profile in experimental filmmaking up to the 70s is uneven but visible in both avant-gardes, as Michelson’s role attests and as Rabinovitz points out: ‘Deren, Clark and Weiland achieved positions of visibility in a system of practices that admitted few women’ (Rabinovitz 1991: 23). Robin Blaetz similarly highlights Deren’s role (Blaetz 2007: 1) and Deren’s relation to both these avant-gardes is detailed in Chapter 4. The avant-garde split makes its most sustained sense as a political faceoff over a contested space, a jostling for position for those commentators entering the academy as the ‘resistance’ politics characterised by May 68 moves in off the street. Poage’s criticism of Wollen’s analysis as polemics (Poague 1975: 312) suggests Wollen has one foot in both academy and street. As Turim attests: ‘The avant-garde has been engaged in a rhetorical arsenal aimed at granting or denying these films power as tools or weapons in an ideological struggle’ (Turim 1980: 144). Whose domestication will it be? By the mid-70s it is time to transform banner slogans like ‘the technological is political’ and ‘the personal is political’ back into cultural capital. Turim remarks: How many critical tautologies can be set up which circumscribe with their own assumptions their own conclusions (Turim 1980: 144).

The imaginary’s inevitability within psychoanalytic discourse indicates one of such ‘critical tautologies’. Following Althusser, just as those watching a patriarchal film become the subject of its ideology, so too those that practice psychoanalysis, subject themselves to its ideology. Foucault recognises this implicit exercise of power: ‘Power is not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power’ (Foucault 1977: 205). From inside psychoanalysis voyeurism, the viewer’s pleasure and the darkened cinema’s dream are unavoidable. Outside the psychoanalytic, the preconscious delivers a

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different view whose phenomenology, Penley’s critique has shown, delivers its own apolitical ‘blind spots’. The different approaches to knowledge in this academic face-off are unresolvable. Penley and Bergstrom’s argument is theoretical and formulated as text, in contrast to ‘The Essential Cinema’ (Sitney 1975) that services the implicit language of the image, foregrounding ‘visual thinking’ (Arnheim 1969) and ‘mental imagery’ (Small, ES 1994: 51). With feminism, as Mulvey explains, ‘bound to its politics’ (Mulvey 1979: 9), Penley and Bergstrom’s political objective is to open up a new critical space for a feminist discourse on and in cinema. According to Rabinovitz this strategy, is ‘not detached academic observation but intervention in the institutions that sustain oppression’ (Rabinovitz 1991: 23). The split is executed in a ‘polemical rather than analytical’ (Poague 1975: 312) register, utilising the written word’s academic institutional power. Something is lost in the psychoanalytic domination of this contested space. Collateral damage has been outlined. Turim again asks the most pertinent question: ‘Can we still allow film to employ visual processes if we are going to mount the kind of ideological critique in which discourse is the only safe ground?’ (Turim 1980: 150). This split and dismissal plays out like a traumatic event in a drama where the villain, materialist film, is banished back to the ‘underground’. Oshima’s room in The Battle of Tokyo has emptied. The critical lefties have left the room for positions in academia, taking the new mourning feminist filmmaker with them. Like the isolated fragment of a forgotten trauma, the film projector is still running in real time at the‘scene of the crime’. Emptied of the social, there is no-one there to see it or run it.

Aftermath The feminist discourse on cinema successfully promotes a politically explicit counter-cinema, subjugating materialist film in the process. For Kuhn the ‘repressed feminine’ (Kuhn 1982: 104) asserts itself through textual analysis and a feminist counter-cinema. In her commentary on Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1985) Mellencamp notes that ‘the (no longer) singular question has been taken away from men; the film is the end of their question, of their question. It is also the end of woman as the question’ (Mellencamp 1990: 184). For Rainer ‘this film is about housing shortage, changing family patterns, the poor pitted against the middle class, Hispanics against Jews, artists and politics, female menopause, abortion rights. There’s even a dream sequence’ (Rainer 1983: 11). Throughout this film, woman’s presence

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only occurs in voice-over. In one scene reminiscent of Wollen’s scene in Penthesilea the central character, Jack Dellar, delivers a convoluted lecture to his students as the camera displays its disinterest, moving its gaze around the auditorium. By 1982 Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures reviews and consolidates the formed relationship between feminism and cinema from the previous decade within a cultural political framework, presenting arguments about feminism’s relationship to film theory and practice. Of the 20 or so films discussed and specifically listed as an Appendix (Kuhn 1982: 200-2), more than half are mainstream feature films that are the subject of a rereading of dominant cinema through a semiotic and psychoanalytic feminist textual analysis. For Heath, like Gidal, such ‘deconstruction repeats- give currency once more and looks into- the terms, the images it seeks to displace, is a continuing and reactionary reproduction of cinema’ (Heath 1979: 94). Kuhn names one chapter ‘Making Visible the Invisible’, and outlines the ‘analytic activity’ of textual analysis as ‘exposing the absences of the text’ (Kuhn 1982: 73). This pre-cogs and contextualises this work in a language later appropriated by trauma theory. For Kuhn this is an understanding developed from Kristeva who ‘sees femininity as the repressed in the patriarchal order’ (Mulvey 1979: 8). This activity unearths the ‘repressed feminine’: ‘What actually emerges from a number of textual analyses is that the unspoken, or the unspeakable, in a text- its repressions, in other words- often pivot on what may be termed, in general the ‘feminine’’ (Kuhn 1982: 104). Apart from the Hollywood fare subjected to textual analysis Kuhn highlights a number of examples of feminist documentary cinema considered experimental or avant-garde works Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Ackerman, 1975), Lives of Performers (dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1972), Thriller (dir. Sally Potter, 1979) and Daughter Rite (dir. Michelle Citron, 1978). These works are all Wollen’s second avant-garde and named by Penley and Bergstrom. For Rabinovitz this list recreates the previous criticism of the Anthology Film Archive: ‘Their valorization to the exclusion of others smacks of a new essentializing, albeit feminist, canon’ (Rabinovitz 1991: 31). A pure conceptual cinema is absent from this list and ignored in Kuhn’s text altogether. Turim’s qualified declaration for formalist concerns of perception and abstraction has no place: Even within highly conceptual films, then, one still has to consider the sensual elements of filmic expression; this does not mean that avant-garde film cannot successfully articulate the interactions between perception and

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Chapter One cognition, image and language, abstraction and representation, affectivity and signification’ (Turim 1980: 149).

Wollen’s dichotomy is also invisible, redundant in this political landscape of only one avant-garde, though there is an unacknowledged trace of Wollen’s influence in the use of the term feminist ‘counter-cinema’ (Kuhn 1982: 157), a term whose coinage Humm sources to Claire Johnston (Humm 1997: 13). Mulvey’s theoretical work persists as seminal and central to feminist film criticism and fully visible in cinema history. Materialist film, separated off in Wollen’s two avant-gardes and further discounted by Penley and Bergstrom, disappears from feminist discourse, a caesura that at best returns materialist film to an invisible practice and a subjugated discourse unavailable as a resource to a ‘trauma cinema’. For Foucault a subjugated discourse is a ‘whole set of knowledges that are either hidden behind more dominant knowledges but can be revealed by critique or have been explicitly disqualified as inadequate to their task’ (Foucault 1980: 82). Though for feminism materialist film has been identified as inadequate for its explicit political agenda I argue that this subjugation need not persist within emerging digital media discourse. Paraphrasing Caruth: can materialist film belatedly return?

CHAPTER TWO A HISTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA

In this Chapter I outline recent neurological research on trauma not yet incorporated into the trauma theory and screen studies discourse explored in Chapter 1. I look at the history of the psychopathological study of trauma initiated by Charcot’s study of Hysteria which in turn enabled Janet’s study of dissociation and from which also emerged Freud’s psychoanalysis, itself the result of Freud’s shift from the view of real to imagined childhood sexual experiences in his patients. My review of recent research outlines the mechanics of the flashback and the interaction between implicit and explicit memory systems that has revived an interest in dissociation. The importance of the alliance between feminism and the anti-war movement from the 70s in integrating the study of trauma under the banner of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is identified, as is the potent coupling of this new PTSD symptomology with digitally enhanced image scanning technologies delivering a surge in neurological research with a consequent shift in the study of trauma out of the social into the biological sciences. I use this review to recover materialist film for its capacity to perform traumatic experience, operating from a theory and practice base from which psychoanalysis has been similarly removed. Chapter 1 demonstrated that critical writing about trauma within screen studies, and specifically the debates in Screen, draws heavily on the psychoanalytic ‘trauma theory’ from literature studies. From this perspective Walker and Kaplan name a group of films as the vanguard of a ‘trauma cinema’, whose pedigree traces back to the 70s emergence of a feminist independent counter-cinema and feminist critiques of dominant cinema. Materialist film also formed in the 70s independent film culture but its formalist concerns did not match an emergent feminism’s need to address itself politically and critically in relation to mainstream cinema. The feminist dismissal of materialist film for its embrace of ‘pure’ cinema, its phenomenological emphasis on perception, lack of political content, its disregard of fantasy and the social, and its apparent misogyny removed it

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from the feminist discursive field. Consequently, this subjugated discourse is unavailable as a resource for a ‘trauma cinema’ 30 years later, despite emerging affinities with the shifts of recent trauma research out of the social sciences into more direct perceptual and visually based research. This review of trauma research identifies evidence supporting the assertion that key materialist films address or perform traumatic experience and that these exemplars thus fulfill the criteria of Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’. As part of their dismissal of materialist film Penley and Bergstrom discerningly point out that the descriptions of homology of structure between avant-garde film and ‘the mind’ ‘are never made explicit’ (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 125), clinical supporting evidence is never presented. This survey addresses this gap specifically for materialist film as ‘analogy of trauma’ replacing Sitney and Michelson’s claim for “analogies of consciousness’. Eugene Taylor and John Young indicate substantial new research into consciousness in the cognitive neurosciences (Taylor, E & Young 1998: 28) that impacts on models of trauma. Although Chapter 1 reviews the move of ‘trauma theory’ into screen studies, Harald Welzer and Hans Markowitsch point out that these recent developments in neuroscience have not been integrated into the social sciences: Work in the humanities and social sciences has ignored the results of more recent neurological research on memory, especially the classification of different memory systems and the concept of “emotional memory” (Welzer & Markowitsch 2005: 64).

Aaron Mishara, Josef Parnas and Jean Naudin’s call for combining the approaches of psychopathology, cognitive neuroscience and phenomenology (Mishara, Parnas & Naudin 1998) is an example of the tactic of integrating objective and subjective discursive fields. Francisco Varela points out that Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of the multi-faceted texture of inner time consciousness is mobilised in this way (Varela 1999) and Havard Nilsen shows that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology makes extensive reference to the findings of Gestalt Psychology (Nilsen 2008). This chapter provides a similar resource for the analysis of specific films in later chapters by marrying recent neurological research with MerleauPonty’s phenomenological philosophy. The feminist appropriation of Althusser’s work, psychoanalysis and semiotics was a similar tactic. The move to install neuropsychological views of trauma into articulating, critiquing and extending ‘trauma theory’ and ‘trauma cinema’ to a relationship with materialist film repeats this strategy of 70s feminist film theory. Kuhn describes such a combination of

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approaches as the ‘appropriation of existing methodologies for a newlyconstituted project’ (Kuhn 1982: 71). It is by placing models from neurological research alongside those of an already articulated ‘trauma cinema’ and materialist film, that this research can make its most sustained claim for new knowledge. Digital media has impacted areas of scientific research similarly to the digital influence on screen studies and visual culture. Antonio Battro notes that ‘the digital revolution has ‘opened’ the human brain for observation’ (Battro 2004: 80). Nancy Andreasen identifies related technological advances in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology that have benefited brain research (Andreasen 1997). Single-Cell Recording detects changes in voltage in a single neuron. Computed tomography (CT), Positron emission tomography (PET), single- photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are all new imaging tools used to observe and locate brain activity and damage (Gallagher, Hutchinson & Pickard 2007). Combinations in real time of these technologies produce graphic animated records of cellular level structural changes (MRI) and biochemical activity (PET, CT) for analysis. Margaret Wilkinson states: ‘brain imaging studies of patients provide evidence about which brain structures are affected by traumatic experience’ (Wilkinson 2003: 236). As well as the absence of recent neurological research, psychopathological perspectives of trauma are subsumed in discussions of ‘trauma theory’ and ‘trauma cinema’ in screen studies by psychoanalytic views. The work of Pierre Janet and Van der Kolk, critical figures in psychopathological and clinical psychological trauma research is referenced in Kaplan and Walker (Kaplan 2005; Kaplan & Wang 2004; Walker, J 2005) but cited in illustration of a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Walker acknowledges Herman’s feminist rejection of Freud in favour of Janet’s work on trauma and dissociation and develops an extensive and balanced argument about the continued usefulness of Freud’s work despite Herman’s forceful feminist charge that ‘the dominant historical theory of the next century was founded in the denial of women’s reality’ (Herman 1992: 14). Walker frames her concept of disremembering as response to the 80s ‘false memory syndrome’ debates around sexual abuse. The primary focus of Walker’s contribution to the Screen dossier is a thorough explication of how false memories can indicate real experience. Kaplan utilises Van der Kolk and Van der Hart’s (1995) notion that traumatic memory ‘has affect only, not meaning’ (Kaplan & Wang 2004: 5) to illustrate Caruth’s ‘belatedness’. As Turim’s research into abstract cinema and the flashback opened up

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a way to the subjugated discourse of materialist film, Van der Kolk’s and Onno van der Hart’s essay offers a path into a parallel subjugated discourse around dissociation. Their essay, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, appears in Caruth’s foundation ‘trauma theory’ book Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Caruth 1995). Van der Kolk and Van der Hart are the only theorists to outline a position critical of a psychoanalytic reading of trauma there, preferring Janet’s psychopathological ‘forgotten’ dissociation model to Freud’s suppression model for traumatic memory. I examine this apparent gap or anomaly further, detailing the research around Janet’s ‘dissociation’ and its rehabilitation through current neurological research in two stages. The first phase teases out historic dissonances between psychopathology and psychoanalysis, reporting the context and break at the birth of psychoanalysis of Janet’s research disappearing from view. The second phase outlines dissociation’s recent reinstatement. The review of recent neurological research on the mechanics of trauma ends with an interactive dual systemic model of traumatic memory.

Charcot, Freud and Janet The history of trauma passes from Jean-Martin Charcot’s study of female hysterics at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris to two of his most influential adherents: Janet and Freud. Janet develops the concept of dissociation to explain the reaction of his patients to real overwhelming events. Freud supports this model and at one point identifies the source of the symptoms of hysterics as real childhood sexual abuse, abandoning his seduction theory in favour of fantasy. This shift marks the birth of psychoanalysis. My analysis of Freud’s identified ambivalence around sexual abuse and fantasy includes its social and political implications (Herman 1992; Masson 1984; Rush 1996). The method of this analysis borrows from the textual analysis developed though the feminist discourse in screen studies which Kuhn outlines in this way: ‘in seeking thus to account in detail for repressions in a film text and how these may be related to or written into its address, textual (psycho)analysis can begin to consider the repression of the feminine in a patriarchy’ (Kuhn 1982: 108). This approach folds the psychoanalytic method back on itself. I read Freud’s ambivalence around trauma as a gap or fissure in the psychoanalytic edifice. Psychological and neurological research reveals a fundamental difference between traumatic and normal memories. Van der Kolk notes that founder of neurology, Charcot (1887), considers psychological trauma

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in ‘hysteria’ and considers traumatic memories as ‘parasites of the mind’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 243). Janet’s ‘dissociation’ describes a disruption of the self present in hysteria (Janet 1889, 1907). He observes that the traumatized war veteran is ‘unable to make the recital which we call narrative memory, and yet he remains confronted by (the) difficult situation’ (Janet 1925: 660). In trauma story is lost. Marooned episodic events express themselves in fugue states as ‘unconscious fixed ideas’. Dissociation is a defence against overwhelming experience. Intense emotional experiences disrupt the integration of perceptual and thinking processes. Memories of overwhelming events are stored as inaccessible fragments. Van der Kolk explains Janet’s view: ‘Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks)’ (Van der Kolk 1996b: 214). Freud initially supported the dissociation model and views dissociation as a ‘splitting of the content of consciousness’ (Freud, S 1962a: 30) and in deference to Janet, agreed that ‘hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Breuer & Freud 1955). For Copjec Freud’s approach to therapy favours the verbal over the visual. The hysteric thinks visually. The hysteric’s troublesome images must become spoken. It is about ‘getting rid of it by turning it into words’ (Copjec 1981: 21). Significantly Freud names sexual abuse at the heart of hysteria (Freud, S 1962a: 152). In his ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (Freud, S 1962b), which Herman described as a ‘brilliant, compassionate, eloquently argued, closely reasoned document’ (Herman 1992: 13) Freud states his breakthrough: I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology (Freud, S 1962b: 203).

Again significantly the next year Freud changes his mind. Florence Rush states: ‘He wrote to Fleiss that his conviction of his patient’s seduction as fantasy left him feeling triumphant’ (Rush 1996: 268). After being in step with Janet’s thinking until 1896, Freud denies dissociation’s fundamental place in trauma in favour of repression. For Van der Kolk and Van der Hart Freud ‘held that patients actively repressed memories of conflictual instinctual wishes’ (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 165). Freud initially believed his patient’s stories of childhood sexual abuse but now

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‘recognized’ such scenes had never taken place: I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies that my patients had made up… (thus) neurotic symptoms were not related to actual events but to wishful phantasies (Freud, S 1959: 34).

Freud’s shift profoundly impacts the profession. For Herman the change: ‘marked the bitter end of an era… For close to a century these patients would again be scorned and silenced’ (Herman 1992: 14). Obscured by psychoanalysis, Janet’s traumatic theory of hysteria is neglected and forgotten (Herman 1992: 19; Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 159). Van der Kolk laments: ‘real-life trauma was ignored in favour of fantasy’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 55). Herman criticises the shift to fantasy as ‘a denial of woman’s reality’ (Herman 1992: 14). At psychoanalysis’s birth, the field of knowledge weaved around dissociation becomes itself dissociated and a subjugated discourse. Rush’s critique of Freud’s reversal involves a speculative psychoanalysis of Freud’s relationship with his father whose death during this period provokes a self analysis in which Freud initiates the psychoanalytic method and suppresses the real in his own life (Rush 1996: 267). A letter to Fleiss on 11 February 1897 indicates Freud’s alarm at the number of fathers identified as the prime sexual abusers in his patient’s stories. This is information that Freud never makes public. Ernest Jones suggests that if sexual abuse is neurology’s ‘Caput Nili’ then Freud’s childhood memories of the hysterical behaviour of his own sisters and brother ‘incriminates’ his own father (Jones 1961: 211). Rush asserts that ‘when Freud replaced the seduction theory with the Oedipus complex he relieved himself of his ‘neurotica’ and vindicated fathers but implicated daughters’ (Rush 1996: 270). In ‘A Forgotten History’ (1992: 7-32) Herman places her criticism of Freud within a wider social framework presenting his reversal as an example of a cultural ‘episodic amnesia’ that intermittently befalls trauma studies because its un-speakability is unbelievable (Herman 1992: 7). Abram Kardiner concurs: ‘the public does not sustain its interest and neither does psychiatry’ (Kardiner & Spiegel 1947: 1). Media artist Brenda Laurel has made a similar point about technology’s social impact: ‘every now and then technological change makes us wake up and notice our media environment with great surprise and alarm, and then we go to sleep again’ (Laurel 1994: 125). In framing Freud’s reversal as a case study of ‘episodic amnesia’, Herman recognised the social and cultural pressures working on Freud. Resistance to his ‘discovery’ is to be

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expected. If his initial diagnosis is correct then incest is endemic in both Parisian and Viennese cultural circles and amongst those powerful men shaping his career. Freud wrote to Fleiss, ‘I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me’ (Freud quoted in Masson 1984: 10). He felt the heat and recanted the reality of child abuse (Herman 1992; Masson 1984; Miller 1984; Rush 1996). Herman lays bare a patriarchal force operating at psychoanalysis’s inception. Charcot and his follower’s work on hysteria thrived in the context of the late 1800s French Republican movement, which was pitted against the Catholic Church. A scientific view of hysteria was valued politically as it replaced clerical views on possession but once this research brought into question the moral standards of the new order’s leaders its social appeal and political traction diminished. For Herman ironically: ‘the only potential source of intellectual validation and support for this position was the nascent feminist movement, which threatened Freud’s cherished patriarchal values’ (Herman 1992: 19). Herman identifies Josef Breuer’s hysterical patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), involved in originating the ‘talking cure’, as someone who later finds an independent voice in the women’s movement. For Herman she was the only one ‘who carried the exploration of hysteria to its logical conclusion’ (Herman 1992: 19). As Paul Berthold she translates into German Mary Wolstencraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (Jacobus 1986: 214) and writes a play called ‘Women’s Rights’. The male pseudonym’s use is reminiscent of dissociation’s identity ‘split’, here performed not as a victim unknowingly protecting herself from overwhelming memories or as Anna O’s anonymous marking in Breuer’s clinical notes, but in the service of an empowering political agenda in which the originating ‘real’ identity persists in daily life. If Pappenheim’s position represents the most positive response to hysteria as Herman suggests then Pappenheim’s ambivalent attitude to psychoanalysis offers some support to Herman and Rush’s critique of Freud’s reversal. Pappenheim’s later opinion of psychoanalysis does not place it ahead of any church intervention it was manoeuvred to supersede. Zohn quotes Pappenheim as saying that: ‘Psychoanalysis in a doctor’s hands is what confession is in a priest’s: it depends on how and by whom it is applied whether it is a force for good or a two-edged sword’ (Zohn 1965: 260). There is also a reticence evident in Pappenheim’s refusal, as director of a girl’s orphanage, to authorise psychoanalytic treatment for those in her care. Since then Alison Orr-Andrawes has suggested a neurological base and drug dependence for Pappenheim’s symptoms,

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questioning Breuer and Freud’s psychoanalytic analysis (Orr-Andrawes 1987). Both Rush and Herman qualify their criticism of Freud’s reversal. Rush does not deny the general value of a psychoanalytic view (Rush 1996: 270). Herman recognises the power of the cultural forces impacting on Freud, the individual clinician. A reading of sexual abuse may be downgraded but it is not completely dismissed (Freud, 1959: 34), a point also made in recent psychoanalytic discourse (Waldman & Walker 1990; Walker, J 2005: 9). Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s breakdown of Freudian fantasy into conscious, unconscious and primal fantasies enables a highly prescribed return of a real event, allowing fantasy to include ‘a distorted derivative of the memory of actual fortuitous events’ (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 315). Van der Kolk records that in his response to the traumatic impact to the First World War, Freud remains closer to Janet’s model: ‘Just as his early hysterical patients seemed incapable of getting rid of their traumatic memories, Freud kept coming back to the issue of ‘fixation on the trauma’’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 55). Henry Krystal identifies two parallel models for trauma as a result: the ‘unbearable situation’ model and the ‘unacceptable impulse’ model (Krystal 1978: 84). The former’s relation to the war trauma of shell shock or war neurosis does not meet the same patriarchal resistances than real sexual abuse. Krystal sees a confusion of definition and theory in these two approaches: ‘The term trauma is used to cover a multiplicity of sins; in fact, just about anything except trauma itself’ (Krystal 1978: 85). Anna Freud is also concerned that trauma’s multiple models will ‘in the course of time, lead to a blurring of meaning and finally an abandonment and loss of a valuable concept’ (Freud, A 1967: 235). Rush observes that despite her view that Freud’s ideas are outdated, his concepts remain popular (Rush 1996: 271). Laub and Auerhahn themselves working from a psychoanalytic perspective negotiate their way through Freud’s blind-spot, an indication that Freud’s recant need not ruin the psychoanalytic method: In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud (1900) describes a young girl who has memories of obvious sexual penetration yet doesn’t seem to know what they mean. Freud labels as ‘hysterical fantasies’ what we would now understand as a re-enactment of childhood trauma in dissociative states (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 288).

Like Rush, in questioning a psychoanalytic model’s suitability for trauma I acknowledge the general scope, breadth and innovation of Freud’s

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achievement, recognising the effective feminist incorporation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into textual analysis. My discounting of psychoanalysis relates solely to its aptitude and fit for the special case of trauma. Radstone has similar doubts: ‘can fantasy’s significance be retained in the context of trauma theory’s insistence on dissociation and the closing down of the traumatised mind’s capacity for association?’ (Radstone 2001: 191). Charles Whitfield summarises the new situation: For most of the 20th century, psychoanalysis-the study of repressed wishes and instincts- and descriptive psychiatry and psychology were used to deny the findings that trauma, often forgotten or minimised by the patient, caused or was a major factor in the psychopathology or ‘mental illness’ with which they presented. Janet’s work has more recently been revived and applied to our own growing understanding to the effects of trauma’ (Whitfield 1995: 111).

Herman points out that three times in the last 100 years (i.e. since the birth of cinema) a particular kind of trauma has come into public consciousness under the sails of a ‘grass-roots’ political movement to inevitably wane and return underground. If the study of hysteria was the first such cycle then the second arose out of the studies of shell shock and combat neurosis after the First World War. This came with a second wind into public consciousness through the anti-war movement that coalesced around the Vietnam War. The political context for this third strand of investigation into trauma overlaps the anti-war politics of the Vietnam War with an emerging women’s movement in Europe and North America bringing sexual and domestic violence to political awareness. Herman played a central role in this shift, noting: ‘My first paper on incest, written with Lisa Hirschman in 1976 circulated ‘underground,’ in manuscript, for a year before it was published’ (Herman 1992: 2). These ‘cycles’ correlate with the cycles of avant-garde film’s appearance and waning discussed in Chapter 1, suggesting parallel histories. There are correspondences in Léger and Ray’s commentary on 20s avant-garde film and Janet’s description of shell shock. Experimental or avant-garde film’s visibility within cinema’s mainstream history remains sporadic, like Herman’s ‘forgotten histories’, also intermittently disappearing from public view. As the ‘underground’ moves into the academy and into theory in the 70s splitting into two avant-gardes, the feminist and anti-war movements unify to boost the public profile of trauma studies. A feminist counter-cinema cuts itself adrift from a materialist practice performing war trauma’s dissociative states.

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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Janet’s work on trauma and memory influenced a generation of psychiatrists, including William James, Jean Piaget and Carl Jung and then disappears from discourse. For Frank Putnam, John Nemiah and others the concept of dissociation gains its second wind in contemporary neurological research through the emergence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the 80s (Nemiah 1989; Putnam 1989). Lisa Butler and David Spiegel identify dissociation as central to current trauma research (Butler & Spiegel 1997). In presenting the research used to construct a model of interacting implicit and explicit memory systems this section contextualises the return of this dissociation based model of trauma and outlines its relation with PTSD.

Social Context The formal unified diagnostic category of PTSD coalesces the field of clinical trauma studies. It harnesses the work of Kardiner on war trauma and through it Janet’s. This unification is enabled by the overlapping grass-roots support of the anti-Vietnam War and women’s movements. As in the case for the study of ‘hysteria’ in a previous cycle, the establishment of a ‘generic’ PTSD provides insurance against the recurring cultural amnesia in the study of war trauma that persisted after the first and second world wars. Brewin and Emily Holmes point out that the category of PTSD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association of 1980 triggers an explosion of neurological research, that PTSD ‘has prompted what is now a very considerable body of research into the psychology, biology, epidemiology of the condition’ (Brewin & Holmes 2003: 339). Through later iterations this diagnostic category in the DSM-III has been further modified and consolidated. By DSM-IIIR and its 1994 revision DSM-IV American Psychiatric Association task forces recommended combining the overlapping systems of PTSD and dissociative disorders (Van der Kolk 1996a: 62). Though the instigation of PTSD occurs through a social and political process, once formed the research into its symptomology advances through the reductionist methodologies of the biological sciences. The move out of the social and political into the scientific clothes trauma’s study with the altered and technical surface of CT, PET, SPECT and MRI scan technologies that directly access brain activity. The diagnostic surface of this new knowledge is organised through the graphic and numeric

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patterning of its technical images, further abstracting Charcot’s hysteric database. Kardiner’s research, initiated after the First World War, illustrates how the symptomology of dissociation persisted underground despite its marginal profile. Kardiner (1941), Charles Myers (1940) and William Sargant and Eliot Slater (1941) investigate the amnesia of overwhelming war experiences that return in nightmares and fragmented re-enactments. Kardiner describes a continuing bodily-centred hypervigilance to a subsided threat, in which: ‘the subject acts as if the original traumatic situation were still in existence and engages in protective devices which failed on the original occasion’ (Kardiner 1941: 82). Kardiner also identifies ‘panic attacks’ and ‘hysterical paralysis’ as moments of reexperiencing the returning fragments of war’s trauma (Van der Kolk 1997: 252). In the United States of America in the 70s Chiam Shatan and Robert J. Lifton pick up on Kardiner’s work. They start rap groups of returned Vietnam veterans across the country. The social and professional networks that develop bring the ‘unrecognised’ symptoms of the veterans to public view. Work on the trauma of Vietnam veterans, on battered children (Kempe & Kempe 1978), rape trauma (Burgess & Holmstrom 1974) and family violence (Walker, L 1979) are all fed into the DSM-III process of presentations and committees within the American Psychiatric Association. Van der Kolk underlines this development’s unifying effect: ‘All the different syndromes- the “rape trauma syndrome”, the “battered woman syndrome”, the “Vietnam veterans syndrome” and “the abused child syndrome”- were subsumed under this new diagnosis’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 61). The relationships between these syndromes is evident in Herman’s naming sexual abuse ‘the combat neurosis of the sex war’ (Herman 1992: 28). Significant contributors to the process of integrating these syndromes into DSM-III experience these correspondences in their daily lives. Sarah Haley working with veterans (Haley 1974), prominent in the DSM-III process whose father is a ‘combat neurosis’ casualty of WWII, has herself suffered sexual abuse. The new ‘a-theoretical and phenomenological’ orientation of DSM-III brings about a belated integration. Elizabeth Brett notes that: ‘It is sobering to contemplate the time elapsed between Kardiner’s observation of World War I veterans and the incorporations of his insights into the DSM-III criteria’ (Brett 1996: 125). It is still a unique achievement. The diagnostic category of PTSD provides a common language for an interdisciplinary investigation of trauma, integrating the concerns about male and female trauma and abuse, rare in other public realms.

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PTSD reinvigorates the investigation of trauma and resuscitates dissociation as a descriptive model. The new technology-rich environment of contemporary neuroscience rediscovers and confirms the accuracy of Janet’s (and Kardiner’s) earlier observations on trauma (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 176). Under PTSD’s umbrella, flashbacks, dissociation and memory failure translate into the contemporary language of clinical and cognitive psychology, neurology and biology. The following descriptions of dissociation, the flashback and implicit and explicit memory systems employ this contemporary language, moving through clinical psychological and psychopathological perspectives into the technical and physiologically based languages of neuroscience and neuropsychology.

Dissociation Dissociation describes how traumatised survivors of abuse or war store the memory of confronting and overwhelming experiences as fragments, cutup and separated from each other, hidden away from everyday life. Dissociation narrows the field of consciousness and diminishes the capacity for integration. Van der Kolk defines trauma as ‘the result of exposure to an inescapable stressful event that overwhelms people’s coping mechanisms’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 243). Donald Kalsched describes how memories of such events are difficult to retrieve and reconstitute as they lie at the edge of what the subject ‘remembers’: Experience itself becomes discontinuous. Mental imagery may be split from affect, or both affect and image may be disassociated from conscious knowledge. Flashbacks seemingly disconnected from a behavioural context occur. The memory of one’s life has holes in it- a full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma (Kalsched 1996: 13).

Traumatic memories differ structurally from normal memories but also from other emotionally charged memories, from what Roger Brown and James Kulik call ‘flashbulb memories’ (Brown & Kulik 1977). Flashbulb memories are formed during momentous cultural events like the Kennedy Assassination or the 911 Twin Towers collapse. Ulric Neissur and Nicole Harsch show that despite witness belief, recollections of the space shuttle challenger crash changed over time (Neissur & Harsch 1992). Traumatic memory in PTSD is qualitatively different. The flashback, with its embedded affect, remains unchanged and frozen, inaccessible to openended narrative recall which Van der Kolk describes as a ‘‘failure to

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process information on a symbolic level’ (Van der Kolk 1996d: 282), whilst other emotionally charged memories change over time (Peace & Porter 2004). In overwhelming situations, with no time to think things through, an automatic response kicks in. This ‘failure to process’ continually repeats. Van der Kolk explains that with PTSD these experiences are not integrated with an individual’s other knowledge: Instead of using feelings as cues to attend to incoming information, in people with PTSD arousal is likely to precipitate flight or fight reactions. Thus, they are prone to go from stimulus to response without making the necessary psychological assessment of the meaning of what is going on’ (Van der Kolk 1996d: page 3 of 22).

Flashback Flashbacks are sampled clusters of sensation replete of story. John Omaha writes that flashbacks consist of the building blocks of story but they ‘tell’ no story: ‘Affects are genetically hard-wired, physiological building blocks from which feelings, emotions and moods are constructed’ (Omaha 2004: 4). These fragments of affect can be described as isolated letters and words, marooned or banished from a sentence. What implicit meaning they contain is released through their immediate visceral impact. Van der Kolk further describes such traumatic memories as ‘fragments of the sensory components of the event: as visual images, olfactory, auditory, or kinaesthetic sensations, or intense waves of feelings’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 253). Van der Kolk highlights these fragments’ constancy and ongoing disorienting impact: ‘emotions, images, sensations and muscular reactions related to trauma may become deeply imprinted on people’s minds and the traumatic imprints seem to be re-experienced without applicable transformation’ (Van der Kolk 2003: 2).

These memories remain the same over decades (Van der Kolk 1997: 245), returning at any time, triggered by an event or situation, with the vividness of the original experience, striking the victim speechless unable to explain their thoughts and feelings (Van der Kolk 1997: 245-6). For Birgit Kleim, Franziska Wallott and Anke Ehlers involuntary traumatic memories ‘take the form of relatively brief sensory impressions such as images, sounds, tastes or smells which are accompanied by the original emotions that the individual experienced at the time of the event’ (Kleim, Wallott & Ehlers 2008: 222). Robert Post et al. describes an intrusive memory’s high perceptual detail as eidetic: ‘Some types of stressful life experiences in adulthood can leave eidetic images intact and evolve into the pathological

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aspects of PTSD’ (Post et al. 1998: 850). A traumatic memory’s compartmentalisation and fragmentation produces unspeakability. For Van der Kolk: ‘In some people the memories of trauma may have no verbal (explicit) component at all; the memory may be entirely organized on an implicit or perceptual level, without an accompanying narrative about what happened’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 255). For Gordon Bower and Heidi Sivers trauma strikes its victims dumb: ‘During the trauma victims are probably not talking to themselves, conducting an internal monologue describing what is happening to them’ (Bower & Sivers 1998: 642). No internal dialogue operates during overwhelming experience.

Implicit and Explicit Memory Explicit memory is flexible and open to recall. Ernest Schachtel explains that explicit memories organise past events for present needs (Schachtel 1947: 3). Van der Kolk describes explicit memories of ordinary events as ‘flexible and integrated with other life experiences’ that ‘disintegrate in accuracy over time’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 245). Implicit memories, characterised in the previous descriptions of the flashback, are fixed, affect based, fragmented, situationally triggered and not open to verbal recall. Psychopathology has understood the contrast between implicit and explicit processes since early in the 20th century. Working at Salpêtrière from 1897-8, Edouard Claparède’s simple experiment with a traumainduced amnesic patient reveals how traumatic memories are stored and the nature of implicit memory. Greeting his patient every day he found that she never remembered his face. During one session he greets her with a pin in his hand for the customary handshake, causing discomfort. During the next session she still does not remember his face but hesitates when he again offers to shake her hand. Claparède distinguishes between two types of memory connections demonstrating how implicit and explicit memory is ‘wired’ in the brain, how one system manifests a sense of self whilst the other, identified in the previous anecdote, doesn’t: We must distinguish between two sorts of mental connections: those established mutually between representations and those established between representations and the self, the personality. In the case of purely passive associations or idea-reflexes, solely the first kind of connection operates; in the case of voluntary recall and recognition, where the self plays a role, the second kind of connection enters (Claparède 1911/1995: 375).

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Recent research confirms this duality. For Bower and Sivers explicit memory is under conscious control while implicit memory is not (Bower & Sivers 1998: 639). Mark Howe and Mary Courage explain that the development of a child’s cognitive self is linked to explicit autobiographic memory developmentally and becomes operational once neural connections develop between representations (Howe & Courage 1997). Bower puts forward concisely both how explicit memory contextualises the memory reports of implicit memory and the impact of explicit memory’s removal or collapse: The ability to form and retrieve contextual associations also supplies us with the means for controlling the expression of our memories- for combining and reasoning about our past experiences, for monitoring, editing, suppressing, and reshaping the contents of our memory reports. Lacking contextual associations to recent experiences amnesiacs have lost conscious control of their memories and in the process have lost the subjective sense of having ‘been there, done that’ (Bower 1996: 64).

In their review of trauma research literature Julio Peres, Alexander McFarlane and Antonia Nasello indicate that normally implicit and explicit memory systems work hand in hand (Peres et al. 2008). Performances that have become second nature like walking, drawing and writing involve implicit memory. Explicit memory places this activity in a larger cognitive framework, placing ‘fragments’, images, sensations, gestures and smells in relation to each other, assigning value and sequence. During a traumatic event this contextualising explicit memory system shuts down, leaving the implicit system without referencing ability. Babette Rothschild makes this point: ‘implicit memories not linked to explicit memories can be troublesome. It appears to be the case that traumatic memories are more easily recorded in implicit memory’ (Rothschild 2000: 31). The situational re-triggering of such implicit memories by another sound, smell or image describes the flashback experience’s mechanics.

The amygdala and hippocampus Before detailing a model describing the interactive relationship between implicit and explicit memory I review recent research into the physiological structures impacted by stress, focusing on data collected using technologies such as SPECT, CRI and MRI scans that Russel Poldrack and Mark Packard indicate are at the innovative edge of PTSD research:

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Chapter Two Whereas early evidence for multiple memory system interactions was provided in experimental animal research, such evidence has also recently arisen in studies of human brain function, spurred by the development of novel neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI (Poldrack & Packard 2003: 249).

The language of this research reflects the biotechnologies used. Brain function or cortical activity is analysed and deciphered using a disciplinespecific language even further removed from the language of intuitive impressions present in psychoanalysis and in the early work on hysteria. This research connects specific structures in the brain to PTSD’s symptoms. The limbic system, the ‘seat of emotions’, is identified as regulating memory and emotions in relation to PTSD (Nadel & Jacobs 1996). Sexual abuse is linked to disruption of the limbic system (Teicher 2000). Allan Schore’s EEG evidence, MRI and PET data demonstrates that the processing of emotion is right hemisphere dominated (Schore 2002). Imaging results show that this neural activity takes place in both sides of the cortex but that activity in the right hemisphere is more pronounced. Werner Wittling reveals that the balance of stress response functions necessary for survival is predominantly located in and develops early in the right brain (Wittling 1997). The right hemisphere’s interconnectivity with the autonomic, limbic and arousal systems suggests right domination of social, emotional and body centred data processing (Devinsky 2000), right control of spontaneous emotional reactions like those evident in facial expressions (Dimberg & Petterson 2000) and right brain domination of emotionally tagged ‘autobiographic’ or ‘personal’ information. Early relational traumatic stress is registered here (Fink GR et al. 1996). According to Schore’s research flashback disorientation originates in the right hemisphere: ‘a right subcorticallly-driven re-enactment, encoded in implicit memory would occur in the form of a strong physiological autonomic dysregulation and highly aversive motivational state of terror and helplessness’ (Schore 2002: 29). The left hemisphere dominates sequencing tasks, logic and number related activity. It is more active in language and writing tasks such as updating verbal working memory (Clark, CR et al. 2003) and visual word processing (Baker et al. 2007). Depression related to poor social functioning is also related to left hemisphere damage (Jorge et al. 1993). Richard Hirsh first identified the hippocampus’s role in memory integration in the 70s. The hippocampus ‘is held to be part of a system mediating contextual retrieval’ (Hirsh 1974: 439). Without the hippocampus there is no framework laid down for event recall: ‘In the

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absence of the hippocampus, associative retrieval operates. Behavior is completely controlled by external stimuli and learning is a matter of habit formation’ (Hirsh 1974: 439). Recent research supports Hirsh’s view. According to Rothschild the hippocampus is involved in the integrating processes of left hemisphere dominated activity and the amygdala the emotive register of left hemisphere dominated activity. The hippocampus is critically involved in the integration of sensory inputs, the temporal organization of memories, of ‘putting our memories into their proper perspective and place in our life’s time line’ (Rothschild 2000: 12). The amygdala is concerned with assessing the emotional register of ‘highly charged emotional memories such as terror and horror, becoming active both during and while remembering a traumatic incident’ (Rothschild 2000: 12). Abnormal functioning of the hippocampus during and after trauma affects such binding and integration (Bremner, J D et al. 1995). MRI scans of Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD indicate decreased left hippocampal volume (Bremner, J D et al. 1995). Women sexually abused in childhood exhibit similar decreases (Stein et al. 1997). Imaging studies register amygdala activation during emotional stimulation (Hamann et al. 1999) and in the early processing of coarse threat information (Maratos et al. 2009). The amygdala and the hippocampus have been identified as critical in the processing of fear (LeDoux 2002: 216). There is now overwhelming evidence that experiences leading to PTSD enhance amygdala functioning and disrupt hippocampal performance: ‘Two of the most recurrent findings in patients with PTSD, using PET, fMRI, and SPECT are decreased medial prefrontal cortex and increased amygdalar activation’ (Francati, Vermetten & Bremner 2007: 216). This evidence has been further consolidated by a number of researchers performing a cellular analysis of neural structures in brain tissue and by tracing oxygen and blood flows at these sites. Neurone structures are affected differently by stress (Vyas, Bernal & Chattarji 2003). Stress breaks down hippocampal neurone structures whilst enhancing them in the amygdala (Shansky et al. 2009). Jennifer Vasterling and Brewin present this view in the technical language of physiology, explaining that the same stress experience produces ‘dendritic atrophy and debranching in the hippocampus while simultaneously producing enhanced dendritic arborization in the amygdala’ (Vasterling & Brewin 2005: 144). The chemistry involved in these changes is now known. Douglas Bremner and Meena Narayan indicate that ‘there is evidence supporting

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the role of glucocorticoids released during stress resulting in damage to the hippocampus’ (Bremner, J D & Narayan 1998: 881). Cortisol reduces synapse plasticity in the hippocampus (Nelson & Carver 1998: 799). Charles Nelson and Leslie Carver believe that this ‘could disrupt the basic formation of the explicit memory system’ (Nelson & Carver 1998: 805). They also indicate that hormonal activity impacts on amygdala functioning and consequently the implicit memory system (Nelson & Carver 1998: 803). This research specifies the dual mechanisms at play in memory formation during stress at the chemical and cellular level. Robert McDonald and Norman White summarise these findings: A neural system that includes the hippocampus may acquire information about the relationships among stimuli and events. A neural system that includes the amygdala may mediate the rapid acquisition of behaviors based on biologically significant events with affective properties (McDonald & White 1993: 3).

Sam and Vam: A Dual Processing Model The concept of dual memory processing is supported across a wide range of discursive fields. Nelson and Carver indicate that ‘Most cognitive psychologists agree that there are likely two major types of memory: explicit (or declarative) memory and implicit (or non-declarative) memory’ (Nelson & Carver 1998: 794). This is consistent with Steven Sloman’s argument that two systems of reasoning underpin human thought. He identifies one of those systems as ‘associative’ and of ‘temporal contiguity’ and the other way of thinking as ‘rule-based’, as it operates in ‘symbolic structures with logical content’ (Sloman 1996). Christopher Beevers, John Gabrieli, and Larry Squire and Stuart ZolaMorgan have all suggested dual processing models. Beevers’ dual processing model explains the mechanics of depression: This model emphasizes the interplay between two modes of information processing, associative and reflective processing. Associative processing involves quick, automatic information processing, whereas reflective processing involves relatively slow, effortful processing of information (Beevers 2005: 997).

Gabrieli posits ‘two different functional architectures of the human brain, two separate processing systems’ (Gabrieli et al. 1995: 76) to explain their research with amnesic patients who are unable to recognise certain words but who still demonstrate some implicit knowledge of their meaning

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through ‘repetition priming’. Squire and Zola-Morgan describe declarative and non-declarative memory. Declarative memory is concerned with the conscious retrieval of facts (semantic memory) and events (episodic memory). Non-declarative memory involves procedural memory, priming memory, associative and non-associative conditioning (Squire & ZolaMorgan 1997). A dual processing model of trauma must accommodate apparently contradictory behaviours. Some symptoms are about shutting the body down and others about hyper-arousal. The numbing of dissociative forgetting stands in contrast to the flashback’s visceral shock. As Nelson and Carver explain: ‘In addition to memory impairment in trauma, there are examples of heightened memory function’ (Nelson & Carver 1998: 803). On the one hand hyper-arousal is characterised by the immediate recurring impact of shock and fear, and a mixture of anger at the cause, sadness about loss and shame about powerlessness. Included are the physical problems of disturbed sleep, intrusive thoughts, breathing difficulties and headaches, nausea and skin problems like eczema. On the other hand numbed victims shut off painful memories. Trauma sufferers keep to themselves and feel detached from others, have trouble concentrating and quickly lose interest in normal activities. Drug or alcohol abuse and loss of sexual interest are common as are both loss of appetite or increased eating. Herman refers to this oscillation between contradictory responses of intrusion and constriction as the ‘dialectic of trauma’ (Herman 1992: 47-50). A time-based systemic model places such different behaviours at different stages of a cycle. A multi-system model places different behaviours in different systems or as a product of varied interactions between them. The recording of the time-based flux of blood and oxygen flow at the basis of contemporary neurological scanning technologies like MRI is used by Brewin to map such a model. In proposing a dual processing model Brewin contends that ‘traumatic memory can indeed have all these contradictory characteristics, depending on which memory system is being accessed’ (Brewin 2001: 161). Nelson and Carver also indicate that a dual processing model can account for disparate PTSD symptoms: ‘The dichotomous nature of memory symptoms in PTSD suggests that the deleterious effects of PTSD on memory vary dramatically depending on the memory system in question’ (Nelson & Carver 1998: 803). Peres, McFarlane and Nasello’s review of neurological research identifies Brewin’s model as demonstrating how a multiple memory system acts simultaneously in parallel (Peres et al. 2008: 483-4). Brewin names one system ‘Verbally accessible memory’ (VAM) and the other .

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‘Situationally accessible memory’ (SAM). VAM is also referred to as declarative memory (Squire & Zola-Morgan 1991; Van der Kolk 1996d: 285) and involves the ‘encoding and storage of conscious experience’ (Brewin 2001: 161). Verbally based, under normal conditions, it enables narrative with retrieval upon request. It is time related and because of its narrative or linear nature, its process speed is limited. This is akin to the impact of low bandwidth in computer technology. ‘Situationally accessible memory’ (SAM) is an implicit memory system, processing the unexpected flashback experience triggered by external cues or thoughts in traumatised individuals. SAM is ‘unable to encode spatial and temporal context’ (Brewin 2001: 161). This system focuses narrowly on risk, is detail rich and displays no sense of time. Steph Hellawell and Brewin list SAM’s profile: ‘the exclusive automated mode of retrieval, the high level of perceptual detail, and the distortion of subjective time, such as the event is experienced in the present’ (Hellawell & Brewin 2004: 3). This model incorporates the research into amygdala and hippocampus functioning reviewed in the previous section. The hippocampus regulates and modifies VAM and the amygdala SAM: Hippocampal processing is likely to be essential in the creation of verbally accessible, contextually located memories of trauma, while the variety of inputs to the amygdala that do not involve the hippocampus provide a neural basis for situationally accessible memories (Brewin 2001: 161).

Other commentators and researchers reinforce this view. The hippocampus is involved in the formation of conscious memories, of building up what Van der Kolk calls a unified ‘cognitive map’ (Van der Kolk 1996d: 295), whose architecture facilitates flexible access to these memories. Peres McFarlane and Nasello indicate that this mapping relocates short-term memory into long term storage: ‘VAM supports ordinary autobiographical memories that can be modified and interact with other autobiographical knowledge’ (Peres et al. 2008: 483). Van der Kolk describes the amygdala’s functioning as inflexible, as concerned with attaching affect to incoming cues and with the ‘establishment of associations between sensory stimuli’ (Van der Kolk 1996b: 230). Peres McFarlane and Nasello point out that: ‘Because SAMs do not involve verbal representations, these memories are difficult to communicate and may not therefore interact with other autobiographical knowledge’ (Peres et al. 2008: 483). Which system responds to a given situation depends on whether the incoming sensory information is traumatic (code red) or normal. Normally

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both systems function simultaneously and inform each other but in trauma VAM shuts down. Because code red is a ‘better match’ to the SAM system (Brewin 2001: 162), a direct emotional and performative response is activated. Survival instinctively triggers a fight or flight response. There is no time to think. The hippocampus and consequently VAM shuts down. No explicit memory, no contextual track of events is laid down. No narrative (VAM) exists for the flashback (SAM) to be later inserted into. Rich in detail with no temporal context, such ‘affect fragments’ periodically redial into a personal network that is never built. Like a running chicken with its head chopped off or a scratched record the flashback has nowhere to go yet keeps redialling. Wilkinson describes this situation: When the different elements of an unbearable experience get dissociated or split off from one another there can be no proper memory of the event. It will not be processed by the hippocampus, which tags time and places to memories, and so it cannot be stored as ordinary narrative memory. It cannot be recalled in the ordinary way because it has not been remembered in the ordinary way. Instead it will be encoded in the emotional brain and in the body (Wilkinson 2003: 246).

Without ‘code red’ both implicit and explicit systems continue to operate, with the explicit VAM system contextualising and integrating incoming information. As Brewin explains, if the cues provide an ‘equally good match for the VAM memory, amygdala activation will be prevented’ (Brewin 2001: 162). Response is reflected upon and thought through so that a network is built. If some unprocessed SAM fragment belatedly returns, it is integrated into this cognitive map. Peres McFarlane and Nasello explain that in normal functioning when a SAM fragment dials back into the network successfully to become part of the story: ‘the memory becomes modified by associated experiences, emotional context and a state of consciousness during the recall process’ (Peres et al. 2008: 483). How these systems interact in a relatively normal situation such as a dinner party? During normal functioning with both memory systems operating one part of the event is instantly understood while other parts are experienced as unclear. Conversations are immediately laid down into VAM for seamless recall. The next day or a week later a gesture, taste or an image comes back unexpectedly, triggered by an ostensibly unrelated cue. This is SAM memory. You debrief with a friend about these flashes or emotional uncertainties in relation to the dinner party. The story of the night gets altered, re-mapped. In this way SAM impressions come back to be integrated into the VAM map. Like a bar room brawl or a Hollywood

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drama’s chase interlude, the flashback adds spice to the evolving story. Peres McFarlane and Nasello explain that once the flashback is integrated into the autobiographical record, ‘it tends not to be available anymore as a separate and immutable entity’ (Peres et al. 2008: 483). This is the focus of recovery. Brewin notes that in psychotherapy affect needs to be unfrozen in this way in order to re-integrate the fragment back into VAM’s cognitive map: ‘The goal is to incorporate into a verbally accessible memory the set of detailed sensory information, that in conjunction with other cues, is effectively triggering flashbacks’ (Brewin 2001: 161). Other researchers stress the importance of this re-integrating process in recovery from trauma. Kent Harber and James Pennebaker concur with Brewin on this issue: ‘For trauma victims the business of connection seems to be of vital importance’ (Harber & Pennebaker 1992: 383). For Edna Foa, Chris Molnar and Laurie Cashman reconnecting fragmented narratives, to combine SAM fragments into VAM autobiographical memories is required for the recovery from trauma (Foa, Molnar & Cashman 1995). Recovery from fragment to integrated narrative is also evident in Laub and Auerhahn’s review of forms of traumatic memory (Laub & Auerhahn 1993). Brewin’s interactive dual processing model of implicit and explicit memory systems describes the processing of overwhelming experience. Neurological research into implicit and explicit memory systems and amygdala and hippocampus functioning help produce this interactive model and dissociation returns to the forefront of trauma discourse through it. This model marks a shift in trauma discourse to a more empirical register. The emergence of the new integrative diagnostic category of PTSD gives trauma a medical pedigree that facilitates cutting edge neurological research. Recent developments in digital technology inform the new imaging technologies driving this research, providing the detailed cellular and chemical brain functioning data from which Brewin’s model is constructed.

Conclusions Brewin’s model incorporates a different register of information and knowledge to the observations of behaviour and the intuitive technique of the psychoanalytic ‘talking cure’. It is also different to the subjective use that has been made of psychoanalysis, re-framed in the social, within screen studies and ‘trauma cinema’. The ‘viewer and the viewed’ relationship moves from the position of the psychoanalyst and critic to the

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neurologist. The therapeutic relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand takes place through the spoken word and body gesture and creatively analyses described ‘dream’ imagery. The visual is not directly accessed but filtered through oral recollection. The critic or theorist replays, pauses and repeats sequences of a highly constructed visual narrative such as Psycho (Bellour 1979) for textual analysis on a VCR or DVD. The scientifically trained neurologist views and deciphers the graphic and looping computer generated imagery that delivers its flux of physical and metabolic processes. Cortical activity is processed through a sophisticated computer mediated apparatus to deliver the ‘real’, not the imaginary. The neurologist’s process of searching for structure in the data of cortical activity, presented as looping graphic animations is described in Marshall McLuhan’s recall of the information theory maxim: ‘data overload equals pattern recognition’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 107). Substituting ‘trauma’ for ‘data overload’ this maxim suggests the fundamental shift in trauma analysis delivered by digital technology. This is the mathematical world of the computational search engine where, as Usama Fayyad, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Padhraic Smyth point out, the manual processing of data has become too slow and cumbersome: ‘manual probing of a data set is slow, expensive, and highly subjective. In fact, as data volumes grow dramatically, this type of manual data analysis is becoming completely impractical’ (Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro & Smyth 1996: 38). There is a shift in emphasis from the verbal to the visual in these relationships. The subject (and the body) is viewed not in any subjective social or personal realm but directly in the register of an eye extended by technology at the ‘invisible’ level of the microscopic and the cellular. This is the shift that Brewin’s dual processing model delivers from the psychoanalytic readings of textual analysis and the initiators of ‘trauma theory’. With technologies such as neuro-imaging the history of Western scientific study of consciousness originating with Charcot and Freud has more clearly crossed the divide of C. P. Snow’s two cultures, more emphatically into the objective sciences, from a subjective hermeneutic form of knowledge into a reductionist positivist framework (Taylor, E & Young 1998). For Vilém Flusser the computational visual material delivered by the MRI scan represents an example of a ‘technical image’, one whose surface qualities can be unpacked by the neurologist. For Flusser ‘technical images are meaningful surfaces. Created by programs, they are dependent on the laws of technology and the natural sciences’ (Ströhl 2004: xxiii). At

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their end-point such image sequences begin to resemble images derived through an earlier technology of film such Man Ray’s rayograms or Breer’s abstract animations, both in graphic form and repetitive structure. Breer’s abstractions and their relationship to materialist film and in their performance of traumatic experience is explored further in Chapter 5 and Man Ray’s work, representative work of the 20s European avant-garde already discussed, return as a foundation practice to Tscherkassky’s recent found footage films, read in Chapter 7 as commentary on digital media practice. Vilém Flusser’s technical image is further discussed in relation to other theorising on digital media’s amnesic and traumatic characteristics in the following chapter. Brewin’s model is further discussed in considering possible homologies between VAM and SAM memory systems and Wollen’s two avant-garde dichotomy. This comparison intertwines the reviews of the first two chapters and leads to a number of related questions. Just as dissociation is rehabilitated into the discursive field of trauma studies, will there be a belated return for materialist film? Given that dissociation’s recall is enabled by digital technologies, is there also a place for a materialist film practice in the general narrative of digital media?

CHAPTER THREE A NARRATIVE OF RECOVERY FOR A MATERIALIST PRACTICE

Having mapped a history of trauma theory within screen studies in Chapter 1 and a history of trauma research in Chapter 2 I bring these histories together to recuperate a historic visibility for materialist film in ‘trauma cinema’ and digital media. Expanding views expressed in Chapter 1 reading Gidal’s extreme negation as traumatic, this recovery recontextualises the feminist criticisms of materialist film as a description of traumatic memory and reads materialist film’s dismissal of the signifier, its erasure of content, as performing trauma. Both these re-readings are executed from a digital new media perspective, marking a historic shift from the positions originally taken up in the two avant-gardes debate. To further identify materialist film’s relation to trauma I also undertake a closer scrutiny of the painting and sculptural practices of Abstract Expressionism as ‘content denied’, extending commentary in Chapter 1 about the traumatic impact of the First World War on 1920s European avant-garde cinema. An appraisal of digital media as traumatic based on analysis and research conducted by Mark Prensky, Flusser, Arthur Kroker, Manovich and others is then presented to support Elsaesser’s Chapter 1 assessment of the digital as a traumatic medium. This includes Prensky’s list of characteristics of the Digital Native and Digital Immigrant, which reproduces the gap of the two avant-gardes and the SAM and VAM memory systems, Vilém Flusser’s concept of the technical image, Kroker’s concept of panic bodies to contain the impact of technological change and Manovich’s insistence on the 20s European avant-garde cinema as a precursor for digital media. The final section of this chapter enlists Laub and Auerhahn’s spectrum of forms of knowing and not knowing trauma to chart a recovery for materialist film in trauma cinema and digital media. A number of key films with ‘materialist’ credentials are identified for in-depth analysis in the following four chapters to locate this trajectory to recovery.

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The Two avant-gardes and the Dual processing model The contrasting qualities of Wollen’s two avant-gardes are evident in Brewin’s Dual processing model of trauma. The visual direct preconscious character of materialist film outlined by Le Grice and Gidal describes an implicit SAM whilst the inter-textual, verbal and narrative emphasis of avant-garde’s political arm allocated to a feminist counter-cinema by Mulvey, Penley and others and incorporated by Walker into a ‘trauma cinema’ performs the contextual, verbal and referential qualities of an explicit VAM. These implicit and explicit polarities weave their way through both the histories of trauma and screen studies from the first two chapters. The gap between the two avant-gardes is evident in the contrast between psychopathology’s dissociation model and a psychoanalytic repression model. Kuhn’s definition of a feminist textual analysis incorporates a psychoanalytic perspective: ‘In seeking thus to account in detail for repressions in a film text and how these may be related to or written into its address, textual (psycho) analysis can begin to consider the repression of the feminine in a patriarchy’ (Kuhn 1982: 108). Le Grice stresses materialist film’s pre-reflective perceptual focus: ‘a film which can function essentially on the psycho-physical rather than the psychointerpretive level’ (Le Grice 1977: 106) and Gidal, in his embrace of the ‘un-thought’ dismisses all narrative practice as repressive (Gidal 1976: 4). These are distinctions critical for those commentators in psychopathology arguing for a new contemporary relevance for Janet’s subjugated research. Van der Kolk characterises this difference between psychopathology’s dissociation model and the repression model of psychoanalysis as ‘reality imprint versus intrapsychic elaboration’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 52) and for Van der Hart & Paul Brown recovery from dissociation requires synthesis and integration rather than abreaction (Van der Hart & Brown 1992). Van der Kolk and Van der Hart point out that in the repression model memories are pushed down and that a dissociative model memory is contained ‘within an alternate stream of consciousness’ (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 168). In Brewin’s model situational accessible memory (SAM) performs this alternative stream. A caesura occurs in both the histories of trauma and screen studies. Chapter 2 outlines how the birth of Freud’s psychoanalytic method obscured dissociation’s visibility, with recent neurological research incorporating imaging technologies marking its recovery. In Chapter 1 Penley and Bergstrom’s 70s psychoanalytically informed dismissal of materialist film, re-performs in the discursive field of screen studies

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Janet’s earlier obscurity. With the recent appropriation of trauma theory into screen studies this contrast between repression and dissociation models re-emerges. Does the recovery of the dissociation model in trauma research predict a similar recovery for materialist film in screen studies? Can key works of materialist film be incorporated into Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’, and further, does a materialist practice inform digital media practice more generally? By placing statements by participants in the ‘two avant-garde’ debate in relation to the current psychopathological understanding of trauma the homologies between the history of trauma and screen studies become evident. Wollen’s characterisation of materialist film as a utopian dismissal of the signified (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 99) becomes a description of dissociation as a survival strategy that guts or denies its own context. Penley’s psychoanalytic reading of structuralist/materialist film as ‘suppressing knowledge of the imaginary’ (Penley 1977: 14) also describes dissociation’s impact. Similarly, Penley could just as easily be describing situationally accessible memory (SAM) when she notes that: ‘the first tactic of structuralist/materialist film is the emptying from the cinematic signifier of all semantic, associative, symbolic, representational significance’ (Penley 1977: 8). This is what trauma does to memory. Mulvey’s description of Gidal’s strategy of ‘rejecting all content and narrative’ (Mulvey 1979: 9) reproduces Laub and Auerhahn’s trauma’s ‘not knowing’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 290). From trauma theory’s contemporary perspective Penley’s offering that ‘images have very little analytic power in themselves’ (Penley 1977: 25), predicts the disabling impact of the flashback on critical thinking and asserts the necessity of a contextual framework that verbally accessible memory (VAM) provides. The similarity between the drawbacks that these critics assign to materialist film and the description of Janet’s dissociation support a traumatic pedigree for materialist film. The prism of trauma shifts the ground on these 70s debates for both materialist film’s detractors and supporters. In performing trauma, materialist film is described outside the perspectives of its own practitioners and theorists as documented in Chapter 1. Trauma theory was not available. Though I consider traumatic memory a special case of the analogies of consciousness claim made by Michelson and Sitney, statements about the preconscious, analogues to consciousness and mental imagery (Small, ES 1994) were directed towards an essential cinema project rather than a traumatic one. Penley and Bergstrom also questioned these claims of consciousness analogy, arguing that they were not supported explicitly by research evidence (Penley & Bergstrom 1978:

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125). Chapter 2 was partly constructed to avoid this flaw or gap in an argument for traumatic analogy here. I use the neurological research it maps to support an analogy to traumatic experience. The use of this neurological research to support key works of materialist film’s inclusion in a trauma cinema and as a precursor for digital media is the clearest attempt at new knowledge here. Unlike Deren’s referencing of her practice to amnesia in her texts profiled in the next chapter, the structuralist/materialist theorists never connect to trauma in their writing. Neither Le Grice, Gidal, Michelson nor Sitney used the 1920s European avant-garde, which they all identified as a precursor to structuralist and materialist film, to mount a case for a traumatic pedigree for materialist film. Only Turim makes a link between trauma and the 1920s avant-garde that she tentatively extends into an emerging feminist film practice and falls short of materialist film. Using Turim, McCabe, Lyford and others I made the point in Chapter 1 that this 1920s avant-garde responded to the direct experience of shock and mutilation of battle in the First World War. This connection between war, trauma and creative practice is explored further in the next section. A similar case is made for the traumatic impact of the Second World War on those arts practices out of which materialist film arose. Post-war shifts in sculptural and painting practices honed in on the essential or pure nature of their specific medium, favouring event ahead of narrative. Despite this silence on trauma much of the commentary on the first avant-garde structure can be understood as descriptions of Janet’s dissociation and Brewin’s dual processing model. Gidal’s description of his self-reflexive practice as ‘a filmic practice in which one watches oneself watching’ (Gidal 1976: 10) brings to mind dissociation’s out-ofbody experience. By Le Grice placing the ‘flux of perception’ (Le Grice 1977: 10) at his practice’s core, he focuses on the pre-conscious realm of the flashback experience. Heath could be alluding to the shutdown of verbally accessible memory (VAM) during stress in noting that: ‘without narrative, the memory of a film fails’ (Heath 1981: 171) and his following account doubles as a description of VAM: ‘what is missing is the habitual common ground, the narrative metaphor or transference or model of the film’ (Heath 1981: 171). Narrative and context is missing in both materialist film and trauma. Van der Kolk stresses this lack of ‘an accompanying narrative’ in trauma (Van der Kolk 1997: 255). Heath locates materialist film’s spectator in similar territory to the dissociative space of an individual confronted with overwhelming experience: ‘at the limit of any fixed subjectivity, materially inconstant, dispersed, in process, beyond the accommodation of reality and pleasure principle’

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(Gidal 1989: 75). Rodowick, in describing Gidal’s project to ‘frustrate strategically the spectator’s desire to ascribe meaning to the image’ (Rodowick 1995: 133), also states the dilemma of trauma’s unlocatability where, as Kalsched also notes, ‘experience itself becomes discontinuous’ (Kalsched 1996: 13). Laying the two avant-gardes dichotomy and the dual processing model over one another brings these correspondences into focus. The dismissal of a primarily visual materialist film for being apolitical, narcissistic and random with no voice, no text, and no narrative describe the characteristics of traumatic memory as exhibited in the flashback and SAM as immediate, not time aware, and though paradoxically undecipherable; information rich. Similarly the emphasis on the social, on the voice and on the text and language to integrate and contextualise the image of the political avantgarde also describes the functioning of VAM in normal memory processing where it provides context and story for both fragments and impressions through voice and verbal recall.

A Background to materialist film Gidal and Le Grice both identify Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in painting as important influences on their filmmaking practice (Gidal 1976: 15; Le Grice 2001: 298). Some critics promote this work as an essentialist return to the medium’s purity. Clement Greenberg characterises the modernist project as stripping back to an absolute of appearance and notes that after the Second World War the arts retreated into their specific media, painting becoming a physical practice: ‘pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically’ (Greenberg 1990 / 1940: 69). For David and Cecile Shapiro this shift emphasised a return to origins: ‘the Abstract Expressionists wanted to erase the past and invent an original culture’ (Shapiro & Shapiro 1990: 9). This essentialist move enlists Wassily Kandinsky’s belief in pure colour and form and displays the religious impact of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman’s paintings. Other critical writing contextualising these New York post war art movements within a wider cultural framework suggest a connection to trauma. Theodor Adorno and Herman Rapaport argue that these abstract and formal reductive practices are responses to the overwhelming and indefinable impact of the Holocaust. Rather than the search for an originating purity that Greenberg promotes, this ‘erasure of the past’ can also be witnessed as content denied. Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ (1953) performs

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this view by obsessively obliterating a Willem de Kooning drawing. Forty erasers were used to remove the markings on a drawing that de Kooning gifted Rauschenberg (Solomon 1997: 236). The act of erasure becomes the painting’s subject. In ‘baring the device’ of denial this tactic brings the underground, the unspeakable and the invisible back into play. In this practice the structures, architectures and games that hold the denied secrets of a culture are performed, the mechanics of erasure becoming visible. Underneath Le Grice’s preference for the hard-core formalism of Austrians Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka lies the influence of the Viennese painter Arnulf Rainer and Viennese Actionists including Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch. Contemporaneous to Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’, Rainer initiated a series of ‘Overpaintings’ in the midfifties that perform a denial of content by obliterating historic works with fields of black and red. An action of ‘content denied’ is further presented in Hermann Nitsch’s “reworking of print made after Rembrandt “Hundred Guilder Print” “ (1956-60), where splatters of emulsion paint cover the Rembrandt etching. Kren’s work especially is influenced by the work of Otto Muehl. Muehl characterizes his work as a rationalist take on contemporary ‘moral hypocrisies and the limitations of representational objectivity’ (Grossman 2002), suggesting those same limits that Felman and Laub identify in the witnessing of trauma and Holocaust testimony: ‘the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma- does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 57). In their historical analysis of modernist painting and the Holocaust Adorno and Rapaport identify historic processes supporting a ‘content denied’ reading. Enlisting Adorno’s argument about the impossibility of the Holocaust’s artistic representation, Rapaport names the ‘flight into abstraction’ in modernist art as a triple convergent break with representation, history and the Holocaust’s trauma (Rapaport 2002). For Adorno, before Auschwitz death was an individual experience but ‘Auschwitz confirmed the philosophene of pure identity as death’ (Adorno 1973: 362). For Rapaport the Holocaust’s abstracted killing machine removed any sense of presenting its victims as individuals and doing so in art only diminishes its overarching horror (Rapaport 2002: 238). This forgetting was designed to ensure that history not repeat, diminishing past politics’ importance in constructing the future. Processing war’s horror into kitsch had to be avoided. In ‘Negative Dialectics’ Adorno asserts that historical trauma can no longer be responsibly depicted. The Holocaust’s ‘absolute negativity’ ‘shatters the

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basis on which speculative metaphysical thought would be reconciled with experience’ (Adorno 1973: 362). For Serge Guilbaut ‘avant-garde art became an art of obliteration, an act of erasure’ (Guilbaut 1983: 181). Though this move avoids kitsch, so is any explicit Holocaust memory sidestepped. Yet in his description of this bypass Rapaport frames the Holocaust’s trace: ‘at the very least, one could infer that we had now entered an age when the unspeakable of history could only be addressed by the unspeakability of art’ (Rapaport 2002: 238). This reductive momentum pushed painting so far that ‘by the late 1950’s Yves Klein and others would start thinking in terms of the death of painting’ (Rapaport 2002: 236). Rather than painting dying, I consider it more productive to see it as performing death. Rothko’s description of his paintings as dramas (Rothko 1990/1947: 397) and Rosenberg’s observation that ‘a sketch can have the function of a skirmish’ (Rosenberg 1990/1952: 77) both indicate a performative attitude. Religions can pronounce death as sublime but, as the Holocaust attests, it can also be unspeakably appalling. When Rosenberg describes de Kooning’s art as presenting ‘an event without an interpretation’ (Rosenberg 1990/1972: 249) he describes the flashback experience in a way reminiscent of Elsaesser’s commentary on the digital as ‘an event without a trace’ (Elsaesser 2001: 197). Simon Hartog recycles Rosenberg’s description in assessing Michael Snow’s Wavelength: ‘He wants to make a film that has no explanation’ (Hartog 1969: 3). Devoid of verbally accessible memory’s context (VAM) such experiences become unspeakable. As Susan Simonds states: ‘for the survivor experiencing flashback, there may be no words to describe the visual imagery or bodily sensations of intrusive traumatic flashbacks’ (Simonds 1994: 7). Rapaport enlists Maurice Blanchot’s concept of the neutre to ‘conceptualise that which precedes all concepts’ (Hill 1997: 132) and his view that ‘the neutre should not just be predisclosive, but indifferent in its singularity and absoluteness to naming, knowing, identifying’ approaches the unlocatable traumatic flashback’s operation’ (Rapaport 2002: 239). A fragment of visceral memory disarmed of context performs as Blanchot’s neutre to repeatedly re-stun its victim. This outline records Abstract Expressionism’s capacity to inflict such a stun. Can materialist film?

Digital Media, Trauma and the Digital Native There is evidence that the digital media environment today permeating the recesses of everyday life has fundamentally affected the way we process

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information, activating a re-balancing of the senses. Marshall McLuhan has already identified the pervasive personal, social and political impact of television as a body-focused ‘spectacular extension of our nervous system’ (McLuhan 1964: 276). His argument that ‘it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’ (McLuhan 1964: 16) rather than a medium’s content, aligns with materialist film’s preferencing of structure before content. The rise in speed and concentrated information flow imposes the more immediate sorting and processing imperatives predicted by McLuhan: ‘You can't send information instantly without creating a new pattern of learning and new undeveloped countries of the mind as well’ (McLuhan 1958: 18). The move towards immediacy requires greater engagement with Brewin’s situationally accessible memory system (SAM). Wollen’s avant-garde dichotomy and Brewin’s interactive dual processing model both re-appear in the differences Prensky identifies in how Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants process information in the accelerated digital media environment. Prensky suggests that young people today ‘think and process information fundamentally differently’ (Prensky 2001a: 1). Those growing up with these new technologies, receiving information instantaneously, are termed ‘Digital Natives’ and those that do not are ‘Digital Immigrants’. Natives prefer random access, parallel processing and multitasking. They process images before texts, are used to networked environments and ‘thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards’ (Prensky 2001a: 2). Skills in multi-tasking and graphic fluency are honed through a constant dialogue with computer screens and programs, through a relentless connectivity to digital technology’s churn. Manuel Castells discerns four characteristics of technology in this Network Society (Castells 2010: 60-3): technologies acting on information, the pervasiveness of their effects, their networking logic and their flexibility. Prensky’s Digital Native is at home in an emergent visual culture where, Nicholas Mirzoeff describes, ‘the world-as-a-text has been challenged by the world-as-a-picture’ (Mirzoeff 1998: 5) and where Battro locates a ‘digital gap’ (Battro 2004: 92). For Mirzoeff William Mitchell’s ‘picture theory’ (Mitchell 1994) marks a ‘significant challenge’ to the text based views of structuralism and post-structuralism. The Digital Native’s multi-tasking, networking and parallel processing effects a crisis in subjectivity that Donna Haraway locates as a move from a Cartesian perspective to the more problematic and contingent seeing of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988). Brenda Laurel describes a similar move from the text through television to the computer screen (Laurel 1994: 129)

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and notes a younger generation’s ability to negotiate an information explosion that nevertheless, in her view, leads to an apathy that Neil Postman also identifies in marking the difficulty of thinking or performing critically in an infowar environment: ‘who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?’ (Postman 1985: 156). John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s observation that ‘Digital Natives perceive information to be malleable’ (Palfrey & Gasser 2009: 7) through the relentless technological reshaping of texts and images presents a more productive positive reconstitution of the real and metaphor mix at the heart of Walker’s traumatic ‘disremembering’ from Chapter 1. Experimental filmmaker James Benning’s considered looking, examined in detail in Chapter 6 similarly mixes the real and metaphor, offers a visual practice performing Haraway’s contingent seeing (Yates 2007). In contrast the Digital Immigrant, with longer attention spans, processes ideas linearly and texts ahead of images. Immigrants, according to Prensky, are performing old literature based thinking that is logically focused on cause and effect rather than the multi-perspectival all-at-once of the Native. It is about past and legacy rather than future oriented. Repeating the criticisms directed at Wollen’s dichotomy, the contrasting extreme of a Native-Immigrant divide oversimplifies a complex shift in the use of the senses. Mirzoeff states Prensky’s oversimplified dichotomy differently, identifying any shift to image based thinking more as a change in emphasis: ‘As one mode of representing reality loses ground, another takes its place without the first disappearing’ (Mirzoeff 1998: 7). We have all known multitasking ‘Immigrants’ and literate ‘Natives’ and the Immigrant and Native exist to some extent in all of us. In this regard Palfrey and Glasser talk about analogue-based ‘Digital Settlers’, who, in transition mode, have helped shape the contours of the digital environment (Palfrey & Gasser 2009: 4). Can materialist film be considered such a ‘settler’ practice? Recent neurological research assigns higher levels of malleability to the human brain than previously understood (Kornack 2004; Van Praag, Zhao & Gage 2004). Stem cell research indicates greater levels of neurogenesis or neuroplasticity (Gage, FH 2000; Zhao, Deng & Gage 2008). Imaging experiments show that blind individuals can learn to access the visual cortex to help process sounds ‘visually’ (Klinge et al. 2010). Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan assert that digital technology has altered the cortex’s neural circuitry (Small, G & Vorgan 2009: 2) and that ‘our brains are learning to access and process information more rapidly and also to shift attention quickly from one task to the next’ (Small, G & Vorgan 2009: 63). They also suggest that attention spans and the ability to

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read facial expressions have atrophied. Prensky indicates that such ‘rewiring’ is predicant on ongoing repetitive activity operating through ‘several hours a day, five days a week, sharply focused attention’ (Prensky 2001b: 3). Both reading (Digital Immigrant) and playing computer games (Digital Native) are capable of such rewiring. Judith Horstman notes that playing video games enhances peripheral vision and quickens reactions to visual stimuli (Horstman 2010: 58). With these cognitive changes ‘one key area that appears to have been affected is reflection’ (Prensky 2001b: 5). With the increased speed of information flow, thinking through situations and building contexts is no longer possible in the same way. Prensky sees a challenge in the education of Digital Natives ‘to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning… but still do it in the Digital Native language’ (Prensky 2001b: 5). McLuhan identified a related problem for the television generation: ‘it is no surprise that students whose right brains have had eighteen years’ education by TV have problems with left-brain curricula and SAT tests’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 78). Like the homologies with Wollen’s dichotomy, the reactive, information rich and sampling Digital Native recalls descriptions of the implicit SAM memory system from Chapter 2. The Digital Immigrants’ more story based, linear thinking aligns with the explicit VAM system. Prensky’s perceived lack of critical thinking in Natives finds an extreme correspondence in the VAM memory system’s shutdown during trauma. As Prensky says, there is no time: ‘in our twitch-speed world there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection’ (Prensky 2001b: 5). The cognitive shifts that McLuhan predicted and that Prensky, Mirzoeff and Elsaesser describe are interpreted through Brewin’s dual processing model as a cognitive move to SAM dominance in everyday experience. This view is further articulated in the theoretical work of Flusser, Kroker and others in the following section.

The Technical Image, Panic Bodies and ‘New’ Media Media theorist Flusser also identifies this shift from text based to image based thinking, from the ‘textolatry’ of historic consciousness to the ‘idolatry’ of a new magic enabled by digital media (Flusser 2000: 12). Ironically, given Prensky’s unwieldy native-immigrant nomenclature, for Flusser the multi-lingual and nomadic migrant has the cognitive tools to critically address this new situation. The migrant’s core experience of displacement and mobility informs the current ‘apocalyptic’ situation where ‘the universe of technical images emerging all around us, represents

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the fulfilment of the ages, in which action and agony go endlessly round in circles’ (Flusser 2000: 89). For Flusser this ‘magic’ world is fundamentally different to the historical linear world of cause and effect ‘in which nothing is repeated’ (Flusser 2000: 9). For Flusser ‘Ontologically traditional images mean phenomena, while technical images mean concepts’ (Flusser 2000: 14). This technical image was formulated: ‘in order to make texts comprehensible again, to put them under a magic spell- to overcome the crisis of history’ (Flusser 2000: 13). This ‘technical image’ recycles Martin Heidegger’s concept of ‘Weltbilt’ articulated in ‘The Age of the World-Picture’ (Heidegger 1977 [1938]). There Heidegger identifies a calculative rather than meditative thinking, predicting the rise in the kind of techno-scientific thinking unleashed by the recent mobilization of imaging technologies in neurological research. Heidegger speculates: ‘whether thinking will come to an end in a bustle of information’ (Heidegger 1998 [1967]). Prensky’s texts on rewired information processing are direct reports from the trenches of this crisis of technical image proliferation. Like the lack of critical thinking identified by Prensky and predicted by Heidegger, Flusser insists the inner workings of the technical image must be laid bare: ‘as long as there is no way of engaging in such criticism of technical images, we shall remain illiterate’ (Flusser 2000: 16). In Technopoly Postman also underlines an illiteracy noting that we embrace the ‘wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them’ (Postman 1993: 94). For Flusser this amnesia has migrated from the machine to be incorporated into the image itself. In their text-based arguments Penley and Mulvey identified similar difficulties at the heart of materialist film. Penley identified a lack of analytic power in an image devoid of textual framing and Mulvey with Wollen both identified the lack of an explicit political framework within materialist film. Gidal and Le Grice’s responses to these criticisms offer some strategies in how to break what Flusser calls the technical image’s magic spell: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario’. Essentially this is a question of ‘amnesia’. Human beings forget that they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned to hallucination (Flusser 2000: 10).

Flusser’s dystopian vision is discernable in Arthur Kroker’s ‘panic bodies’, an upgrade on McLuhan’s assertion that the multiple perspectives

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of the ‘electric implosion’ produces an ‘Age of Anxiety’ (McLuhan 1964: 12). Kroker’s theoretical jamming on phrases such as panic sex, electric flesh and panic bodies maps the cultural burnout of digital information overload on our bodies: ‘unlike billboards in the age of pavement, these advertisements are injected directly into the veins of the post-flesh body like bar codes burned into flesh’ (Kroker & Weinstein 1994: 109). This language marks the dysfunctions of overeating, substance abuse, anorexia, paedophilia, on-line pornography, HIV+ but also extreme sports, body building, cloned bodies and ‘cosmetic body cuts, then, for perfect panic faces’ (Kroker, Kroker & Cook 1989: 187), bodies resonating with the panic traces of traumatic experience. Like Prensky’s Digital Native, the panicked herd acts without reflection as it locks into pure, unadulterated SAM. Kroker’s theorising also re-visits, via McLuhan, Walter Benjamin’s insight that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (Benjamin 1969: 257). McLuhan’s notion that acceleration has placed us all in a perpetual state of war (see De Kerckhove in Virilio 1998: 329) raises the stakes further as does Paul Virilio’s positing of an ‘acceleration of reality’ whose speed deterritorialises space (Virilio 1998: 326-335). It is these traumatising environments that Kroker’s panic bodies internalize. He extends the Canadian tradition of critical thinking on media, through George Grant, Harold Innis and McLuhan (Kroker 1985) to articulate a world of ‘dead identities, dead vision, and an overwhelming sense of inner dread and anxiety’ (Kroker 1985: 22). The contradictory feelings that Kroker finds inside the ‘spasm’ of being both ‘panicked and calm’ (Kroker & Weinstein 1994: 172) bring to mind Janet’s observations on dissociation and the ‘traumatic paradox’ that Walker locates in traumatic experience. New media analyst Manovich’s investigation of the essential language of digital media strengthens further the three way link between trauma, materialist film and digital media explored here by naming the same precedents for digital media identified for materialist film in Chapter 1. For Manovich computer users ‘speak the language of the interface’ (Manovich 2001: 79) spawned by cinema. Where montage between shots was cinema’s critical development, the montage within a shot introduced by the 20s European avant-garde is an essential characteristic of digital media. Léger’s Ballet Mechanique (Manovich 2001: 307) and Vertov’s ‘endless, unwinding of techniques’ (Manovich 2001: 242) both represent this innovation. For Manovich this ‘avant-garde became materialised in a computer’ (Manovich 2001: 307). In its transformation into a singular



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button in a field of many on a computer screen avant-garde technique no longer identifies a medium’s essential character, having been ingested into its architecture. Richard Wright describes this shift as ‘a displacement of the ideology of representation onto another level entirely’ (Wright 1995: 3). Avant-garde practice metamorphoses into ‘a problem of pure information processing’ (Wright 1995: 3) inside the computer, demonstrating McLuhan’s ‘law’ that ‘the content of any medium is always another medium’ (McLuhan 1964: 15-16). Manovich’s assertion is a later iteration of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s earlier claim that film contains within it all the other art forms of text, speech, painting, dance and photography: ‘I might as well be totally outrageous and refer to the whole history of art as either a series of preconfigurations or a series of footnotes to film’ (Frampton, Hollis 1986-7: 292). Manovich in stating that ‘Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and artists still have to learn- how to merge database and narrative into a new form’ (Manovich 2001: 243), re-enacts Wollen’s caesura, rendering invisible a whole history of post 20s avant-garde cinema that includes Gidal’s materialist film. Within Manovich’s text, materialist film’s relevance for digital media must be traced back obliquely through Sol Le Witt’s Minimalism (Manovich 2001: 234) and utilise the 20s avant-garde/materialist film connect outlined in Chapter 1. Sean Cubitt makes the connection that Manovich avoids in Cubitt’s preface to Le Grice’s Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age by placing Le Grice’s project at the centre of a shift from narrative to event based art (Cubitt 2001).

Laub and Auerhahn’s knowing not knowing trauma Laub and Auerhahn’s ‘Knowing and not knowing massive psychic trauma’ (1993) lays out a gradation of forms of traumatic memory based on psychological distance from the originating event, level of ownership, and level of integration of the critical events into recall: ‘We all hover at different distances between knowing and not knowing about trauma’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 288). In neurological terms this spectrum moves from its pure SAM flashback form to an eventual re-integration of SAM within a constructed VAM framework. This gradation signposts a pathway to recovery for Herman, requiring the re-integration of both communal and personal fragments into the present (Herman 1992: 241). In this text this ‘present’ is digital. In order from least to greatest integration Laub and Auerhahn catalogue these forms of knowing as; not knowing, fugue states, fragments, transference phenomena, overpowering narratives, life themes,

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witnessed narratives and metaphors. The recovery of the subjugated discourse of materialist film acknowledges these forms of traumatic memory in its process. The stepladder to normalcy they offer orders the key works analysed in the remaining chapters. Following is a summary of these eight forms. 1. Not knowing is about dissociation and marks the site of the split. Laub and Auerhahn identify ‘primitive mechanisms of defencee.g. denial, splitting, amnesia, derealisation and depersonalization’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 290). Reality is split off and there is a lack of content. 2. Fugue states are relived rather than remembered memories. These flashbacks are not digested into narrative. Laub and Auerhahn describe such flashbacks as ‘the intrusive appearance of split off, fragmented behaviours, cognition and affect, which are pieces of the traumatic memory or experience.’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 291). 3. Fragments refer to an isolated image, sensation or ‘irrational’ thought with no context. It ‘involves the retention of parts of a lived experience in such a way that they are contextualized and no longer meaningful’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 292). 4. In transference phenomena, fragments are spliced together in apparently surreal scripts or re-enactments. Though played out in present experience they are distorted, absurd and inappropriate (Laub & Auerhahn: 294). 5. Overpowering narratives, though a more conscious knowing consume every day life. They are narrated with a lack of affect. These stories are characterized by timelessness and the frozen image. These narratives ‘occupies a great deal of psychological and emotional space’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 295). 6. Life themes become incorporated into the personality despite the fact that the connection to the underlying memory ‘may be unconscious or at best fleetingly acknowledged.’ The life theme ‘is often not only played out in relationships (as are transferences) but can also become a cognitive style’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 296).

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7. The witnessed narrative is a true memory that incorporates the victim’s point of view. The knowing is clear but not immediate or direct. ‘There is a person who remembers and relates not only to the experiences that are recalled but to the experience of remembering as well’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 297). 8. Metaphor involves play. It is the display of the creative non-victim. The need to organize the internal reality of the psyche is privileged here ahead of historic accuracy, but with an ongoing dialogue between these two ‘realities’ maintained. ‘The imagery of trauma becomes more conscious, colourful, plastic and variable’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 298). At its most incisive, metaphor delivers an emotional and body centred reality but it can also deliver an evasive web of lies. As Metaphor is available to both survivor and non-victim the dialectics between truth and lies re-emerges and kicks up the possibility of both ‘prosthetic’ and ‘real’ traumatic memories. In discussing J. G. Ballard’s fiction, J. Stephen Murphy points out that ‘the writer of poetry or fiction might desire to distort reality and conventions of narrative and logic but the survivor (of trauma) is seemingly unable to not do anything but’ (Murphy 2004: 63). Though the order of these forms of traumatic memory maps a path to recovery, Laub and Auerhahn do not position these ‘forms’ as mutually exclusive and point out that moving from level to level ‘does not occur in a simple, progressively linear fashion’ (Laub & Auerhahn: 300). These rungs to recovery correspond to Kaplan’s viewer positions in relation to films about trauma (Kaplan 2001: 203-4) and Atwood’s four victim positions. Atwood’s positions are: deny you are a victim (fugue states and fragments), you are a victim because of an act of fate (overpowering narratives), acknowledge you are a victim but refuse its inevitability (witnessed narrative) and be a creative non-victim (metaphor) (Atwood 1972: 36).

A recovery narrative Correspondences between trauma research and materialist film, and the arguments for inclusion in a trauma cinema have been outlined without supporting analysis of specific films. Their absence from Wollen’s rationale for two avant-gardes and materialist film’s dismissal is criticised by Buschbaum (Buchsbaum 1985: 63). Poague points out that this lack adds to the polemic character of Wollen’s scholarship (Poague 1975: 312).

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A number of avant-garde films are analysed in historic order in the next four chapters to avoid such a gap here. A narrative of recovery of a materialist practice constitutes the rest of this argument. Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon is analysed Chapter 4. Breer’s animations, 69 and Fuji are discussed in chapter 5, Benning’s Landscape Suicide in chapter 6. Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (dir. Martin Arnold, 1998) and Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (dir. Peter Tscherkassky, 1999) and Dreamwork (dir. Peter Tscherkassky, 2001), found footage films are the final works analysed in chapter 7. As, like Gidal and Le Grice, Deren is both filmmaker and theorist, Chapter 4’s analysis of her Meshes of the Afternoon restates the concerns of my argument through both practice and theory. Both histories of screen studies and trauma research from Chapters 1 and 2 intertwine here. The film displays many of Laub and Auerhahn’s forms of traumatic memory, from fugue states to metaphor. As a pre-split film that has been claimed by both camps of Wollen’s two avant-gardes, a historic review of the varied analyses of Meshes of the Afternoon reads the film as a contested space. My analysis of Deren’s theoretical writing on vertical and horizontal editing structures reveals homologies with Brewin’s dual processing model. Deren references her practice to the psychopathological research into amnesia pioneered by Janet and I place her later research into Haitian voodoun in opposition to Charcot and Freud’s work on female hysteria. Like McLuhan, who also appropriated the tactic of the Vorticist’s typographical field (McLuhan 1967: 68), Deren aligns herself with this British avant-garde and particularly Ezra Pound’s focus on direct impact: ‘vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary applications’ (Pound 1970: 88). Following Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that: ‘the way we experience works of cinema will be through perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 99), Chapter 5, focusing on 69 and Fuji, presents Breer’s animation practice as performing the traumatic flashback’s direct perceptual stun, expressing Brewin’s implicit SAM memory system. I outline Breer’s painting origins by drawing on the Abstract Expressionist history from this chapter. Breer’s practice exhibits the most dissociated forms of Laub and Auerhahn’s stepladder of not knowing, fugue states and fragment forms and establishes that materialist film’s contribution to a trauma cinema genre is the most inarticulate, visceral and body centred forms of knowing trauma whose invisibilities help explain its previous exclusion. I further frame Fuji in relation to Tom Gunning’s early ‘Cinema of Attractions’ (Gunning 1990) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s analysis of the advent of train travel on the experience of time (Schivelbusch 1986). I name the

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rebalancing of the senses required to negotiate this new technological situation as a similar but earlier occurrence of the perceptual upheaval precipitated by the speed of new digital technologies discussed here through the writings of Kroker, Flusser, Elsaesser and Prensky, in which trauma plays a fundamental role. McLuhan indicates this relationship in noting the influence of railway speed on work, leisure and a city’s form, and then pointing out that the airplane’s acceleration ‘tends to dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for’ (McLuhan 1964: 16). Landscape Suicide is a ‘post-split’ film constructed through an evolving materialist practice that responds and runs parallel to a feminist counter-cinema. It merits inclusion in ‘trauma cinema’ as a vanguard film through the considered use of duration rather than Breer’s perceptual impact. Like Gidal, Benning’s use of duration evolves through Warhol and Minimalism into a method of looking performing Haraway’s contingent seeing (Yates 2007) and Laub and Felman’s witnessing of trauma. Landscape Suicide is located at the integrated end of Laub and Auerhahn’s spectrum, as a witnessed narrative using a balance of metaphor and the real reminiscent of Walker’s ‘disremembering’. This landscape film analyses the process of erasure and ‘content denied’ manifest in dissociated testimony of two murderers. A review of the information available to Benning helps define this film as communicating a traumatic experience. Benning’s relation to feminism is mapped through his collaborations with feminist filmmaker Bette Gordon and daughter Sadie Benning’s lesbian coming of age videos. Extending the traumatic rebalancing of the senses explored in the previous chapter, by enlisting Bourdieu’s habitus I identify Benning’s practice as predictive of a critical digital practice capable of moving under the surface of Flusser’s technical image and performing Brewin’s dual processing model of trauma. Chapter 7’s examination of the found footage films of Arnold and Tscherkassky returns materialist film into the contemporary situation addressed by Elsaesser in Chapter 1 and by Kroker, Flusser and Prensky here. These found footage films re-couple the two avant-gardes in a way that hands pre-eminence to Gidal’s materialist practice. These films bring Laub and Auerhahn’s earlier forms of knowing trauma back into view inside a metaphoric structure that, like the world of the Digital Native, emphasises SAM and performs Laub and Auerhahn’s most integrated form of knowing trauma. I argue that in this found footage practice a psychoanalytic textual analysis, used to dismiss materialist film from feminist film theory in the 70s, returns as the performed subject inside

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these films. In the case of Alone this is a performed or panicked textual analysis of 40s melodrama and in the case of Tscherkassky it is 80s horror reconstituted through Ray’s 20s European avant-garde direct on film interventions. These frameworks re-iterate and find their structural and theoretical trace in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. I further identify a shift from Mulvey’s identified ‘voyuerism’ and ‘fetishistic scopophilia’ to Bellour’s ‘pensive spectator’ that marks his ‘Analysis in Flames’ (Bellour 1985), appropriated by Mulvey to frame the active viewer of contemporary digital media. All the films in these four chapters link through their relationship to a materialist practice surviving the 70s as a subjugated discourse that concludes with a belated re-emergence within digital time-based media arts, a recall evident in the structure of these found footage films.

CHAPTER FOUR THE STRUCTURE OF TRAUMA, REPETITION AND DISSOCIATION IN MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

With Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon I begin the analysis of a series of films. In Chapter 1 Kaplan identifies this film as an early example of a ‘trauma cinema’. Here I reinforce that assertion through an examination of Deren’s own theoretical writing on film, the writing of others on Meshes of the Afternoon and by placing her theory and practice in relation to early developments in psychopathology and the British avant-garde between the wars. This returns the discussions of Chapters 1 and 2. Firstly, an appraisal of the critical commentary on this film revisits many of the same critics that outline the relationship between trauma and screen studies in Chapter 1. Secondly, identifying Deren’s relationship to psychopathology recalls the early developments in trauma research reviewed in Chapter 2 so that these two histories are viewed through the prism of Deren’s practice. The feminist counter-cinema and materialist film split plays out in the two main strands of Meshes of the Afternoon’s critical analysis. This first strand of analysis emanates out of the magazine Film Culture and the organisation Anthology Film Archives in the 50s and 60s. This criticism includes the writings of Sitney, Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Michelson. The second is the feminist psychoanalytic framing of Deren’s work that emerged in the 70s and 80s that includes the critical writings of Kaplan, Mellencamp and the Camera Obscura Editorial Collective. I place Deren’s own position in relation to her work and experimental film in general in relation to these assessments. Her own arguments link to Gidal’s defence of the materialist arm of Wollen’s two avant-gardes in the 70s and correspondences between Deren’s writing on horizontal and vertical editing and Brewin’s Dual processing Model of Situationally Accessible Memory systems (SAM) and Vertically Accessible Memory systems (VAM). Deren’s own scholarship on Imagist poetry and her interest in amnesia and psychopathology stand in contrast to the psychoanalytic and surrealist readings others have placed on her work.

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I also place Meshes of the Afternoon as a critical pre-feminist text in relation to Charcot’s clinical containment and framing of women’s hysteria in the late 1800s. Deren’s acting gestures are related to those evident in Charcot’s photographs of hysterics and her empowered position as actor and creative artist is measured against the position of the hysteric patient framed by Charcot’s clinical gaze. Deren’s later anthropological work on Haitian voodoun extends the empowering trajectory of this position by contrasting the different cultural value of a public trance performance in Western and Haitian societies. It is beneficial that institutions at odds with each other critically on the nature and significance of Deren’s work can nevertheless converge to bring research material to public view. The Maya Deren Project (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1984, 1988) is the most substantive resource on Deren utilised in forming the arguments presented here. This long-term project is developed by members of the Camera Obscura editorial collective and published by the Anthology Film Archives.

Background Sitney identifies Meshes of the Afternoon as a classic and foundation work for American avant-garde cinema (Sitney 1979). Its cyclical, repetitive narrative structure pre-dates Manovich’s (Manovich 2001) concerns with database and narrative fusion in New (or digital) Media. In her own theoretical writing, Deren’s conceptualisation of vertical and horizontal editing, central to the development of this cyclical narrative structure, is related to issues of amnesia and dissociation. As noted in Chapter 1, Kaplan names this work as an example of a cinema of the witnessing creative non-victim that she identifies as particularly productive in performing trauma. For her Meshes produces a visual correlative to the subjective, emotional and visual experience of trauma, leaving the situation uncertain and to be deduced by the viewer. That is, the entire world of the film is ‘inside’ the traumatic experience (2005: 125). Deren’s reputation as key figure and founder of the American avantgarde rests on a series of films and investigations kick-started with this work, on her promotional and touring activity for her own and other’s work, her active personal and political presence in the New York artist and film community and her developing theoretical arguments for ‘individual’ film in opposition to what she refers to as an ‘industrial’ cinema (Deren 1965b). Highlighting its seminal historical position Sitney’s Visionary Film (1979) opens with a detailed discussion of Meshes in relation to Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s French surrealist collaboration Un Chien

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Andalou (1928). Sitney describes it as a psycho-drama and trance film: ‘as psycho-drama Meshes of the Afternoon is the inward exploration of both Deren and Hammid’ (1979: 18). Dwoskin also describes this film as surreal and a juxtaposition between dream and reality (Dwoskin 1975: 41). Eleanora Derenkowsky, shortened by her father to Deren, migrated to the United States from Kiev with her Jewish parents in 1922 at age 5. Her father worked as a psychiatrist. She became active in the Young People’s Socialist League and in 1939 obtained her master’s in English literature from Smith College. ‘For her Master’s thesis she was interested in how the French Symbolists (Baudelaire and others) had influenced AngloAmerican poets (Pound and T. S. Eliot)’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1984: 302). From 1940 to 1942 she worked as choreographer Katherine Dunham’s secretary, meeting her collaborator on Meshes of the Afternoon émigré Alexander (Sasha) Hammid. Hammid was already an accomplished photographer, having also worked as cameraman and collaborator on a number of anti-fascist documentaries in Czechoslovakia and Europe before ‘escaping’ to America. These documents were ‘mainly about fighting and conflict, human beings under stress’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 19). Like the typical migrant, Deren was multi-lingual: ‘When I speak French, I speak it with a Russian accent, they tell me’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1984: 471). Extending her father’s gesture of shortening the family name, Deren changed her first name to Maya, the name of the Hindu goddess of illusion, launching her film career with this re-branding not long after her father’s death. The inheritance paid for the camera. Meshes of the Afternoon was shot by the couple while living in a bungalow in Kings Road, Hollywood. It is unclear what stage their relationship had reached. Ute Holl refers to the film as their honeymoon experiment (Holl 2001: 154) while Brakhage, film artist, writer and friend whose own work is strongly influenced by Deren’s, speculates that their relationship, which ended in divorce, was already unravelling: ‘Perhaps, too, ‘meshes’ is a simple pun on ‘mess’; certainly Maya’s and Sasha’s lives together must have devolved to this point by then’ (Brakhage 1989: 95).

The Film In her writing and promotional material Deren is very specific about the meaning of her work. She prefers the term subconscious to the psychoanalytic unconscious. Michelson and Sitney later outline her interest in consciousness as a general premise for experimental film and specifically for structuralist film. She states her interest in Meshes as

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documenting the process from effect to affect: This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event that could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it produces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience (Deren 1965a: 1).

For Deren this is a real experience rather than a symbolic one: ‘the protagonist does not suffer, of which the world outside remains independent, if not oblivious; on the contrary, she is, in actuality, destroyed by an imaginative action’ (Deren in Stauffacher 1947: 58). Deren’s thinking about the tension between what she called vertical and horizontal development is demonstrated in the following outline of Meshes of the Afternoon. This summary outlines three vertical ‘splits’ that occur in the main character and five iterations of that ‘simple and casual incident’ that the film repeats and dissects. This systemic structure is built up through a dialogic pattern between narrative and poetry, a polarity that Michelson interprets as ‘positing dis-junctiveness against linearity’ (Michelson 1979: 632). At Meshes’ beginning, Deren, acting in her own film, walks down a path to pick up a flower. A draped hooded figure is glimpsed turning a corner ahead. The young woman’s profile is only captured as shadow. After knocking on a flat’s door, her dropped key falls in slow motion down the concrete steps onto the path. On subsequently entering the house the camera, from Deren’s point of view, settles on a table with a loaf of bread and knife. Through a jump cut in close-up the knife jumps out of the loaf. The young woman climbs the stairs past an off the hook telephone. As wind blows through curtains, a turning record player is arrested. She sits in a comfortable lounge chair in front of the window. This ushers in a wider-angle view out of the window onto the path introduced at the film’s start. With heightened music, a shot of the path through a ‘telescopic’ tube is followed by a close up of slowly closing eyes. The seated woman watches herself chase the hooded figure on the path in third person, and so, the sequence begins again. In this second varied scan the camera shifts away from the woman’s first person point of view to move ‘with’ her. The hooded figure turns to reveal a mirror for a face. The young woman’s face is now evident, entering the flat without a key, the young woman’s face is now visible, and the knife replaces the telephone on the stairs. Climbing the stairs in slow motion she falls through a curtain to land on the bed. The phone is on the bed, the knife, with her reflection, is revealed from under the sheets.

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The move back downstairs is shot for effect in disjointed motion to the point that the woman appears to be ‘above’ the action when she comes across herself sleeping in the lounge chair. This second ‘floating’ persona turns off the record player and goes to the window to watch another, perhaps third, version of herself chasing the hooded figure down the path again. The third woman extracts a key from her mouth and enters the house with a key and this time catches sight of the hooded figure inside the house, placing a flower on the bed, near the knife. From a shot of the knife the camera pans to the ‘original’ sleeping woman in the lounge chair (#1). The narrative again repeats. The camera alone watches the woman once more fruitlessly pursue the hooded figure down the path. The key comes from the woman’s mouth and turns into a held knife as she (#4) enters the house. Woman #2 and #3 are seated at the table to receive her (#4). She (#2) feels her neck, holds the key and with a protective gesture places her hand across her face. #3 repeats these actions. #4 with a black palm picks up the key that turns into the knife and rises from the table wearing goggles. With deft editing cuts her five footsteps land in sequence on beach sand, vegetation, earth, concrete and finally on the indoor rug, placing her (#4), ready to stab, in front of the sleeping self (#1) in the lounge chair. The ‘originating’ persona wakes and repeats the protective hand gesture as she sees a man (Hammid) over her, not the goggled knifewielding #4. As Hammid and Deren (#1) go upstairs, a glance back at the table finds it undisturbed with the knife and loaf in place. ‘Hammid’ picks up the flower from the bed and places the phone on the receiver. Deren lies beside the flower that is again on the bed. Sitting next to her he strokes her body. The flower becomes a knife with which she stabs him. Astute editing suggests that his face, at which she thrusts, becomes a mirror that breaks to fall on a beach. Waves break over the shattered pieces. We have moved to another reality, another space. The originating sequence is again reprised. In this final re-iteration the man (Hammid) walks down the path. There is no hooded figure. He picks up the flower, enters the house with his key and the camera pans to the final shot of the woman in the chair, with a throat wound, amid broken glass, blood and seaweed around her neck.

Analysis Like peeling away an onion’s skin, each replay lays bare additional meanings. The ‘splitting’ that is ‘acted out’ by the four ‘personas’ during each replay reveal multiple perspectives in dialogue with each other. The

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film ends with an ambiguous image, which re-integrates the four personas in a vortex of signification. I undertake three strands of analysis of Meshes here. Firstly the horizontal-vertical structure or system of the film is placed in relation to Brewin’s VAM-SAM dual processing memory system. Secondly the splitting or cloning of the main character is placed in relation to Janet’s concept of Dissociation and thirdly the final image is related to the Imagist ‘vortex’ and then the traumatic flashback and information rich Situationally Accessible Memory (SAM).

1. Vertical-Horizontal The film’s cyclical structure reflects Deren’s theorising around ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ attacks (Sitney 1970: 173 ff) performed in her editing strategies. The ‘horizontal’ axis unfolds an event along its cause and effect development. The ‘vertical’ axis plumbs the same event in greater intensity from multiple perspectives. For Deren this is an interplay between drama and poetry: What I called horizontal development is more or less of a narrative development, such as occurs in drama from action to action, and that a vertical development such as occurs in poetry is a plunging down (Deren in Sitney 1970: 183).

There is evidence that Deren’s horizontal and vertical conceptualisations emerged out of an interest in psychopathology. Although most commentators acknowledge the originality of Deren’s vertical-horizontal split and its role in framing her practice, it is not an idea generally built on within theoretical discourse on avant-garde cinema. At times it is openly dismissed. It is a concept historically recognised rather than utilised and rarely analysed, although R. Bruce Elder does identify this dichotomy as a convincing foundation for communicating immediacy in film (Elder 1989: 424). All the filmmakers discussed in this text have some connection back to Deren but for only one does this play out directly through this dichotomy. Breer’s career was augmented by winning Maya Deren’s Creative Film Foundation Awards for Recreation (dir. Robert Breer, 1956) in 1957 and for Inner and Outer Space (dir. Robert Breer, 1960) in 1961 (MacDonald 1992: 32), James Benning was inspired to make films after seeing Meshes (MacDonald 1992: 223) but only Tscherkassky uses the vertical-horizontal split directly as a theoretical foundation for his found footage practice (Beghin, Delorme & Lavin 2002). Vertical development, as Elder suggests, is about immediacy, it is performative, sensory and body centred. Its direct effect has affinities with

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the fairground joyride connected to the birth of cinema available in Tom Gunning’s notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’, where an attraction, like its fairground namesake, imparts ‘sensual or psychological impact’ (Gunning 1990: 59) on the viewer. But the most emphatic connection emphasised here for Deren’s vertical-horizontal concept is with Brewin’s Dual processing model. This outcome from the neurological research mapped out in Chapter 2 shares a history with Deren’s psychopathological influences; it is a homology that consequently also connects Deren’s dichotomy back to Wollen’s two avant-gardes. Such homologies reinforce the trauma credentials of Meshes. The following examples from Deren’s writing tease out such overlaps and her understanding of amnesia in more detail. This reveals a depth of Deren’s understanding of this ‘traumatic’ process, the nature of the SAM memory systems in particular and how VAM and SAM interact. Two substantive passages from Deren’s writing on the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ are presented. One arises from her theoretical writing in An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film published in 1946 where it is part of a discussion on memory functioning in human beings and animals. The later instance is from Deren’s contribution to a symposium on ‘Poetry and the Film’ organised by Cinema 16 in 1953 where Deren applies it directly to narrative development in cinema. Michelson has documented Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas’s disappointing dismissive reaction to these ideas at that event (Michelson 2001). The context of these two passages supports a psychopathological source for Deren’s thinking, further supported later in this chapter by Deren’s relationship to her father and her writing on possession and dance. Placing this second instance first, Deren describes this vertical axis as communicating the complexity and feelings of a particularly critical moment, as poetic: The poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramification of a moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring with what it feels like or what it means. A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement (Deren in Sitney 1970: 173-4).

Poetry’s magic of turning the invisible visible suggests the process of recovery from trauma while its complex of layered affect conjures the flashback’s intense return. Trauma arises when events are denied, hidden or erased from memory to be reclaimed in recovery (Herman 1992). The traumatic act has been described as invisible, as unspeakable, unknown or

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absent. As Laub and Auerhahn note ‘erecting barriers against knowing is often the first response to such trauma’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 290). Deren describes the horizontal-vertical interaction as an oscillation between drama and poetry: In Shakespeare you have the drama moving forward on a ‘horizontal’ plane of development, of one circumstance-one action- leading to another, and this delineates the character. Every once [in] a while, however, he arrives at a point of the action where he wants to illuminate the meaning [of] this moment of drama, and at that moment, he builds a pyramid or investigates it ‘vertically’, if you will, so that you have a ‘horizontal’ development with periodic ‘vertical’ investigations, which are the poems, which are the monologues (Deren in Sitney 1970: 174).

This describes how implicit and explicit memory systems interact in Brewin’s model (Brewin 2001). VAM, like Deren’s dramatic horizontal plane, is contextual, linear, conveys cause and effect and is time dependent, whereas SAM, like Deren’s poetic vertical plane, is situationally triggered, sensory, body-centred, information rich and immersive. Deren’s description of the relationship between drama and poetry describes how these two systems interconnect and support each other during normal memory processing. Normally we can recount conversations we have had even though there are some parts of an event that remain unknown or perplexing. Neurologically amnesia occurs in trauma when no contextual VAM tracks are laid down. Deren’s description of amnesia as leaving a man reduced to ‘immediate perception only’ (Deren 1946: 11) is SAM-like. In the following passage Deren’s reveals an understanding of the relationship between horizontal and vertical memory systems: In the process of evolving conscious memory man had had to forfeit those complex instinctual patterns which substitute, or rather, antecede, memory in animals. The infant kitten, out of itself- by a process of ‘vertical’ inevitabilities- and through its own immediate experience of reality, will become a complete cat. But a human infant, out of itself, will not develop into its proper adulthood. It must learn beyond its instincts, and often in opposition to them, by imitation, observation, experimentation, reflectionin sum, by the complex ‘horizontal’ process of memory (Deren 1946: 11).

Here is a trace of a pre-reflective space and Claparède’s two separate memory systems (Claparède 1911/1995: 375) upon which Janet constructed dissociation. These insights into the processes informing amnesia are psychopathological rather than psychoanalytic. In this light Deren’s dismissal of psychoanalytic readings of Meshes is founded on scholarship

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and medical research rather than merely a personal, narcissist or artistic aversion.

2. Splitting In cycling from one iteration to the next in Meshes, a split occurs forming an additional persona. By film’s end four personas represent four points of view. As an element of dissociation the split is a significant concept in trauma theory. In Deren’s poem ‘Death by Amnesia’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 65), the different parts of personality at odds with each other predict the splitting, dissociative phenomena enacted in Meshes. This poem evolves from a newspaper account of a man who loses his memory and collapses in an L.A. street. To create the effect of four personas in the same room Deren combines deft, strategic editing with the trick effect of double exposure and masking. This technique has gained currency in the digital age, where it is known as cloning. Given that the Hydra was a mythological many-headed serpent, when Le Grice names digital media Hydra-media (Le Grice 2001: 297-309) he alludes to the unique attribute of repeatability in digital media manifest in the copy and the clone. For Manovich repeatability is one of New Media’s defining characteristics. The technique of cloning enters the mainstream with seamless technical virtuosity in the digital photographic work of Martin Liebscher (Wagner & Liebscher 2007), in the digital renta-crowd scenes in the fantasy adventure Lord of the Rings Trilogy (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001-3) and in Michel Gondry’s Music Video for Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World (dir. Michel Gondry, 2002). The psychology and magic of cloning is further explored in the mainstream Hollywood psychodrama, The Prestige (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006). Apart from this aspect of repeatability, Le Grice identifies the entire structure of Meshes as predictive of computer-based non-linearity (Le Grice 2001: 319). There is a consensus amongst researchers working within both psychopathological and psychoanalytic frameworks that splitting is key to the formation of traumatic memories. Splitting allows victims of trauma to distance themselves from overwhelming experience and occurs at that critical moment when the traumatic event directly impacts the body. Laub and Auerhahn name the split as integral to the most basic form of not knowing or forgetting. They describe the process of creating isolated traumatic memories that flash back unexpectedly with the full impact of the originating trauma: ‘the most tangible form of knowing trauma is, in its crudest undigested, and unassimilated version, like a split off foreign

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body, casting a perpetual shadow on life events‘ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 299). Such a split can impact on personality structure and in extreme cases precipitates Dissociative Identity Disorder. Herman identifies splitting as a dissociative form of personality organisation operating as a way of coping with childhood trauma: ‘The alters make it possible for the child victim to cope resourcefully with abuse while keeping both the abuse and her coping strategies outside of ordinary awareness’ (Herman 1992: 103). ‘Splitting’ partitions off uncomfortable feelings. Contemporary researchers of PTSD understand that ‘Dissociation allows people to maintain their existing schemata, while separate states of mind process the traumatic event’ (Van der Kolk, Van der Hart & Marmar 1996: 317). Meshes performs these processes. Deren’s description that her film shows how the response to an event is developed, interpreted and elaborated in the subconscious ((Deren 1965a: 1) is close to the view originating out of PTSD research. Paul Dell and James Eisenhower (1990) name three core personalities within Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Identity Disorder). These are fearful, protective and vengeful. These attitudes are identifiable in the gestures displayed by the multiple personas that face off in Meshes (and also visible in the gestures of the hysterics in Charcot’s photographs to be discussed later in this chapter). In Meshes with the three personas at the table we see one looking around, another gestures with a hand across her face and another persona wields a knife. These performances communicate the same traits of fear, protection and anger that Dell and Eisenhower identify. Within psychopathology, the process of splitting is central to Janet’s concept of dissociation. Dissociation was previously discussed in this way in Chapter 2. It is an out-of-body experience which Van der Kolk describes as an event where ‘people develop a split between an ‘observing self’ and the ‘experiencing self’’ (Van der Kolk 1996c: 192). This observing and experiencing or mind-body gap is also present in Deren’s horizontal-vertical, linear and poetic dichotomy. This gap is also critical in the historic splits in both trauma research and screen studies previously reviewed. The first split occurred between psychoanalysis and psychopathology and marginalised Janet’s concept of dissociation. Whitfield states that Janet’s findings were ‘overshadowed by the denial of abuse facilitated by Freud’s Oedipal theory’ (Whitfield 1995: 110). Deren’s stake in this split is discussed in the sections on Charcot and her father. Secondly, the split in screen studies marked the emergence of a feminist political counter-cinema and marginalised a materialist film

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practice. Feminist counter-cinema appropriated psychoanalysis and the materialist practice emerged from a phenomenological tradition. In this split both avant-gardes stake a claim on Meshes. The relationship of both camps to Deren’s work is discussed in the contested space section of this chapter. Within individual trauma Laub and Auerhahn point out that the reintegration of split memories is necessary for recovery: ‘Elucidation of split-off and diffusely re-enacted memory fragments is essential in order to facilitate reconstruction of the unknown ‘traumatic’ event and comprehension of its meaning’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 300). Their hierarchy of knowing and not knowing is a stepladder of forms of remembering to such recovery. This is also Herman’s view. In her text Trauma and Recovery (Herman 1992) she maps this process. On the social or societal level this strategy of re-integration also has currency. Just as Janet’s forgotten insights were re-integrated into thinking about trauma, would it not be beneficial to a belated return for materialist film? I present an argument to that effect.

3. Vortex and spiral The ending of Meshes performs like a vortex. All meanings that arise in the film’s spiralling horizontal-vertical narrative terminate ‘all-at-once’ in its ambiguous final image. For Gregory Taylor the final image ‘thrusts ontological imbalance to the fore, severely challenging epistemological certainty by collapsing the text’s various levels of reality’ (Taylor, G 1993: 49). The British avant-garde between the wars that emphasised an image’s immediate and direct qualities and its capacity for complex and multiple meanings influenced Deren’s filmmaking practice and theory here. Such an image exhibits the qualities identified in psychopathological research into trauma and brings to mind the impact of the traumatic flashback on the senses. Jan Millsapps (Millsapps 1986) makes the case for Deren as Imagist by identifying her approach to the poetry of Eliot and Pound, the subject of Deren’s Master’s Thesis at Smith’s College. Millsapps identifies similarities in approach to interior experience in Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday and Deren’s Meshes. Pound is the major identified influence. He was involved with both the British Imagists and Vorticists in turn. For Richard Sheppard these groups constituted a more conservative arm of the European avant-garde between the wars (Sheppard 2000: 12). Millsapps identifies Pound’s preference for the direct impact of an image over its symbolic meaning and that this preference is taken up by Deren. Sheppard

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describes this impetus to experience the image in and of itself as ‘to privilege the concrete over the abstract’ (Sheppard 2000: 111). Aspects of Pound’s description of an Imagist image resurface in Brewin’s description of situational accessible memory as detail rich and experienced in the present (Hellawell & Brewin 2004: 3). Pound writes that: An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. . . It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the greatest works of art (Pound 1935: 4-5).

In stating that ‘the moment or image is valuable only insofar as its ripples spread out and encompass the richness of many moments’ (Deren 1946: 27) Deren echoes Pound’s approach and offers an apt description of her final Meshes image. Both Le Grice and Sitney use the concept of the spiral to describe the structure of Meshes (Le Grice 2001: 295; Sitney 1979: 7). The interplay between the horizontal and vertical narrative paths creates a circular or spiral trajectory within the film. Each scan or iteration of the situation adds depth and complexity and builds on the preceding one. As Le Grice states: ‘At each repetition small changes expand the spectator’s imaginary construction of the symbolic space rather like a spiral through a matrix of action images’ (Le Grice 2001: 318). Deren was aware that a repeating or circular structure moving forward through time and space becomes a spiral. In commentary triggered by little spiral paper sculptures that Hammid made to rotate under a candle’s flame, Deren remarks that ‘the spiral must be defined in terms of movement and time, whereas the circle can be defined only in terms of space’ (Deren 1980: 80). A Vortex is a compacted or flattened spiral. Both Pound and Wyndham Lewis place this image at the hub of Vorticist thinking about art. Pound stresses its performative and direct qualities: ‘the image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ (Pound 1970: 92). The following statement by Lewis describes Deren’s final Meshes image: ‘you think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist’ (Wyndham Lewis in Hunt 1926: 211). Lewis’s image articulates Meshes’ structure, of moving through a repeating swirl of views to rest on the film’s all-at-once body-centred action concentrated final image. Inside this vortex sits Deren in what she describes as her chosen moment: ‘the chosen

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moment should be of such significance that one can deduce all history from it’ (Deren in Sitney 1970: 183). Meshes morphs into cinematic form this vorticist credo. Deren’s embrace of the direct formalist approach of Imagism and Vorticism in her practice moves her towards what Gidal later articulated and developed as a ‘materialist’ anti-illusionist practice for film (Gidal 1989). For Deren art is not about parable, art presents its own unique experience: ‘a work of art creates a reality and itself constitutes an experience’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 317). Pound stresses the approach’s pre-reflective immediacy: ‘The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW’ (Pound 1914: 153). The move away from symbolism and fantasy towards the ‘direct’ is apparent in Deren’s disdain for psychoanalysis. This disdain is evident in Deren’s relation to another contemporary female artist, Anais Nin, whose autobiographical writing incorporates the psychoanalytic tradition (Holl 2001: 173). Nin embraces psychoanalysis in her art and life. Her diaries reveal the analysis she undertook to understand her relationship with her father and that one of her analysts became a lover. Nin was dissatisfied with her image in a Deren film. It was not how she imagined herself in her creative writing. Holl indicates that Deren directed a poem at Nin as a response to this disillusionment. In part Deren wrote: ‘this is no longer mirrors, but an open wound through which we face each other framed in blood’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 537). Deren’s confronting response mobilises her commitment to direct experience in art. This viscerally charged line functions as an alternative epitaph for the final image of Meshes. In turn Nin could also be incisive about Deren’s work. For Nin Deren’s ‘obsession was to employ symbolic acts but to deny that they had symbolic significance’ (Nin 1973: 135), The critical dialogue between these two independent women stresses those same ingredients of perception and analysis (the experienced and observed) at play in the manufacture of the 70s avant-garde split. Rather than metaphor Deren commits to the real and direct impact of the open wound in this face-off and in her practice generally: ‘The distinction of art is that it is neither simply an expression of pain, for example, nor an impression of pain but is itself a form which creates pain’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 17). This direct approach appropriates the British avant-garde’s critical attitude manifest in the image of multifaceted vortex. Both practices have much in common with the shock of the traumatic flashback revealed through Janet’s, Van der Kolk’s and Brewin’s

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psychopathological trauma research. Like Deren’s open wound, the flashback returns with the immediate shock of the initiating trauma and overwhelms the senses all at once. The image of the vortex displays this all-at-once impact of trauma’s stun.

Contested Space Meshes is considered a contested space not only because of the film’s ambiguous subject. The film itself is an event that has been read and reread from different politically, theoretically and culturally determined positions. There are three main clusters of often overlapping contention around Meshes that I discuss more fully. The first centres on authorship. There has always been a degree of contention about the balance and nature of the Deren-Hammid collaboration in Deren’s first film. The second area of contention is in part a feminist response to this questioning of authorship that moves into an argument about autobiography and psychoanalysis to help stake Deren’s claim. A third area concerns Deren’s own stated view of her work for which she pointedly dismissed Surrealist or Freudian readings. The feminist position is of particularly interest given its support of Deren’s ownership on the one hand coupled with a counterreading against Deren’s own aspirations on the other. Though Deren’s authorship of Meshes of the Afternoon has always been emphasised, a lack of clarity on the nature of her collaboration with Hammid and their apparently crumbling personal relationship during its making and their later split feeds debate about authorship. Brakhage goes as far as assigning authorship to Hammid: ‘Its always been assumed that ‘meshes’ was mainly her film; but from knowing her personally and from studying the film, I have good reason to know it is Sasha’s’ (Brakhage 1989: 93). Sitney considers this film co-authored, as collaboration. He assigns all technical expertise to Hammid giving him full credit for its surrealist special effects: We should remember that he photographed the whole film. Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared. The general fluidity of the camera style, the free movements, and the surrealistic effects, from slow motion to the simultaneous appearance of three Derens in the same shot, are his contribution (Sitney 1979: 10).

Mekas echoes Sitney’s assessment. He also makes the link between surrealism and Hammid’s claim to the film through trick effects: ‘surrealism was imposed upon Maya by Sasha’ (Mekas 1998: 131).

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This issue of Hammid’s authorship and influence run a course through the pages of Film Culture and its contributors (Mekas, Sitney, Brakhage) to finally settle on a wide-ranging article by Thomas Valasek (Valasek 1979) examining Hammid’s extensive filmmaking career. Film Culture nurtured that generation of film artists and writers that directly followed Deren’s lead into cultural activity, exhibition, analysis and production. The publication’s emergence is in part a testament to her initiating activity. As with each emerging generation there was a need to set themselves apart from her earlier work. It is within this context that the argument for Hammid’s surrealist influence is first inspected and played out. In terms of cultural activity and critical analysis Hammid himself remains mute, his silence reinforcing his perceived role as technician. Deren’s self-made public profile and relentless screening activity continually reinforces her claim on the film. Deren inserted herself emphatically inside the dialogue between audience and film, between viewer and viewed. As Brakhage indicates: ‘Maya Deren became recognised as someone incredible and extraordinary in film. From these public presentations sprang all kinds of possibilities for film’ (Brakhage 1989: 94). In later life Hammid put on the record Deren’s primary role without completely acquiescing authorship: ‘I always worked better when I had somebody who sparked some idea. If it weren’t for Maya, I would never have made a film as Meshes’ (Alexander Hammid in Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 115). Hammid’s role as a ‘professional’ documentary cameraman in places of conflict is conversant with the act of witnessing, a role he also performs as cameraman (and partner) in Meshes. Using Laub and Auerhahn’s forms of traumatic memory (Laub & Auerhahn 1993), Meshes can be interpreted as Hammid’s witnessing of Deren’s metaphoric performance. Hammid witnesses a metaphoric enactment, not any originating trauma or event. This remains mute or invisible in Meshes. Deren resists such knowing. Laub and Auerhahn make the point that metaphoric expression ‘is a characteristic element of psychoanalytic work’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 300), a position taken up by feminist discourse but resisted by Deren. Valasek identifies an early Czech Experimental film by Hammid. Aimless Walk (Bezúþelná Procházka) (dir. Alexandr Hackenschmied Alexander Hammid, 1930), edited by Jochen Wolf, includes a key sequence where the film’s character appears twice in the same shot. Valasek notes: ‘Hammid says that the idea of separating one human being into two has always fascinated him’ (Valasek 1979: 255). In Aimless Walk this doubling signifies a split between the sensibility of urban speed and a duration that persists within the rural landscape.

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Valasek attempts settling Meshes’ authorship: ‘The fact is that none of Hammid’s films before Meshes, or after, is as intensely emotional as Meshes of the Afternoon. It is apparent therefore, that, notwithstanding Hammid’s previous exploration of the concept, Maya Deren significantly influenced tone and mood of Meshes’ (Valasek 1979: 284). Yet Valasek’s comment that ‘film space becomes inseparable from the action’ (: 285) in Aimless Walk throws a lifeline to Hammid’s claim of authorship as such an ‘inseparability’ is a key aesthetic and structural feature of Meshes. Given surrealism’s role in Hammid’s claims, Deren’s own aversion to, and public rejection of surrealist readings of her work may be a practical or political response to these contestations. Kaplan’s observation that Meshes alludes to the gender struggles following World War II offers another way into a collaborative reading of the film (Kaplan 2005: 125). From this perspective the film reads the death of a relationship. Metaphorically or metonymically the film registers a dyad’s split into two entities that go their separate ways. With the invention of Deren’s powerful public persona Hammid’s role in the making of the film is overshadowed and eventually denied. This process itself describes dissociation. Deren’s work has garnered its most substantial critical attention since her death in 1961 from feminist commentators drawn to Deren’s success in erecting a cultural profile when such activity was clearly male dominated. This psychoanalytically oriented feminist discourse on her work often questions the gender prejudices of Deren’s contemporaries and makes the case for autobiographic readings of Meshes. Theresa Geller, for example, responds to Mekas’s assessment of Deren as an ‘adolescent film poet’ (Mekas 1970: 23) and her ‘artificial’ depth (1970: 25) through Turim as ‘symptomatic of gender prejudices’ (1992: 201). Geller names Meshes as ‘a feminist intervention and re-appraisal of the patriarchal discourses at work in early European modernist film’ (Geller: 149). She places this view in contrast to Sitney’s promotion of the film as exemplar of that tradition. Geller identifies Sitney’s ‘unproblematized’ reading as exhibiting ‘an implicit discomfort with the film’s critical engagement with gender relations’ (Geller: 149). Marilyn Fabe also identifies this resistance in Sitney and Brakhage’s emphasising of Hammid’s contribution and clearly puts an autobiographical argument for Deren as the originating source of this ‘collaboration’ based on the psychological state and circumstances of Deren’s life (Fabe 1996: 138). Fabe also takes up a psycho-analytic reading of Meshes through her question: ‘what desire does a woman dread?’ (Fabe 1996:137), and frames part of her analysis in a ‘Psycho-Biographical Afterword’.

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Fischer-Hornung (2005) and Geller (2006) make the case for an autobiographical reading. Geller utilises Elisabeth Bruss’s criteria to make her case as Meshes contains: ‘the unity of subjectivity and subject matterthe implied identity of author, narrator and protagonist on which classic autobiography depends’ (Bruss 1980: 297). By identifying correspondence that prefigures the record player sequence in Meshes’ second iteration Kaplan (2005: 128) enlists Deren’s own words to support ‘autobiography’. This account involves terrifying moments of ‘possession’ triggered in Deren while dancing alone in her apartment. ‘I ran to the phonograph and lifted the needle and grabbed my head with both my hands to stop it. I felt terribly exhausted and sank into a chair’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 472). While Sitney and others interpreted this film as an apprenticeship to Hammid into the technical aspects of filmmaking, Deren’s poetry is clearly hers and open to an uncontested feminist autobiographical interpretation against Deren’s own wishes. Geller argues persuasively for a central role for Deren in any feminist revision of film history and remarks on the discounting by feminist scholars such as Rabinovitz who see Deren as uninformed of the impact of cultural institutions on her, having ‘constructed a position of resistance within traditional roles’ (Rabinovitz 1991: 5). More importantly Geller identifies Mulvey’s assignment of Deren to dance and avant-garde pioneer (Mulvey 1979: 6) rather than as a ‘legitimate founder of feminist film practice’ (Geller 2006: 154) as a move that benefits Mulvey directly, enabling ‘Mulvey to emerge from this void-along with her European counterparts Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Ackerman- as the necessary integrators of avant-garde film praxis and feminist polemics’ (Geller 2006: 154). This is a critical area and moment that is identified by Mulvey as a ‘meeting between the melodramatic tradition and psycho-analysis’ (Mulvey 1979: 6), a convergence Geller finds clearly evident in Meshes of the Afternoon. If Geller’s naming of Deren as a founder of a feminist film practice has traction Deren may be better aligned with that generation of women to which Freud’s Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) enlisted. As indicated in Chapter 2 this co-founder of the ‘talking cure’ became an activist for women’s rights yet demonstrated, like Deren, a guarded and reticent attitude towards the psychoanalysis she unwittingly helped form. Perceptively, Mellencamp inside her effective critique of Sitney’s discounting of Deren offers that ‘Meshes is about the female subjectivity divided against itself, held in the violent and domestic contradictions of sexual difference’ (Mellencamp 1990: 33), yet marks Deren as ‘knowledgeable about psychoanalysis’ (Mellencamp 1990: 34) when Deren emphatically rejects what she calls ‘Freudians’. In this way Mellencamp embraces in

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turn that same accusation of opportunity that she herself levels at Sitney, in her pointing out that ‘Deren’s death silences her opposition’ (Mellencamp 1990: 35). The discussion about the vortex, the spiral and her relationship to Anais Nin indicate that Deren herself was more interested in a meeting between melodrama and Vorticism (or Imagism) than psychoanalysis. Holl also points to Deren’s preference for perceptual and visceral effect rather than psychoanalytic symptom (Holl 2001: 160). Utilising Deren’s notes, Millsapps puts this view. Deren’s own notes to organisers of film screenings of her work state that ‘Under no conditions are these films to be announced or publicized as surrealist or Freudian’ (quoted in Millsapps 1986: 26) and emphatically states in a lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1951 that the ‘work must not be dismembered with some system as Freudian’ (quoted in Millsapps 1986: 26) For Deren her film was created out of ‘elements of reality- people, places and objects-… they are not symbols in the sense of referring to some meaning or value outside the film- to be interpreted according to some established system or psychology’ (Deren in Stauffacher 1947: 58). Deren places her work in the realm of Imagist poetry and research into perceptual processes and mental activity that she saw as uniquely enabled by cinema. Over and over, she makes the same point. It is not about symbolic representation: ‘When you see a bird or tree in my films it represents a bird or a tree, not something else altogether’ (Deren quoted in: Patterson 1951: 6). Such fragments in Deren’s approach are before her time. This reductive view predicts painting’s assault on illusionism in 50s and 60s New York (Frampton, Hollis. 1983: 62). It passes through Abstract Expressionism and later Minimalism to be encapsulated in Frank Stella’s celebrated comment: ‘what you see is what you see’ (Kramer 1967: 39). The subject of the next chapter, Breer’s practice of compacted perceptual effects, is enmeshed in this method and Benning’s structuralist work, the focus of the chapter after that, takes its initiating cues from Deren and Minimalism. If Deren is to be read through psychoanalysis as autobiographical, Deren’s resistance or denial to such a reading needs to be acknowledged and incorporated. Reading Deren through trauma promises this. Caruth has suggested that the impact of a traumatic event moves through the ripples of repetition ‘suggesting a larger relation to the event which extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known and is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing’ (Caruth 1997: 208). Deren presents such an ambiguous image, an un-containability at the heart of trauma and hysteria

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that keeps coming back and being rewritten.

Charcot Not only are contested readings of its situation or events played out inside Meshes itself through a number of iterations and points of view, but there are also contestations around authorship and debates and counter-readings about the film’s historical and critical currency. It is as if this maelstrom of contestations itself reflects the film’s own internal layered psychic dance at some ‘meta’ level. This indeterminacy is also present inside Charcot’s hysteria. It manifests in the weekly scientific enactments of hysteria by his female patients from Paris’s Salpêtrière Mental Hospital in the late 1800s and it registers in the clinically assembled photographic series of these hysterics. These performances predict Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and later Fluxus art events. The photographic series is an early formulation of Manovich’s database and Flusser’s ‘technical image’, both central to an understanding of digital media as articulated in Chapter 3. In fact Charcot’s hysteria gains a certain resilience and mobility by straddling the object-subjective realms through its multi-platform delivery as authoritative clinical invention, public performance and conceptually arranged image field. According to Van der Kolk, Charcot had proposed that the ‘symptoms of his hysterical patients had their origins in histories of trauma’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 52). Charcot’s hysteria has been identified as problematic and many on its list of symptoms migrate into contemporary conceptions of trauma and PTSD. Lisa Apignanesi notes the chameleon like nature of Hysteria’s diagnosis. This hysteria ‘described a sexualised madness full of contradictions, one which could play all feminine parts and take on a dizzying variety of symptoms, though none had any real, detectable base in the body’ (Apignanesi 2008: 126). For Apignanesi hysterics embodied a desire for sexual freedom ‘both for herself and for the fascinated men who watch and help to invent her’ (2008: 126). The hysteric arises out of a ‘productive’ dialogue between the viewer and the viewed. The contestations about authorship and ownership of Meshes resurface here and again play themselves out along gender lines but with a different outcome. At the very least in Deren’s case Meshes problematic authorship is publicly recognised as hers. Charcot takes clinical ownership of a female body caged inside a clinical construct arrived at through a relentless male gaze. Both Janet and Freud attest to Charcot’s persistent scrutiny. For Janet, Charcot ‘was carried along by his habits as clinician’ (Janet 1907: 17).

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‘Nothing is left to chance’, said Charcot; on the contrary, all happens according to rules, always the same, common to private and hospital practice, applicable to all countries, to all times, to all races. He naturally sought to discover this determinism and these general laws of hysteria’ (Janet 1907: 17). And Charcot’s scrutiny was relentless as Freud also attests in his obituary to Charcot: ‘he was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel’, a man who sees…He used to look again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him’. (Freud quoted in Apignanesi 2008: 128). A vortex of images coalesces into a concept. This gaze, one could say, finds it technological equivalent in the camera, and the ‘new nosological pictures’ (Apignanesi 2008: 128) that emerged find their equivalent representation in the field of symptomatically arranged ‘technical’ images that Charcot’s team constructed. Georges Didi-Huberman levels an accusation of slipperiness at Charcot’s reading of hysteria and stresses hysteria’s un-containability, naming Charcot’s causes of hysteria as ‘a chaotic ragbag of causes, again. A dissemination of causality: circulus vitiosus. But is not this the very same causality, specific and strategic, as it were of hysterical causality?’ (DidiHuberman 2003 [1982]: 72). It is as if the elusive checklist of Charcot’s hysteria is itself hysterically un-nameable. Even for Janet, making the case for a ‘psychological fact’ rather than a ‘physical fact’ ruminates that ‘no doubt, our types of hysterical phenomena are ephemeral like his’ (Janet 1907: 21). Didi-Huberman had also noted that ‘time is stubborn in the cryptology of the symptom: it always bends a little, ravelling and unravelling, but, in a certain sense, it remains stubborn- very stubborn in hysteria (DidiHuberman 2003 [1982]: 26) and he laments that ‘if only hysteria could have been found, somewhere. But nothing was; because hysterics are everything at once’ (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]: 72), reminding us of the all at once Imagist vortex harnessed by Deren at the end of her film and her commitment to poetry’s plunging down. In this sense the hysterical resides inside Deren’s ‘vertical’, inside the poetic and outside time. In terms of this famous photographic record assembled at Salpêtrière, whether coached or of their own volition, Charcot’s hysterics performed for the camera. Apignanesi makes the link to the actor in cinema for these hysterics: ‘like the early silent film stars, who may well have imitated their impressions, went through the dramatic paces of their condition for the camera’ (Apignanesi 2008: 129). This field of gestures, cloaked in the methods of scientific taxonomy and observation and the technical virtue of photographic realism re-frame the medieval personifications of the Vices

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and the Virtues that Edwin Panofsky identifies in the primitive stereotyping of early cinema. For Panofsky such ‘fixed iconography… was introduced to aid understanding and provide the audience with basic facts with which to comprehend the narrative’ (Johnston 1977: 408). Three historical traces converge in this pre-cinematic database of transportable images. We have a technology historically poised to usher in moving images, a core database of gesture and emotion to resource cinematic melodrama as it arrives, and critically, we also have a clinician at the heart of its directorship whose mentoring work inspires Freud’s ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896) (Freud, S 1962b), and spawns psychoanalysis itself. This is a core gestation point, a convergent moment set to belatedly (in Caruth’s sense of the word) remind us of Mulvey’s earlier quoted remark about the encounter between melodrama and psychoanalysis in the development of feminist film theory in the 1970s to say nothing of the scopophilic male gaze itself so heavily and articulately theorised by Mulvey herself in her critical historical text: ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1975). Didi-Huberman intimates an essential core in Charcot’s dialogues with his patients that speak to this tussle between trauma’s un-speakability and un-containability. In its mirroring dialogue between Charcot and ‘Hysteria’, it is as if science in its pulling apart and dissecting, its opening up of the toy to see how its apparatus performs, is in co-dependant accord with that state of hysteria, itself a pulled apart and dissected or fragmented psychic state. Could it be a way of being in the social for the hysteric, one that continually reflects back to others (including Charcot) their own point of view, like a broken record, amplifying any scrutiny in a kind of biofeedback loop back to the scrutineer? And Meshes already responds to this relationship between actress and auteur in Charcot’s demonstrations by placing this dialogue not between the performed hysterical body of Charcot’s patients and Charcot’s directed cues but within herself. Deren is both actress/performer/dancer and director encompasses both the viewer and the viewed in her works of art in the same way that Cindy Sherman does in photography in which Foster has identified ‘a return to the real’ (Foster, H 1996). This question about reflection may also be part of the continued fascination of Meshes, its continued ability to reflect back to successive generations essential elements of their own being-in-the-world. And such a question may also open up to Sobchack’s phenomenological argument expressed in Address of the Eye (Sobchack 1992) that the action is not in the film but in the dynamic to and fro between the ‘viewer and the viewed’ a dynamic that she argues is neglected within psychoanalytic film criticism. Certainly it is

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within the social that Deren eventually frames her own response to this dynamic between viewer and viewed, into her study of Haitian voodoun as ‘culturally disciplined states of possession’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 108).

Father The influence of her father’s career on Deren’s critical thinking helps explain her resistance to psychoanalytic readings of her work and further supports a reading of Meshes as a response to Charcot’s medical framing of the female body. Brakhage notes the importance of her father’s approval: ‘Maya also had an overwhelming desire to create something that would meet with his approval and respect’ (Brakhage 1989: 92). Maya Deren’s father Salomon Deren was a psychiatrist with psychopathological rather than psychoanalytic credentials. The Maya Deren Project’s commentary on Deren’s relationship to her father relate back to those concepts of dissociation, shell shock and amnesia that pre-occupied Charcot, Janet and Freud and that our previous review of the investigation into overwhelming experience indicate were at the heart of early research into hysteria: He taught Deren a great deal about psychopathological phenomena, as is evidenced in her later writings, where she often mentioned aberrations of consciousness such as fugue states shell shock and amnesia, on the one hand, and culturally disciplined states of dissociation such as possession, trance, hypnosis on the other (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 108).

Salomon studied at the Psycho-neurological Institute of Vladimir Bekhterev, who studied with Charcot in Paris. Through his interest in possession, hypnosis and trance Bekhterev is, like Charcot, dedicated to proving the objectivity of mental activity and enlists the movie camera as a tool in this venture. Holl indicates that in 1916 Vertov had conducted a series of experiments at the Institute (Holl 2001: 157). As Charcot’s photographic database failed to deliver ‘hysteria’ objectively, Beckterev’s use of moving images to record mental activity also foundered. With digital image scanning technology capable of sourcing blood and oxygen flow Beckterev may have felt better placed today than with film. Although Deren’s Haitian trajectory takes her out of medical containment’s orbit, when compared to medical research Deren’s Meshes presents as a commendable presentation of hysteria’s performance, produced by Kaplan and Atwood’s ‘creative non-victim’. Here again, such ambiguity Deren performs a slipperiness Didi-Huberman locates in

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hysteria. As discussed in Chapter 2 the quest for the objective recording of mental activity in relation to hysteria and trauma returns in the 90s, facilitated by the explosion of neuro-imaging techniques that combines the capacities of the microscope, x-ray, the movie camera and the computer to provide moving images of brain activity in real time. It is that research upon which Brewin’s Dual processing model is founded which finds some homologies with Vladimir Lerner and Elizier Witztum’s observations on Bekhterev’s conception of two psychological systems: Bekhterev assumed the existence of two psychological systems; subjective, whose basic method of study is introspection, and objective (conditioned reflex). Thus before Watson, Bekhterev had founded an objective psychology without recognising it as such (Lerner & Witztum 2005: 1506).

The presence of the works of Eugen Bleuler and Charles D. Fox’s Psychopathology of Hysteria (1913) in Deren’s personal library (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 637) further indicates Deren’s commitment to a psychopathological view of hysteria nurtured by her father. Bleuler is recognised for naming schizophrenia and developing the idea of ambivalence for that contested sensation of ‘mixed feelings’ that Deren performs in the multi-persona scenes of Meshes. Fox’s work focuses on areas of hysteria that today could be more specifically attached to debates around trauma and PTSD: ‘Traumatic hysteria should be considered the result of the acute mental shock of an accident’ (Fox 1913: 39). Her later writings and her trajectory towards voodoun indicate that concepts around trauma on hysteria, trance and amnesia continually occupied Deren. In Meshes Deren enters and performs those psychic states that are the focus of her father’s professional practice and interest. In Haiti she enmeshes herself in a community that places these states at the vortex of public life.

Haiti Through the public success of Meshes Deren has the opportunity to go offshore to Haiti to investigate and document her long-standing interest in voodoun dance and ritual. This gives her a glimpse, widely sought but denied to many of her generation, of a fulfilling and absorbing experience of community, of what Michelson refers to as ‘collective enterprise grounded in the mythic’ (Michelson 1980: 49) and McLuhan as ‘using the ground or the total culture itself as a figure for attention’ (McLuhan &

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McLuhan 1988: 109). A short trip there extends to eighteen months. What does such work and experience bring to Deren’s practice and a traumatic reading of her work? I discuss three areas. One is her relationship to the mountain of film material shot during her eighteen month stay in Haiti, the second area is her embrace of voodoun practice on her return to New York and the final area is the critical writing that contextualizes voodoun with western interpretations of possession. Firstly Deren brought back with her from Haiti film documentation of Haitian rituals and over another two and a half years of returns shot even more material. She encounters great difficulty giving the thirty thousand feet of colour film a form she is happy with. Brakhage states that the material overwhelmed her (Brakhage 1989: 100). Her editing and her foraging for a structure to contextualise the material, the continual going over and re-organizing through ten years of treatments, scripts and storyboards was never resolved. The inability to integrate this material into a narrative appears traumatic, similar to the ‘disconnect’ of the flashback dialling into a network that was never built. The same re-iterative loop constructed in Meshes is evident in this situation. There it spirals into a ‘defeat’ that resides in the personal bodilycentred final image, here it is left unspoken. Brakhage and Michelson read this abandonment differently. Brakhage’s view was that Deren herself did not think she had captured the voodoun experience’s essential nature (Brakhage 1989: 112) while for Michelson it was more about the relationship between the voodoun experience and its cultural context that was the stumbling block (Michelson 1980: 52). Though context and experience may well have remained unwedded in this work, certainly within her writing in Divine Horsemen, Deren achieved some telling insights about the cultural context of voodoun rituals. This will be discussed more fully toward the end of the section on Haiti. A second impact of Deren going to Haiti became evident on her return when she took on a role of a voodoun priestess. Deren did not always integrate her different personas easily, in the case of Haitian voodoun, allowing individual issues to cloud social or public rules. Possession in such a Haitian oriented community is not constructed to address individual conflicts but group or social ones. It is a rule that one must not use the magic accessible during possession for personal reasons. Brakhage suggests that Deren at times transgressed this principle ‘It is said that Maya had gotten into the practice of putting Voodoun curses on people who displeased her’ (Brakhage 1989: 107). Brakhage witnessed an event that reveals the depth of Deren’s participation. Deren became ‘possessed’ at an important Haitian New

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Yorker’s wedding. When her preparations were ignored she caused a pandemonium that included throwing a fridge around the kitchen. Brakhage writes: A group of Haitians formed a ring around her and said not to call the police, that they would handle this themselves. And so they began to calm her down according to the rituals of the religion. She left the room still growling and was taken upstairs. As it was explained to me, she was possessed by Papa-Loco, the Haitian god of ritual, tradition and artists (Brakhage 1989: 105).

This anecdote witnesses a marginal non-western ethnic community operating ‘inside’ of New York. Like the fragment and the split identified in trauma, this self-contained cell of social ‘other’ performs as a dissociated fragment inside the wider community of New York and as a displaced cell of culture split off from Haiti. From Brakhage’s exterior view its actions appear idiosyncratic, exotic and surreal and he remarks that ‘After that experience, I wasn’t inclined to doubt the power of Voodoun, or Maya’s status in it’ (Brakhage 1989: 105). This ‘underground’ ethnic community pronounces a subjugated discourse similarly to the underground film scene Deren helped congeal and ‘surface’. Being born in the Ukraine, Deren’s own migrant experience is also re-enacted here; the migrant who remains suspended in-between. The community that is entered, that is migrated into, discounts any status assigned by the originating culture. The larger community within which these groups ‘struggle’ marginalises them. As the following substantial passage about her move to Haiti attests, Deren was acutely aware of such subjugating processes. This passage is included because it integrates so much of Deren’s thinking on the position of the Film and Dance artist, the multi-lingual Jewish migrant and the Haitian native, further tempered by her personal experience as a pre-feminist independent woman: I became freshly aware of a situation to which I has grown inured and oblivious: that in a modern industrial culture, the artists constitute, in fact, an ‘ethnic group’, subject to the full native treatment. We too are exhibited as touristic curiosities on Monday, extolled as culture on Tuesday, denounced as immoral and unsanitary on Wednesday, reinstated for scientific study on Thursday, feasted for some obscurely stylish reason on Friday, forgotten Saturday, revisited as picturesque Sunday. We too are misrepresented by professional appreciators and subjected to spiritual imperialism, our most sacred efforts are plagiarised for yard goods, our histories are traced, our psyches analysed, and when everyone has taken his pleasure of us in his own fashion, we are driven from our native haunts, our modest dwellings are condemned and replaced by a chromium

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110 skyscraper (Deren 1953: 6).

This passage makes evident those social processes at play in marginalising both artist and native. Though the established view is that this Haitian project ‘radically deflected’ (Sitney 1979: 38) her film work or conversely that ‘her interest in Haitian dance was initially deflected by her discovery of film’ (Nieman 1980: 4), this analysis argues for a sustained line of epistemological enquiry; a hidden odyssey, rather than a deflection, caesura or gap. Like Deren’s multi-lingual voice this line runs through those parallel processes that colonise or subjugate the artist, the ethnic, the native and the Jew- all at once. Trauma theory and trauma research provides both the framework and content for this view. To paraphrase Deren: trauma’s ‘ripples spread out and encompass the richness of many moments’ (Deren 1946: 27). This brings us to the third outcome of Deren’s Haitian’s research, because it is not the thirty thousand feet of film nor her voodoun practice that, in the end, brings such insights to view, it is Deren’s critical anthropological writing in Divine Horsemen that delivers them for contemporary scrutiny. Her views on the relationship between possession and hysteria are here contextualised in the critical language of western scholarship familiar to her father. In Divine Horsemen Deren argues that unlike hysteria, possession in the Haitian context is not an illness. It had religious and cultural currency: ‘the function and purpose of such divine manifestation is the reassurance and the instruction of the community’ (Deren 1953: 30). She pinpoints the essential function of the witness in both possession and hysteria: ‘One of the similarities is that hysteria, as possession also, occurs only within a social context, when there are one or more witnesses to the scene’ (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1984: 489). To make this connection between hysteria and possession through witnessing, brings to mind Felman and Laub’s idea of witnessing trauma as a search for gaps and hesitations in testimony: ‘truths that are unspoken –or unspeakable- and that are yet inscribed in texts’ (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv) and Kaplan’s witnessing by the creative non-victim as the most empowering form of ‘trauma cinema’, a form for which Kaplan identifies Meshes as an example. In Haiti witnessing possession in the context of a belief system grounds the event in a social context. Holl’s commentary on Deren underlines the importance of this social framework and points to its absence in western culture: ‘the possessed person in Western cultures is considered sick, because the disease is not traced back to the social context that caused it’ (Holl 2001: 159). This sounds like trauma as trauma describes an event where context is forgotten, denied or erased. In

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neurological terms it is that overwhelming experience that shuts the hippocampus down so that no contextual or explicit memory (VAM) of the event registers. The experience’s direct impressions can later find no network to be connected into. Holl points out that Deren takes us back to early western research into hysteria: ‘In examining possession, suggestibility and affectivity of the nerves, she returns to the roots of European medical discourse and thus to the favourite fields of Charcot- and consequently of Bechterev and Freud’ (Holl 2001: 158). Unfortunately Holl omits Janet, whose position Deren’s most closely resembles. But this context does bring back Freud’s revelation and later denial hysteria’s social basis in sexual abuse (Freud, S 1962b: 203) in favour of fantasy (Freud, S1959: 34), removing hysteria’s performance from public view into the asylum and onto the psychiatrist’s couch. Deren’s anthropology counters Charcot’s clinical investigations. Her commitment to the ethnic and the artist flips over the clinical order. She comes to a very different understanding when possession is placed in a social framework rather than an individual one: ‘The actions and utterances of the possessed person are not the expression of the individual, but are the readily identifiable manifestations of the particular lao or archetype principle’ (Deren 1953: 16). In Divine Horsemen she identifies a commitment to the ‘vanquished’ in her method: I have come to believe that if history were recorded by the vanquished rather than by the victors, it would illuminate the real, rather than the theoretical, means to power; for it is the defeated who know best which of the opposing tactics were irresistible (Deren 1953: 6).

In her approach to Haitian voodoun Deren submerges herself in every day life in a non-goal directed way. For a long time she remained an outsider but slowly she entered the orbit of Haitian cultural life. The success of this immersion is evident in her acceptance as voodoun priestess on her return to New York. She did not stand outside her subject but attuned her beingin-the-world to the moment she found herself in. This is very different to Charcot’s incessant looking from a position of power inside Salpêtrière’s partitioned-off asylum. Deren practices Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy that ‘concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x). Attuned to implicit rather than explicit memory systems, this body centred practice defers to and privileges the subject’s view. Deren puts her body on the line: The belief that physical, sensory- hence, sensual! -experience is at least a lower form, if not a profane one, of human activity and the moral

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Chapter Four judgement that the highest, most reliable truths can be achieved only by means of rigid ascetism’ (Deren 1953: 9).

Though Deren’s assertion on the importance of the social to a bodycentred direct performative practice comes to its greatest clarity in her commentary on Haitian voodoun, it has been apparent in her construction of Meshes, her appropriation of Vorticist aesthetics, the loyalty to her father’s psychopathology manifest in her interest in amnesia that is transposed in the poetic register of vertical development in her theory about film construction. Even in terms of possession and dance, traces of this position are discernible and her anti-Freudian stance previously cited in her defence of Meshes and palpable in her critique of Anais Nin emerges in commentary about Balinese dance. Together all these traces mount as evidence for a unified trajectory to Deren’s theory and practice in dance and film. On re-reading a paper she’d written in 1942 (Deren 1942) before Meshes she writes that ‘I rediscovered that whole section on the hysterical release of a subconscious system of ideas’ (Deren 1980: 24). This describes both her first film and the foundation of possession. A 1947 viewing of Gregory Bateson’s Balinese dance footage elicits commentary similar to views more fully articulated in Divine Horsemen. She compares the exhibitionist of the western ‘star system’ to the anonymous Balinese dancer: How can this same term of exhibitionism be applied to Balinese performers who are essentially anonymous…. how could it be ‘exhibitionist’ (an ego attention statement and satisfaction) in the trance dancers when this is characterised by amnesia for the period of performance, and there the amnesia is also true of the audience in the sense that they treat the little girl, afterwards, just like any other little girl, and not as the little girl who danced so well? Nor do they have ‘memories’ of their moments of glory (Deren 1980: 30).

Here again are ideas of trance and amnesia gathered from her father’s psychopathology rather than psychoanalysis: ‘Freud wouldn’t do well in Bali. Hooray for the Balinese’ (Deren 1980: 37). As Holl again indicates ‘for Deren repression or disavowal is not a matter of personal neurosis but of social conventions and communication systems’ (Holl 2001: 174). This position weaves through her work in dance and film to settle on her work on Haitian voodoun. Hysteria and voodoun dance are framed as parallel phenomena, one aberrant, dysfunctional and cloistered, the other celebrated within the vortex of communal life:

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The hysteria of an individual in our culture is pathological because it is induced by personal conflicts. In the African or Haitian cultures the conflicts are the conflicts of a community, and the system of ideas which is emancipated is organised entirely in terms of their cultural tradition (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1984: 490).

Given this ‘hysterical’ trajectory embedded in Deren’s scholarship and practice that terminates in a more empowering reading of the symptom cluster of hysteria as possession within Voodoun dance and ritual, Meshes of an Afternoon is read as a signpost along such a road to Deren’s designated ‘normalcy’ and ‘belonging’. This ‘inverted odyssey’ delivers the hysteric female body out of the clutches of the originating diagnostic moments of Charcot’s photographs and his weekly public demonstrationperformances at Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and out of Freud’s waiting hands, to dance all the way into the centre of Haitian cultural and political life. This view extends Geller’s reading of Meshes as a critique of the ‘the patriarchal discourses at work in early European modernist film’ (Geller 2006: 149) to those operating within Medical discourses to Charcot’s and Freud’s work on hysteria. Meshes of an Afternoon is read as a prefeminist performative response to Charcot’s and Freud’s clinical caging of the female body.

Cusp Where is Deren further placed in relationship to the arts practices that surround and follow her? Jonas Mekas’s recent image both freezes and mythologises her: A person who stands at the cusp of these changes: All the surrealists and dadaists had converged on New York, and she was looking for an escape into something else…. She landed on the shores of an ocean and froze there, intensely gazing into the future just before the cultural explosion of the 50’s and 60’s (Mekas 1998: 131).

This is a different view of Deren than her trademark public Botticelli image, photographed by Hammid from the mid-point of Meshes, of an attractive young woman looking with curiosity and longing through a window that incorporates a reflection of the outside world. Mekas delivers a representation of Deren’s in-control ‘observing self’ in contrast to the final vortex of Meshes which is an image of an ‘experiencing self’ (Van der Kolk 1996c: 192). It recognises Deren’s aversion to Surrealism and recalls the migrant who struggles to name herself, longingly looking back seawards home to Kiev or Haiti. The image also registers the artistic

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promise of an American avant-garde extending through Brakhage’s psychodramas and camera-less and visionary film that unfolds in the 60s and beyond, towards Gidal’s materialist film. Jonas Mekas describes Gidal’s Room Film in relation to Brakhage’s psychodrama, Anticipation of the Night (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1958) as ‘anticipation of a room’ (Mekas 1973: 87). Brakhage’s creative response to Deren’s ‘freezing’ was to open up the real body of film itself, its materiality. Brakhage’s move plays as a generational response extending a mentor’s practice. There is a critical moment in Daybreak (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1957), a ‘suicide’ film in the tradition of Deren’s initiating psychodrama, where Brakhage takes this step, an operation (in both clinical and tactical senses of the word) into something that Deren promises. He hyper-edits, cutting the central character’s actions obsessively, of a woman walking through a park, to stutter and collapse the action into a fugue dissociative panic moment abducting the viewer out of representation. It is a ‘vertical’ brutality, a traumatizing act, like the obsessive slashing of wrists in self-abuse, which emphatically interrupts and stuns narrative. In this obsessive operation Brakhage opens the action of the cut, the edit up so insistently that the edit becomes a thing of itself, a move from signified to signifier. Such mutilation extends Deren’s invocation to Anais Nin on the open wound (Clark, V, Hodson & Neiman 1988: 537) and further asserts her insistence that film be understood through its own inherent nature. Consequently Brakhage ‘heroically’ plumbed further into Deren’s vertical axis into a poetic relationship with films’ materiality to the language of camera-less and direct animation via such works as In the Garden of Earthly Delights (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1981) and Mothlight (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1963). Deren’s insistence on an image for its own sake forecasts Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism’s focus on a medium’s specific form, predicting Frank Stella’s minimalist mantra ‘what you see is what you see’ (Kramer 1967). Deren insisted that film presented its own unique form, as the photographically ‘real’ (Elder 1989: 341-4) that, according to Lucy Lippard, later surfaces in Cindy Sherman’s photography (Lippard 1998). Paul Taylor identifies both Deren and Robert Breer (whose work is the subject of the next chapter) as protostructuralists ‘for their rigorous innovation with form in the 1940s and 1950s’ (Taylor, P 2009: 105). The focus on an essential self-reflexive cinema pervading structuralist and materialist film taking its cue through modernist art, especially painting coming out of New York, germinates in Deren’s insistence on film as film. With it materialist film inherits a resistance to psychoanalysis that Gidal hysterically (to use Deren’s sense of the word) expands upon. As Deren

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insists: ‘To be loved for the wrong reason is a very painful thing, and this film was… This film is a film; it may be analysed by Freudian analysts, but you cannot say this film is Freudian’ (quoted in Millsapps 1986: 26). In the end Mekas’s ‘Vortex’ image of Deren personifies SAM, a multilingual identity of many fragments continually redialling into her own context and history.

CHAPTER FIVE THE FLASHBACK’S OPTICAL STUN

This chapter begins charting the event horizon of Deren’s gaze, appraising the capacity of Breer’s animation practice to perform the flashback’s shock, disorientation and perceptual fatigue. Like materialist film, I situate Breer’s practice in Wollen’s first ‘purist’ avant-garde, aligned with sculpture and painting and that 20s European avant-garde connected to Futurism, Cubism and Dada. I compare Breer’s critical thinking about this practice and his methods of construction to structural characteristics of trauma, drawing equivalences between the perceptual processes involved in Brewin’s SAM memory system and the viewing of Breer’s animated films. I respond to Deren’s ‘a film is a film’ assertion by framing the discussion of two animations, 69 and Fuji through Merleau-Ponty’s ‘nonFreudian’ phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 51-53), useful for examining artworks operating in the pre-reflective realm: A philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins- as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status (MerleauPonty 1962: x).

Descriptions of the films play a fundamental role in this chapter’s analysis, teasing out the overall impact or gestalt of the films, in line with MerleauPonty’s view that: ‘the real has to be described, not constructed or formed’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x). The direct ‘real’ perceptual experience of trauma that these films communicate is not representational or traditionally photographic, as Merleau-Ponty’s attests; ‘the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 14). I compare the disorienting impact of Breer’s films to the performance of a traumatic flashback. In 69 this is achieved through the techniques of randomising, flicker and figure- ground reversals. By referencing the structure of Fuji to perceptual performance during rail travel, I consider

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the traumatic impact of technology on perception at the beginning of the last century.

The films of Robert Breer In film a lot of things have been repressed for so long that they’re fresh. I explore the medium for that kind of thing. There is an awful lot of conformism (Robert Breer in MacDonald 1992: 42).

Breer’s playful short quickly moving animations ‘research’ (MacDonald 1992: 17) the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception generally ignored and buried by the industrial film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. I read these films as ‘making sense’ in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s view that ‘a movie is not a thought; It is perceived’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a; 58). Breer was born in Detroit Michigan in 1926. His father was an automobile designer who built a 3-D camera to document domestic family excursions. In his continuous loop film Image by Images I (dir. Robert Breer, 1954), which Christian Lebrat (1999:74) describes as the ‘first visual bomb in cinema’, Breer first introduces the shock tactics of a different image for every frame and so a different image every 1/24th of a second. He reports that he ‘backed into’ (Cote 1962-3: 17) the moving image in 1952 from an interest with neo-plastic painting and Piet Mondrian after arriving in Paris in 1949 on a Returned Serviceman’s Scholarship from the United States having trained in painting and sculpture. He first sighted Mondrian’s paintings at an exhibition in San Francisco in the late 40s. In Paris his circle included Yves Klein, Hans Arp, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely. His early flipbook sculptures also resulted from an interest in capturing the process and evolution of his paintings. On returning to the United States in 1959 he continued to evolve his collage and line animations, becoming involved with avant-garde cinematic innovation and performance art in New York through Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, George Brecht, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman. Juliette Singer points out that despite his proximity and synchrony to such “art systems” ‘he never belonged to any clique’ (Singer 2006: 51). Included as foundation works in Anthology Film Archive’s ‘Essential Cinema’ collection (Sitney 1975: xiv) his highly compacted graphic animations are considered key films in Sitney’s ‘Graphic Cinema’ (Sitney 1979: 175-304). In their single frame or multiple frame bursts and clusters, they contain a mixture of abstract and concrete images exploring the

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illusion of motion through a reconstituted collage of fragments, sudden appearances and subliminal effects. English experimental film historian and curator David Curtis identifies Breer’s films as formal reflexive inquiries into the tension between the single frame and the perception of motion: ‘two images on consecutive frames give the effect of a single superimposition’ (Curtis 1971: 155), plumbing Deren’s vertical axis.

Contexts: Why Phenomenology? Here I triangulate relations between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Breer’s practice and psychopathological views of trauma referenced against the role of dream, fantasy and psychoanalysis in a feminist counter-cinema, placing Breer’s practice as successor to a 1920s European avant-garde cinema and in correspondence with Gidal’s materialist film. Merleau-Ponty ascribes a ‘manner or style of thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii) to phenomenology’s study of subjective experience. This phenomenology is a reflective hermeneutics about pre-reflective processes, a philosophical framework for thinking through and identifying a direct being-in-the-world. Chapter 2’s review of recent neurological research extends Merleau-Ponty’s strategy of resourcing the objective psychological research from Gestalt Psychology to support his philosophical framework. Merleau-Ponty theorises, writes and reflects on the pre-reflective. This is not a pre-reflective act. It has removed itself from that situation and looks back at it from the position of theory and description. This is what I am doing now, in the reflective describing the pre-reflective. There is a gap between the pre-reflective realm and reflective thought. We inhabit the world in a body-centred subjectivity preceding the conscious thought of this writing. When reflection occurs it is to reflect on these embodied life experiences: on what we see, hear, and move through. Merleau-Ponty situates this being-in-the-world before dreams and daydreams: My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I immediately place in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams around things (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x).

I use Phenomenology’s focus on the pre-reflective realm to assess the performance Breer’s films on our senses and evaluate their traumatic credentials. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘constant play’ of ‘fleeting sensations’ describes the impact of Breer’s films at the moment of viewing. Breer concurs that his practice, his visual thinking, is not drawn to the dream but

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to the moment’s immediacy: I have a mind-set that if something crops up and seems absurd that must be a good thing in a way. I am not interested in surrealistic juxtapositions. Invoking dream-states or anything of the kind, its not that. But I make choices on a total basis, there might be several reasons for choosing this thing or that thing, one might be the shape of it. See it’s a general point but a good one; animation is a system that leads to metamorphosis (Breer in Griffiths 1985).

The subject of Breer’s practice and Merleau-Ponty’s critical thinking is the realm of perception standing before the dream and the daydream. What Merleau-Ponty attempts in his writing about the ‘real’, Breer attempts in his performance of the ‘direct’, setting both apart from psychoanalytic concerns of dream and fantasy. The not-dream emphasis has already been identified in Deren’s attitude, Le Grice’s preferencing of the ‘psycho-physical’ over the ‘psycho-interpretive’ (Le Grice 1977: 106) and Gidal’s ‘un-thought’ (Gidal 1976: 15). Breer’s disinterest in surrealism or ‘dream-states’ restates Le Grice’s exclusion of surrealist work readable as dream narrative from materialist film (Le Grice 1977: 32-33). Yet Le Grice’s attitude to Breer’s work is ambivalent. He credits Breer with bringing the formal innovation of mathematical permutation into structuralist practice, evident in the random re-ordering of frames in 69. Breer’s connection back to Richter (Curtis 1971: 25) strengthens Breer’s materialist pedigree as Le Grice singles out Richter’s early film work as structuralist film’s precursor. Breer acknowledges the influence of Cubism, Dada and Neoplasticism and his debt to the 20s avant-garde of Richter, Eggeling, Léger and Ray (Russett & Starr 1976: 135), identifying Richter’s Rythmus 21 and Léger’s Ballet Mechanique as direct influences (Beauvais 2006: 164). On the other hand Le Grice treats Breer’s use of autobiographic material with suspicion, despite its obscured position. In films like Fuji which includes rotoscoped impressions of a train trip past Mt Fuji, personal and representational imagery seeps back into view. If there is a narrative at all in this work, it is a compacted and layered single-frame account mapping perception’s trajectory through space. Le Grice’s ambivalence situates Breer’s practice at materialist film’s boundaries, useful in articulating Walker’s ‘traumatic paradox’ of being at once known and not known. I use 69’s identification on one side of knowability’s divide and Fuji on the other side to strengthen Breer’s practice’s ‘traumatic’ credentials. The ‘not-dream’ orientation also exists in Janet’s revitalised ‘dissociation’. Chapter 2 notes that the visual evidence supporting

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dissociation’s new relevance, delivered through neuro-imaging scans, display visual, graphic, technical and structural qualities available in Breer’s animations. Structural parallels exist between the performance of Breer’s animations and the workings of Situational Accessible Memory (SAM). The flashback’s structure in trauma as small packets or fragments of imagery and affect disconnected from each other describes both the perceptual impact and structure of Breer’s films. Turim’s identification of this effect in 20s European avant-garde films like Richter’s (2001: 207) further indicate the connection between the flashback in film and trauma. Breer’s predecessor Richter describes a dynamic perceptual process of moving from one image to another developed while working with Eggeling in 1919 on long paper scrolls: We had arrived at a dynamic expression which produced a sensation rather different from that possible in easel painting. This sensation lies in the stimulus which the remembering eye receives by carrying its attention from one detail, phase or sequence, to another that can be continued indefinitely (Richter in Russett & Starr 1976: 35).

Richter’s ‘dynamic expression’ diverges markedly from a single image’s contemplation and the spoken or written word’s narrative. The movement from one image to another, ‘remembering’ one detail while denying others, is also the focus of Breer’s cinematic research, and retained in his ‘flip-book’ installations and panoramas. Walking past a Breer panorama reproduces the kinetic effect of Richter’s dynamic expression’s kinetic effect (see Singer 2006: 57-60). Breer’s first steps into film analysed his Mondrian influenced painting’s construction and development. Richter describes both the perceptual train a Breer film sets in motion and a traumatic flashback’s uncritical or unspeakable fugue. Dream’s avoidance and rejection marking Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Breer’s practice and Gidal and Le Grice’s definitions of materialist film contrasts to its embrace within a feminist textual analysis and counter-cinema developed through Wollen, Mulvey and others. This difference returns the ‘two avant-garde’ face-off documented in Chapter 1. Amongst the foundation ‘cine-feminists’ in the UK such as Pam Cook, Claire Johnson and Mulvey the critical importance of psychoanalysis, fantasy and dream emerged early. Claire Johnson’s statement, made at the inception of these substantive developments in screen studies clearly states their importance: It is clear that film is closely related to fantasy. The placement of the audience vis-à-vis the film is a voyeuristic one and conjures a kind of dream situation in which the primary process is very much in operation.

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There are a lot of analogies between dream and film; the actual mechanisms that take place invite displacement (Claire Johnson in Kaplan 1977: 402).

Fantasy pervades dominant cinema’s entertainment and illusionism. Within the 70s critical debates in screen studies a psychoanalytic imaginary is irrefutable and like Gidal’s materialist film, Breer’s practice, becomes irrelevant and invisible. Tim Cawkwell’s comment on Breer’s films suggest that within fine art circles a further invisibility operated: ‘Hilton Kramer, the noted art critic, refused to write about his films because they moved’ (Cawkwell 2008: 5). This may have been a consequence of the way the art market operated. As the resale value of a photograph, painting and sculpture was more evident than the resale value of a film print, moving images had limited currency in this market. Breer’s practice negates dominant cinema’s fantasy and illusionism and its outcomes fall outside the fine art market’s reach. Such invisibilities traumatize his practice. Like the performance of Breer’s films, trauma first manifests itself in the pre-reflective realm preceding dream construction and fantasy where it erasures, denies and short-circuits narrative form. The nervous system’s collapse in an overwhelming situation finds an analogy in 69’s structure.

69, Chance and The Trace My examination of Breer’s ontological practice evident in 69 (and later Fuji) is informed by research into perception emulating Merleau-Ponty’s strategic use of Gestalt Psychology. Merleau-Ponty’s notion that a film ‘is not a sum total of images but a temporal gestalt’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 54) describes 69 (1968 5 minutes). 69 is pre-occupied with the film apparatus’s mechanics, optical effects compacted into the single frame and a construction method mobilizing gaps and chance operations, creating an abstract palimpsest of forms. These perceptual operations perform a traumatic flashback. As shock removes context from traumatic experience so Breer’s chance operations break down the film’s narrative. Breer’s concept of ‘unrelationship’ informing this break down brings to mind Elsaesser’s ‘lost referentiality’ and Kroker’s panic. In 69 the title image alternates between positive and negative registering as a flickering object that appears to hover in front of the screen. The film begins with a line-drawn hexahedron rod on white background rotating into frame on the left and moving away from the viewer, followed by other shapes going through similar movements. These shapes recede to a horizon-line, sustaining a conventional 3-D perspective.

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There is the precision of architectural drawing in the line and textured imagery at the film’s early stages. Though highly stylised and abstracted the repetition of these effects brings to mind the movement of rods on a locomotive wheel. This rotation sequence goes through a number of permutations. In the next image cluster line shapes become blocks of colour, then a mixture of line and colour and then with a darker blue background. These shapes are originally drawn with thin straight lines and then as blocks of colour alternate with a different colour for every frame. Now and then there are bursts of single frame abstractions flickering and flashing. This palimpsest of forms flickers across the original in a repeating, yet disintegrating sequence. A viewer’s memory of the previous cycle informs the perceptual reading of the next. Dwoskin notes that ‘the single-frame accumulation results in the viewer receiving impressions without retaining any one single image’ (Dwoskin 1975: 233). The tension that develops between movement and palimpsest is reminiscent of the play between a solo instrument and a rhythm section in a jazz score. ‘Palimpsest’ involves writing over one image with another. Its use with pre-historic cave paintings describes how a later scene obscures a faded image on the cave wall. Today such layering effect appears in the graffiti and poster-covered walls of our inner city streets and laneways. Breer’s palimpsest is created perceptually by the projector’s speed, as there is little overlap discernible between the images when inspecting the filmstrip over a light table with the ‘naked’ eye. There is a gap between what is perceived and what is physically present on the filmstrip. The projection apparatus performs Breer’s palimpsest and its speed creates a frantic spasmodic flickering effect at odds with the contemplative space of a cave wall’s layered paintings. In the second half of 69 bug-like geometric forms crawl across the screen, like synchronised drops of sweat on skin. These shots perform a minimal autobiographical insertion as these forms are based on Breer’s own geometric moving sculptures called ‘floats’ and ‘creepies’. For Breer the imperceptible movement of these sculptures and his rapidfire flicker both deal with ‘thresholds’ (Robert Breer in Beauvais 2006: 163). Flicker and bursts of frames from the original sequence, black frames and other abstractions intermittently punctuate this field of forms. The silence from the middle part of the film is replaced with mechanical sounds such as a phone-like repeating click and a clock like tick-tick. The skim of the radio dials switching between stations further suggests indeterminacy and breakdown. 69 ends with its opening sequence. The film is a loop of a disintegrating loop. It is now ready to begin again. 69’s images relate to each other perceptually in series, cluster,

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proximity, layer and depth on a frame after frame basis. Breer works at an ambiguous threshold where elements do and do not relate to each other. It is the border between making and not making sense that nevertheless is perceived as a totality for Merleau-Ponty: ‘I perceive in a total way with my whole being, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 50). Small’s description of Breer’s practice supports this view: ‘The phenomenological, glowing, gestalt-color exists in no one frame but is rather the projected product of groups of frames’ (Small, ES 1994: 71). Breer’s perceptual practice constructs the unspeakable. Turim relates such flicker as Breer’s to hysteria: ‘these produce effects ranging from meditation calms to sensation of being subject to the affects of hysteria’ (Turim 1978: 93). Like describing a traumatic flashback, relating the content and structure of Breer’s films reveals little of their optical or physiological impact. The act viewing is immediate and fleeting, not analytic, the flicker and flux of geometric shapes and colour accentuates film’s general ‘persistence of vision’ effect. Similar to slowly rewinding through the film frame after frame, a series of stills from the film cannot communicate a sense of this. These films exemplify Merleau-Ponty’s prediction that ‘the way we experience works of cinema will be through perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 99). Though commentators categorizing visual music films often make this connection (Brougher, Strick & Wiseman 2005) Breer does not promote his perceptual effects as synaesthesia. The rhythm and duration of 69 suggests a connection to the Visual Music tradition where ‘Color is the keyboard, the eye is the hammer’ (Kandinsky 1994/1912) but, as Breer himself notes (Beauvais 2006: 158), the formal qualities of his interventions point away from Kandinsky’s spiritual and transcendental abstraction. Musically 69 is situated closer to Schonberg’s twelve-tone scale and experimental music (Nyman 1974). Similar to materialist film, this aural art is concerned with duration’s structure, perceptual limits, chance interventions, the recycling of earlier work and the reflexive use of the fundamental materials of the medium. Through its focus on the single frame and Breer’s method of re-organisation, 69 contributes to ‘the concept of films as physical material’ (Le Grice 1977: 95). Like experimental music, Breer also uses chance interventions in 69: 69 undoes itself. It starts out like a system, then the system breaks down and goes to hell. During the editing I came up with the idea that it should break down, so I shuffled the cards. I thought it served me right to undo my own pretence at formal purity (Breer in MacDonald 1992: 43).

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Randomising is a formal mathematical exercise. For Le Grice this shuffling emphasises a series of frames’ ‘programmability’ (Le Grice 1977: 80) and further links this organisational method to the first computer-based animations by Breer’s contemporary John Whitney’s Permutations (dir. John Whitney, 1968). Manovich identifies the serial database of Whitney’s Catalog (dir. John Whitney, 1961) ‘as the founding moment of new media’ (Manovich 2001: 236). By shuffling the cards during production Breer imparts a traumatic effect in which the originating order is rendered un-recoverable. The frame loses its referentiality. Brewin’s dual processing model describes such lack of reference for the traumatic flashback. During the impact of overwhelming experience no explicit VAM is constructed. The implicit SAM system that redials as flashback into the present has no VAM context from which it can be understood, no referentiality. Breer expresses his wish to deconstruct the imagery’s order: It was also a tour de force because in shuffling the cards I could never get them back in their proper order again. They weren’t numbered. And it was deliberate to get away from too much -inality, too much construction, too much definition (Breer in Griffiths 1985).

This ‘tour de force’ is not an act of self-aggrandisement. Like the fate of the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel drop leaving a trace back out of the dark woods that then get eaten by the birds, Breer’s shuffling is a critical act of irreversibility. As in the child abuse fable where the birds remove the trace, there is also no way back. Breer traces this technique back to Hans Arp’s 1917 Dada intervention of letting coloured pieces of paper fall on sheets to decide their composition (Beauvais 2006: 169). Derrida’s sense that a trace is not simply absent or present is productive in describing 69. An accumulation of traces constituting Derrida’s realm of ‘différance’, outlining a field of deferred meaning and interdependence that can never tell the whole story. 69’s image traces performs a problematic unhinged space approaching Derrida’s ‘différance’. Combined displacements create a trace of a trace (and so on) eventually leading to the lost referentiality of Elsaesser’s ‘event without a trace’, with Breer’s extreme act of irreversibility creating a ‘traceless trace’. This nowhere is more subjective than Thomas Nagel’s objective ‘View from Nowhere’ (Nagel 1986), returning to disorient the senses directly, subjectively and traumatically. Elsaesser identifies this un-locatable place through Gertrude Stein’s words of there being ‘no there there’ (Elsaesser 2001: 201). Do Breer’s disintegrating shifting and vibrating structures, like Stein’s

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repeating insistent catatonic prose, its ‘trace of a trace of a trace’, ‘traceless trace’ or ‘an event without a trace’, articulate trauma’s archaeology? Is the image traumatised by these erasures upon erasures, this moving away from source through technique’s relentless application? Breer’s sabotaging approach of getting away from ‘construction’ and ‘definition’ performs Elsaesser’s lost referentiality. Breer’s ‘unrelationship’ brings to mind the flashback’s marooned affect and fragment: ‘“Unrelationship”, itself a word, indicates a type of cinema built around the art of the non-rational, non-reasonable association of images’ (Robert Breer in Russett & Starr 1976: 133). Breer remains in constant dialogue with his material: ‘I’m constructing under the camera as well as after I get the film back and edit it. There are decisions being made all the time’ and ‘I like to improvise on the spot’ (Griffiths 1985). Like the flashback’s unexpected return, Breer re-inserts himself repeatedly, intervening and sabotaging process to stymie narrative. Disruption of process is his process. The method describes the continuous denial of self-mutilation trauma victims perform on their own body (Van der Kolk 1996c: 189-90). Breer’s question of ‘how to take advantage, how to violate’ (Griffiths 1985) imparts a creatively obsessive hypervigilance on his material, imposing the same constant dialogue on his audience. Breer continually performs SAM’s recurrent being-in-the-moment of the flashback’s return. Gidal identifies this self-reflexive activity: ‘Thus viewing such a film is at once viewing a film and viewing the “coming into presence” of the film. I.e. the system of consciousness that produces the work, that is produced by and in it’ (Gidal 1976: 2). For Singer too, in Breer’s animations: ‘The animation unveils its workings, it becomes it own subject’ (Singer 2006: 53).

The Cinema Apparatus and its Perceptual Artefacts The avant-garde continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film (John Hanhardt 1976: 44).

Breer’s preoccupation with the mechanics of the film apparatus is evident in the projector’s mechanics, pre-cinema toys, flicker, the single frame and the afterimage. There is a historical connection between these obsessions within cinema and Goethe’s examination of similar visual phenomenon in daily life in the late 1700s. In a strategy similar to Merleau-Ponty’s use of Gestalt Psychology Edwin Land’s ‘Retinex Theory’ of colour constancy is co-opted as a scientifically based model of colour perception accommodating both objective and subjective traditions of colour research.

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Breer’s interest in the cinema apparatus is evident in a ‘pre-cinema’ aesthetic present of his sculptural work, modified from optical toys like the flip-book, the mutascope, the thaumatrope and the zoetrope describing his mutascope-like kinetic sculptures as ‘old rotating paddle-wheel image devices that preceded cinema, rotating flip-books’ (Griffiths 1985). Such toys inhabited the perceptual space of everyday life at the turn of the 19th century. A zoetrope is a cylinder with a series of vertical slits. Opposite each slit is one of a series of images, of some cyclical action like running. When the device is spun like a turntable the illusion of motion is experienced for the cycle of drawings. The thaumatrope (trans. ‘wonder turner’) is a small disc with an image on both sides, like a bird and a cage. When spun at sufficient speed by the strings attached to both ends the two images are superimposed, producing a similar perceptual effect to the flicker of alternating images in Breer’s films. His perceptual focus utilizes the cinematic apparatus in both recording and screening modes, in a pre-occupation with flicker, the gaps between images, the single frame’s inherent ‘speed’, its subliminal and afterimage effects and their cumulative impact. Breer conscious focus on it transforms the apparatus so into the film’s subject: ‘the modern cinematic device was designed to eliminate flicker, but you can bring it back and play with it’ (MacDonald 1992:44). Breer’s strategic and considered placement of his black frames emphasises the cinematic effect produced by the movie projector accentuating its flicker, ‘bringing back’ the hidden. The mechanics of the film projector involves holding an image frame in its gate to be projected on the screen. The projector claws this image down to reveal the next frame after a short hold. The shutter hides this movement from view. The shutter masks this blur with a dark moment. This cycle repeats every 1/24th of a second. The viewer’s eye builds smooth movement despite this inbuilt image flicker. The perceived movement delivered by the mechanics of this presented series of images is called the ‘persistence of vision’. Jennifer Burford identifies how the apparatus inexorably hides, performing the same denial found at the heart of traumatic experience: The interval, this brief moment of interruption, thus corresponds to a fraction of time, and so to a movement which has not been recorded. The film device ‘analyses’ and then the brain ‘synthesises’. But the restoration is only partial: half the scene is missing. The filmstrip holds unseen things, in the same way one speaks of unspoken things; traces are missing (Burford 1999: 99).

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The fundamentally different scanning process of video or digital projection produces no black moments. Animator Norman McLaren alludes to the performance hidden by black moments when he scratches on his worktable that animation ‘is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames’ (Weinberg 1962: 47). For cinema’s formal tradition this is fair game. Peter Kubelka makes the this point about his single frame flicker films that it is: ‘between the frames that cinema speaks’ (Kubelka 1978: 141). Breer perceptually disrupts and stresses this persistence of vision to bring the invisible into view. Following a Russian formalist tradition he ‘lays bare the device’ (Shklovsky 1969) of cinema. For Michelson, Breer’s is a ‘maieutic impulse’ (Michelson 1975: 101), that she locates in Vertov’s 20s European avant-garde Man with a Movie Camera: Kino-Eye avails itself of all the current means of recording ultrarapid motion, micro-cinematography, reverse motion, multiple exposure, fore-shortenings etc. and does not consider these as tricks, but as normal processes of which wide use must be made (Vertov 1984: 42). Breer uses the metaphor of the magician’s hat to communicate an antimagician’s attitude: ‘The hat should be transparent and show the rabbit’ (Breer 1973: 70).

Flicker & the Single Frame According to Small different frequencies of flicker produce colour effects (Small, ES 1994: 74). There is evidence that the body responds directly to flicker. Small and Anderson note that a subject’s electroencephalograph (EEG) frequencies are altered by strobing (Small, ES & Anderson 1976). A significant but low number of youth under 12 years old suffer from photosensitive epilepsy. Paul Sharits in discussing his flicker films has also made the connection between his interest in perceptual effects and anxiety: ‘I think the flicker films are partly about anxiety. Aside from being interested in perceptual realities, perceptual thresholds and the possibility of creating temporal chords of color, a lot of it has to do with the projection of inner felings.’ A Pokemon episode in Japan in 1997 with alternating red and blue flicker caused seizures in viewers, hospitalizing them (Binnie CD et al. 2002: 323). As a result Independent Television Commission (ITC) instituted guidelines in 2001 prohibiting flicker from saturated red, flashes over greater than ¼ of the screen area and flashes of greater frequency than 3 Hertz (cycles per second) (Binnie CD et al. 2002: 327). These guidelines deny 69’s ‘viewability’ on British Television. Such authorised perceptual criteria culturally re-perform trauma’s erasure and denial to

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similarly isolate toxic effects. Breer acknowledges he: ‘pushed that experience of disparate single frames further than anyone else’ (Robert Breer in Russett & Starr 1976: 135). An image existing for one frame, though hardly seen, leaves a perceptual trace. Though physically present on the film in projection an image may be buried in the general textural noise or by the visual intensity of frames that precede and follow in the image stream. Image by Images I (1954) and Blazes (1961) are constructed out of such accumulated moments. Traumatic memory’s dissociated fragments occupy similar ambiguous spaces, covered over, materially present but remaining un-recognised. Breer explains that in mainstream cinema such a subliminal effect as the hidden single frame can be in-jokes played at the audience’s expense: There used to be an old gag with cartoonists to have a bird fly across somewhere. For one frame, I’m told; instead of a bird they would draw a brick. But nobody would see that because what you are following is the identity of the bird in the beginning, carries it right through the brick. You don’t see the brick. That was kind of an in-joke inserted in conventional cartoons and it’s something I do. I put bricks in all the time, but I make them somewhat more obvious, to share the joke with the audience (Griffiths 1985).

Breer’s disruptive practice brings such subliminal effects, the unseen, into clearer view. Just as textual analysis identifies dominant cinema’s hidden ideologies, Breer’s practice makes evident the covered over in-joke, revealing the rabbit in the hat at the material rather than social level. Breer’s intervention is performed as an ontological practice, as direct theory (Small, ES 1994) rather than a theoretical text, registering its critical understanding at the body’s implicit level rather than the text’s social realm. Breer’s target is not a social construction as it is in textual analysis but the physical and perceptual medium’s materialist body as perceived in the act of viewing. Breer’s practice sits closer to a trauma’s bodily trace than textual analysis’s social or political intervention. Its proximity to a trauma’s unknowability makes it by definition politically or socially inarticulate. In art therapy creating images and drawings are critical in the initiating phases of recovery with abuse victims. David Johnson confirms trauma’s visual core: ‘Due to the manner in which traumas are neurologically encoded in visually dominant forms, art therapy has a special place in the assessment and early stages of treatment’ (Johnson 1987: 12). For the later stages of re-entering community life, Johnson identifies the confession, drama, poetry and group performance as more effective. These are the forms prominent in the identified exemplary texts of Walker’s ‘trauma

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cinema’ and higher up the rung of Laub and Auerhahn’s ladder to recovery (Laub & Auerhahn 1993).

The Afterimage An afterimage, also known as a photogene, is an image that persists even after its stimulating source has been removed. It is a physiological effect, an aftersensation or trace, created neurologically in the eye as a response to a flash of light. It performs as a visual bruise. The afterimage is a negative version of the originating source that slowly fades in intensity. Breer employs the afterimage, both by suggesting it artificially through alternating positive and negative imagery and colour and by enhancing its natural impact through the insertion of blank frames. Flicker is a special case that builds on this effect. Given cinema’s inherent flicker stream of ‘image mask image mask image etc’ the afterimage is an effect that Breer can ‘bring back’ and ‘play with’ (MacDonald 1992: 44). The title of 69, with its alternating positive/negative, figure/ground flicker, reinforces this physiological effect so that it appears as if the throbbing image floats between the eye and the screen. Scott MacDonald notes that ‘These are ‘retinal collages that our minds subsequently synthesize and/or decipher’ (MacDonald 1992: 16). Breer’s use of afterimage flicker can be complex in that it may overlay rhythms of afterimages and other subliminal effects. The afterimage operates like an intense, speeded up visual bruise. I recall a close friend relating her experience of being physically beaten by her ex-partner and those blows stunned not only the body but also instantly numbed her mind. The bruise became the event’s trace and continued to elicit both unabated and unprocessed fear and numbing in her until she was able to talk through and remove herself from this relationship. Similarly Breer’s work stuns and ‘understanding’ the meaning of this experience develops after. This dissociated narrative is about erasures, interruptions, gaps and silences, operations used to deny content, about forgetting and entering an amnesic space. Breer’s relationship to absences as entities productively articulates trauma’s forgetting. His method articulates in visual bodily form Felman and Laub’s method for witnessing trauma through literature, described as ‘methods and techniques of reading, and of listening to, truths that are unspoken –or unspeakable- and that are yet inscribed in texts’ (Felman & Laub 1992: xiv). As Breer states: I like interruptions a lot, I like sudden bangs, sudden silences. I like changes of pace very much and changes of ideas, whole changes of ideas,

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Breer’s sabotaging strategies of inserting gaps and absences addresses Caruth questioning on what it would mean, ‘to conceive of an experience that is constituted by the very way it escapes or resists interpretation?’ (Caruth & Esch 1995: 2). Breer operates on the materiality of film in the same way that trauma excises life’s narrative. Like trauma Breer creates gaps and unspeakable performances impacting the body directly through its perceptual apparatus. Rosalind Krauss’s assertion about Paul Sharits’ flicker films, that it is the viewer’s response that is the object of these films (Krauss 1978) holds true for Breer.

An Objective-Subjective Gap Breer’s exploration of kinetic visual effects reproduces in cinema Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s subjective exploration of ephemeral visual phenomena in daily life nearly 200 years earlier. Goethe connects to Breer via Mondrian. MacDonald describes Breer’s paintings as ‘Mondrianesque’ (MacDonald 1992: 18). Goethe insists his experiments are designed to be reproducible by any dilettante. He places his observations of colour’s subjective effects in opposition to Newton’s objective scientific experiments, importantly considering the category of physiological colour as the product of the perceptual apparatus rather than an intrinsic quality of the observed artefact. Physiological colours ‘depend on an action and reaction of the organ’ (Goethe [1810] 1967: iv) Goethe observes such phenomena as afterimages, present in Breer’s films, publishing them and other observations in ‘Theory of Colour’: Let a black object be held before a grey surface, and let the spectator, after looking steadfastly at it, keep his eyes unmoved while it is taken away: the space it occupies appears much lighter. Let a white object be held up in the same manner: on taking it away the space it occupied will appear much darker than the rest of the surface. Let the spectator in both cases turn his eyes this way and that on the surface, the visionary images will move in like manner (Goethe [1810] 1967:14).

The painters Kandinsky and Mondrian integrated Goethe’s observations into their visual practice. For example, a Mondrian yellow makes a

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different impression on the viewer depending on surrounding shapes and colours. Bridget Riley describes Mondrian’s plastic principle as resting on ‘a visual interplay between weights, forces and tensions’ (Riley 1997: 156) creating a total impression. Breer migrated into film in Paris in the 40s and 50s from the creative visual culture that recognised and incorporated this practical knowledge during the same place and period from which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology formed. In parallel, such knowledge was also gathered through scientific research in the 60s and earlier. Though recognised by artists since Leonardo Da Vinci, Edwin Land’s ‘Retinex Theory’ of colour (Land 1964) adds scientific credibility to Goethe’s subjective view. In Land’s theory fluctuations in Mondrian’s yellow, for example, is explained as the result of the phenomenon of ‘colour constancy’. In ‘colour constancy’ a banana is perceived as the same yellow irrespective of the red light used to illuminate it because the coloured objects in its vicinity ground its perceived hue. Abstract painting both intuitively and explicitly push such colour rules to their limits. Kandinsky actively sought out research into colour’s psychological impact (Gage, J 1993: 207) incorporating this knowledge into his creative practice: ‘It is often the case that to improve the bottom left hand corner, one needs to improve something on the right’ (Kandinsky 1982: 387). Land’s experimental design contains two identical Mondrian-like patterns (referred to as ‘Mondrians’) separately illuminated by varied combinations of red, green and blue light for very short and longer intervals. This procedure isolates perceptual artefacts (persistence and shifts in colour, shape and luminosity) identifiable in Breer’s rapid-fire montage. Land’s retinex model, constructed from these experiments, recognises both Goethe’s and Newton’s views, integrating their subjective and objective theories of colour into the one ‘gestalt’. John McCann’s commentary on retinex places these objective-subjective views in relation: The interesting paradox of the past is the conflict between physics and psychology. The physics of colorimetry has produced a robust quantitative model of quanta catch in the retina. The psychology of color sensation has pointed out that human biological processes use spatial comparisons (McCann 1998).

Land’s experiments indicate that colour constancy is the result of complex, referential perceptual processes hard wired into the body’s neural architecture. His model shows that the colour one sees is dependent on how the eye ‘processes’ the whole field of view, supporting Gestalt Psychology’s understanding that the whole is a perceptually primary

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phenomenon, a notion also present in Mondrian’s general principle of plastic equivalence: ‘the entire work must be only the plastic expression of relationships and must disappear as particularity’ (Piet Mondrian in Holtzman & James 1986: 138). Land’s experiments demonstrate that such hard wiring is evaluative, comparative and referential producing paradoxical visual artifacts that may not be materially present. Such ambiguous visual artifacts are performed in 69. Though constructed from interventions, strategies and compiling of geometric forms Breer constructs his viewer to experience his films as a rewindable totality to be re-experienced and further understood through multiple viewings. Such referential perceptual processes appear in more developed and expanded form in James J. Gibson’s concept of a ‘visual kinesthetic’ where mobility, head movement and direct perceptual assessments of ambient light are incorporated into a visual gestalt of our environment instantly playing before us as a totality: ‘The persistence of the environment together with the co-existence of its parts and the occurrence of its events are all perceived together’ (Gibson 1979: 222). Like Land’s and Merleau-Ponty’s this view rests on a direct perception ‘not mediated by retinal pictures, neural pictures or mental pictures’ (Gibson 1979: 147) but of a field perceived as a whole rather than the sum of parts. Following on from Kandinsky’s lead Breer demonstrates an interest in such published psychological research into perceptual effects, citing psychological research in which image features disappeared from view by eliminating saccadic rhythm from eye movement (MacDonald 1992: 25-26). In colour perception there is a gap between scientifically measurable ‘quanta catch in the retina’ and what is perceived and experienced. In Breer’s film this gap is demonstrated in the incongruity between viewing the projected film and inspecting the same material over a light box. This gap between what is perceived and what exists or ‘real’ in such cases as Goethe’s afterimages, wrongly illuminated bananas, yellows in a Mondrian painting and the graphic flicker in a Breer film all suggest a perceptual gap similar to the one manifest in trauma, between what is subjectively perceived and what remains objectively known or unknown. Van der Kolk’s review of neurological research into PTSD stipulates that trauma initially resides as fragments isolated from the narrative recall of normal memory: ‘Traumatic experiences are initially imprinted as sensations or feeling states, and are not collated or transcribed into personal narratives’ (Van der Kolk 1996d: 296). Brewin’s dual processing model is based on this understanding and specifies an inherent gap between two memory systems normally working together. In trauma there is a gap between the flashback’s visceral recall and the witnessed narrated

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event, between what is remembered and what ‘really’ happened, between the body’s situationally triggered memory (SAM) which is sensory, immediate, performed, ‘disremembered’ and the actual forensic ‘real’ event witnessed by others and verbally accessible (VAM). Van der Kolk’s description of dissociation contains the objective– subjective gap: ‘When people develop a split between the “observing self” and the “experiencing self”, they report having the feeling of leaving their bodies and observing what happens from a distance’ (Van der Kolk 1996c: 192). Trauma’s dissociative state is entered through perceptual processes like those at play in Breer’s retinal performances. Herman documents the subjective description by one of her patients on entering this dissociative state: I would do it by unfocusing my eyes. I called it unreality. First I lost depth perception; everything looked flat, and everything felt cold. I felt like a tiny infant. Then my body would float into space like a balloon (Herman 1992: 102).

This subjective testimony plays out the gap that for Van der Kolk is instituted in trauma between the body and social space, between experiencing and observing. This patient’s description emanates from the same subjective body-centred space from Goethe’s perceptual descriptions arise, which Deren’s voodoun dancers enter and in which Breer’s visual performances take place. The contrasts between flat and 3-D perspective articulated in Herman’s perceptual testimony corresponds to Breer’s stated concerns in 69. Breer’s ‘pure’ avant-garde moving image practice utilizes referential and performative aspects of implicit perceptual processes identified by trauma research. Its palette is constituted from an array of discordant, ambiguous, comparative, relational and performative perceptual effects as rich in variance and complexity as the language of representational narrative cinema. This parallel language is informed by and expanded from a legacy of creative experimentation in painting, sculpture and music straddling the subjective and objective realms. Neurological research, especially its use image scanning technologies, interrogates the same perceptual hardwiring that Breer’s cinema performs.

The Flashback The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. Odd contradiction; a floating flash (Roland Barthes

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134 1981:52-53).

The mechanics and structure of Breer’s films have been placed in relation to the flashback experience in trauma. This section explores that analogy further and reiterates Breer’s relationship with the 20s avant-garde and the traumatic flashback. Utilising Lenore Terr’s concept of post-traumatic play and Ulrich Baer’s observations about ‘rewindability’ Breer’s more representational films like Fuji are placed in relation to the flashback’s appearance and disappearance. The connection between the flashback in cinema and trauma has been made through Turim’s description that ‘these flashbacks were often abrupt, fragmentary, and repetitive, marked by a modernism of technique’ (Turim 2001: 207) and her identification of a 20s European avant-garde. It is not surprising that such a description could double as an account of Fuji or 69 given Breer’s stated debt to this tradition. The figure-ground reversals, the intersections and overlaying of forms all appear in Richter’s Rhythm 21 which had impressed and influenced Breer: ‘I lifted stuff right out of it’ (MacDonald 1992: 18). Van der Kolk has identified the non-verbal nature of the traumatic flashback: ‘traumatic memories come back as emotional and sensory states with little verbal representation’ (Van der Kolk 1996d: 296) Brett and Robert Ostroff indicate that the flashback is constituted of fragments of visual and mental imagery (Brett & Ostroff 1985). Whitfield describes flashbacks as performative: ‘a kind of re-enacting and re-experiencing of the trauma from the perspective of a person’s total being- including their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects’ (Whitfield 1995: 238). The flashback is situated at the unprocessed end of Laub and Auerhahn’s spectrum of knowing and not knowing trauma (Laub & Auerhahn 1993). In this primary form of remembering trauma there is a ‘retention of the experience as compartmentalised, undigested fragments of perception that break into consciousness (with no conscious meaning or relation to oneself)’ (Laub & Auerhahn 1993: 289). Like Breer’s films, there is no explicit narrative, the recall is fragmentary and imparts a direct sensory impact. Herman, working with sexual abuse victims, describes traumatic memory ‘as a series of still snapshots or a silent movie’ (Herman 1992: 175). Breer’s films utilize the inherent speed of cinema projection of 24 frames a second to its limit. Speed limits critical analysis. The velocity of Breer’s ‘sensory manipulations’ defies any kind of thinking through while watching. Benjamin designates such an effect for film in general through modern fast editing strategies: ‘No sooner has his eyes grasped a scene than it has already changed. It cannot be arrested’ (Benjamin 1976: 231).

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Through focusing his practice on the single frame Breer takes this effect towards the apparatus’s perceptual limits. Flashbacks are ambivalent in not only imploring a past remembrance but also inserting, knocking, shattering these forgotten difficult events into the present. Can such flashbacks be thought of as a visual blow: flash back? If so, how much of the forgotten, knocking at the door of representation is re-cognised? Does not the blow itself re-traumatize, delivering back the trauma rather than the memory? There is an unresolved tension between a re-constitution and the flash, the optical stun. What comes back in the flash? It is a paradox that also begs the question: how easy is it to think, to negotiate when you have just been “hit”? Breer’s films present this shocked ambivalent state to the viewer. What is experienced is not processed consciously during the film’s projection. Trauma’s pre-reflective bodily impact is so severe that it cannot be processed, thought through or understood with its trace remaining unspeakable in the body. Like a Breer film trauma’s stun is difficult to unpack analytically because living in the world comes before knowing and in trauma’s extreme knowing never comes, remaining unspeakable. This is also how Brewin defines Situational Accessible Memory (SAM): immersive, rich in detail, lack of time awareness and not open to verbal recall (Hellawell & Brewin 2004: 3). You experience a Breer film’s performance, there is too much to take in consciously. There is no classic continuity so that time becomes irrelevant. Happening all at once, a Breer film is hard to outline in words: I tend now to have multiple experiences on the screen so that there is something slowly evolving on the screen at the same time, punctuated by rapid change, radical change, so that there is a kind of texture, a continuous texture as well as interrupted texture (Breer in Griffiths 1985).

Is the flashback a replay of a pre-reflective moment or experience that the senses replay anew? Is it a perceptual cluster of effects that is unexpectedly inserted into, and upsets a train of reflective thought, that impacts the body but emerges into reflective thought? The trace of the trauma remains in the body and the flashback is its incoherent call. In its stun it is difficult to unpack analytically. In narrative cinema the flashback marks the out-of-control that inserts itself as an optical catastrophe directly into the steadiness of narrative. It is a shock tactic designed to break or pause. Breer’s use of representational material shifts his work from inside the flashback to the horizon of its

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appearance and disappearance. ‘I cut so as to obfuscate narrative’ (Robert Breer in MacDonald 1992: 34). In Time Flies (1997) and Frog on a Swing (1989), the domestic family photograph, rather than the emptied frame provides a still point through which a cluster of abstract shapes and movement breaks through. The performance of a Breer film exhibits characteristics of posttraumatic play. In her work on childhood trauma Lenore Terr identifies a contrast between unsettling action and stillness in post-traumatic play. Children insert disturbing material in the most normal activities. ‘The artistic juxtapositions of plain and terrifying, mundane and mean, smooth and out-of-control- these juxtapositions mimic sensations of real trauma. Trauma after all starts off on a plain, ordinary day’ (Terr 1990: 331). In Breer’s films the images are not dysfunctional, in fact quite arresting and domestic. It is the performative energy unleashed that unsettles the out-ofcontrol into the viewing experience. Breer’s method ‘is to see the figurative or narrative elements of my films as establishing norms from which to depart’ (Robert Breer in MacDonald 1992: 23). Like the later Time Flies and Frog on a Swing, though not autobiographical in the same way, Fuji sits within such a tension between smooth and out-of-control. Its content of train travel permits associations between the moving carriage’s body impact and Breer’s flickering retinal performances, and also between the eye’s movement through the frame of the screen with the movement through the train window’s dynamic space. I have argued for Breer’s practice’s direct effect on our senses simulating a traumatic flashback and for parallels between a Breer film and situational accessible memory (SAM). Like trauma’s fragment, the film’s sequence is frozen. Though both are constituted of critical, referential and compacted perceptual events one critical difference between a debilitating traumatic flashback and watching a Breer animation is that the opportunity for reflection remains open after the film’s screening without the same amnesic emotional shutdown sustained by real trauma, an opportunity I have taken here. Like a prosthetic memory we can repeatedly replay the film at will to critically inspect an event’s overlooked detail searching for meaning to the point of employing a film analysis projector or editing machine. Baer names this potential a film’s rewindability: Because film presents images not as a succession of still photographs but as indistinguishable from movement, it can continually restage this “disintegrating unity” without either instituting coherence or succumbing to total fragmentation (Baer 2002 :170).

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Rewindability’s potential enhances the argument for materialist film’s inclusion in Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’. More clearly than in 69, where trauma’s subject is further lost in abstraction as in real trauma, this is especially so when a materialist film’s subject implicitly relates to breakdown as in a pet’s death in Brakhage’s Sirius Remembered (1959), relationship collapse in Frampton’s Critical Mass (1971) and the atomic explosion of Conner’s Crossroads (1976).

Fuji Having discussed the flashback in trauma and cinema in relation to Breer’s practice I now look more closely at Fuji (1974) as a site of appearance and disappearance, moving out of trauma and into representation and vice versa. I discuss Fuji in relation to early cinema, train travel, male hysteria and a rebalancing of the senses required to accommodate the impact of technological change on the body and the senses. Fuji contains more recognisable imagery than the graphic 69. Its hand drawn images of landscape figures and shapes are photographically sampled using an old super 8 camera through the window of a Japanese express bullet train, the 135 mph Tokaido Express, reductively traced to paper and then re-animated. Breer states: ‘I had a neat little fifty-dollar super-8 Kodak camera, which I still use. The handle folds up, and you can slip it in your pocket. A no-focus idiot camera’ (Robert Breer in MacDonald 1992: 45). The film begins and ends, like 69, with the same image, this time the filmed profile of a face at the side of a train window, a screen within a screen. This train shot is followed by a man running into the space of an installation of white objects in a white room, taken at Breer’s Expo 70 installation at Osaka where his ‘creepies’ or ‘floats’ were on show. The fluctuating sound is like the clicking metallic sound of a dragged chain that also suggests the sound of a rolling train, perhaps a trolley car. The sound of a bell starts the film off. The clicking seems to pulse in sync with the filmic flickering rhythm of the drawn images whose colours change and flicker frame to frame in ways reminiscent of the earlier 69. Towards the end the sound breaks off, creating a heightened awareness of the animated images. ‘I stopped it right at the climax of the film, or should I say created the climax of the film with the sudden drop into total silence’ (Robert Breer in MacDonald 1992: 47). There are a number of wide-angle shots, a Japanese panorama part industrial, part rail and part rural moved through and viewed from the train window. The hand-drawn rotoscoping, incorporating Mt. Fuji, adds a

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pensive quality. Those sections focusing on Mt Fuji are broken up, paused, by moments of black that suggest the train moving through a tunnel. After such blackouts we receive another animated sequence out of the window, often re-using frames from previous sequences. These gaps demonstrate Breer’s view that gaps and absences still register a presence. In the tunnel we have an architectural example of a simultaneous absence and presence. The very real tunnel is signified by the image’s absence. This relationship is also found in Frank Stella’s minimalist black paintings of totally black fields with such Nazi invoking titles as ‘Die Fahne Hoch!’, ‘Reichstag’ and ‘Arbeid Macht Frei’ attached. Stella use of this ‘traumatic’ gap between absence and presence invokes the Holocaust. Anna Chave suggests that such strategies and ‘minimalism generally, might well be described as perpetrating a kind of cultural terrorism, forcing the viewer into the role of victim’ (Chave 1990: 49). Heath points to a similar disorientation for materialist film’s viewer: ‘The disunity, the disjunction, of structuralist/materialist film is exactly the spectator’ (Gidal 1989: 75). Ernst van Alphen registers a related insight in his examination of the ‘violence done to the viewer’ (Van Alphen 1992: 11) by Francis Bacon’s paintings. Rotoscoping is a key technique mobilised by Breer in Fuji in abstracting the moving image. It refers to tracing by hand the outline of a projected image on paper. When this is done for a series of film frames and then re-photographed, no matter how roughly the original image is traced the drawn object’s movement survives most successfully. Breer’s rotoscoping is generally a minimal sketch onto a white background. Like Japanese calligraphy it is quick and gestural, but with technically rougher quality lines. Although abstracted these sequences clearly retain the filmic movement of the originating film. Speed, so much part of contemporary life, is incorporated into Breer’s practice through flashes of form, short edits, rough rotoscoping and through the off-hand method of image collection by Breer with his Super 8 movie camera on the train. This device registers movement, focus and blur in a specific photographic way. The camera’s lightness and its hand held use allows for the immediate performance of any perceptual gesture or physical whim. This recording device’s mobility predicts later video camcorder use. The increasing miniaturisation of digital moving image collection since this film’s making takes this immediate reactive aspect to another level. The quality of the rotoscoped images’ movement retains the train and camera apparatus’s trace. The camera’s perceptual performative gestures in relation to carriage space and the train window are still evident in the completed work despite the tracing and abstraction imposed by

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Breer’s drawings and tracings. There are screens within screens. The viewfinder’s framing of the landscape echoes the train window’s function, with the projector gate and the projection screen re-performing these roles in the cinema. Fuji documents an instant instantaneously, standing in contrast to Katsushika Hokusai’s contemplative woodblock print series ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ from 1832, which took 10 years to produce. The instant shorthand titling of the work as Fuji telegraphs Breer’s emphasis on immediacy. Breer’s method reveals that the technology of speed as expressed through both the train and the super 8 camera impacts directly on what and how we see. Despite this subject of speed there is still a sense of this contemplative aspect delivered in Fuji. This is embedded in these textural, floating, repetitive and gestural images that retain a connection through the drawing hand, to the body and the stuttering movement of train travel. Breer also uses as sources for rotoscoping here shots of the train’s conductor, train seating and sequences of people walking through, inspecting the static Osaka exhibition space. Echoing the randomising strategies of 69 many of these rotoscoped traces of original film footage repeat and have their order randomised, re-arranged and variably colourised from frame to frame. Though using similar drawing tools, unlike the manufactured squash and stretch motion of traditional cartoon animation, a re-traceable trace of the originating photographed movement survives. As in 69 other geometric abstractions are overlayed and inserted over these rotoscoped traces of the real. The juxtaposition of these geometric shapes and the blurred movement of objects just outside the train window suggest a convergence of imaginary and real space and a contrast between 2D and 3D space. There is a tension between ‘movement’ of indexical tracings into and across the frame and a ‘palimpsest’ of iconic imagery layered onto the screen surface. Macdonald observes the tensions between depth imagery and the screen surface: ‘The film plays with deep space and the flat picture of the screen’ (MacDonald 1992: 45). Posts and shrubs that flash past close to the window exhibit the same abruptness of appearance and disappearance as the flashing geometric shapes. These small and rapid visual concussions re-enact the bodily and auditory impact of a moving train. The mechanics of the eye movement, the blink, the action of letting these effects wash over you, the catching of an image, the persistence and repetition of Mt Fuji, creates a perceptual performance for the eye similar to that required by a train passenger looking out the window.

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The paradoxical clash between stillness and speed, produced in train travel has been remarked upon since its inception: ‘The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red and white: there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak’ (Victor Hugo quoted in Schivelbusch 1986:55). There is an abstraction produced by the speed of the train, speeding ‘like a bullet’ through the landscape while the perceiving body remains still. We are ‘shocked’ inside the Dadaist bullet. In Fuji objects are suggested by their trace. Images are partly erased like Victor Hugo’s blurred images. Though only the movement of a drawn line across the screen registers we still perceive it is a flower, a field, a telegraph pole, a mountain, Breer’s trace extending this paradoxical effect into a more conscious iconic realm. Despite its speed or glimpse we know it is Mt. Fuji and we know it is Japan. Is it entirely because it is glimpsed that we know or fall into this? Breer works at thresholds, ambiguities, paradoxes and approximations that read like an atomised form of Walker’s ‘disremembering’ at the heart of traumatic recall. Within the moving railway carriage the eye at times focuses on the window’s surface, its flecks of dirt and inconsistencies, at times it quickly samples into the distant slower moving, yet less detailed horizon line or at times one stares out of focus at those shadows and blurs that flash past in an instant. Sampling in and out of these layers of movement harnesses different visual skills that also need to be practiced and learnt for the cinematic experience of a Breer film as they were for such train travel. To change the way we experience this world required a re-alignment or metamorphosis of the senses. Failure to harness such skills is itself stressful. When train and cinema technologies were new the medical view was that stress was inevitable: ‘the rapidity and variety of impressions necessarily fatigue both the eye and brain’ (from Lancet quoted in: Schivelbusch 1986: 59). Despite their implicit nature it appears that these eye exercises need to be learnt. The adaptation to train travel that has occurred over time indicates that it can. And further, what rebalancing is required now in this new digital age? This is the surface age of Flusser’s technical images residing within Elsaesser’s lost referentiality incorporating Kroker’s ‘panic bodies’ (Kroker 1992). As discussed in Chapter 3, Small and Vorgan indicate that digital technologies activate a cortical rewiring towards faster information processing and attention shifts (Small, G & Vorgan 2009: 63) while Prensky asserts that such ‘rewiring’ is facilitated by daily repetitive activity like game playing and computer use (Prensky 2001b: 3).

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The Railway Journey and a re-balancing of the Senses We must go back to the working actual body- not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b: 162). I used to take lessons in a biplane and do stunts and things (Robert Breer in Griffiths 1985).

Fuji’s study identifies correspondences between looking out of a train window and looking at a Breer film. The flight both of birds and aeroplanes are also perceptually performed in Breer’s films, for example Gulls and Buoys (1972), and like the moving train, flight’s impact on perception informs Breer’s practice. For Breer, going around in circles and doing his loops, is not about getting lost as it may appear to an earlier generation. These films are perceptual training films for a new technological situation perceived as traumatic at its inception. The perceptually encountered visceral experiences of movement and speed that Breer documents were novel at the turn of the last century when their enabling technologies first entered public space. In the late 1800s train travel’s mobility converged with cinema’s birth. The torque and blur of the aeroplane stunt and the visceral experience of the fairground joyride performs the same blur of speed that train travel introduced and which repeatedly appear as the content in early cinema forms. Hale’s tours, a prominent fairground attraction from the early 1900s integrates these developments. Shaped and furnished like a train it used filmed panoramas in its windows and film shot from the front of locomotives at one end (Fielding 1970). The capacity of the new industrializing machinery to impart new shocks onto the body was evident in the rationales and manifestoes of current art movements. Dada and Futurism were attracted to cinema’s potential to register these technological effects. The new emergent psychological conditions of ‘war neurosis’ and ‘railway spine’ attest to the bodily distress that the new machinery introduced to both theatres of war and train travel. Flying stunts provides an embodied pre-reflective encounter with technology involving the disorienting push and pull on the body. In a spinning, banking and then descending aeroplane images move past at ever changing angles. Depth perception and balance are critical in locating one’s body in relation to the ground and horizon. Such experiences relate to the visual expression of depth, surface movement and blur in Breer’s films. The fairground joyride provides a similar body-centred perceptual

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shock. In cinema Eisenstein’s term of ‘attraction’ was appropriated from this fairground setting. Gunning identifies early cinema as a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ (Gunning 1990) because of its pre-occupation with such effects, an attraction aggressively subjecting the spectator to ‘sensual or psychological impact’ (Gunning 1990: 59). Early cinema’s exhibitionist and joy-ride films delivered ‘direct stimulation’ rather than telling or recounting story. Such films were usually constructed serially and utilised trick effects. This entertainment occupied a position of perceptual fascination in public space, extending the status of pre-cinema toys like the flipbook, thaumatrope and 3-D photography in the home. Cinema’s ability to precede reflection marked Futurism’s interest in the new medium: Because it is concerned with such essential material, the cinema is able to generate situations which arise for the collisions of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions. It is not separate from life but rather rediscovers the primal relationship of things. Marinetti 1916 Quoted in (Cantrill & Cantrill 1971b: 16)

Benjamin links Dadaist shock tactics whose ‘ballistics’ hit the spectator ‘like a bullet’ to the visceral impact of film (Benjamin 1976: 231), reiterating connections between trauma and 20s European avant-garde film already made. In Breer’s Fuji the audience travels in the Tokaido Express as if situated inside such a Dadaist bullet. As early cinema evolved with the cut and the emotive close-up into the feature length ‘talkie’ the visceral effect of the attraction migrated into the fist-fight interlude, the car chase and the love or dance scene within narrative, described by Deren as a ‘horizontal’ development with periodic ‘vertical’ investigations’ (Sitney 1970: 174). Gunning names such strategic placement within contemporary narrative film ‘tamed attractions’. This domesticating relationship between ‘attraction’ and narrative cinema recalls again the complimentary relationship between Brewin’s visceral situationally accessible memory (SAM) and the contextualizing verbally accessible memory (VAM). Lynne Kirby illustrates a male hysteria at the heart of the technological developments of cinema and train travel (Kirby 1988), counterweighing the discourse on female hysteria charted through Charcot’s photographic database into the emphatic gestures of silent cinema melodrama. I have previously read Deren’s subjugated practice as a performative response to that dominant discourse. The anti-modernist Nordau in his book Degeneration identified aimless and inattentive behaviour and the ‘striving for nervous excitement’ in fashion as symptomatic of a hysteria related physical degeneration brought on by the impact of industrialization and

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urbanisation (Nordau 1895). Kirby argues that a male specific hysteria is articulated in these early cinema forms. She identifies how the shock of this new railway machinery impacts on the male body both in cinema and within the public sphere generally. In so doing she makes direct connections between the shock delivered by both the cinema and train travel and specifically the capacity of a perceptually based cinema utilising flicker to impart a trauma on the viewer: If shock was by this time a programmed unit of mass consumption, and a principle of modern perception, it could clearly turn back in on itself and frighten- or thrill- with the force of trauma, (The flicker film is a perennial tribute to this power) (Kirby 1988: 121).

Breer’s perceptual performances relate back to this early cinema tradition and the strategies of those artists who, like the Futurist Marinetti, were attracted to it: ‘We shall show in the very same frame-instant two or three diverse visions. One beside the other’ (Marinetti quoted in Cantrill & Cantrill 1971c: 9). Small points out that early cinema exhibited forms taken up and expanded upon in the avant-garde and experimental film and that ‘early cinema exhibits a comparative homogeneity which, in a sense, made all production equally experimental’ (Small, ES 1994: 16). A traumatic impact of train travel was that its speed made redundant previous ways of viewing the landscape. Trains more than tripled the old speed of coach travel. Train speeds averaged 30 miles per hour while top speed of trains in the 1840s were between 60 and 70 miles per hour (Lardner 1850: 176) compared to speed of coach travel below 10 miles per hour (Lardner 1850: 36). The collapse of space delivered by speed disoriented established space-time relationships by which people had previously organised their daily life. In the train it was impossible to watch the landscape in the same way as one does while walking or by boat, bicycle or coach. Schivelbusch considers this a problem of perception rather than politics, ideology or taste: Dullness and boredom resulted from attempts to carry the perceptual apparatus of traditional travel, with its intense appreciation of landscape, over to the railway. The inability to acquire a mode of perception adequate to technological travel crossed all political, ideological and aesthetic lines (Schivelbusch 1986: 58).

A more body oriented looking was required. Schivelbusch identified three perceptual adaptations, or organising principles that train travel delivered. Panoramic vision, the compartmentalisation of time and space and a shift

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to a more sampled reading strategy while travelling (Schivelbusch 1986: 160). These shifts were implemented in other areas of culture as well, evident in cinema’s editing strategies. For Schivelbusch the result of looking out the train window ‘was exhaustion of the senses of the mind. To adapt to the conditions of rail travel, a process of decentralisation, or dispersal of attention, took place in reading as well as the traveller’s perception of the landscape outside’ (Schivelbusch 1986 :68-69). Dispersal of attention and decentralisation also prove useful in negotiating Breer’s rapid-fire films as visually capturing each fragment and fracture generates visual fatigue. Trying to grab images as they appear and disappear builds frustration. Letting them wash over you avoids its stress. There is no time to think, to appreciate these objects, so it becomes easier to let go and go with the flow. For Schivelbusch the train’s motion delivers a sense of stress and bodily fatigue through a ‘series of small and rapid concussions’ (1986: 117). If the cumulative stresses of train travel can lead to metal fatigue, what effect may it have on the body? Similarly, Burford argues that Breer’s rapid retinal concussions also require a new approach: The speed and compression of images; the refusal of beautiful images and drawings; in short the frustration imposed by the film’s short running time, and its denied communication which ensues, upsets people’s habits and demands a new kind of spectator (Burford 1999: 75).

The perceptual resistance confronting both the early train traveller and the viewer of a Breer film has been levelled at experimental film generally. You have to be willing to put in the effort. As experimental films are difficult to watch, inaccessible, they have to be watched differently. Audiences weaned on entertainment are often resistant to their insights and inherent critical position and find such films dull, boring and unreadable or too stressful to watch. Gidal tried to frame such issues politically and theoretically by critiquing dominant cinema’s illusionist embrace ‘at the centre of oppressive structuring in society’ (Gidal 1979: 73) and in a commitment to a ‘production of meaninglessness’ (Heath 1979: 96). Such arguments had some traction in academic circles like Screen rather than with a mainstream cinema-going audience whereas a feminist counter-cinema sourced the general social and political groundswell on issues of gender inequality. There remains a recurring face-off between experimental film and its audience, in Australia often addressed in the rhetoric of Cantrills Filmnotes editorials: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for

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four. If still boring try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two and so on. Eventually one discovers that it isn’t boring after all but very interesting’ (Cantrill & Cantrill 1971a). Uncannily, this mantra contains within it a trace of the obsessive work ethic at the heart of Prensky’s game playing cortically rewired Digital Native (Prensky 2001b: 3). Edwin Carels situates experimental film’s difficulties in the viewer’s constructed perceptual habits. For him experimental film ‘is always a bit like experimenting with yourself, being confronted with your own expectations, attention span and viewing habits. We try and watch without inhibitions but rarely succeed’ (Abrahams 2004: 14). Michele Pierson expresses a similar view: ‘By and large, film viewers have needed to want to experience whatever it is that avant-garde films have to offer, if they’re to get much out of them at all’ (Pierson 2006: 36). Although general train travel had its stressful effects, the railway accident introduced a radical new experience, an extreme case asserting the general rule. Initially those who complained of recurring shocks were seen as malingerers. It was only after much resistance that such medical complaints led to the diagnosis of a new medical condition known as ‘railroad spine’ or ‘railway shock’ in some of its seemingly ‘unscathed’ survivors. Herbert Page was one clinician who suggested psychic origins for ‘railroad spine’ (Page 1885: 29) and influenced Charcot’s view on the presence of a male hysteria (Drinka 1984: 113). Charcot postulated that in male hysteria the dread of debilitating injury set off an electric blow that travelled through the body and collapsed the body’s nervous system (Drinka 1984: 114). Schivelbusch also presents ‘railway shock’ or ‘railroad spine’ as an extreme case of the more general impact of train travel. ‘Shock’ was part of modern society, an end product of a pervasive industrialisation that the railroad and cinema represented. George Drinka suggests that ‘the progressive symbols of society, such as the railways, seemed to be responsible for the breakdown of the human nervous system’ (Drinka 1984: 122). In her exploration of Male Hysteria and Early Cinema Kirby conceptualises the relationship between the impact of railway travel and the railroad accident in terms of ‘real and anticipated’ shock and further relates this trauma back to the representation of hysteria in the cinema: ‘The railroad accident victim becomes in relation to early train films, and early cinema more generally, the film accident victim- a traumatised, and, in one sense, hysterical spectator’ (Kirby 1988: 116). Each dose, both the accident and ‘normal’ travel, impacts on the body and senses as a lived event as does the cinema experience. Merleau-Ponty states that we respond to the totality of these experiences not just the sum

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of its parts (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 50). Dealing with such a new industrial environment requires a re-balancing or metamorphosis of the sensory cluster. Even a slight shift in one of the senses to accommodate, say, a more visual environment can have a total effect on this cluster, producing a new ‘gestalt’ of the senses, of being-in-the-world. A shift has implications for all the senses and influences how personal and social space is structured within the culture generally: a vicarious flow on effect similar to the effect of vicarious listening that Felman and Laub locate in trauma’s witnessing. As with the rewired computer game playing Digital Native (Horstman 2010: 58) and with experimental film, we have learned to look productively out the train window. Upon reflection and through repetition over time the traveller has negotiated the bodily and sensory effects of this ‘new’ mobility. This perceptual negotiation has also impacted train behaviour and how we construct and negotiate space in ways Max Nordau criticised as an amoral ‘degeneration’ (Nordau 1895). The new integration of the senses involves trauma but is eventually perceived as a new totality, one impacting on the relationship with our environment beyond those industrialised elements that have been ‘added’ to it. A film like Fuji is useful as an articulate performative trace or re-iteration of this shift in the sensory balance required to negotiate industrialised space. In chapter 6 and 7 we investigate critical ways of looking that open up once this practice of viewing is negotiated for digital space.

Reprise I have described and reflected upon Fuji and 69 and Breer’s filmmaking practice generally, with respect to Breer's own reflections on his methodology, in relation to symptoms of trauma, brain physiology, the perceptual nature of flashbacks in cinema and trauma and the perceptual qualities of train travel. To get at the trace of the unspoken in these films I have enlisted Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thinking. It has become apparent in watching 69 and Fuji that we are uncannily confronted by what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘real’: The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x).

This is not always an encounter we do willingly or with pleasure. We may look away or shut ourselves down and go perceptually and reflectively elsewhere. As with trauma, there is no escape. Into this we are captured.

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What awaits the viewer of a Breer film is an encounter with one’s own perception and a sublime suggestion on how it needs to function and not function in our technologised being-in-the-world. The perceptual shift or re-alignment of the cluster or gestalt of the senses required to confront radical experiences can be overwhelming. It can be experienced traumatically and shut the body down. It is therefore, as Baer (2002: 170-1) suggests, in its rewindability that 69 and Fuji present a historically specific traumatic structure remaining open for inspection. Rewindability acts here as a request to inspect history and is enabled because film continues to exist in its originating form after each performance. This availability offers up a methodology for re-presenting (continually and upon request) trauma’s unknowability. As with photography’s invention at industrialisation’s beginning, the photograph was seen as offering a superior form of memory in its ability to record the most intimate of details that the naked eye missed, so too the moving image is offered up for this new digital post-industrial period as a prosthetic memory. It is offered up with an artistic methodology illuminated by phenomenological reflection, to trace the most invisible of missed relationships and to record the unspeakable and transgressive interconnectedness across the subjective-objective gap, between and across bodies and objects before being transformed into narrative.

CHAPTER SIX WITNESSING TRAUMA’S GUTTED CORPSE

This analysis of Landscape Suicide (dir. James Benning, 1986) moves materialist film’s critical trajectory from the minutiae of Breer’s unavoidable perceptual performances to Benning’s disciplined looking, a practice plumbing materialist film’s concerns with duration and Laub and Felman’s witnessing of trauma. I place Benning’s practice within the parallel and subjugated discourse of materialist film. His practice develops from a 70s materialist base to more textual work into the 80s and beyond, retaining a strong formalist focus on the image and duration. Sitney marks Benning’s trajectory with his new category of Menippean satire, formulated as a response to the new dominance of Wollen’s second avantgarde: a feminist counter-cinema. Benning brings a social dimension in view, found absent by Penley and Bergstrom in materialist film. He follows Yvonne Rainer in reordering and reconstructing found texts and landscapes as commentary on history and place, but like Deren and Breer, he avoids psychoanalysis. I reference Benning’s use of duration back to Andy Warhol and Gidal. Landscape Suicide documents two murderous acts, examines perpetrator testimony and surveys the landscape in which the murders take place. To help tease out the film’s unique character Benning’s approach is contrasted to other media responses to the same event. I argue that because of the unique way that issues of witnessing, dissociation, forgetting and denial are tackled this film merits inclusion in the ‘trauma cinema’ genre. Given the integral status of materialist film in Benning’s practice, the capacity of materialist film to communicate traumatic experience is further supported. Benning’s ways of looking at the image is also expressed in his teaching practice. This critical looking relates to the witnessing of trauma outlined by Felman and Laub. By utilizing Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus I suggest that this looking reflects the re-balancing of the senses required to accommodate image dominant digital technologies. The traumatic experience of this perceptual shift replays events from cinema’s birth and the advent of railway travel addressed in the previous chapter.

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Contexts: Mennipean Like Melinda Ward’s earlier placement of Benning’s work between ‘narrative and pure abstraction’ (Ward 1979: 11), Sitney maps Benning’s practice out of its structuralist source into a formal documentary avantgarde with affinities to a feminist counter-cinema containing both ‘narrative’ and ‘political criticism’ (Sitney 2002: 418). A new fourteenth chapter in the third edition of Visionary Film deals with developments since the text’s first publication in the 70s and responds to criticisms like those from Penley, Bergstrom and Mellencamp outlined in Chapter 1. Sitney gives Benning’s work pre-eminence within a new category of Menippean satire, in contrast to Brakhage’s Mythopoeic tradition. The name ‘Mennipean’ reinforces the mythic and heroic flavour of Sitney’s original avant-garde reading. Removing his own presence from this landscape, Sitney outlines the impact of Wollen’s split on 70s and 80s theory and practice: Theoretical authority had passed from the poetics of film-makers writing about their art… to academic critics under the influence of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan; the paradigm of modernist or even high art, cinema was under assault; feminism became the single most dynamic arena of energy generating both new films and critical discussion (Sitney 2002: 409-10).

Despite this affinity between this new category and Wollen’s second avant-garde it is no surprise that Sitney does not utilize Wollen’s dichotomy given the documented rancour between them (Sitney 1982; Wollen 1982). Sitney’s Menippean satire is: ‘a dialogue of forms and voices, open to narrative elaborations but not requiring them, in which characters embody ideas rather than manifest complex psychologies, the Menippea became the favourite genre of ‘postmodernists’ internationally’ (Sitney 2002: 410-11). This postmodern emphasis underlines ‘a rejection of distinctions between high and mass culture, an iconoclasm of artistic authority, relentless politicization of all themes, and an insatiable desire to unmask ideology’ (Sitney 2002: 418). Sitney identifies Yvonne Rainer’s work as foundation Menippean work and cites her Journeys from Berlin/1971 (dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1980) as prototype for Benning’s films (Sitney 2002: 415). Feminist critics and theorists such as Mulvey have long registered Rainer as a central figure in the emerged second avant-garde: ‘Rainer has done crucially important work with narrative, reinstating the possibilities of its radical use so firmly rejected by some’ (Mulvey 1979: 9). As Rainer herself states:

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Chapter Six For me the story is an empty frame on which to hang images and thoughts which need support. I feel no obligation to flesh out this armature with credible details of time and place. I was much more concerned with interweaving psychological and formal content (Rainer 1976: 89).

Reinforcing Sitney’s reading, Rainer appears as one of the scripted talking heads in Grand Opera (dir, James Benning, 1978) along with structuralist filmmakers, Snow, Frampton and George Landow. This film was completed immediately before Landscape Suicide. ‘By the time I had finished it, my feeling were more like the Bob Huot postcard you sent me: Less Is More… But, Its Not Enough’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 237) This postcard was an image of Huot’s billboard ‘Billboard for Former Formalists’ (Huot 1977). Benning offers Sitney a way out of gender politics and issues of sexual difference levelled at Sitney by Mellencamp’s feminist criticism (Sitney 2002: 437). For Mellencamp, in her articulate feminist rave, Visionary Film ‘traces a promethean national quest and elucidates male subjectivity as an art of brave, sacrificial narcissism’ (Mellencamp 1990: 24).

Contexts: Feminism Benning’s career intersects with feminist filmmaking practice through his collaborations with Bette Gordon in the 70s and the emergence of his daughter’s practice in the 90s. The first experimental film Benning encountered on public television was Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon in the early 60s. According to Berenice Reynaud: ‘Its freedom from the limited vocabulary of mainstream film affected him deeply’ (Reynaud 1996: 77). This motivated Benning to pick up a camera a few years later: ‘My whole vocabulary came from watching TV or going to the local theatre, so I had no idea what Meshes was about. It just stuck in the back of my mind, and finally I bought a camera’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 224). His collaborations with then partner Gordon included The United States of America (dir, James Benning and Bette Gordon, 1975). Working rhythms, changing interests but also issues of ownership of the early films (reminiscent of aspects of the Deren-Hammid split) ended their collaboration: ‘It also had to do with the credit that was going to him and not to me’ (Bette Gordon in MacDonald 1992: 229). Gordon’s interest reflects general feminist concerns connecting the pleasure of looking with the female figure (Gordon & Kay 1993: 92). She is concerned with: ‘how I- as a woman, would present my own sexual images without being exploitative’ (Bette Gordon in MacDonald 1992: 226). After her split with



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Benning she makes Empty Suitcases (dir, Bette Gordon, 1980) and Variety (dir. Bette Gordon, 1983). For Foster Empty Suitcases unpacks the ‘female image as an eroticized object’ (Foster, GA 1995: 152). Kathy Acker’s screenplay for Variety has a ticket-taker in a porno movie theatre in the female lead role. Gordon’s intervention is more direct than Mulvey: ‘the idea of a female spectator of pornography is exciting to me. If she was a female voyeur, she would be a character seldom seen in cinema’ (Gordon & Kay 1993: 93). Benning and Gordon’s The United States of America samples radio news broadcasts in a trip across America as the Vietnam War ends. One important scene intercuts two fixed-camera shots of the same freeway riddled landscape. In one shot Benning walks nude towards the camera and in the other Gordon walks nude away from the camera. As the bodies cross, the image flickers to alternate between the two shots and bodies. Benning comments: ‘Its very electric when we pass through each other’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 226) This flicker effect is reminiscent of Paul Sharits’ flicker films and Brakhage’s hyper-editing in Daybreak (1957) noted previously as a response to Meshes in the Afternoon, and has been examined in Breer’s practice. For Gordon: the ‘politics of sexuality were there whether or not they were completely articulated during the making of the film’ (Bette Gordon in MacDonald 1992: 226). In walking away from the camera Gordon is ‘trying to combat the art historical tradition of the female body depicted nude and frontally, while the male body is always covered’ (Bette Gordon in MacDonald 1992: 226). As the woman walks out of frame, Benning’s ongoing obsession with the emptied landscape remains operative, with him out of frame but with continued access to the camera apparatus. Gordon’s position succinctly performs both aspects of that moment which Mellencamp marks as the emergence of woman as the questioner and ‘the end of woman as the question’ (Mellencamp 1990: 184). The performed rather than theorised Benning-Gordon split provides a more productive metaphor of the avant-garde split for the male filmmaker than the Oshima moment near the end of The Battle of Tokyo or the theoretical model of Wollen’s dichotomy. Gordon’s move out of the frame in The United States of America to her own practice off-screen in Empty Suitcases and Variety, leaving Benning to his own devices, demonstrates a sustained respect for his practice. With Benning behind the camera at scene’s end, his critical view and its history though invisible remains enabled. Gordon notes the domination of the male voice in The United States of America: ‘as his voice gets louder and his image gets larger, the female voice gets more muffled’ (Bette Gordon in MacDonald 1992: 226). In his

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later films Benning responds by using a woman’s voice for his own: ‘I’ve used a woman’s voice for my voice in a number of films. I think I began doing that to question gender and to explore how you hear stories differently if they’re told by a man’s voice or a woman’s voice. Also I don’t like the sound of my own voice. And I want to distance myself from the personal things that I put into my films’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 226). This gesture re-performs Bertha Pappenheim’s use of the male pseudonym in her writing a century earlier. In Him and Me (dir. James Benning, 1982), in a woman’s voice Benning recounts waking up on November 4 1979 next to a close female friend who has died during the night. This real event also replays Turim’s Oshima moment, with the gender roles reversed. Reynaud comments: ‘since then, death has cast a subtle shadow on his films. He’s also showing an increasing concern for history’s slow work of destruction on our social and physical space’ (Reynaud 1996: 79). These concerns converge in Landscape Suicide. Another aspect to Benning’s relationship to feminism is the emergence of his daughter Sadie Benning as an important feminist and lesbian film and video artist in the 90s. Her signature images consist of shards of intimate text inscribed over music samples and close up shots of parts of her body. He responds to his daughter’s strategies also evident in his own: ‘She’s a very special person. In the first piece I saw of her, she had written on the image, ‘A friend of mine was raped by a black man. Now she’s a Nazi skinhead’ But it didn’t end there. The third line was ‘Its so easy to fall in a trap’’ (James Benning in Reynaud 1996: 79). Sadie Benning’s seminal highly personal coming of age diaries chart an emerging lesbian identity and are situated in the next generation of feminist discourse beyond Ackerman, Rainer and Mulvey. Patricia White describes them as ‘constructed and set in her bedroom in her mother’s house and composed of poses and references drawn from popular culture, are exemplary of the kinds of things baby dykes do with the legacy of classic movies’ (White 1999: 59). Though not raised by her father her series is initiated by his gift of a Fisher-Price pixelvision camera and employs technical strategies such as her use of text recalling her father’s practice. These toy cameras produce chunky black and white images on sound cassette tapes. Landscape Suicide was initiated on a 1985 Chicago to New York train trip by Sadie showing her father a Rolling Stone article about the fate of killer Bernadette Protti: “Death of a Cheerleader: An American Tragedy” (Sullivan 1985). Her father explains: ‘She rips six or seven pages out of the magazine and handed them to me and said she did not want to read this kind of article, it only scared her’ (Voice-over from Landscape Suicide). This article intimates that the murderer is lesbian: ‘Finally they just came

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out and asked, ‘Are you a lesbian? Did you think Kirsten might prefer girls to boys? I was shocked’ (Sullivan 1985: 52).

Disremembering, duration and looking Disremembering Despite his historic relation to feminist practice, Benning acknowledges and asserts his materialist roots. Using the Menippean form’s ‘insatiable desire to unmask ideology’ (Sitney 2002: 418) Benning mobilises feminist masks to unmask his and feminism’s ideology. Like Gidal and Le Grice he averts Sitney’s psychoanalytic perspective and avoids Brakhage’s visionary Mythopoetics: ‘I don’t think of the camera as an extension of my eye. I don’t have that kind of romance with the camera. I use it as a precise tool’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 230). As Benning’s ‘trademark is the static shot with a rigorously defined frame’ (Reynaud 1996: 78) his formalism is closer to Gidal via their shared deference to early Warhol’s use of duration. Images are delivered emotionally cool, self-reflexively, reminding you that you are watching a film. As Gidal describes: ‘The antiillusionist project foregrounds mechanisms of cinema in the viewing, denying possibilities of an imaginary oneness of viewer and viewed’ (Gidal 1989: 61). Benning combines real and manufactured images: ‘I choreograph the movements of the characters within the frame, but at the same time I like to incorporate the random movements of unaware passersby’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 230). Sound is similarly approached. In 9-175 (dir. James Benning, 1975) the ambient sounds and voices recorded at the campground are mixed with scripted rehearsed phrases and recognizable sound effects. ‘I wanted to combine ‘real’ and ‘manufactured’ sounds, so that the audience would question each sound’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 230). Benning’s use of the female voice is a further example of mixing real with metaphor. This performative gesture holds within it a trace of the Gordon-Benning split and the loss of the ‘disremembered’ friend in Him and Me which itself replays the earlier loss. The voice over in Landscape Suicide is also delivered in the feminine where MacDonald finds this intervention particularly apt (MacDonald 1992: 246). This dissociative quality is also found in Flusser’s ‘technical image’ and this real and manufactured mix approaches Walker’s ‘disremembering’ where traumatic memories function both on a real and metaphoric level. On his technique Benning states: ‘I’ve always been interested in that. I

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don’t recreate reality, I create a metaphor that suggests reality. Within that metaphor I make things a little hyper-real, or surreal, just off balance’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 246). Benning addresses Walker’s question: ‘How can we conceptualize mental images and sounds that bear a relationship to past events, but a relationship that is oblique and not represented through simple imagist transcription?’ (Walker, J 2005: 17) Keeping things off balance so that the viewer must continually unpack is integral to Gidal’s conception of materialist film: ‘each film moment therein being a moment of contradiction, of opposites held only to be simultaneously unheld, and thereby productive. This is different from illusionist narrative production’ (Gidal 1989: 148). A Benning film traumatizes both theory and practice. His paradoxical images and obtuse use of narrative arrives, not from a psychoanalytic framework as Walker does, but from materialist film’s anti-narrative practice. This position dislodges Walker’s ‘disremembering’ from its psychoanalytic origins and maroons Benning’s narrative from its antinarrative roots. Benning’s layered double negation, though modelled on Gidal’s intervention, enables narrative’s constrained return: ‘Less is More… But it is not Enough’ (MacDonald 1992: 237). The displacement that occurs for the viewer in an engagement with a Benning film: ‘One could listen to a Benning film and not fully anticipate what one would see (and vice versa)’ (Pisaro 2007: 234) places the viewer in the position of Laub and Felman’s witnessing of trauma trying to unpack events partially denied and obscured.

Dual Processing Benning extends the combination of real and metaphor into longer written and visual texts, sequences and whole films. It is in his appropriation of longer texts that the connection with Yvonne Rainer is strongest. American Dreams (dir. James Benning 1984) has a continuous handwritten white scrolling diaristic text running underneath the image and North of Evers (dir. James Benning 1991) has a similarly positioned diaristic hand-written black text. Macdonald points out that the viewer has to work: ‘This unusual structure requires an unusual kind and amount of activity on the part of viewers (or really viewers-readers)’ (MacDonald 2001: 102). These consist of parallel tracks of image and text that fight with one another for the viewer- reader’s attention. Macdonald describes the process of viewing: ‘the viewer must choose between the text and the other imagery: we cannot read and scan the frame simultaneously. But

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whichever choice we make at any given moment, we are continually tempted by the other alternative’ (MacDonald 2001: 102). Sometimes the text rests on a white background in American Dreams or a black background in North of Evers so that the words become invisible and meaning has to be guessed. Each move within this labyrinth of choices, as well as revealing, makes something else unseen. The story must be revisited because it is not available in one take. Benning acknowledges that, like a foreign film’s sub-titles, perceptually text is unavoidable: ‘Text is always given more importance than image. Even when I’ve watched American Dreams- and I know what the film’s about and all its images, everything- I always read the text from beginning to end’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 243). Unlike the subtitles of a foreign film, where the text directly extends the human voice, there is no attempt at one to one image and text correspondence. In a Benning film the differing information in parallel tracks suggest elliptic connections and productive ambiguities. Into the image sequences and stream of consciousness texts Benning stacks further ‘off balance’ and out of sync meanings. This viewer activity requires the kind of skills alluded to by Felman and Laub as necessary for unpacking trauma narratives. Such memory work is closer to witnessing than understanding. This two-track dissonant relationship between text and image once again recalls the image dominant SAM and verbally based VAM of Brewin’s dual processing. Where attention to one track crafts the other as unseen suggests this model’s performance of dissociation. In normal processing of events verbally accessible memory (VAM) and situational accessible memory (SAM) are integrated on the run, as occurs in most image and sound films. In trauma VAM shuts down and only SAM operates. In these Benning films information is similarly lost because only one perceptual or memory system is operational. You either read the words or watch the image. Something is missed.

Duration As with Gidal duration is a key strategy Benning derives from Warhol’s early work: ‘Duration has been part of my work from the very beginning’ (MacDonald 2007: 430). In its use of real time Gidal identifies Kitchen (dir. Andy Warhol, 1965) as a ‘forerunner of structuralist/materialist film’ (Gidal 1989: 51). Benning is indebted to Warhol: ‘I was conscious of the early Warhol. I think he made it easier for people to make films like I make’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 233). Warhol places duration at the centre of everyday life:

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Chapter Six I like boring things. When you sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. It takes up time. Yeah. Really, you see people looking out of their window all the time. I do. If you’re not looking out of a window, you’re sitting in a shop looking at the street (Andy Warhol quoted in Gidal 1971: 86).

Gidal has outlined how duration imposes a different relationship to the image than dominant cinema’s, with aspects missed in illusionist cinema coming back into view. As Benning explains: It always pleased me when people would tell they’d almost left but instead had stayed with the film and felt that the experience had taught them to look differently, to pay more attention and become more proactive as viewers, to look around the frame for small details and not wait for the film to come to them’ (MacDonald 2007: 435).

Benning stresses the direct relationship between landscape and duration: ‘Place is a function of time’ (MacDonald 2007: 430). He teaches a practical field-based subject called ‘Looking and Listening’ at Calarts exploring how to pay attention to different physical environments (MacDonald 2007: 435). As an ex-student Amanda Yates lists the type of questions asked: ‘what happens if you just look and don’t add anything? What happens if you don’t try to sell anything, even your beliefs? What if the story is already there in the environment?’ (Yates 2007: 156) This approaches Walter Benjamin’s take on Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris’s deserted streets as ‘scenes of a crime’, necessitating a different looking to address their apparent but ‘hidden political significance’ (Benjamin 1976: 220). ‘Disciplined’ looking coupled with duration productively reveals trauma’s gaps and unspoken qualities over time. Caruth has noted the importance of trauma’s belatedly returning gap (Caruth 1995: 6). Charcot’s ‘visuel’ clinical observations of the ‘hysteric’ woman’s body involved a disciplined looking (Apignanesi 2008: 128). Mulvey’s male scopophilia effectively critiques Charcot’s practice as does the trajectory of Deren’s performative practice. Though historically connected Charcot’s, Mulvey’s and Benning’s ‘disciplined’ looking are not the same. Benning’s looking is a critical skill shaped through direct contact with the everyday that also plumbs the deep-seated source of Bourdieu’s habitus.

Benning’s Looking and Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ Coupled with duration, and by placing the viewer’s activities of listening and seeing off-balance Benning elicits a different way of looking at and

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thinking through his films. Like Gidal and Le Grice, Benning recognizes a political dimension to his durational looking: ‘I suppose if I think of my films as dealing with politics, it’s with the way you look at the screen. If you look at things differently aesthetically, maybe you’ll look at things differently politically’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 231). For Benning because of the academy’s privileging of written knowledge, looking has to be re-learnt: ‘I think that is a function of the education system where so much importance is put on reading and hardly any on visual thinking’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 242). Like Mulvey Benning understands Althusser’s argument that we are all subjects of ideology (Althusser 1997): ‘we gradually learn that our looking and listening are coded by our prejudices. We need to confront our prejudices and learn to see and hear more clearly’ (MacDonald 2007: 435). An important distinction between Benning’s looking and Mulvey’s scopophilia remains. Benning, like Gidal, Le Grice and Breer, places his argument in relation to discrete perceptual events rather than dream, identity and sexual politics as is evident in Amanda Yates’ list of questions from Benning’s class: ‘do you actually remember the character of the light, or was it your imagination filling in the gaps? Is this a dramatic representation or is it your real memory?’ (Yates 2007: 155) I use Foucault’s thinking on a ‘technologising of the self’ and Bourdieu’s habitus to understand Benning’s disciplined looking. For Foucault ‘discipline works through a series of ‘quiet coercions’, working at the level of people’s bodies, shaping how they behave and how they see the world’ (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000: 62) For Bourdieu these coercions operate at the level of the habitus. John Codd describes the habitus as ‘a set of basic, deeply interiorized master-patterns’ operating below levels of calculation and consciousness that ‘may govern and regulate mental processes without being consciously apprehended or controlled’ (Codd 1990: 137). In prompting a clearer looking and listening by confronting our prejudices Benning demands a wilful adjustment of our sensory cluster at the deep ingrained level of Bourdieu’s habitus. For Bourdieu the habitus provides a sense of what to do and how to react to events during the normal course of daily life, ‘without consciously obeying rules explicitly posed as such’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 76). Though not essentially visual or emotive, the habitus shares its implicit nature with the SAM memory system and its integrative qualities with VAM. Bourdieu’s sense that the habitus ‘structures new experiences in accordance with the structures produced by past experiences, which are modified by the new experiences’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 60) describes the interaction between VAM and SAM

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memory systems. In dynamic interaction the habitus is both product and producer of structure, appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s ‘style’: ‘I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 455). The habitus’s mediation of the objective and subjective realms recalls and extends the discussion on objective-subjective gap in Chapter 5. Goethe’s experiments with light, Land’s ‘Retinex Theory’ of colour constancy, Breer’s perceptual performances and now Benning’s practice of looking are here theorised as instances of the habitus in action at its deep-seated perceptual hard-wiring core. Though Bourdieu defines practice as the habitus’s operation on a field of knowledge, and although the habitus itself inhabits a traumatic position ‘as neither apprehended nor apprehensible’ (Codd 1990: 137) can a materialist practice coax the habitus into view as Elsaesser’s recovered referentiality, or locate it as Barthes’ unlocatable sign? Michel de Certeau’s critical description of Bourdieu’s habitus as a receptacle of ‘the contrary of what he knows’ (de Certeau 1984: 60) enters the realm of Felman and Laub’s slippery witnessing of trauma and approaches the elusive belated knowing Caruth locates inside the traumatic flashback. Further, de Certeau’s description of Bourdieu’s tactical positioning of the habitus as being ‘knowledgeable without knowing precisely because it knows only too well what it does not and cannot say’ (de Certeau 1984: 60) further defines the slipperiness performed by Benning’s cinematic practice and indicates a Situational Accessible Memory (SAM) base for this knowledge. My analysis of Landscape Suicide assesses how well Benning is able to communicate the subject that ‘it knows too well’ in a way ‘it cannot say’.

Landscape Suicide Benning had planned a film in three sections: the story of Ed Gein that ended the eventual film, a recounting of the death of Medgar Evers witnessed by his brother at the front of their house and the remembrances of an Ambulance driver during World War II. These three accounts all relate to violence and the vicarious traumas of witnessing. This changed when Sadie Benning showed her father a Rolling Stone on the Chicago to New York train (Reynaud 1996: 78). This travel setting itself informs Benning’s practice, so often about traversing the American landscape. At the turn of last century the railway journey with its motion and panoramas became a metaphor for cinema, annihilating ‘the traditional space-time continuum which was characterized by the old transport technology’

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(Schivelbusch 1978: 33). The reading of short articles suited this environment. Newspaper sales rose at the expense of book sales. For Schivelbusch ‘The perusal of reading matter is an attempt to replace the conversation that is no longer possible’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 75). The dual activities of watching the landscape and reading that so define travel are in some ways re-enacted in the structure of two of Benning’s films (American Dreams and North of Evers). In Landscape Suicide the use of the Rolling Stone text enables a father-daughter conversation that never took place. The story of the death of a cheerleader (Sullivan 1985) disturbed 12 year old Sadie Benning. ‘I realized that this murder was having the same effect on her as the Gein murder had on my life in 1957, when I was fourteen’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 244). In both events the murder was an out of body experience for the perpetrator. Both perpetrators’ remembering involved varied levels of amnesia and the community reaction became one of covering over and denial. The Ed Gein and Bernadette Protti murders form the double spine of Landscape Suicide. ‘I can relate to Protti. There have been moments in my life when I could do something like she did. And maybe I can enter Gein sometimes too. That’s frightening but true. Our minds are capable of strange things’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 245). The Protti testimony forms the film’s first half and Gein’s follows. These ‘witness accounts’ are taken from police interrogations and court transcripts. They are split by images from the locations and communities in which these crimes took place. These oral and then visually dominant tracks build on Benning’s previous films’ practice. This time the dual tracks are not laid next to each other but follow one another, with a female voice-over, limited radio and news reports related to the crimes and songs. Kirsten Costas’ favourite song, Memories, plays while a young teenage girl talks on the phone in her room. The popular 50s tune The Tennessee Waltz plays on the radio while Bernice Worden dances to its tune in her home. The testimony sequences are simply single camera shots in an uncluttered, bland office-like or courtroom setting, focusing solely on the two actors, Rhonda Bell and Elian Sacker. The testimonies’ deadpan nonemotive delivery produces a ‘real’ dissociative effect: ‘After our screening last night, the people from the Criminal Justice program said that delivery was absolutely in keeping with the way they’ve seen people confess’ (MacDonald 1992: 246). As Herman states: ‘the patient’s first attempts to develop a narrative language may be partially dissociated’ (Herman 1992: 177) and research indicates that dissociation is a common symptom in incarcerated perpetrators of homicide (Moscowitz 2004). Effective acting

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also requires an orchestration of non-verbal cues, as much is communicated with what is left unsaid through pauses and hesitations. The testimonies are separated by landscape sequences of the two communities. Orinda is presented after Protti’s testimony and Plainfield before Gein’s. Benning says: ‘I compare the isolation produced by the Middle Wisconsin winter an isolation so severe that it can almost lead to madness, to the alienation felt in the pristine landscape of affluent California that caused that kid to become a killer’ (James Benning in Reynaud 1996: 78). Though Benning names the landscape’s complicity it remains unspoken in the film the viewer is expected to make the connection through their looking. The female off-screen voice (Benning) tells how in visiting Orinda to shoot these images she (he) connects to the community: ‘it’s a funny thing about trying to tell the truth. When I began this story I felt the pain of Bernadette so heavily that I overlooked the victim. When I visited Orinda things became more real’ (Spoken narration in Landscape Suicide). Driving into Plainfield Benning’s voice-over observes: ‘when I visited Plainfield, I couldn’t get a sense of the murder. But the feeling of a collective guilt still lingers’ (Spoken narration in Landscape Suicide The urban and mid-west topography’s unfortunate history seeps into the screen, in Gein’s case, 50 years after the event and in Protti’s only one year later. Benning re-photographs the crime scenes and re-animates Protti and Gein’s testimony, forcing the images and perpetrators to ‘speak’ for themselves. Despite this direct connection back to real events this work falls uncannily within the purview of Elsaesser’s comments about the rise of fake documentary and re-enactment within the post-modern as exhibited in the digital documentary form. There remains a tension between the real and fabrication that delivers the unlocatability at the heart of the crime. The ability of Landscape Suicide to speak its ‘truth’ depends on its ‘ethical’ construction. This ‘ethics’ is delivered through Benning’s disciplined looking.

The Murders Before detailing the film’s perpetrator testimony these next sections focus on the historic record of the Protti and Gein murders available to Benning. Apart from the Rolling Stone article on Protti, a number of documentaries and books have been written about the Gein event. Though some of this material appears in the film, its trace registers in the film’s structure, framing, duration and editing decisions. Just as trauma is largely defined

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by what is not known or what is not said, so too how material is left out of the film leaves an implicit residue.

Protti-Costas 15-year-old Californian Michelle Protti killed schoolmate Kirsten Costas in an out of body moment of fear on the front porch of Kirsten’s home at night in 1984: ‘I really feel like it wasn’t me. It was weird. It was the weirdest feeling I’ve ever had… it was exactly like when you see a dream and so see yourself doing things. It was so much like a dream I thought I would wake up’ (Bernadette Protti in Sullivan 1985: 46). She stabs her repeatedly and randomly with a kitchen knife left in the car by her sister. After staggering to a neighbour’s house, Kirsten is pronounced DOA as the ambulance enters the hospital grounds. The murder takes six months to solve, during which Protti lives a normal life, putting aside the events of that night. ‘That’s why I can live through every day, because I just forget about it, because it doesn’t seem real’ (Sullivan 1985: 52). The community incessantly regurgitates the murder, with ongoing speculation about the murderer and their motivation. Randall Sullivan reports: ‘We don’t expect murders to happen here’ (Sullivan 1985: 48). Sullivan’s article’s structure mimics techniques Benning uses in his films. Not everything is stated explicitly and like Benning, Sullivan presents two narratives at once. Protti’s dissociative testimony of shame and self-revulsion interrupts an account of community reactions, the two narratives converging and at other times opening up disconcerting gaps. Sullivan’s journalism presents the Rolling Stone style of the hero negotiating an inhospitable perplexing environment in which writers like Hunter S. Thompson excelled. Costas was a winner in a community obsessed with success. ‘In the game of vague motives and clear associations, where the rules are unwritten but the score was always kept, Kirsten Costas had been one of the winners at Miramonte High School’ (Sullivan 1985: 50). Costas is painted as confrontational and mean by some that knew her with wanna-be Protti fearing what Kirsten will say about her after the two of them talk together privately one evening, a meeting Protti had manufactured. As the case drags on rumours circulate the community and those that do not fit in are the first suspected: As the stories got passed around, some altered, some magnified- many invented – they began to grow into one another, layer upon layer, until they took their place among Orinda’s environmental features, like the tule

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Sullivan and Benning both embed the community’s behaviour into the landscape. Benning gives you the image and the time to locate its trauma, with context removed and a slight distortion of the background sound: ‘There’s something that detaches them just a bit from the place we’re seeing’ (MacDonald 1992; 246). Sullivan’s descriptions conjure up images for Benning’s film: They lived in large houses on landscaped lots in a setting of bird-calls and high tension wires, where streets without sidewalks wound like leafy tunnels through the dense foliage toward hilltop cul-de-sacs called Lost Valley Road and Sleepy Hollow Court and Fallen Leaf Terrace (Sullivan 1985: 48).

Protti’s identification shocks school and community and marks a shift from festering fascination to shut down and denial. Those pointing out that ‘there’s too much focus on external achievement and success and not enough attention on the people inside’ (Sullivan 1985: 121) are now ignored. It’s easier to consider Protti a bad egg, a lesion to be excised and the murder ‘an isolated event’ best forgotten. Most of Protti’s school friends disconnect, although Stacey Soares, on agreeing to write back to Protti enunciates Benning’s position: ‘She helps me understand. Bernadette feels like she’s died and gone and everyone thinks she’s horrible. No matter what they tell you, the pressure is that great here’ (Sullivan 1985: 123). Rick Barth’s comment that ‘the homicidal threat and the suicidal threat are just the opposite end of the same breath’ (Sullivan 1985: 123) explains Benning’s title for the film. A formal three-minute sequence of a tennis player practicing serves opens Landscape Suicide, terminating with a ‘still-life’ of numerous tennis balls randomly strewn across the other side of the court. This shot sets up the film, suggesting the significance and apparent randomness of offscreen events, and a dynamic between action and consequence about inputs to schema, structures and fields transgressing linear cause and effect, joining the dots for a dynamic relationship between environment and action. McDonald reminds us that the environment is not only the product of our actions; the environment in turn impacts us: ‘Benning’s story of each murder is presented in its physical and social environment, and the viewer is asked to consider how environment relates (and doesn’t relate) to violent crime’ (MacDonald 2007: 429). The scene represents the obsessive and competitive nature of the Orinda environment where even playing sport is a highly competitive pursuit, a continual focus of time,

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effort and money. The tennis scene primes the viewer, providing a model for Benning’s looking. This scene presents the same modus operandi (MO) as the randomly directed stabbings into Kirsten Costas’s body by Protti’s kitchen knife. The MO is present in the scattergun approach of the sheriff’s unsuccessful investigation of Pinto car sightings and the exhaustive interviews with classmates, acquaintances and friends: The reward boosted telephone calls to a dozen a day at the twenty-fourhour hot line the sheriff’s department had set up. Investigators followed the leads one by one and, as the weeks passed, began to describe the progress of the case in statistical terms: 4000 man-hours, 800 tip sheets, 300 interviews, 750 pintos - zero arrests (Sullivan 1985: 48).

Finally, it is also the MO of the computer and its random access memory (RAM) into which, magically, the facts of the case are keyed, coughing up a killer profile that locates Protti. Is this the same MO now operating in search engines scouring a dissociative and fragmented world-wide-web? Google takes this input to database model to another level, as do MRI and PEP image scanning technologies presenting a visual join the dots on computer screens of cellular neural activity. The computer’s MO is particularly suited to ferreting out apparent random acts of violence: The bureau’s psychological profile coordinators fed the material into computers and prepared a ten-page composite of the killer. This document, Special Agent Robert Gast II said, provided ‘a very clear picture of the individual’ likely to commit such a crime. The FBI was reluctant to reveal details, offering only that the composite suggested the killer was a female the same age as Kirsten Costas- probably a peer group member- and she would exhibit a lack of remorse (Sullivan 1985: 52).

Is there significance in that an 80s computer program is more effective than the local law in solving a murder? Is Landscape Suicide, with its own lack of emotional delivery and structural emphasis, somehow predictive of the digital explosion at its event horizon? Computer code’s formal logic, the geometrics of abstraction and the mathematical proof’s certainty all inform Benning’s practice through his previous mathematical training. Benning states in Grand Opera: ‘the story of the young boy memorizing the digits of pi seemed like a metaphor for my life as an artist and for my decision to become a structuralist filmmaker’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 237). Grand Opera is also the film in which a young Sadie Benning dutifully recites the alphabet for her father, finishing her recital with ‘This is for P. Adams Sitney’. As daughter she later attests:

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‘my dad is a math person. He is always trying to find a structural solution. For many years I did not understand this. But now I do’ (Benning 2007: 65). The FBI’s secrecy about their computer’s process registers a preoccupation with surface that Flusser identifies in the technical image. A preoccupation with surface also describes Orinda and Plainfield’s community denial, also expressed by Benning’s landscape images. Where in trauma the social removes the mechanics of the event from view, according to Flusser in the digital this effect is intrinsically performed by the technology itself.

Gein-Worden ‘When he walked into the court room there was dead silence’ (Eddy Brillowski in Gorham 2004)

Ed Gein’s killing has a longer gestation period than Protti’s, reaching back into the 50s of Benning’s youth. Gein’s testimony points to a more deepseated trauma, minimally revealed but with enduring traces in popular culture. Gein was found guilty of hardware store owner Bernice Worden’s murder, shot at close range with a .22 calibre rifle at the height of the local deer-hunting season in November 1957 in Plainfield Wisconsin, USA. Police suspected Gein's involvement and upon entering a shed on his property discovered Worden's corpse. Decapitated, her headless body hung upside down by ropes at her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. The torso was empty, the ribcage split and the body ‘dressed out’ like that of a gutted deer. The search recovered other disturbing objects including human skulls mounted upon the corner posts of Gein’s bed, skulls fashioned into soupbowls, human skin employed as seating upholstery and lampshade covering, a box containing nine vulva and an elaborately constructed wearable skin torso. A human heart was found near the stove. The skin from the face of what looked like Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, was found in a paper bag amongst other such paraphernalia in a jumble with children’s toys and discarded rubbish. Despite this strata of clutter, Gein’s dead mother’s boarded up room had been kept in pristine shrine-like condition since her death two years earlier. Ed Gein was born in 1906. There is evidence that his alcoholic father physically abused him and his brother. His Lutheran mother, Augusta Gein was emphatic on the innate immorality of the world and alcohol’s evil. She was hard on her sons, lecturing them that all women (herself excluded) are prostitutes and instruments of the devil. This was possibly a

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strategy to avert them becoming like their father who died of heart failure in 1940. Since Gein’s eighth birthday the family lived on an isolated farmhouse outside town. Ed’s brother, who was more resistant to his mother’s invective, died (in retrospect mysteriously) during a farm brush fire in 1944. Known for his gifts of fine cuts of venison, Gein frequently babysat for neighbours, recounting strange stories about shrunken heads ostensibly collected from south sea island head-hunters to local children. Though of average intelligence Gein presented as simple, childlike and inoffensive to his neighbours. After the revelation of Worden’s gutted body Gein co-operated with police but never admitted to any other local unresolved murders such as Mary Hogan’s. He volunteered that he had exhumed the body parts from local cemeteries shortly after burial. His mental incompetence to stand trial was overturned a decade later, this later trial finding him guilty of Worden’s murder. Three medical reports from the original investigation help find Gein legally insane. The following excerpts point to Gein’s traumatic and amnesic nature of Gein’s state of mind: ‘He is not always clear in his statements and at times holds his head and declares he is not sure of his actions’ (Dr Warrington’s report in Gollmar 1989: 59)…. At times the remark was made ‘It seems like a dream, impossible’ (Dr Warrington’s report in Gollmar 1989: 60). Gein demonstrates ‘deep seated feelings of insecurity in his social contacts… The source of the poor ego strength is problematic but could be related to psychologic traumatization suffered at the hands of the father, over-identification with the mother, and morphologic factors of small stature and eye defect’ (Dr Warrington’s report in Gollmar 1989: 61). ‘He recalled the sequence of events up to the act itself, which in the latter case he described as accidental, but had no recall of his activity following the acts’ (Dr Collwell’s report in Gollmar 1989: 64). ‘He states that he does not remember putting the body in his truck and driving it to his home, although he admits he must have been the one who did this’ (Dr Schubert’s report in Gollmar 1989: 67).

Gein-Worden: Social and Cultural Responses ‘I remember the jokes people told about Gein when I was fourteen’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 245).

After the murder hordes of reporters from around the western world descended upon Plainfield, population circa 700. The locals quickly learnt to abhor this media attention, of being stopped in the street by reporters, seeing themselves and their town on the news every night, of the Gein

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jokes, the scavengers and the tourists, of out-of-towners ordering Gein hamburgers. Research may show that such humour relieves stress and helps deal with difficult situations (Lindsey & Benjamin 1981; Pollio 1995) but the locals were at the centre of the storm. Here are a few more examples of the jokes used: There was an old man named Ed, Who wouldn’t take a woman to bed. When he wanted to diddle, He cut out the middle, And hung the rest in the shed. Q: Why did Ed Gein keep his house so warm? A: So the furniture wouldn't get goose bumps.

In 1958, in an instant of 50s lost innocence, the first global media frenzy transforms Gein from anonymous psychotic to cultural anti-hero. Responses to this event fall into two opposing categories similar to the two lists of trauma symptoms collected in Chapter 2. One response is about shutting down, boarding up and denial and the other is a kind of media based hyper vigilant response of over-arousal that even affects court proceedings. The graves Gein exhumed are covered by tarpaulins to prevent them being photographed from the air by over-zealous media and Gein is taken out secretly by the sheriff to collect testimony there. The global media occupation of their little town racks Plainfield’s overwhelming situation up another cog. Locals lock their doors because talking about the murder becomes counter-productive. The contradictory ambiguity of attraction and repulsion of these events inaugurates a tabloid formula that saturates popular culture and is refined in gothic literature to manifest through the abject as an ‘aesthetic of pleasurable fear’ (Sedgwick 1986: vi). Once committed to the Central State Hospital Gein’s farmhouse is put up for auction but burns down mysteriously before the auction date. The fire brigade takes its time getting there. It is as if the locals re-enact Gein’s amnesia imposing it onto the landscape. ‘Just as well’ Gein reportedly mumbled. This conflagration further marks the farmhouse that witnessed Gein’s aberrant rituals leaving an invisible anti-monument in its place. The landscape must suffice as enduring witness to Gein’s crime. Gein’s car survives erasure to endure as a fairground ‘ghoul car’. A suitable site as the fairground is theorized by Kirby as a site of ‘fearful pleasure’, of bodily shock and male hysteria, (Kirby 1988) informing cinema’s beginnings. Like the fairground attraction, the cinema packages the shock

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of Gein’s transgressions as melodrama and horror in dumb service to an aesthetic of pleasurable fear. For consumption no knowledge of these effects’ origins is required. The serial killer randomly plying his trade is now the stock and trade in Hollywood drama, suspense and horror. Psycho (dir. A. Hitchcock, 1959), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Silence of the Lambs (dir. Johnathan Demme, 1991) are traceable back to Gein. The relationship between boy (Ed) and mother (Augustine) becomes a template for gothic and horror fiction. Robert Bloch, living in Wisconsin while writing Psycho (Bloch 1959) incorporates aspects from the event into the novel that Hitchcock turns into a film. In Psycho Norman Bates suffers severe emotional abuse as a child at the hands of his mother, Norma, who preaches to him that women and sex are evil. Like Gein collects substitutes and keeps his mother’s room, Norman retains his mother’s corpse. Bloch’s surface puns sum up Bates’ multiple personalities: Norman, a mother dependant child; the possessive mother Norma kills anyone who threatens the illusion of her existence; and Normal performs the functions of day-to-day life. Texas Chain Saw Massacre appropriates a raw visceral edge for the Drive-In experience from the Gein event. The retarded and disturbed Leatherface wears the skin of his victims. Under the control of his butcher family he cannibalizes his victims. The look of the house and butcher’s den draw on publically available photos of Gein’s Plainfield home. The James Gumb or ‘Buffalo Bill’ character in Silence of the Lambs murders overweight women, removes their skin to wear as a garment. As Kaplan discussed in Chapter 1, in films dealing with trauma, she does not consider melodrama or the horror of these mainstream films as delivering the most empowering viewer positions (Kaplan 2001). For Kaplan in melodrama trauma is resolved at a distance, and horror delivers vicarious shock for voyeuristic consumption while the most empowering form addresses its viewer as witness (Kaplan 2001: 204). That is reserved for the work of the creative non-victim of the feminist vanguard of Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’ and to which Landscape Suicide seeks admission in this research.

The Testimony of Ed Gein Landscape Suicide’s witnessing produces a different viewer experience to the popular cinematic forms of melodrama and horror. In these cultural forms connection to the real Gein event is reduced to metaphor or completely severed. Benning offers a more reductive minimalist approach

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witnessing the event’s disappearance, distanced from the fairground attraction’s sensationalist shock. Gein’s amnesia is presented as testimony in the hard-core minimalist register of Benning’s earlier work on duration. Both the landscape and testimony are delivered with the surface emotional restraint of denial common to the real situations. Such delivery is easier to perform than describe, so to look more closely at its characteristics I replay two sections of Gein testimony. The first section considers the position of the victim’s body and the second how the gun went off. I also settle on quoting at length from these two passages to compensate for the comparative lack of public access to the film. Even though Landscape Suicide is available for rental from the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and is now available on YouTube, remaining difficult to see in its entirety. This inaccessibility adds another layer to the arguments of denial, erasure and cultural amnesia explored in the film that also describe the position of materialist film as a subjugated discourse. The following testimony is a Q and A between Assistant Attorney General Robert Sutton and Ed Gein. This re-enacted testimony is presented in a reductive, minimalist aesthetic form foregrounding the process of forgetting. The first passage deals with Bernice Worden’s position and location at the time of the shooting and the second passage focuses in on the moment when the gun goes off. Sutton’s questions are heard in a disembodied voice over a black screen. Floating in and out of sync with the cut to black a metal sounding click is also heard. Like a broken record these blackouts repeatedly enact Gein’s amnesia while the metal sound conjures up the instant of the gun trigger’s click at the heart of Sutton’s questioning. This sound also suggests Gein’s switching off, his reflex of mental desertion. The click ‘triggers’ or signifies the kicking in Gein’s amnesia, kicking in intermittently with every question and answer. The click performs similarly the inserted black in Robert Breer’s Fuji, there signifying the going through a tunnel. Where in Breer we have an artifact, the tunnel, being signified by an absence, Benning’s click signifies both an absence’s appearance (the amnesia) and the erased act of murder. This moment of the gun going off and Gein switching off is the elephant in the room. It is that perceptual instant, act and flash when Gein shoots and kills Worden that this testimony attempts to recover. It is that SAM memory fragment that continually fails to successfully dial into the VAM network.

Witnessing Trauma’s Gutted Corpse Part 1 Q: (Click) Now was her back to you or was her face to you? A: No her face was towards the north, kind of northwest Q: (Click) Was her back facing you then? A: That’s right, cornerwise, slantwise Q: (Click) And what did you next observe? A: When I was looking down I heard a sound like something striking metal- like a metal can or something Q: (Click) And then what did you do? A: There was an island in between so I couldn’t see her, so I stepped around the island and I saw her lying there Q: (Click) and what if anything did you do then? A: I believe I laid down the rifle to see if she was hurt or what was wrong Q: (Click) and then what did you do? A: And then I saw blood there. So it came to my mind that either the bullet had struck her when the rifle fired or she fell that way. I didn’t know. Q: (Click) Will you tell the court whether or not at any time you aimed the rifle at the person of Mrs Worden? A: No I did not Q: (Click) And what did you do after you observed this blood on the floor? A; from here on- well, I better explain this, from little on, whenever I saw blood, I’d either faint or just about faint. I’d just like black out. So that is why I can’t answer at this time. Q: (Click) What if anything did you do with the gun at this time? A; I believe I put the gun back because as I remember, I had to. Q: (Click) Do you recall in what position you put the gun back in the rack, if you remember? A: I believe the same as the others Q: (Click) Now do you remember what, if anything you did with the body of Bernice Worden, What is the next thing you did when you saw Bernice Worden’s body on the floor, if you remember? A: I’m afraid I do not remember that Q: (Click) Do you remember anything else you did on that day you saw the body of Bernice Worden on the floor? A: I do not Part 2 Q: (Click) When you went over and looked at Mrs Worden’s body did you know she was dead? A; No Q: (Click) Did you realize she had been shot? A; I saw blood, that’s all. Q: (Click) Did you think to get a doctor? A: I’d say no to that. Q: (Click) Did you think there was any connection between the fact that you had been handling that weapon and it discharged and the fact that she was laying on the floor with some blood? A: Yes

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Chapter Six Q: (Click) So then did you take her body around behind the counter? A: No Q: (Click) You’re sure of that? A; Yes Q: (Click) Did you take her body out of the back of the store where the truck was? A: That I don’t remember Q: (Click) When did you see your car again? A: The same day Q: (Click) When do you remember seeing the car again? A: The same day. That is all I can answer. Q: (Click) Well, how long after what happened in Mrs Worden’s store? A: Probably an hour Q: (Click) Where did you see it, do you remember? A: Parked in front of her store Q: (Click) Okay what happened then? A: Drove home, I guess Q: (Click) You don’t remember driving home? A: I remember being home Q: (Click) And do you remember being home with Mrs Worden’s body? A: I don’t remember that Q: (Click) Look at these pictures Mr Gein. Do you remember that? A: Some of these pictures Q: (Click) Do you remember these pictures, do you know what they portray? A: I remember what they portray but I don’t remember seeing anything like this.

Gein’s testimony repeatedly presents his wilful or amnesic resistance to an account of these events. Benning’s approach interrogates, rather than celebrates, these mechanisms of denial. The events remain unavailable yet the process of forgetting is somehow still described. As Gidal’s account of Beckett’s ‘pro-theatric’ points out: Language’s incapacity to cover the world outside language militates against the ‘pro-theatric’ being describable, the ‘pro-theatric’ being that which is empirically real, on stage or off. Yet this impossibility of description does not stop things being ‘described’, a narrative of events being set forth (Gidal 1986: 35).

Though testimonies ‘cannot take place in solitude’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 70-71), yet they do. Benning’s ‘blackouts’ emphasize Gein’s testimony’s total social disconnectedness. It is as if Gein is in a position where he cannot witness or benefit from his own testimony. The un- referenced solitude of Gein’s testimony enacts Beckett’s de-authored monologue (e.g. The Unnamable (Beckett 1994)), whose repetitive self-reflexive tone contrasts with the omniscient narrator’s delivery. For Gidal the deauthored monologue extends the ‘strategies of construction and hyperbole at every level of construction’ (Gidal 1986: 11).

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This is the problematic from which the narrative form of Landscape Suicide arises and in which the trauma it addresses is formed. Trauma’s unspeakability is both its signifier and signified, both its content and its form. In the reductive, matter-of-fact manner of such sequences Benning lays bare and witnesses a minimalist process that can be read as erasure, denial and emptiness, recording its practice as a breakdown of dialogue, witnessing and understanding.

Witnessing Community, Perpetrator and Viewer The three witness positions of perpetrator, community and viewer are examined in relation to Landscape Suicide and the events it embraces. These are the acts of viewing the trauma by the perpetrators, the experience and reaction of the community to the murders and the viewing of the film by the viewer. Benning states his interest in the first two positions as motivation for making the film: ‘There was also interesting similarities in how the two communities reacted. Also each murderer had an ‘out of body’ experience when the murder occurred, and neither remembered what had happened’ (James Benning in MacDonald 1992: 244). His creative response builds and sets up the third position of the viewer and operates when the film is played, when the structure of its texts are performed. This performance works in a similar way to the way Felman identifies for the film Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985), identified by Walker as exemplary of a ‘trauma cinema’. Referring to Shoah Felman asserts that: ‘Victims, bystanders and perpetrators are here differentiated not so much by what they actually see (what they all see, although discontinuous, does in fact converge strictly) as by what and how they do not see, by what and how they fail to witness’ (Felman 1994: 93). Firstly, in Landscape Suicide the testimony reveals that one perpetrator, Gein, fails to see at all and is hardly present in his own testimony. The other hesitantly takes responsibility for the act that she witnesses as if in a dream. Secondly, a review of the related film and written material of these events has revealed a process of public anger, disgust, confusion and erasure that then burns out and shuts the community down because it experiences more than it wants to see and it stops looking critically. The looking that continues becomes dissociated from these real events and is engaged in through forms of entertainment. The real event is lost and the community’s complicity is denied.

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Thirdly, in Landscape Suicide, like in Shoah witnessing becomes for the viewer, ‘in all senses of the word, a critical activity’ (Felman 1994: 92). Through the film the viewer witnesses the perpetrators performing their testimony. The locations of the crimes are also performed to the viewer. But the viewer has very limited access to the community view, only the outcome of its denial and shutting down and that trace that remains in the questions put to the perpetrators. That is all the viewer sees. An emptied crime scene exhibited in duration is all that Benning allows the viewer to see. In this ‘now’, coupled to its perceived ‘then’ these topologies exhibit Caruth’s concept of ‘belatedness’ in materialist form. Trauma experienced by perpetrators is the most contentious of these three sites. When viewing Gein or Protti’s testimony we actively listen to weigh up what Caruth identifies as an ‘ethical’ truth: ‘The shock of traumatic sight reveals at the heart of human subjectivity not so much an epistemological, but rather what can be defined as an ethical question’ (Caruth 1996: 92). Research indicates although some perpetrators have reason to fake amnesia, it is real in most cases. Silence may elicit a beneficial psychiatric evaluation. A feigned forgetting ‘allows one to exploit your right to remain silent in an elegant way’ (Merckelbach & Christianson 2007: 169). Bogus amnesia allows perpetrators to avoid painful memories of a crime (Marshall et al. 2005) but not to the same extent that genuine amnesia does. Daniel Schachter shows that the stress of extreme emotions experienced during criminal activity often leads to genuine memory loss (Schachter 1986) and Michael Kopelman submits that in cases of murder self-reported instances of dissociative amnesia occur more often than not (Kopelman 1995). Julio Arboleda-Florez indicates that provocation or a psychological blow can cause a perpetrator to act like an automaton in an unconscious or uncontrollable state (Arboleda-Florez 2002). This may be the situation in Gein’s case. With his aversion to blood the trigger, Gein’s abnormal childhood points to such a ‘blow’. Our active participation in Caruth’s ‘ethical’ listening is directed by the questioning of both Protti and Gein. Did they do it or not? Are they telling the truth? Listening and observing Protti, it is as if Costas did not die, but there is never any question that Protti committed the crime. What are of interest is the distortion, hesitancy and gaps in her testimony. With Gein the gap of his amnesia is all there is. His extreme amnesia is incisively interrogated by Sutton’s relentless questioning that focuses repetitively on the minutiae and immediacy of the instant of the murder. Stephen Porter’s research shows that an apparent callousness and a lack of remorse or empathy are often communicated by a perpetrator’s delivery (Porter,

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Woodworth & Douchette 2007: 121). Gein’s testimony is readable in this way. His minimal child like responses bring to mind Harald Merckelbach’s point that perpetrator testimony is saturated with ‘the sensory and iconic forms of memory that predominate in early life’ (Merckelbach & Christianson 2007: 172). The Protti-Costas and the Gein-Worden murders’ recountings document community reactions shifting from shock and agitated interest to denial and erasure over time. This traumatic forgetting’s end point remains present in Landscape Suicide, the emptied crime scene is presented for view. Benning asks the viewer to look for its ‘traceless traces’ in the testimonies and landscape views, the institutional buildings and popular songs. Benning presents the community’s presence as an absence, enacting Caruth’s understanding ‘that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it’ (Caruth 1996: 91-2). The viewer actively witnesses by performing Benning’s critical looking. The amnesias and dissociations of the perpetrator testimonies coupled and the belatedly presented topologies of the two crime scenes are all witnessed and the viewer becomes, after perpetrator and community the third trauma site related in the film. Felman and Laub underline the vicarious impact of such witnessing: ‘He [or she] needs to know that such knowledge dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and space, of self and subjectivity’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 58). A gutted referentiality floating in a non-linear field of associations is delivered in the immediacy of viewing the film: ‘there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 70-71).

The Skinning of the Deer Where the opening tennis scene sets up and resonates through the Protti narrative, so too for the final ‘Gein’ half of the film the skinning scene stands for a practice performed on multiple levels in Landscape Suicide. Barbara Pichler indicates that it is the ‘emblematic’ image of the film’s second half (Pichler 2007: 85). It is also its most disturbing, presenting a normal everyday event with visual and visceral intensity. It marks the time of the crime as the height of the hunting season. At its most incisive it signifies the gutted torso of trauma that the film, Gein and Benning all wear. The skinning scene performs both Gein’s forgetting and the act he has forgotten, re-playing the gutting Gein performed on his victims and Benning performs on the viewer. Because Gein blacks out at the sight of blood this is a performance he himself has no conscious access to, this

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event only residing in Gein’s Situationally Accessible Memory (SAM). The skinning is a metaphor for the film’s construction, Benning having removed most of the social and community based narrative from the film. The emptied landscape images and the two texts of dissociated testimony, themselves gutted by amnesia, remain as the film’s surface skin. This erasure re-enacts the community’s own acts of denial and forgetting. Like the burnt down farmhouse’s absence, gestures performed to remove feelings of complicity and guilt leave their own ‘unspeakable’ trace in the film’s images and testimonies. The community’s VAM is severed, removed to leave the gutted torso and its skin for presentation. Its disturbing ‘affect’ dislodged from the real, migrating into Flusser’s global churn of Elsaesser’s traceless traces, lodged in Kroker’s panic bodies (Kroker, Kroker & Cook 1989) and metamorphosed into surface via the Gein jokes and Hollywood films uncoupled from any direct connection to the originating events. In this way Landscape Suicide both performs and witnesses traumatic memory, disconnected and dissociated from the real. Benning performs Foster’s understanding that ‘in trauma discourse, then the subject is evacuated and elevated at once’ (Foster, H 1996: 168). The skinning metaphor extends further. Gein skinned his victims, and then wore them as clothes. In using the female voice as avatar for his own voice Benning metaphorically repeats this act. Macdonald asks Benning about this nestling: ‘MacDonald: You use a woman to narrate the film. She becomes your alter ego, the way Gein’s mother was his. Benning: I hadn’t thought about that’ (MacDonald 1992: 245). Uncannily, even in the ‘un-thought’ (Gidal 1976: 15) of Benning’s reply Gein’s amnesia is performed. Though disturbing in Gein’s case and to some extent Benning’s, clothing the self in another’s persona becomes commonplace in digital online chat-rooms and games and is reflected in the contemporary rise of online identity theft. Benning’s masquerading inside the female narrator’s voice has a history in his practice, responding to Gordon’s earlier disappointment on the woman’s voice’s muffling in The United States of America (MacDonald 1992: 226). The argument for Landscape Suicide’s inclusion within Walker’s trauma cinema’s predominantly feminist vanguard is mischievously addressed by Benning’s masquerade, performing the gap that defines its current invisibility. Benning’s nestling strategy is reminiscent of and critically re-performs in the social Breer’s signification of the tunnel in Fuji through absence and Benning’s allusion to Gein’s amnesia through the randomised metallic click. Theoretically, Landscape Suicide performs materialist film’s MO (modus operandi), whose deference to structure over content obsessively guts the signified from its practice, something Wollen found irresponsibly

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utopian (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 99). Landscape Suicide belatedly but productively responds to Wollen’s dismissal from within the special case of trauma. Benning’s landscape is certainly not utopian, though it may very well have been emptied in the service of utopian ideals. For this you can take your pick from Plainfield’s misplaced nostalgia for a 50s innocence or Orinda’s more contemporary pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ through individualist competition and a suburban accumulation of wealth. The argument for the inclusion of Landscape Suicide as a form of ‘trauma cinema’ returns the concerns of materialist film contained in Benning’s creative practice, elements including the use of duration and critical looking coupled to an avoidance of psychoanalysis, fetish, voyeurism and scopophilia. Materialist film addresses issues of trauma’s invisibility and un-speakability in ways otherwise unavailable. When its strategies are applied to texts clearly concerned with issues of personal and cultural trauma, it releases a materialist practice’s capacity for articulating the difficult and deep-seated traces of overwhelming experience. Benning achieves this outcome by cocooning his materialist practice inside the outer skin of a gutted feminist counter-cinema. This itself is a traumatic and unspeakable act of survival, indicating that within trauma’s topography materialist film’s subjugation has not denied its critical productivity. Materialist film belatedly returns as a traumatic practice who’s ability ‘to suppress a knowledge of the imaginary of the image by asserting the objectivity of the images and the rationality of our relation to them’ (Penley 1977: 14) captures the victim’s dissociative response to overwhelming experience. Penley’s critique of materialist film as ‘a denial of unconscious processes at the level of vision, image and the apparatus’ (Penley 1977: 23) is explicitly performed and describes the impact of traumatic denials and erasures executed by the traumatised communities of Orinda and Plainfield. From the position of the ‘present present’ the structural rules of traumatic memory speak directly to a technological situation of Kroker’s panic and Flusser’s technical image. Technological shifts morph ideological, social and public space. To accommodate how trauma’s gutted subject speaks there, materialist film forecasts modifications to the witnessing of Bourdieu’s habitus. A gutting practice like Benning’s answers Elsaesser’s call for ‘a different kind of hermeneutics’ (Elsaesser 2001: 196) placing the internal organs of Bourdieu’s habitus inside out, for all to see, pointing to the means by which the surface of Flusser’s ‘technical image’ is to be critically and productively breached. A lesson in objective-subjective ethics the Digital Native needs to see.

CHAPTER SEVEN RECOVERING THE HIDDEN INSIDE FOUND FOOTAGE FILMS

In this chapter Arnold and Tscherkassky’s found footage films: Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Arnold, 1998), Outer Space (Tscherkassky, 1999) and Dreamwork (Tscherkassky, 2001) are analysed from a materialist perspective. Previous chapters outlined materialist film’s reprieve through trauma theory’s appropriation, firstly for a belated inclusion into the genre of trauma cinema and secondly as a practice capable of unpacking the technical image. Having presented arguments for Breer’s 69 and Benning’s Landscape Suicide’s inclusion into trauma cinema, this chapter argues for the inclusion of these found footage films. Materialist practice’s capacity for critically unpacking digital media is explored further, of performing Kroker’s panic bodies, Manovich’s merging of ‘database and narrative into a new form’ (Manovich 2001: 243) and of breaking through the amnesia and new magic Flusser identifies at the technical image’s surface. These contemporary films complete materialist film’s recuperative trajectory into digital time based media arts. All three perform a direct prenarrative impact, replacing Breer’s perceptual abstractions with a performed ‘textual analysis’ as the film’s subject. Like the court transcripts that hold centre stage in Landscape Suicide to witness the gaps and denials in perpetrator memory, textual analysis performs a similar witnessing on the gaps in the originating film material. In these films this performed textual analysis returns to ‘the scene of the crime’ of the 70s avant-garde split to become materialist film’s subject and content. Textual analysis, developed through feminist film theory to unpack dominant cinema’s patriarchal ideology reappears inside of a materialist practice it was used to dismiss. This flip signifies a traumatic turn of events, at the heart of which Elsaesser places digital media’s traumatic loss of referentiality, one treasuring the fake and favouring re-enactment. The metamorphosis of the senses it triggers is as emphatic as that imposed by the birth of cinema and

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the advent of railway travel a century earlier. Chapter 5 showed that those technological changes also involved shock, speed up and bodily trauma and transformed the way the world was viewed.

Introduction The use of found and stolen moving images and their re-editing and reprocessing transforms the original to emphasize aspects previously hidden. For William C. Wees such avant-garde found-footage films ‘are intended to “undo”, deconstruct, or “detourn” images produced and disseminated by the corporate media’ (Wees 2002: 4). These interventions empower a marginalized and impoverished practice enabling access to images produced by a commercial film and television apparatus to which its practitioners have no economic entry but are nevertheless subjected to in daily life. This “detournement” is examined in Tscherkassky and Arnold’s recent found footage films. Found footage cinema’s ability to transmit historical thinking ahistorically is critical to both digital media practice and Felman and Laub’s concept of witnessing trauma (Felman & Laub 1992: 75) Turim had already spotted this ability in found footage cinema before trauma theory entered screen studies: In other recent cases avant-garde films frame a kind of flashback in their innovative use of found footage or home movie footage. These re-edited traces of the past need not be framed by a narrative present to transmit the concept of history and memory associated with the flashback (Turim 1989: 246).

Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy reprocesses sequences from the Andy Hardy series of black and white feature films (1937-58). Designed for mass consumption by a general audience this series reflects back family values and family life to 40s and 50s Middle America. Despite the films’ relative low budget and lowbrow pitch, between 1939 and 1941 this MGM series made Mickey Rooney the most popular Hollywood star, charting Andy’s journey through childhood and adolescence. Tales of small town morality are resolved with man-to-man discussion between Andy and father Judge Hardy, pioneering a formula that became the staple of general television viewing. Judy Garland starred in three of these films as Andy’s love interest. Arnold samples this resource and focuses in on perceived ideological cracks in this material. The two other films considered, Outer Space and Dreamwork, both reedit sections of the 80s horror colour feature film The Entity (dir. Sydney

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J. Furie, 1982), whose title sequence asserts that its story is based on real events. The Entity follows the drama of a single mother (played by Barbara Hershey) who is raped by an invisible assailant later identified as the devil but is not believed. Hershey’s character’s struggle for recognition brings her to a cluster of sceptical psychiatrists who dismiss her hysteric performances as symptoms of her ‘single’ status. Another group of ghost-busters sets an elaborate misguided trap for this entity. These films are Tscherkassky’s compacted re-configuration of Hershey’s relationship to a home environment saturated with para-normal activity (Outer Space) and a recurring rape experience (Dreamwork). Reediting and layering shots and parts of imagery from the film over the top of each other creates a complexity that challenges and overwhelms the viewer. All three films fracture story to uncover hidden meanings. These complicit operations of ‘fracture’ and ‘uncover’ place Janet’s dissociation and Freud’s repression back in relation to each other, that Van der Kolk contrasts as ‘reality imprint versus intrapsychic elaboration’ (Van der Kolk 1996a: 52), with repression the subject contained within a dissociative performance. Tscherkassky in particular draws on Deren’s verticalhorizontal model. Arnold radically reduces Deren’s re-iterative structure, obsessively replaying half gestures and signs. Tscherkassky lays his reiterations one on top of the other rather than in sequence. Both use technique, like Deren, to critique melodrama but unlike Deren who railed against it, Arnold and Tscherkassky both embrace psychoanalytic readings of their work. Their critique hits with a stun’s dissociative force and eviscerates the original narrative towards trauma. Before placing the films in historical and cultural context I focus on the films themselves. Although the filmmakers contextualize their work psychoanalytically the pre-reflective domain in which these films perform their gaps is critical to my materialist view and connects to my analysis of Breer’s practice. These films perform psychoanalysis within a phenomenological framework. As with Breer’s films, the direct prereflective re-experience of the rape and the tic and stutter’s daze are perceptual performances occur before analysis and dreams. Extending the arguments from Chapter 3, I place these found footage films in relation to Wollen’s two avant-gardes and Brewin’s dual processing model to further the case for traumatic pedigree. I relate Tscherkassky’s practice of ‘manufracture’ to Deren, Man Ray and Benning’s creative practices. These three artists have already been identified as articulating traumatic experience. Firstly Tscherkassky consciously appropriates Deren’s concept of vertical and horizontal

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development in his editing procedures, secondly he incorporates Man Ray’s direct manipulation of the photographed image into his practice and thirdly he employs Benning’s method of unbalancing the real with metaphor. In the final section I stress the capacity of a materialist practice to critically unpack the technical image that addresses Flusser and Prensky’s call for an image-based form of critical thinking identified in Chapter 3. This requires a counter-reading of Mulvey and Bellour’s analysis of the new digital situation and their conceptualization of a ‘pensive spectator’. This in turn initiates a re-reading of the face-off between the two avantgardes as a contestation between artist and critic over the creative space in front of the film editing table and later the VCR and computer screen. The critic wins the dispute in front of the editing table but loses primacy in front of the computer screen.

Alone Arnold repeats obsessively sampled extracts and gestures from the Andy Hardy series of films in Alone. Arnold’s repetitions are sometimes as little as a couple of frames long, turning the actors into tic-riddled puppets with stuttering soundtracks reminiscent of the sampling strategies employed in scratch video, contemporary experimental music and sound design. Arnold himself notes the sampling of hip-hop and the broken record strategies of Christian Marclay (MacDonald 1994: 10). In Alone a father repeatedly slaps his son. The recoil is slowed down. A mother’s goodbye look becomes a shaky panic attack. Andy hesitantly walks forward and backwards in and out the door. Judy Garland’s graceful song is broken down with repetitions and loops, creating broken rhythms and phrases, moving from the lyrical into sound poetry’s shudder, clatter and thud fragments. Obsessive technical manipulation unravels a sweet Rooney and Garland kiss into the long and tentative grimace of groans and unseemly smiles. Sexual innuendo is unsettlingly teased out of a kitchen scene between Andy and his mother. An innocent rub between mother and son as two bodies pass while washing and drying the dishes is repeated ad infinitum to eventually transform into a sexual act and a further indiscreet masturbation, all gestures of cultural breakdown. The narrative is cracked to unleash those same dislocated fragments of affect that have also been found in trauma’s raw dislocated flashback. Arnold’s apparatus performs Franz Kafka’s writing machine from his “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka 1995) in which the prisoner’s sentence is physically inscribed directly on the victim’s skin. Similarly to Kafka’s, for

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Akira Lippit, Arnold’s apparatus is ‘a kind of mnemographic machine that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film’ (Lippit 1997: 8). Arnold’s neurotic machine consists of a hysteric projector and an optical printer deconstructing, working against the camera, performing the loops of Breer’s somersaulting biplane: ‘in my films the projector is broken (or neurotic) in many ways at the same time. Sometimes it seems to stand still, the next moment it seems to flip the film’ (MacDonald 1994: 11). The film fixes on the gesture’s fracture. This rewriting’s back and forth scrubbing of gesture and sound is not comedic but melancholic, uncomfortable and foreboding. The character’s hidden obsessions and taboos seep out of fissures in the film’s surface. The archaic cut and splice techniques perform the film’s subject and character as in Brakhage’s Daybreak (1957). The primal sensory spirit so released returns us to the early cinema of the amusement parlour, to ‘sensual or psychological impact’ (Gunning 1990: 59) of Gunning’s Cinema of Attractions. Like the fairground attraction’s bodily shock, Arnold’s hyper-editing unleashes a psychoanalytic joyride. Bringing back the hidden, Arnold’s hyper-editing inscribes the symptom of the tic and stutter into his found characters. Tics and stutters offer rich sites of ambiguity, conflict, multiple meanings and charged emotions. For Gilles Deleuze stuttering ‘puts language in perpetual disequilibrium’ (Deleuze 1998: 111). Jane Prasse and George Kikano point out that as well as stigma and anxiety, stutterers tend to have ‘greater emotional reactions and more problems with flexibly controlling attention and emotion’ (Prasse & Kikano 2008: 1272). The tic inserts itself into body gesture. A tic moves over and works against an opposing movement. It is as if the body wants to viscerally perform two gestures at once. Arnold describes stuttering as a condition in which ‘a message that is in conflict with what is being said wants to be expressed’ (MacDonald 1998: 362). Arnold’s repetitions reverberate with symptoms of breakdown in the cinema and medical science. Jean Epstein identifies a similar arrest of narrative in the close-up to that which obsessively recurs in Alone. In Epstein’s ‘lyrosophie’ the hypnotic close-up arrests narrative at the moment of a recognized crisis: ‘the lip is laced with tics like a theatre curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack’ (Epstein 1988: 235). Tics for both Arnold and Epstein, by breaking through the surface of the narrative, plumb the depth of affect that Deren assigns to the poetic vertical rather than horizontal, linear or narrative movement. I am reminded of Charcot’s hysterics from Chapter 4, performing with Charcot as puppeteer their all-at-once dysfunction to a public audience at

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the Salpêtrière Mental Hospital in moves predicting silent cinema’s array of body gestures. Arnold’s relationship to his actors finds a trace in Charcot’s obsessive and relentless looking. In describing his relationship to his celluloid actors Arnold re-enacts Charcot’s difficulties in naming hysteria: They clearly project a neurotic impression, although I feel that their form of neurosis would be hard to diagnose, because their symptoms are changing from one moment to the next. So they seem to be hysterical, compulsive, and manic, at the same time they are stuttering and having tics, the next moment they fall immobile. So what is their symptom? (MacDonald 1994: 11).

Alone’s breakdowns express the unspeakable. What is their symptom? Lippit describes Arnold’s practice as a parasitic discourse: ‘a constant flow of nervous ruptures, which are the result of a struggle between the host and an invading body. The foreign body or anti-body that contaminates the text can be read as the memory work itself, arriving from elsewhere’ (Lippit 1997: 8). This parasitic condition works as metaphor for a body invaded by the Hep C or HIV virus, for Kroker’s panic and for a body possessed by a flashback event appearing from a ‘no-where’ that the body cannot acknowledge. Freud’s original insight into hysteria as originating in sexual abuse contained such unacknowledged panic before he disowned it in favour of repression (Herman 1992: 7-32). Deren might read these parasitic performances through Haitian voodoun, and commend Arnold for returning possession back to the centre of cultural production. Caruth’s view on repetition in trauma further describes the cyclical performances of Alone. In the flashback trauma’s suffering returns repeatedly. In normal processing of an event becomes known, but in trauma its incomprehensible impact repeatedly returns. There remains a gap between what is known and what is seen. For Caruth it is ‘belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing’ (Caruth 1997: 208). Arnold opens such a gap and agitates its crack so that it speaks its hesitations and uncertainties. Arnold’s practice materially performs textual analysis. Alone performs, not a written, but a visual textual analysis on the Andy Hardy films. Textual analysis is based on the belief that every film is part of an economic and ideological system and that hidden ideologies operate in any given film. Textual analysis is framed in a psychoanalytic language that exposes the unconscious or repressed through fissures found in the otherwise seamless operation of ideology. Mulvey states that psychoanalysis is integral to a feminist textual analysis as a ‘political weapon’ (Mulvey

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1975: 6). Kuhn re-iterates Mulvey’s emphasis, that a feminist textual analysis uncovers the work of patriarchal ideologies in mainstream cinema: ‘such disjunctures are discernible within the text in the form of ‘symptoms’ –cracks, ruptures and so on. These symptoms provide us with clues as to what, ideologically speaking, is going on’ (Kuhn 1982: 86). Arnold reproduces Kuhn’s description: In the symptom, the repressed declares itself. Hollywood cinema is, as I have already said, a cinema of exclusion, denial, and repression. I inscribed a symptom into it, which brings some of the aspects of repression onto the surface, or to say it in more modest words, which gives an idea of how, behind the intact world of being represented, another notat-all intact world is lurking. Maybe this is my revenge on film history (in MacDonald 1994: 11).

Textual analysis’s metamorphosis from written into visual form converts critical deconstruction into visceral recital. The symptom, rather than being described, materially re-appears in the pre-reflective moment. Chapter 5 argued that this pre-conscious space before dreams is phenomenological rather than psychoanalytic. Arnold psychoanalytically describes what lies ‘behind the intact world being represented, another not-at-all intact world - the unconscious’ (Arnold in MacDonald 1994: 11). Reading Arnold’s practice through phenomenology and Brewin’s dual processing model this description becomes: what lies before a contextual VAM, is a visceral SAM –the preconscious. Alone, in its tics and stutters repeatedly returns to the immediate perceptual instant of the story’s cracks and gaps. The film presents the critic’s analytic performance in front of the film editing machine. Like pacing up and down, the critic stops and starts the film, contemplates the frozen frame, deconstructs and creatively grazes, scouring the narrative for its peaks and gaps. As the analysis of Breer’s practice reveals, this is the pre-reflective pre-dream realm of materialist film’s performance described by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. It is the field of ‘difference’ that the critic negotiates in coming to a critical understanding. In the shift from written textual analysis to its performance we move from one way of thinking to another. Alone’s tics and stutters continually and obsessively returns the immediacy of the perceptual moment ‘narrated out’ of the original. The viewer experiences these rupture’s repeated performance perceptually as a pre-reflective stun. Does not such a hit produce anxiety and fear of a trauma rather than the memory? What comes back in this break? How easy is it to think, to negotiate when you have just been ‘stunned’? We have asked similar questions before. As with Breer’s practice, analysis comes afterwards.

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Lippit suggests that Arnold’s memory machine is a tool capable of critically breaking the surface of its own technology: ‘opens a passage towards a thinking of the technical virus, the infected machine that seeks to reach outward and touch the scene of its own writing’ (Lippit 1997: 10). Is Lippit’s passage the one that Flusser is looking for to crack the surface of the new magic? Does Prensky’s Digital Native learn to think critically in this way?

Dreamwork and Outer Space Both Outer Space and Dreamwork use The Entity as source material. In terms of the analysis undertaken here these films are to a large extent used interchangeably, though the title of each does emphasize different aspects of Tscherkassky’s method. Outer Space makes a connection back to possession and alien abduction and the title Dreamwork names the psychoanalytic method. Both suggest aspects that relate to trauma. Like Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud, S 1971/1900), Tscherkassky articulates his technique as unearthing something under the narrative: It’s like digging. You have something like a landscape, and you know that there is something covered, and you dig it out- in that sense “archaeologist”. It’s not primarily about ideology, but you have that sense of uncovering new meanings (Beghin, Delorme & Lavin 2002).

This description is reminiscent of Landscape Suicide’s landscape sequences, where the viewer is left to ponder; what bodies, both real and metaphoric have been buried here? As well as digging into his material, Tscherkassky’s practice re-incorporates a greater visual and visceral complexity into his originating material than Arnold does in Alone. Like Breer’s practice, the complex imagery of both Dreamwork and Outer Space enacts the intensity of Merleau-Ponty’s world of ‘colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x). Like Arnold, having located narrative’s fissures, Tscherkassky layers the consequent sequences on top of each other, creating a compact multilayered field of movement and representation. Every nook and cranny in the frame is mobilized. We see images of a room, a window, Hershey’s face and body, we glimpse snatches of movement, see strips of film and other textured artefacts (rayograms of nails and grains of sand) often as afterimage, flickering and in negative and all at the same time. Narrative is materially shattered in front of the viewer. In Outer Space the story of woman entering a suburban home, fending off a series of un-locatable assaults, is still readable. In Dreamwork, which

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is more body-centred and dissociative, with more fragments of film material entering and disrupting the frame, story is purged. Four different rates and timbres of ticking clock signify the different image layers and communicate a folding in of time. Alexander Horwarth identifies a coming together of materialist concerns with melodramatic form in Outer Space: A woman enters her cinematic image where she is attacked by an external force, a ‘monster’ only visible to us- harsh reality, the exterior are of the image, “negative space”. She is threatened by the soundtrack’s jagged trail of light, by the sprocket holes in the film’s edge, by the sounds of “manufracture”, by the sudden multiplication of her own image, by the perforation of her pictorial space, by being stuck in cinema time (Horwarth 2005: 46).

Minority Report (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2002) utilizes a similar form of layered imagery to Tscherkassky’s to depict the pre-cogs predictive mental activity. The pre-cogs thoughts are rendered available for manipulation via a computer screen cabled directly into their brains, presenting an embellished metaphor for those abstract animated MRI scan sequences outlined in Chapter 2 that record and map cortical activity during traumatic stress. As noted, the title Outer Space suggests science-fiction’s fractured narratives of alien abduction. For Walker these fictions cover over the trauma of real sexual abuse: ‘psychological literature that points to sexual abuse as the underlying trauma beneath screen memories of alien abduction and satanic ritual abuse’ (Walker, J 2005: 16). Walker’s concept of ‘disremembering’ as mixing metaphor with the real is linked to Benning’s method of film construction in Chapter 6. Michael Nash supports the view that the distortion of memory is at the centre of traumatic recall: ‘memories do not literally return in pristine form, unsullied by contemporary factors like suggestion, transference, values, social context, and fantasies elaborated at the time of (and subsequent to) the event’ (Nash 1998: 102). Roger Lockhurst locates a traumatic structure in conspiracy theories such as alien abduction, repositioning Walker’s link between abduction stories and sexual abuse from an individual into a social framework. Both trauma and abduction are concerned with gaps, with time compression and missing time (Lockhurst 1997: 39). Similarly in trauma Brewin’s model indicates that there is no sense of duration or of time passing in dissociation and flashback memories. Lockhurst points out that an ‘ongoing fictionalization of trauma’ has broken the bounds of the science fiction genre ‘to colonise the real’ (Lockhurst 1997: 48). Likewise Outer Space (and Dreamwork) re-tools fictionalised melodrama to perform real perceptual events to unsettle and disorient the viewer. Lockhurst connects

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this development to present-day constructions of subjectivity: ‘alien abduction narratives offer an insight into the shifting modes of conceiving contemporary subjectivity through the categories of memory and trauma’ (Lockhurst 1997: 48). Trauma’s complicity in this subjectivity is further unpacked in relation to digital media in the final section of this chapter. Through Tscherkassky’s ‘manufracture’ technique, ‘contact printing and the simultaneous manipulation of the elements’ (Horwarth 2005: 44), he re-focuses The Entity’s rape sequence back into the audience’s face. ‘An event without a witness’ (Felman & Laub 1992: 75) is communicated never-the-less. This cacophonic field of images and sounds expresses the psychic disorder of the rape experience. Is what is presented here a compact narrative of dreams as the title suggests? As with Alone, it may indicate a trace of something more immediate. This is not an imagined rape that is being communicated, something more real, direct and immersiveis performed that is more about the perceptual ‘here and now’ than the processing of dreams. Dreamwork’s perceptual performance re-enacts the rape directly by returning to the prereflective cacophonous moment of its initiating implicit bodily impact. In describing his strategy of folding narrative back on itself Tscherkassky appropriates Deren’s concepts of vertical and horizontal editing: What I really try to do is convert the horizontal structure of a narrative film into a vertical structure. This was something that Maya Deren pointed out… well if you take the narrative structure of prose, you have the story unfolding on a horizontal line. And you have poetry, where you may have, within every single word, several multiple meanings, in terms of connotations (Beghin, Delorme & Lavin 2002).

I view Dreamwork and Outer Space as a contemporary response to Meshes of the Afternoon. For Deren a film’s horizontal structure refers to its linear cause and effect progress, its narrative or story while an event’s vertical structure reveal different meanings through multiple iterations. Where Deren places her multiple readings of the one horizontal or linear event in series, one after the other, Tscherkassky presents them overwhelmingly compacted and layered, all at once, as a complex field of moving images. The Entity is deconstructed back to the visceral prereflective moment of the rape. The connection between Tscherkassky’s practice and trauma is also evident from within the neurological perspective developed in Chapter 2. His fragmented imagery communicates the same characteristics that neurological research has used to describe the impact of trauma that is also

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evident in Brewin’s dual processing model. For Kleim, Wallott and Ehlers the traumatic flashback takes ‘the form of relatively brief sensory impressions such as images, sounds, tastes or smells which are accompanied by the original emotions that the individual experienced at the time of the event’ (Kleim, Wallott & Ehlers 2008: 222) Such compartmentalized and fragmented traumatic memories have an implicit unspeakable quality that is also communicated by Tscherkassky’s films. As van der Kolk states: ‘in some people the memories of trauma may have no verbal (explicit) component at all; the memory may be entirely organized on an implicit or perceptual level, without an accompanying narrative about what happened’ (Van der Kolk 1997: 255). Dreamwork and Outer Space are organized at this perceptual level. It is in the shock of the perceptually rich performances, in their immediacy and directness that the film is perceived in ‘Samming’ mode (i.e. the performance of Brewin’s implicit Situational Accessible Memory). The film has been constructed by working backwards, folding back to the pre-reflective moment. It is Tscherkassky’s technique to dismantle or erase the integrated explicit verbally accessible memory (VAM) back down into its intense high definition implicit SAM fragments. The film is whittled back to the perceptual moment of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘being in the world’, the pre-reflective domain of ‘first contact’ with a traumatizing event.

‘Manufracture’ and Man Ray In Dreamwork Tscherkassy pays particular homage to 20s avant-gardist Man Ray, whose Dadaist work Retour a la Raison (1923) which Le Grice, re-iterating Ray, indentifies as a cinematic form ‘which can function essentially on the psycho-physical rather than the psycho-interpretive level’ (Le Grice 1977: 106). Tscherkassy explains: ‘I added some of Ray’s more famous objects- needles, tacks and coarse salt- to my found material and interpreted these objects as sexual metaphors within the framework of the plot of the film’ (Horwarth & Loebenstein 2005: 158). In this way the ‘psycho-interpretive’ of sexual metaphor appears inside Man Ray’s ‘psycho-physical’ practice. Tscherkassky names his method Manufracture. This repeats Benning practice of enmeshing metaphor with the real putting the real off balance with a technical intervention (MacDonald 1992: 246). This strategy is evident in the word play of Tscherkassky’s chosen term. Like the tic and the stutter, Manufracture compacts the opposing forces of manufacture and fracture into one expression. This ambiguous effect performs the traumatic flashback.

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Tscherkassky works directly with 35mm acetate, with individual images or image strips. In the micro-aesthetics of fracturing the imagestrip, this practice appears materially or physically closer to Breer’s than Benning’s. Breer, in his orchestration of perceptual effects amplifies the cinematic apparatus. Horwarth makes a similar point about Tscherkassky, connecting his practice to the real through his use of the material cinematic apparatus: ‘Tscherkassky’s ‘archaic technique’ enables him to not just analyse but also reconnect the cinema apparatus to the real’ (Horwarth 2005: 48). In his appropriation of The Entity Tscherkassky begins by logging, memorizing and re-ordering the originating material in his mind: ‘I had the entity transferred to VHS, transcribed the film shot for shot, memorized it more or less by heart, and began to visualize a new story’ (Tscherkassky 2005: 154). This obsessive analysis of the film approximates the performance produced in Arnold’s Alone. It also replays the position of the critic whose textual analysis is produced from such repeated viewings: ‘And again and again I also repeatedly scrutized the video, searching for some detail that might be hidden in the original film, and which might be relevant to the framework of the new plot’ (Tscherkassky 2005: 154). This obsessive repetition performs a VCR based version of Benning’s looking and is like the perceptual training required triggering the brain’s neuroplasticity. Having isolated details in the original Tscherkassky contact prints these filmstrips using cameraless techniques first developed by Man Ray in the 1920s called rayographs or photograms. Tscherkassky paints with light. He uses laser pointers and tiny flashlights to transfer bits of the original onto 35mm film print stock. Working with 35mm film in this way is a micro painterly and laborious, time consuming chemically based exercise that foregrounds the medium’s materiality. This method leaves a visible trace on the finished film through the artefacts of photographic manipulation such as scratches, dirt, traces of the optical soundtrack, the shakiness and blurring of the image, effects that were absent in the original illusionist work. Such artefacts constitute a fresh non-narrative stream running through the film that further frame and accentuate the new fragments of action and gesture. Paul Hammond relates Man Ray’s transgressive behaviour in the cinema: ‘Man Ray used to transform any film that bored him by blinking rapidly, making a grill with his fingers, covering his eyes with a semitransparent bit of cloth, even wearing a pair of prism spectacles he had made himself’ (Hammond 1979: 10) These performances predict Tscherkassky’s practice. What Ray performs live, Tscherkassky registers

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directly on the melodramatic image-strip in the photographic darkroom.

Gidal and The Entity An unexpected aside to Tscherkassky’s reworking of The Entity is the film’s earlier appearance in the writings of Gidal on the stare and voyeurism in Materialist Film (Gidal 1989: 61-5) and in a critical article on Kristeva (Gidal 1983). Gidal uses media news material about the initial screenings of The Entity from 30 September 1982. This material documents a feminist backlash during which protestors picketed against a screening of the film. A spokeswoman for Women against Violence Against Women states: It’s one of the occasions when I’ve come out of the cinema feeling frightened of the men who were coming out of the cinema with me. Yes I kept my eyes towards the women, I knew my reaction to the men would be very angry, what I’d see in them (Gidal 1989: 63).

Such pronouncements about male scopophilia, spoken with feeling on the street in front of the cinema and on television, restate politically and performatively Mulvey’s academic argument. These texts record the impact of the film on these women who to their credit transform their felt victim experience through a local political act on the steps of the cinema: ‘I am an ordinary woman, and I was shaken, hurt, by the continual scenes of a woman being raped- I’m still hurt by it.’ (Gidal 1989: 62) Gidal places these reports on the The Entity screening in relation to Kristeva and Warhol. He presents Warhol’s cinema in contrast to The Entity as a way of avoiding the production of such victim positions. ‘Feeling like a voyeur watching Warhol’s Couch (1964 silent) is precisely not to be in the position of voyeur’ (Gidal 1989: 59). Gidal plumbs for a cinema where the ‘victim’ position is not internalized: ‘leaving a film feeling oneself a victim, as stated in the interview cited, is oppression’ (Gidal 1989: 65). In this cinema the foregrounding of its mechanisms, people staring into the lens, static cameras, long takes, duration determined by length of film roll rather than action, repetition of action and the switching of roles by actors, concede rather than deny the stare’s presence. In so doing: ‘totalizing identificatory projections and introjections can be barred; a first step. The anti-illusionist project foregrounds mechanisms of cinema in the viewing, denying possibilities of an imaginary oneness of viewer and viewed’ (Gidal 1989: 61). I have previously stated Mulvey’s understanding that Gidal’s negation of mainstream cinema extends beyond her feminist position (Mulvey

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1979: 9). Gidal’s negation is here on display in a needless critical marking of feminism as fascist using Kristeva’s own words: ‘jealous of conserving its power- the last of the power-seeking ideologies’ (Kristeva 1982: 208). It is present in the blanket dismissal of Kristeva’s anti-censorship position: ‘I completely disagree’ (Gidal 1983: 15). It is also present in his description of a feminist counter-cinema: that it leaves you feeling good about feeling bad (Gidal 1989: 64). For Gidal such feelings merely repeat the original problem of representation. What is required, according to Gidal is the impact of the materially real. Given the importance of Kristeva’s notion of the intertextuality at the heart of a feminist countercinema (Kuhn 1982: 12-13), Gidal’s negations and dismissals consequently guarantees a similar response for his own writing. Here is a trace of that maelstrom of contestations that prompted Turim to make her point about: ‘How many critical tautologies can be set up which circumscribe with their own assumptions their own conclusions’ (Turim 1980: 144). In this context Gidal’s prodding responses appear prescriptive, reactionary and overtly negative. But times have changed. Tscherkassky’s response in re-editing The Entity performs Gidal’s theoretical argument in practice short-circuiting Gidal’s hyper-negative and often counter productive rhetoric. Where Gidal criticises and opposes psychoanalysis, Tscherkassky places it in the frame, containing it. The boundaries between the two avant-gardes are further blurred by Horwarth’s commentary on Tscherkassky, that he invokes the ghosts of both the first and second avant-garde in his recycling of The Entity. Horwarth places Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1998) next to Outer Space as contemporary outcomes of the two strands of avant-garde practice and notably assigns a politics to materialist film that Wollen and the originators of a feminist counter-cinema’s supporters never recognised: ‘both are political, post-modern and highly personal forms of archaeology’ (Horwarth 2005: 46). One film richly mines the first and the other the second avant-garde: Yet unconsciously the two works appear to move slowly towards each other, towards a third place, a possible mutual goal; the “thing” that has never been seen before, but somehow emerges right from the centre of the visible world. The hereafter, the repressed, the monster of horror films (Horwarth 2005: 46).

But Horwarth’s ‘thing’ or monster has appeared before; in Benning’s presentation of Gein. Gidal and Breer place its activity not in the ‘hereafter’ of story but in the pre-reflective moment of stun. The horror film is only half the story.

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Whether by ‘accident’ or design, Tscherkassky not only re-cycles The Entity film but, either inadvertently or mischievously, re-iterates the charged face-off around anti-illusionist materialist film and countercinema that played out in the 70s, its trauma returning inside the image. That this is such an un-recognisable un-articulated historical trace which never-the-less had such emotions running underneath it, gathered up from the street for repackaging in the academy, is pertinent given that Tscherkassky’s practice appears at the moment of ascendancy of a digital practice that, for Flusser, is preoccupied with surface. Again, trauma’s structure provides a critical reference for understanding this ‘new’ situation.

The New Situation Although never identifying its practice as specifically traumatic, Le Grice has recognised materialist film as precursor to digital technologies: ‘the tradition of experimental film and video has already provided the basis for exploring these concerns (of non-linearity) not as a response to the new technology but as a consequence of artistic reflection on the human condition’ (Le Grice 2001: 296). Arnold and Tscherkassky’s found footage practices express Le Grice’s assertion. In the rest of this chapter I describe materialist film’s new digital relevance through the shift to a pensive spectator and textual analysis’s collapse. A number of critics active in the avant-garde split in the 70s detail digital technological shifts in their recent writing. Bellour (Bellour 2001), Penley (Penley 2001) and Mulvey (Mulvey 2006) identify a shift from their appropriation of Metz’s ‘authorised scopophilia, legalized voyeurism’ (Penley 1977: 13), Mulvey’s 70s voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia (Mulvey 1975: 14) to a ‘pensive spectator’ (Bellour 1987) through the moving image’s enhanced ‘rewindability’ in digital form. Such commentary provides additional context to the technological and cognitive shifts that Elsaesser identifies in Chapter 1 and Kroker, Mirzoeff, Prensky and Flusser articulate in Chapter 3 and the related earlier rebalancing of the senses at the birth of cinema and railway travel discussed in Chapter 5. Mulvey points to the omnipresent computer to compound and lock in these changes: ‘rather than the voyeuristic tendency associated with projected cinema, often discussed by feminists, a more ‘pensive cinema’ in Raymond Bellour’s phrase, should emerge’ (Mulvey 2003: 268). This shift occurs because the stop, start and freeze capacity of the film editing machine, introduced to the film critic and film artist in the 70s transforming their critical practice, becomes publically ubiquitous with the

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VCR and the jog-shuttle of computer editing. Baer’s ‘rewindability’ is incorporated into this post film technology’s architecture, collapsing the critic’s role and introducing the performative language of materialist film to an emerging generation of Digital Natives. As with Horwath’s blurring, Maria Walsh points out the debate between the avant-gardes has fundamentally shifted: ‘that these oppositions are becoming less distinct, giving rise instead to dialectical uncertainties that oscillate between them’ (Walsh 2006: 1). This is particularly evident in a historic review of Bellour’s commentary and analysis. Though a materialist practice remains hidden within Mulvey and Bellour’s recent texts, this obscured practice’s residue remains locatable. These are traces that have been predicted, sustained and re-formed in the practices of Deren, Breer and Benning to return in Tscherkassky and Arnold’s contemporary found footage practice. Placing the critic before the artist, Bellour’s scholarship in these shifts is critically placed, sharing materialist film’s interest in duration through the stilled image, foregrounding the image in texts about the image and pronouncing textual analysis’s demise. Recycling Walsh’s text, the historic trajectory of Bellour’s criticism ‘oscillates between’ Wollen’s two avant-gardes. Central to this oscillation is Bellour’s pensive spectator, which Mulvey appropriates in her recent commentary on the digital moving image. The ability to arrest the image on the editing table originally produces Bellour’s pensive spectator: ‘the photograph enjoys a privilege over all other effects that make the spectator of cinema, this hurried spectator, a pensive one as well’ (Bellour 1987: 10). This stilling is accentuated in Bellour’s photogram as ‘a freeze frame within a freeze frame’ (Bellour 1987: 10). This narrative arrest recalls Gidal’s duration, excavates Deren’s verticality and exposes the stilled image as a site for inscription for Man Ray’s (and Tscherkassky’s) photogram and cameraless materiality. Mulvey, in looking back, presents a view of cinema that extends Bellour’s stillness: To my mind, it is primarily the historic cinema of celluloid that can blossom into new significance and beauty when its original stillness its material existence in the photogram, is revealed in this way. The new allows a fresh and unfamiliar insight into the old’ (Mulvey 2004: 90).

Mulvey’s are not ‘unfamiliar insights’ when viewed from the dismissed history of materialist film. A commitment to cinema’s direct materiality has always been central to both Gidal and Le Grice’s approach. Arnold and Tscherkassky materially recycle a historic cinema performing Mulvey’s text. The critical and emblematic role of Man Ray’s photogram

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to Tscherkassky’s practice was outlined in an earlier section of this chapter. Though both artists disturb and inscribe a cinema’s stillness, Benning’s work with duration particularly directly addresses Mulvey’s ‘stillness’. In Landscape Suicide this stillness signifies the hidden bodies and traumas covered over by the surface of the emptied, static landscape. Can Mulvey’s stillness be read in the same way? What does Mulvey’s ‘stillness’ cover over? Mulvey locates digital media’s shift to the pensive spectator in a loosening up of narrative design: ‘as the spectator controls the unfolding of the cinematic image, so the drive of the narrative is weakened and other, previously invisible or unimportant details come to the fore’ (Mulvey 2004: 90). What Mulvey portrays here is Benning’s process of critical looking, his ‘visual thinking’ (MacDonald 1992: 242) outlined in Chapter 6. Using a strategy of duration inherited from Warhol and present in Gidal, Benning similarly expects his audience ‘to look around the frame for small details and not wait for the film to come to them’ (MacDonald 2007: 435). Though for Mulvey’s ‘foundation’ eye, trained in constructing a feminist counter-cinema such details may appear ‘invisible or unimportant’ they have always remained in view inside a materialist practice. When Mulvey states that ‘the cinema can now be turned back on itself into a means of looking back at history, at the cultures of modernity now seemingly archaic’ (Mulvey 2004: 92) she predicts Horwarth’s commentary on Tscherkassky’s films, which also identifies a fascination with the archaic (Horwarth 2005: 48). The gesture of ‘turning back on itself’ evokes a reflexive critical method sustained within materialist film, extending the modernist turn to refine the essentialist qualities of painting and sculpture that has been read traumatically in this analysis as ‘content denied’. For Horwarth, Tscherkassky’s practice ‘is not so much based on the primary pleasures of cinematic illusion- diving into dreamlike, magical images- but a better mystery: making contact with the dream machine operator, with the magician himself’ (Horwarth 2005: 46). Bellour’s shift from fetish to fascination is evident here, not as Bellour’s spectator but as operator and puppeteer. There is a difference. Horwarth’s description derives from an image of the film artist, not only with camera in hand or manipulating an optical printer but positioned like the modern film critic, in front of the editing machine. Bellour witnessed the film analysis projector and film-editing machine’s transformative impact on film criticism in the 60s and 70s, enabling the film critic to create the critical tool of textual analysis. Until

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the 60s film criticism depended on sitting in the darkened theatre ‘traumatically’ scribbling notes with eyes fixed on the screen: ‘to take notes during a projection is nothing less than a denegation’ (Bellour 2001: 2). In the darkened cinema Bellour ‘jotted down everything I could to the point of absurdity’ (Bellour 2001: 3). In these frantic actions: A vertigo and a hysterical trembling remained: the vertigo of not being sure of my text, and with it, by the relative impossibility of doing so, a different kind of profound vertigo by what the implications would be if I were someday able to be sure of it (Bellour 2001: 3).

The film editing machine and the film analysis projector empowered Bellour ‘to be sure of it’. The critic can now privately stop, start, freeze and replay the film outside of its theatrical context, creatively transforming the possibilities of criticism and analysis. Vertigo migrates out of the critic’s body. Michelson names this new feeling of omnipotence: The euphoria one feels at the editing table is that of a sharpening cognitive focus and of a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence open to those who, since 1896, have played, as never before in the world's history, with the continuum of temporality and the logic of causality (Michelson 1990: 23).

Both critic and artist take on the same new space opened up by the editing table. The vertigo of its absence and the consequent euphoria of this newly accessible technology both transforms the critic’s work and offers the artist a new integrative tool. Penley points out, for the critic: ‘this simple move opened up a world of discoveries about the language, semiotics and rhetoric of film’ (Penley 2001: xii) while Gidal refers dismissively to this new world as ‘giving fetishistic significance to Steenbeck-analysis’ (Gidal 1979: 74-5). Materialist film’s repetitions, freezes, speed and contemplation delivers this new situation directly to the viewer, bypassing the critic. Michelson’s ‘sharpened cognitive focus’ is performed inside its practice. The editing table is added to the moving image artist’s tools of the camera, the optical printer, the film-strip and the screen for describing and casting materialist film’s pre-reflective and performative space. As well as this chapter’s three contemporary films this performative space is discernible in the earlier found footage work of Le Grice’s Little Dog For Roger (1967) and Berlin Horse (1970) and Conner’s Crossroads (1976), all described in Chapter 1. Reading materialist film as performing the experience of ‘playing’ a film editing machine opens up or vertically plumbs another perspective or layer to the two avant-garde face-off as a contestation over ownership of the production of cultural meaning

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between the artist and the critic: Who owns the creative seat at the filmediting machine? Feminist film criticism’s embrace of Bellour’s method (Kuhn 1982: 96-108) suggests that, in the 70s, the critic’s claim prevailed over the artist’s. On the back of digitally induced cognitive shifts materialist film’s inheritors reclaim this space. The relative popularity of Arnold’s and Tscherkassky’s cinema (Pierson 2006: 30), further enabled by the avantgarde’s greater availability on DVD (Arthur 2006: 6) supports this view. Arnold describes his fascination with the manipulated image in front of the editing machine that is now available to all: ‘at a projection speed of four frames per second the event was thrilling, every minimal movement was transformed into a small concussion’ (Arnold in MacDonald 1994: 4). Arnold’s comments retain a trace of Schivelbusch’s ‘small and rapid concussions’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 117) marking the trauma of ‘railroad spine’ in early railway travel. In the 70s the editing table’s new accessibility enables Bellour’s intense analysis of a fragment of Hitchcock’s Psycho (Bellour 1979). Kuhn presents this work as a model for a feminist textual analysis’s critical method: ‘Bellour’s analysis, even in this small part of a film, possesses all the detail and density of a dream analysis’ (Kuhn 1982: 103). John Belton notes this practice’s creativity: Bellour, like all critics, necessarily rewrites the film he is analyzing to reveal or make clear its operations. For the original text he substitutes, out of necessity, his engagement with the text and this becomes the subject of his analysis (Belton 2006: 243).

Bellour’s analysis of Psycho contrasts with Benning’s approach to Ed Gein’s serial killer and skinning abominations. Where Benning contemplates the space of their occurrence and the nature of Gein’s own memories of these events in Landscape Suicide, Bellour processes the dissociated residue of the Gein event after its filtering through public media, terminating in Psycho as a dream analysis of a fiction. By the time of Bellour’s analysis numerous layers of re-iteration have erased the real from public view. Where Bellour psychoanalytically deconstructs dreams Benning dissociatively performs the mechanics of forgetting and erasure. In trauma it is only this trace of a ‘content denied’ that remains detectable. The personal remains unspoken and has to be excavated through a critical looking into the image for Mulvey’s ‘invisible or unimportant details’ (Mulvey 2004: 90). Bellour predicts the demise of analysis with the public explosion of VCR use in the 80s producing the ‘pensive spectator’. As well as this

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cathartic transformation of textual analysis facilitated by the editing table’s use, in 1985 Bellour then pronounces its demise as ‘an art without a future’ (Bellour 2001: xii) at the hands of the VCR in “Analysis in Flames” (Bellour 1985). Home computer use has since compounded its ruin. Fascination replaces voyeurism in the shift to the ‘pensive spectator’. The new climate of desktop manipulation, freezing, slowing down and speeding up of images enabling more sophisticated and interactive consumption practices. The critic’s role is now performed directly by every individual with a remote or keyboard in front of the VCR or computer screen. With the revision of the voyeuristic spectator in multi-platform ‘hydra media’ (Le Grice 2001: 297-309) the dynamic between form and content alter and the dismissals of materialist film re-surface in a new light. The move to do away with the signified is no longer as utopian as Wollen intimated (Wollen 1982 [1975]: 99) and Mulvey and Susan Buck-Morss now nostalgically place a ‘social utopia’ (Buck-Morss 2000: 68) or ‘political utopianism’ (Mulvey 2003: 262) inside modernism generally, locating a caesura at the gap between modern and post-modernism’s ‘rejection of history’ (Mulvey 2003: 264) and globalisation’s rise. From within the digital, materialist film’s gutting of the signifier reads as more pragmatic than utopian. The unconscious wish of ‘authorized scopophilia’ in cinema for which Penley and Bergstrom reference Metz and Baudry (Penley & Bergstrom 1978: 119) is no longer central to the pensive spectator’s construction like it was for the voyeur. With the image in ascendancy as nominated by Mirzoeff and Laurel in Chapter 3, Penley’s assertion on the necessity of ‘a commentary on the images simultaneously with the commentary of and with them’ (Penley 1977: 25) reduces in authority. Penley’s assertion now sounds more like the nostalgic call for Prensky’s text based Digital Immigrant than the voice of the ascendant image based Digital Native. Mulvey finds an antecedent for the pensive spectator in the feminist counter-cinema and textual analysis she helped forge. Despite her acknowledged proximity in the 70s to its negating intensity, materialist film remains unstated yet vaguely present inside Mulvey’s claim: I have tried to evolve a different kind of spectatorship, one driven by curiosity and a drive to decipher the images unfolding on the screen. However the curious spectator was, by and large, the product of feminism, of the avant-garde, and of a consciously alternative relation to cinema…this spectator is the ancestor of the one formed by new modes of relating to the screen image now immediately accessible to anyone who cares to experiment with the equipment available’ (Mulvey 2004: 89).

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Kaplan too, in her later writing promotes an ‘ethical’ witnessing of trauma distinguishable from voyeurism and sensationalism (Kaplan 2004: 142). Le Grice’s articulation of his practice in 1980 aligns with Mulvey’s ‘new’ condition of empowering the active viewer resident in Bellour’s pensive spectator: ‘My practice, which seeks to counteract the passivity of the spectator and bring the cinematic experience into context of reality, opposes an analysis which leads to an assumption that cinema is inevitably locked in voyeurism, fiction and illusion’ (Le Grice 1980: 67). Gidal’s 1970 rationale for the position of the viewer in materialist film now reads like an argument for digital media’s new interactivity. Gidal invites the viewer to perform the critic’s work: Peter asks Gidal: Q: isn’t representing specific images in a specific ordered way fascist? A: All linear, focused, presented experience has that aspect of psychological force, the problem is NOT to deny that, but to work with it, open it up (i.e. give framework, the discipline, and let the individual respond, react to his own (awareness of) manipulation, find his own spaces, his own time progressions, his own minutiae of (film-) reality, his own obsessions within the context of the presentation… (Gidal 1970: 2).

Penley’s recent commentary on Bellour makes the same point. For the new digital condition Penley invokes: ‘new creative strategies that could open up the illusory science of film analysis to a wider world of images and to relations between and among images and texts’ (Penley 2001: xii). For Penley, with the image’s ascendancy ‘now we can do research on cinema history and theory by quoting images rather trying to turn images into language’ (Penley 2001: xii). Both Tscherkassky and Arnold respond by performing this ‘new’ research, as Breer did in the 50s in Paris. Breer initially moved into his interest in film through such an animated analysis of the construction of his abstract paintings (Beauvais 2006: 157). There is an unexpected affinity in Penley’s insight with the materialist position effectively dismantled thirty years previously. That was not how things worked in the 70s. It was not what Penley did in her critique of materialist film. There she occupied the text, critiquing it and avoiding any direct analysis of the imagery it addressed. With the image’s ascendancy materialist film cannot be dismissed or defended in the same way but, having been taken off the table, now it only needs to be ignored to remain invisible, forgotten and lost. Bellour’s role in these historic shifts is revealing, being identified with the second avant-garde and complicit in the first’s dismissal, yet displaying an aesthetic interest running parallel to and approaching 70s materialist film. His analysis is more image-based than those of feminist

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colleagues promoting his work, such as his analysis of Psycho, as best practice within their arguments for textual analysis. In her critique of materialist film Penley lines up with Baudry and Metz Bellour’s work on hypnosis as a predecessor for both cinema and psychoanalysis to stress the unavoidability of fetish and desire (Penley 1977: 4). In the 80s Bellour predicts textual analysis’s loss of relevance and conceptualizes a pensive spectator that approaches the viewer constructed by materialist film. His ruminations on the still, the photograph and the frozen image in cinema are often performed in materialist films of the period. Bellour’s stilled image has correspondences with the duration of Benning’s landscapes. During the 90s Bellour’s interest in video brought him to write more about experimental film and video containing a variety of images and a mixture of digital and analog forms (Penley 2001: xi) though predominantly by artists working in the second avant-garde. His deference to an image that cannot be captured within a text (Bellour 1975) places Bellour closer to the gap between the two avant-gardes rather than at its extreme poles. But the gap that persists is a disparity between the artist and the critic, between performance and analysis. Both put Michelson’s ‘heady delights of the editing table’ (Michelson 1990: 22) to different use. The critic creatively transforms the experience as text, while the artist integrates image clusters. Interestingly and elusively, Bellour’s dense and serial use of the still in his text, attempts a form of both. But it is in this bifurcation between text and image based practice that Bellour’s place in the second avant-garde makes most sense. His place there steers this split to be read as a face-off over ownership of the contested space in front of the editing table. In the 70s the critic prevails through text-based thinking’s dominance of Flusser’s ‘textolatry’ and of what Prensky now calls the Digital Immigrant. There the text is read before the image and most require the image translated. In the digital this relation reverses. Today the editing table experience is easily and directly available in the technical images’s digital production. Alone, Outer Space and Dreamwork perform those image manipulations that are the source of the critic’s value adding work. In so doing the critic’s position is bypassed and rendered redundant, as Bellour witnessed and expressed. Like Manovich’s insight that the avantgarde re-materialises inside the computer (Manovich 2001: 307), textual analysis is performed inside these found footage films, obeying McLuhan’s third law of media that asks ‘what obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 99).

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In the contemporary digital landscape a series of questions come into focus. Is Mulvey’s pensive spectator not that same spectator constructed by materialist film in the 70s? Is it not the subjugated discourse of this materialist practice that belatedly re-turns to view? Is this not the wound that flashes back as a trace in the work of Tscherkassky and Arnold, in their repetitive, cyclical and layered sampling strategies? Or that Benning buries in the landscape and perpetrator testimony? Or that Breer incessantly incises into his material? Is this not the same wound that Maya Deren presented to Anais Nin, to break the mirror’s spell? Do not these technical operations excavate the pre-conscious of textual analysis? Although the film’s performance may prove an ‘unattainable text’ for the critic as Bellour suggests in Screen in 1975 (Bellour 1975), this may not be the case the other way around for a resurgent materialist practice. In a belated display of its new ascendancy this materialism both brandishes its own wound and visually lays bare the critic’s own practice. This new materialism re-contextualises the search for the sublime in painting and an essential perceptually based materialist moving image practice in terms of its shadow; the articulation of the mechanics of denial at trauma’s core.

CONCLUSION

This conclusion returns specifically to the two questions: Can ‘materialist film’ model traumatic memory and perform the traumatic flashback? Does the capacity to articulate trauma’s unspeakability and invisibility give this practice a renewed relevance in the digital media environment of information overload? Though the answer to the second question may be more circumspect and multifaceted, for Baer the answer to the first question is a straightforward yes: Film may uncover traumatic memory because it does not necessarily imply a cumulative effect or logic, or a unified point of view. This ability to register an event’s lack of coherence is singularly programmed into the technology, whereas it is unavailable to human consciousness. Memory cannot replay an incoherent scene in order to examine it more closely as incoherent; it either surrenders to the craving for meaning or shatters under the impact of trauma (Baer 2002: 171).

My discussion of materialist film and a series of films from this practice’s perspective refine or value add to Baer’s concept of rewindability. His reexamination of photography as communicating ‘explosive bursts of isolating events’ (Baer 2002: 6), photographs that ‘capture the shrapnel of traumatic time’ (Baer 2002: 7) is answered in film in Chapter 5 by relating Breer’s experimental animations to the performed traumatic flashback and locating Breer’s practice at the more numbing and unspeakable pole of Laub and Auerhahn’s spectrum of knowing trauma (i.e. not knowing, fugue states, fragments). I present there the arguments for Breer and materialist film’s inclusion in Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’ to this point constituted more from a cinema that articulates Laub and Auerhahn’s more integrated forms of knowing trauma: overpowering narratives, life themes, witnessed narratives and metaphors. For Breer’s films to be included into Walker’s genre requires a stretching of its criteria. Even though they may be experienced traumatically, on their surface Fuji and 69 are not about trauma at all. Not so for Benning’s Landscape Suicide in Chapter 6 whose inter-textual strategies are prized within the trauma cinema genre. Benning’s looking performs Laub and Felman’s witnessing without recourse to psychoanalysis or dream. It is

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this difference, stressed in my analysis, that is traceable back to the position Gidal took up for materialist film and sets it apart from Walker’s psychoanalytically formed position and other films in the genre’s vanguard. Psychoanalysis is present in Arnold and Tscherkassky’s found footage films discussed in Chapter 7 but there materialist film returns to visibility as container for its performed textual (psycho)analysis. This ‘trauma cinema’ wannabe presents a turning of the tables of materialist film’s dismissal by Penley, Bergstrom, Wollen and Mulvey in the 70s, with these found footage films incorporating psychoanalysis within an ascendant phenomenological framework. Emptying the signifier in materialist film may have appeared utopian to Wollen and promoted to extend its essentialist brief by Gidal but I have tried to demonstrate that these positions can be counter-read through trauma as content denied, outlining the mechanics of erasure, revealing how secrets are kept, demonstrating how an event without a witness can still be articulated. From this view the gutting of context becomes a traumatic and disabling operation performed on the body and sensory apparatus of its targeted ‘victim’. It represents an extreme negative case of Foucault’s ‘technologising of the self’ whose intrinsic impact on the senses moves deeply into the cultural-personal interface of Bourdieu’s habitus to instigate a sensory re-balance of comparable significance to the shift performed by cinema, automobile and train travel and newspaper reading on our senses at the turn of the last century. Materialist film’s status as a subjugated discursive practice has offered a unique perspective from which to witness this shift historically. As Deren identifies: ‘it is the defeated who know best which of the opposing tactics were irresistible’ (Deren 1953: 6). The speed and mobility of digital technology within public space tolerate little ‘time’ for reflection preferring Brewin’s situational accessible memory (SAM) to verbally accessible memory (VAM) to negotiate productively, with both memory forms conceptualised through neurological research into trauma facilitated, in turn, by advances in digital imaging technology. The introduction of this recent neurological research into the ‘trauma theory’ and screen studies nexus offers the strongest claim for new knowledge here. Its non-psychoanalytic and scientific emphasis meshes with Le Grice and Gidal’s approach to materialist film. Brewin’s dual processing model provides an uncanny fit to the architecture of Wollen’s avant-garde split and Prensky’s Digital Natives and Immigrants, explicating tripartite relations between trauma’s ‘samming’ flashback, materialist film and digital media. The digital explosion provides the context for a productive counter-

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reading of materialist film as content denied. As a practice which itself has been operated on and denied in its 70s reincarnation, materialist film has the credentials to direct a critical visual language onto the unspeakable issues of this digital age flagged by Kroker’s panic and Flusser’s preoccupation with surface. The emptied signifier, the gutted corpse and performing traumatised memory are its shtick. No wonder feminism avoided materialist film at its inception. Counter-read as content denied materialist film performs that traumatic and disabling cultural role whose orbit women in particular were escaping from in the 70s. The subjugated trajectory of materialist film into digital visibility by Arnold and Tscherkassky, mapped through the practices of Deren, Breer and Benning from Chapter 4 to 7, itself outlines trauma’s structure. The trauma theory concepts of split, reiteration and belated recall are predictively available in the story and structure of Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Deren’s later research on Haitian voodoun presents an alternative to the medical view of the ‘hysteric’ body’s dysfunction offered by Charcot and his followers by placing its performance at the productive centre of cultural life. Arnold and Tscherkassky aspire to Deren’s positioning by performing materialist film’s perceived ‘lack’ productively at the critical centre of digital media. The point needs to be made that materialist film’s relevance to digital media is not an exclusive claim. It is stressed here because of its identified invisibility and, enlisting Foucault’s archaeology, I try to reveal how this invisibility is executed historically. The rise of visual culture, the history of net art, navigation and the multiplatform nature of ‘hydra’ media have already had traction in their own right via Mirzoeff, Laurel, Haraway, Castells, Kroker and Cubitt, to mention commentators already sourced here and also exemplified by the promenade of prize winners over the last decade at festivals like Prix Ars Electronica in Vienna or Transmediale in Berlin and evident in critical journals such as Leonardo and Mediamatic. And further, though materialist film and a feminist counter-cinema are certainly in the opposing camps of Wollen’s avant-garde split, these clusters of practice are also not alone. Any crossover connections with video art have not been considered here and I have previously noted that materialist film takes up an extreme position in relation to other experimental, formalist, artist or co-op avant-garde films. These multifarious terms surface further constellations of contention, largely sidestepped in this research but evident in Brakhage’s negation: ‘I have never been happy with any of the names independent film has had… I felt no affinity with ‘experimental’ which was hatched by someone showing contempt for both science and art’ (Brakhage 1978: 3). A feminist counter-cinema also

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shares its position with other personal, independent or counter-cinemas including work by Jean Luc Godard, Straub and Huillet and Alain Resnais, work also not considered here though identified by commentators such as Kaplan, Penley and Wollen. The claim for materialist film’s retrieval through its traumatic credentials reaches beyond the creative practices discussed so far. It finds a trace in Francis Bacon’s highly regarded contemporary painting practice and is evident in Mike Hoolboom’s film and video practice, available in works such as Panic Bodies (dir. Mike Hoolboom, 1998) Tom (dir. Mike Hoolboom, 2002) and Lacan Palestine (dir. Mike Hoolboom, 2012). Both artists tie into the analysis so far undertaken, offering strategies useful in critically breaking through the technical image’s surface that deserve further analysis beyond the cursory glance I still have time for here. The digital is discernible in Bacon’s ‘screened existence’ of daily life (Sylvester 1975: 82) and in his view that our perceptions are mediated by ‘the assault that has already been made on one by photography and film’ (Sylvester 1975: 30). His paintings break through this veneer to reveal Kroker’s panicked body: ‘I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens’ (Sylvester 1975: 82). In so doing Bacon’s images both perform Breer’s visceral impact and require Benning’s looking: ‘What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance’ (Sylvester 1975: 40). Bacon suggests the fulcrum of Wollen’s split in his description of a performative and perceptual practice comparable to Breer’s: ‘it’s a very very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’ (Sylvester 1975: 18). Tom is Canadian Mike Hoolboom’s biography of filmmaker Tom Chomont and his City, New York and recycles excerpts of his films such as Phases of the Moon (dir. Tom Chomont, 1968) and Sadistic Self Portrait (dir. Tom Chomont, 1994). Peter Tscherkassky is listed as consultant to Tom. Its visual imagery processes directly to the audience the everyday traumas re-counted on the soundtrack. Chomont tells of his struggle with HIV and Parkinson’s disease and disarmingly recounts confronting memories of infanticide, incest, fetishism and death. These revelations are processed through an anthropology of technique, pulled out of Hoolboom’s lifelong immersion in fringe film, bringing to bear layered photos, home movies, video, appropriated archival and found footage and images directly out of the video rental store, to construct a cathartic visual

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processing machine. Kroker’s ideas on panic bodies and excremental culture permeate both the video’s structure and content. As well as McLuhan, other Canadian thinkers on technology, George Grant and McLuhan’s mentor, Harold Innis, shape both Hoolboom’s and Kroker’s thinking to evolve a position syncing with the critical position materialist film retrieves within digital technology described here. For Kroker Harold Innis: ‘seeks to preserve some critical space in Canadian discourse for the recovery of an authentic sense of time’ (Kroker 1985: 124), linking to Gidal’s work on duration. Hoolboom’s Tom examines the erasure and loss of both Chomont’s body and moving image practice and recovers time by simultaneously re-casting a resilient personal form of digital moviemaking out of popular media detritus. Both Kroker and Hoolboom resource George Grant’s invocation to preserve a Canadian identity in the face of the dominant technological monolith of the United States of America: ‘only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live critically in that dynamo’ (Grant 1969: 142). This invocation and Hoolboom’s practice speaks to Elsaesser’s ‘different kind of hermeneutics’ (Elsaesser 2001: 196), required to break through the surface of Flusser’s ‘technical image’. It is through its ability to articulate trauma that I have argued for a role for materialist film in unpacking that ‘technical image’ dominating that public space ushered in by digital media, utilising Kroker’s ‘panic bodies’ and Schivelbusch’s commentary on the traumatic impact of an earlier period of rapid technological change. Though distinct, this linking of materialist film to digital media through trauma may mark a transitory historic moment. The greater reliance on SAM (Situational Accessible Memory) in an age of simultaneous information flow need not continue to be experienced as traumatic. Further research or analysis may reveal if the traumatic impact of new technology performed on Kroker’s ‘panic bodies’ describes an intermediate period of stress on a sensory cluster undergoing metamorphosis before, as Laurel puts it: ‘we go to sleep again’ (Laurel 1994: 125). Hoolboom’s Tom, informed by panic and extreme personal experience already reprocesses this material to sublime effect. According to Schivelbusch the stress of negotiating the new technology of train travel was eventually retrained or rewired through a ‘dispersal of attention’ (Schivelbusch 1986 :68-69). McLuhan’s fourth law of media supports this view. It states that when a technology is ‘pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what have been its original characteristics’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 99). Trauma becomes contemplation? ‘Breakdown becomes breakthrough’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 108). McLuhan’s third law, where the content of one medium is another medium, is also of interest here describing materialist

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film’s retrieval and textual analysis’s containment within digital technology: ‘an old ground seen as figure through a new ground’ (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988: 103).

FILMOGRAPHY

Cited Works 69 (motion picture short - animation) 1968, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 5 minutes 9-1-75 (motion picture short) 1975, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 22 minutes Aimless Walk (Bezúþelná procházka) (motion picture short) 1930, Czechoslovakia, dir. Alexandr Hackenschmied (Alexander Hammid). Duration: 8 minutes Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (motion picture short) 1998, Austria, Sixpakfilm, dir. Martin Arnold. Duration: 15 minutes American Dreams (Lost and Found) (motion picture - documentary) 1984, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 55 minutes Anemic Cinema (motion picture short - silent) 1926, France, prod. & dir. Marcel Duchamp. Duration: 6 minutes Ballet Mechanique (motion picture short - silent) 1924, France, prod. & dir. Fernand Léger. Duration: 11 minutes Berlin Horse (motion picture short) 1970, UK, dir. Malcolm Le Grice. Duration: 9 minutes Biography: The Real Silence of the Lambs (motion picture – documentary) 2004, USA/UK, A&E Entertainment/ Channel 4. Duration: 50 minutes Blazes (motion picture short - animation) 1971, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 3 minutes Catalog (motion picture short - animation) 1961, USA, prod. & dir. John Whitney. Duration: 7 minutes Confessions of a Chameleon (video) 1986, USA, prod. & dir. Lynn Hershman. Duration: 10 minutes Come Into My World – Kylie Minogue (music video) 2002, UK, dir. Michel Gondry. Duration: 4.07 minutes Daughter Rite (motion picture - documentary) 1978, USA, dir. Michelle Citron. Duration: 48 minutes. Daybreak (motion picture short) 1957, USA, prod. & dir. Stan Brakhage. Duration: 4 minutes Dreamwork (motion picture short) 2001, Austria, Sixpakfilm & P.O.E.T. Picture Production, dir. Peter Tscherkassky. Duration: 11 minutes

206

Filmography

Emak Bakia (motion picture short) 1926, France, prod. & dir. Man Ray. Duration: 19 minutes Empire (motion picture) 1964, USA, prod and dir. Andy Warhol. Duration: 8 hours 5 minutes Empty Suitcases (motion picture) 1980, USA, dir. Bette Gordon. Duration: 49 minutes Entr’acte (motion picture short) 1924, France, Les Ballets Suedois de Rolf de Mare, dir. Rene Clair. Duration: 15 minutes Form Phases I (motion picture short – silent animation) 1952, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 3 minutes Frog on a Swing (motion picture short - animation) 1989, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 5 minutes Fuji (motion picture short - animation) 1974, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 10 minutes Grand Opera (motion picture - documentary) 1978, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 84 minutes Gulls and Buoys (motion picture short - animation) 1972, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 8 minutes Him and Me (motion picture - documentary) 1987, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 87 minutes Hiroshima Mon Amour (motion picture) 1959, France, Argos Films/Como Films, dir. Alain Resnais. Duration: 83 minutes Histoire(s) du Cinema (video) 1988-98, France, Gaumont, dir. Jean Luc Godard. Duration: 266 minutes History and Memory (video) 1991, USA, dir. Rea Tajiri. Duration: 31 minutes Inner and Outer Space (motion picture short - animation) 1960, USA, prod & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 4 minutes In the Garden of Earthly Delights (motion picture short - silent) 1981, USA, prod. & dir. Stan Brakhage. Duration: 2 minutes Image by Images I (motion picture short - animation) 1954, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: endless loop. Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980, USA, prod. & dir. Yvonne Rainer. Duration: 125 minutes Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (motion picture) 1975, France, Paradise Films, dir. Chantel Ackerman. Duration: 225 minutes Lacan Palestine (digital video) 2012, Canada, prod. & dir. Mike Hoolboom. Duration: 70 minutes Landscape Suicide (motion picture - documentary) 1986, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 93 minutes Light Reading (motion picture short) 1978, UK, dir. Lis Rhodes. Duration: 20 minutes

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Little Dog For Roger (motion picture short) 1967, UK, dir. Malcolm Le Grice. Duration: 12 minutes Lives of Performers (motion picture) 1972, USA, dir. Yvonne Rainer. Duration: 90 minutes Love Finds Andy Hardy (motion picture) 1938, USA, MGM, prod. Carey Wilson, dir. George B. Seitz. Duration: 91 minutes Man with a Movie Camera (motion picture - documentary) 1929, USSR, VUFKU, dir. Dziga Vertov. Duration: 64 minutes Meshes of the Afternoon (motion picture short) 1943, USA, prod. Maya Deren, dir. Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Duration: 14 minutes Minority Report (motion picture) 2002, USA, DreamWorks/20th Century Fox, dir. Steven Spielberg. Duration: 145 minutes Mothlight (motion picture short - silent) 1963, USA, prod. & dir. Stan Brakhage. Duration: 3 minutes Neck (motion picture – short) 1969, UK, prod. & dir. Peter Gidal. Duration: 3 minutes Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (motion picture short) 1989, Australia, prod. Penny McDonald, dir. Tracey Moffatt. Duration: 17 minutes North of Evers (motion picture - documentary) 1991, USA, prod. & dir. James Benning. Duration: 87 minutes Outer Space (motion picture short) 1999, Austria, Sixpakfilm & P.O.E.T. Picture Production, dir. Peter Tscherkassky. Duration: 10 minutes Panic Bodies (digital video) 1998, Canada, prod. & dir. Mike Hoolboom. Duration: 70 minutes Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (motion picture) 1974, UK, prod. & dir. Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen. Duration: 99 minutes Permutations (motion picture short - animation) 1966, USA, prod. & dir. John Whitney. Duration: 8 minutes Phases of the Moon (motion picture short - silent) 1968, USA, prod & dir. Tom Chomont. Duration: 5 minutes Psycho (motion picture) 1959, USA, Shamley Productions, prod. & dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Duration: 109 minutes Recreation (motion picture short - animation) 1956, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 2 minutes Le Retour à la Raison (motion picture short - silent) 1923, France, prod. & dir. Man Ray. Duration: 3 minutes Rhythmus 21 (motion picture short- silent) 1921, Germany, dir. Hans Richter. Duration: 3 minutes Sadistic Self Portrait (video short) 1994, USA, prod & dir. Tom Chomont. Duration: 4 minutes Shoah (motion picture - documentary) 1985, France, Les Films

208

Filmography

Aleph/Historia Films, dir. Claude Lanzmann. Duration: 9 hours 26 minutes Silence of the Lambs (motion picture) 1991, USA, Orion Pictures/ Strongheart Films, prod. Edward Saxon/Kenneth Utt/Ron Bozman, dir. Johnathan Demme. Duration: 115 minutes Sleep (motion picture) 1963, USA, prod and dir. Andy Warhol. Duration: 5 hours 21 minutes Symphonie Diagonale (motion picture short - silent) 1921, Germany, dir. Viking Eggeling. Duration: 5 minutes Texas Chain Saw Massacre (motion picture) 1974, USA, Vortex, prod. Tobe Hooper/Louis Peraino, dir. Tobe Hooper. Duration: 84 minutes The Battle of Tokyo or The Man Who Left his Will on Film (Tokyo senso sengo hiwa) (motion picture) 1970, Japan, dir. Nagisa Oshima. Duration: 94 minutes The Entity (motion picture) 1982, 20th Century Fox, prod. Harold Schneider, dir. Sydney J. Furie. Duration: 125 minutes The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (motion picture) 2001, USA, New Line Cinema, prod. Peter Jackson/Barrie M. Osborne/Tim Sanders/Fran Walsh, dir. Peter Jackson. Duration: 178 minutes The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (motion picture) 2002, USA, New Line Cinema, prod. Peter Jackson/Barrie M. Osborne/Fran Walsh, dir. Peter Jackson. Duration: 179 minutes The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (motion picture) 2003, USA, New Line Cinema, prod. Peter Jackson/Barrie M. Osborne/Fran Walsh, dir. Peter Jackson. Duration: 200 minutes The Man Who Envied Women (motion picture) 1985, USA, dir. Yvonne Rainer. Duration: 125 minutes The Pawnbroker (motion picture) 1964, USA, Allied Artists, prod. Philip Langner & Roger Lewis, dir. Sydney Lumet. Duration: 116 minutes The Prestige (motion picture) 2006, USA, Touchstone Pictures, prod. C. Nolan/A. Ryder/E. Thomas, dir. Christopher Nolan. Duration: 130 minutes The Ties That Bind (motion picture) 1984, USA, prod. & dir. Su Friedrich. Duration: 55 minutes The United States of America (motion picture short) 1975, USA, dir. James Benning, Bette Gordon. Duration: 27 minutes Thriller (motion picture) 1979, UK, prod. & dir. Sally Potter. Duration: 33 minutes Time Flies (motion picture short - animation) 1997, USA, prod. & dir. Robert Breer. Duration: 5 minutes

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Tom (digital video) 2002, Canada, prod. & dir. Mike Hoolboom. Duration: 75 minutes Total (motion picture) 1964-68, Austria, prod. & dir. Marc Adrian. Duration: 34 minutes Un Chien Andalou (motion picture short - silent) 1929, France, written: Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, dir. Luis Bunuel. Duration: 16 minutes Variety (motion picture) 1984, USA, dir. Bette Gordon. Duration: 100 minutes Wavelength (motion picture) 1967, Canada, prod. & dir. Michael Snow. Duration: 45 minutes

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