The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik 9780231530811

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THE UTOPIA OF FILM

FILM AND CULTURE John Belton, Editor

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FILM AND CULTURE A Series of Columbia University Press John Belton, Editor What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Henry Jenkins Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle Martin Rubin Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II Thomas Doherty Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy William Paul Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s Ed Sikov Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema Rey Chow The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman Susan M. White Black Women as Cultural Readers Jacqueline Bobo Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film Darrell William Davis Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema Rhona J. Berenstein This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age Gaylyn Studlar Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond Robin Wood The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music Jeff Smith Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture Michael Anderegg Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 Thomas Doherty (continued on first page following Index)

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CHRISTOPHER PAVSEK

THE UTOPIA OF FILM CINEMA AND ITS FUTURES IN GODARD, KLUGE, AND TAHIMIK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved The author and Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledge the support of Simon Fraser University in the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pavsek, Christopher, 1964– The utopia of film : cinema and its futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik / Christopher Pavsek pages cm. — (Film and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16098-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16099-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-53081-1 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures—Philos0phy. 2. Godard, Jean Luc, 1930– —Criticism and interpretation. 3. Tahimik, Kidlat—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Kluge, Alexander, 1932– —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1995.P353 2013 791.4301—dc23

2012037591

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Vin Dang Cover images: “JLG / JLG”, a film by Jean-Luc Godard. Production Gaumont. 1995 An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Discourse 28.1 (Winter 2006): 166–95. References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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For Carolyn, Sophie, and Mia, who smile the smile that dismisses the universe

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Once a possibility, always a necessity! —Rick Roderick / C. Wright Mills

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Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: The Idea of Cinema

1

1. What Has Come to Pass for Cinema: From Early to Late Godard 24 2. Kidlat Tahimik’s “Third World Projector” 3. The Actuality of Cinema: Alexander Kluge Epilogue

78 150

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Notes 243 Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations

JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994) Figure 1.3 Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Figure 1.4 JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994) Figures 1.5–1.9 Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991) Figures 1.10–1.12 Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010) Figures 2.1–2.8 I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991) Figure 2.9 Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, 1977) Figure 2.10 I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991) Figures 2.11–2.13 Turumba (Kidlat Tahimik, 1983) Figure 2.14 I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991) Figures 3.1–3.2 The Power of Feelings (Alexander Kluge, 1983) Figure 3.3 The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Alexander Kluge, 1985) Figure 3.4 Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1965) Figure 3.5 The Patriot (Alexander Kluge, 1979) Figure 3.6 The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Alexander Kluge, 1985) Figures 3.7–3.8 Brutality in Stone (Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni, 1961) Figure 4.1 Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1965) Figures 1.1–1.2

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Acknowledgments

My first thanks must go, of course, to the teachers I have had over the years, and above all to Fredric Jameson, who remains for me a model of intellectual ambition, generosity, and joy. I know no one so truly Galilean, in the best Brechtian sense: he cannot resist a new thought, and he has encouraged those of us lucky enough to have studied with him to happily cultivate the same weakness in ourselves. And though it’s been a long time, I do wish to publicly thank my teachers at Cornell: David Bathrick, Susan BuckMorss, Sander Gilman, and Biddy Martin, who still inhabit my thoughts. My teachers at Duke, Michael Hardt, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Toril Moi, Ellen Risholm, James Rolleston, and Ken Surin, were inspiring—and tolerant, perhaps to a fault. When I list all these people here, I realize the good fortune I have had as a student. If I can ever live up to even a small fraction of the standard this amazing cast of teachers and intellectuals has set, I will be content with my own work. At Simon Fraser University, Martin Gotfrit was an encouraging and understanding chair of the School for the Contemporary Arts at a crucial time. Colin Browne took on some of my duties so that I could finish this manuscript. Thank you. All of my colleagues at SFU, scholars and artists alike, have been extremely supportive of my work. I also need to thank Kidlat Tahimik and Kidlat de Guia for generously making films available to me and for answering many questions. The research and publication of this book received financial support from various organizations. Two large grants from the DAAD supported initial research in another century. I received significant support from a number of sources at Simon Fraser University: the Iris Garland Fund in

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XI V

A C K N O W LED GMENT S

the School for the Contemporary Arts; the Office of Research Services and the office of the Vice President for Research; the office of the Dean of the Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology; the President’s Office; the Endowed Research Fellowship; and the University Publishing Fund. I also must thank the two anonymous readers who provided insightful and transformative feedback on my manuscript. Over the years I wrote this book, many friends and colleagues have provided conversation, inspiration, practical advice, references, encouragement, and comfort in my pursuit of this project. In particular, I must thank here Nora Alter, Warren Breckman, my friends at the D-Word, Jill Godmilow, Susan Hegeman, Jenny Horne, Rembert Hueser, Paul Jaskot, Dick Langston, Daniel Morgan, Rick Warner, and Phil Wegner. I know I have forgotten to mention some, and I ask forgiveness. My parents, Adelina D. and Edward J. Pavsek, also have my deepest gratitude for the love and encouragement they have given me. Amongst these friends, Jonathan Kahana deserves special thanks for his support and advice; few in our profession are as generous as he with his time and counsel. Finally, the greatest thanks I give are to Carolyn, Sophie, and Mia. They amaze me with their understanding and seemingly limitless warmth of heart. Together they make me think that Utopia is not just a crazy idea, but a very real and distinct possibility.

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THE UTOPIA OF FILM

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Introduction: The Idea of Cinema

This book is about what I call the utopia of film, a term and title I borrow from Alexander Kluge’s first essay on cinema, “Die Utopie Film,” published in 1964. For Kluge, as one of the most interesting students of Theodor Adorno’s thought and an heir to the tradition of the Frankfurt School, utopia is an inordinately rich concept possessed of complex temporal dimensions that bind the present to the past and to the future. As he defines it in “Die Utopie Film,” “utopia is a conservative idea, the search for a quality about which one vaguely knows that it existed at some point in the past.” The utopia of film, for Kluge, in its most basic formulation, is “the idea that there could be something other than this insufficient present of the moment”; it is something that in film history “has been unable to unfold up to this point.” By this view, the history of cinema must be understood not as the history of its grand achievements, but rather as the history of unrealized possibilities, thwarted ambitions, and disappointed hopes; the “promises that are contained in the history of film” have not been met and are too little known, but they persist, especially for those sensitive to their call, awaiting their realization. My borrowed title indicates the degree to which this general idea of Kluge’s, as well as his thought more broadly, guides this study; for as I will show at greater length in the third chapter, this utopian imperative—that this unfulfilled past will constantly press for its realization—translates into not only a prescription for a form of engaged or partisan filmic practice but also into a form of interpretive method—again deeply indebted to Adorno but also to the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch—which attempts to suss out and excavate, to use a favorite metaphor of Kluge’s, the

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utopian dimensions of a cultural document. As I will argue, as true as he finds Walter Benjamin’s great dictum to be, that every document of culture is a document of barbarism, so too does Kluge insist, often provocatively, that every document of culture, even the most barbarous, contains within it a utopian dimension, a promise of a better world and a better life that constitutes its truth content. One goal of the present work will be not only to examine the more explicit or conscious utopian pronouncements or representations in the work of the three filmmakers who form its focus— Jean-Luc Godard, Kidlat Tahimik, and Alexander Kluge—but also to seek out other ways in which a utopian moment is encoded less explicitly in their work at the level of form and in the terms by which they conceive of their cinematic artistic practices. In one way or another, openly or implicitly, Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge subscribe to an idea of utopia in which the hope for and aspiration toward the establishment of a social utopia is deeply bound up with the commitment to unfolding the promises contained in the history of film. Cinema, somehow, gestures toward or prophesies the possibility, and as we will see, the consequent necessity, of utopia and seems to know the deeper nature of what utopia will be. This bond between the project of social utopia and the promise inherent to cinema constitutes what I am calling here the utopia of film. To put it most pointedly, for each of the filmmakers in this study, one could say with only slight reservation (as we will see in each chapter, each waivers in his commitment) that the two ideas are in fact one: the promises of cinema will be realized only when the promises of emancipation that slumber uneasily in the history of humankind are also met. Each, it seems, is necessary to the other. Kluge’s own definition of utopia registers an uncertainty about the utopia of film, about whether or not such an ideal cinema which worked in concert with the movement for social revolution ever really existed; even such a devout student of early cinema as Kluge can only say he “vaguely” knows that a utopian cinema existed in the past. But it seems utterly consistent with Kluge’s notion of utopia, as well as Adorno’s, that this knowledge would be “vague,” for utopia’s place is not in the past—it has yet to exist—but in the future, and in the end the longing for such a full past is but a cipher for such fulfillment in times to come. The vague knowledge of what went on in the past is actually a presentiment of what should arrive in the future. The origins, then, to which each of these filmmakers turn for inspiration and motivation are quasi-mythical in nature, and often explicitly acknowl-

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edged as such, be it in Kluge’s reverence for early cinema or peasant society in the pre-capitalist German lands, or in Godard’s turn to the history of the twentieth century as embedded and encoded in the documents of cinema history, or in Tahimik’s investment in pre-colonial idylls and traditions, in handicraft modes of production, and in what he calls “the cosmos.” This might appear, at first blush, as a liability for a group of filmmakers whose artistic philosophies and practices are informed by an emphatic materialism; for is not the critique of illusion and myth a minimally essential component of any perspicuous and meaningful materialism? Indeed, it is, but one must keep in mind a central lesson of Adorno’s, that the consequent and rigorous—Adorno at one point calls it fanatical—critique of illusion runs the risk of undermining its ostensible goals: on the one hand, if it is successful, it leads to the utter triumph of reason, a triumph that paradoxically leads to the extermination of the subject—the very subject whom reason is to liberate—which is reduced to the status of a mere automaton of reason; on the other hand, the critique of illusion runs the risk of throwing out the “baby with the bathwater” (the title of one of Adorno’s aphorisms in Minima Moralia) and dispensing with the utopian truth content that lies within illusion. So it is that the filmmakers in this study all must carefully tread into dangerous territory, all consciously and unconsciously cultivating a whole host of near-myths of origins of the utopian impulse of cinema to which they will return in various ways. But before this begins to appear like a ruthlessly cynical gesture, it must be asserted that the utopia of film is not only mythical: for every myth has its truth content, its moment of grounding in the material social context from which it emerges, and encodes not only the contradictions and antagonisms of the particular historical social formation which gave rise to it but also the demand for the resolution to those contradictions and antagonisms. And this holds true not only for myths, but for entire cultural forms—that is, in this case, for the cinema—which as both retrospective mythical construct and as an actually existing form or medium itself embodies a utopian wish. The filmmaker who looms perhaps largest in constructions of cinema’s utopian past, no matter how contested his place within the history of political cinema, is Sergei Eisenstein, a figure who is an acknowledged touchstone for Godard and Kluge (albeit one to whom they have a deeply ambivalent relationship), and almost unavoidably so, emerging as they both do from a European film culture where Eisenstein had been an influence since the

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premiere of The Battleship Potemkin (1925) in Berlin in 1926. His influence can also be felt, if in much more mediated form, in Tahimik’s work, in particular in I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), a film whose presentation of the tense events surrounding Ferdinand Marcos’s fall and Corazon Aquino’s rise emit strong echoes of similar scenes in Potemkin and October (1928). Eisenstein’s importance in the near-mythical origins of the utopia of film are rendered dramatically in a film to which I will later return briefly in my discussion of Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010): I am thinking of Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977/1993) and its stunning opening scene, which is of interest for this study as it lays out the parameters of the utopia of film and the stakes involved in any attempt to sustain it at a time when both cinema and the idea of utopia itself seem under dire threat. The film begins with its famously untranslatable title, “Le fond de l’air est rouge,” which fills the screen in enormous red print. The voice-over, in a woman’s voice (Simone Signoret in its French version), tells us: I didn’t see Potemkin when it first came out. I was too young. I remember the shot of the meat, definitely. With the maggots. And the little tent where the dead man was laid out, and when the first person stops in front of it. And the bit when the other sailors take aim on the bridge of the battleship.

As the voice-over unfolds, that very scene from Potemkin begins to play itself out, reedited and condensed by Marker: an officer’s disdainful face, the sailors cowering beneath the sail, the other sailors raising their rifles, the priest slowly pounding his cross into the palm of his hand, the bow of the ship, and the officer shouting “fire!” At that moment, the narrator of A Grin Without a Cat says: And just when the officer gives the order to fire, a huge sailor with a big moustache shouts out a word, which spreads itself all over the screen— “BROTHERS!”

And that title fills the screen, much as the opening title of A Grin Without a Cat did moments before. The music—a march—simultaneously triumphant and mournful, composed by Luciano Berio, rises on the sound track as the image track cuts to a shot, in color film stock that contrasts sharply with the tinted black and white of Potemkin, of a close-up of raised hands from a demonstration in the 1960s or 1970s. So begins the masterful mon-

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tage for which the opening sequence of Marker’s film is so well known: the sequence cuts back and forth between images from protests, demonstrations, funerals, and memorial marches from the sixties and seventies, and shots from the Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin. The cuts are terse graphic-, motion-, and content-matches—a marcher in an unnamed city in South America wipes his eyes as he passes a casket, and a mournful Odessan does the same before Vakulinchuk’s body on the funeral bier; raised rifles in Santiago, Chile, are matched with raised rifles in Odessa; a bloody face outside the Pentagon in 1967 is matched to the well-known image of the woman shot in the eye on the Odessa steps; and so on. In each case, in the footage from the contemporary demonstrations and the shots from Eisenstein’s film, the images are of a solidarity—the image of brotherhood itself—immanent to the time being filmed, be it 1905 or 1967; but in their montage they also create a third image of a solidarity stretching across the time between the Bolshevik Revolution and the uprisings of the sixties. A Grin Without a Cat thus repeats a symbolic gesture internal to Potemkin: Marker’s film yokes the impulses of the sixties to those of the Bolshevik Revolution in much the same way that Eisenstein, making his film in 1925, yoked the revolutionary impulse and courage of the historical mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in 1905 to the needs of the Revolution in 1925. The images of solidarity in Potemkin, however, as well as of the successful revolt against the ship’s officers and the subsequent (provisional) victory against the Black Sea Fleet, are accompanied by images of defeat, suffering, brutality, and repression, which Eisenstein’s montage and shot composition emphasize and “dynamize,” to use one of his favored terms. These fictional images—of the Odessans being cut down ruthlessly by the Cossacks on the steps—find their uncanny echoes in Marker’s contemporary documentary footage from Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Indeed, after A Grin Without a Cat’s inspirational opening moment, embodied in Vakulinchuk’s appeal of “BROTHERS!,” the dominant effect of the subsequent montage is to convey the continuity of the experience of defeat across almost fifty years of time. And in retrospect, from the perspective of this contemporary documentary footage, what in Potemkin was initially portrayed as the heroic sacrifice of a people in a march toward ultimate victory—even if that victory would be deferred until the Bolshevik Revolution—now appears as one more step along the path toward ultimate and inevitable defeat. The poignancy of the opening of A Grin Without a Cat, captured and heightened so well in Berio’s music, arises in this tension

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between the utopian call to collective solidarity and its repeated denial, its seemingly ineluctable trajectory toward failure. Marker has said, almost accusingly, that in Potemkin Eisenstein was unknowingly “staging the imagination of several generations.” It is generally assumed that Marker was speaking of the way people imagined politics and the way people imagined the project of human emancipation with its dual call to brotherhood and spectacular revolt, and that Eisenstein, in his masterful film with its stirring editing, provided the images and sentiments appropriate to such a politics. Marker’s accusation, though, seems to be also that this form of politics was misguided, an error, and that Eisenstein had led us astray. A Grin Without a Cat, then, is Marker’s leave-taking (a notion that will return again and again in the course of this book) from the form of politics Potemkin stages for us, a leave-taking most clearly articulated in the film in Marker’s critique of the charismatic figure of Che Guevara, who comes to stand for a commitment to a near-inhuman revolutionary logic that only leads to barbarism and defeat. But in Potemkin, Eisenstein stages, as a metteur en scène, not only the imagination of a kind of political practice—the sorts of revolt that the Odessa Steps sequence initially and the documentary footage in A Grin Without a Cat subsequently portrays, and the proper attitudes and gestures that denote and connote brotherhood and rebellion, such as the raised hands and clenched fists—but also the imagination of a kind of committed artistic practice, of a kind of committed filmmaking practice in particular. Eisenstein’s film, as well as the polemical and theoretical writings that he composed around it, articulates a notion of cinema that in itself is deeply utopian. It is utopian in its universal appeal to the great collectives who comprise its audience and in its ability to speak to them across the divides of language and the barriers of illiteracy. It is utopian not only in its commitment to the project of revolution and the constitution of a new society but also in its status as the most modern of the arts, one suited to the task of revolution and one appropriate to the modern technical age of industrialization, as he articulates in his famous call for the “tractorization” of the arts. It is utopian in its capacity to move and inspire unlike any other art, and in its ability to subsume all forms that have come before it, much as the advent of communism is to supersede all prior forms of society. It is thus significant that the voice-over of A Grin Without a Cat begins with neither an account of revolution—neither that of 1905 nor of 1917— nor an account of the revolts of the sixties and seventies, but with the recollection of seeing a film, a film about—and an active part of—the Bolshevik

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Revolution, and with the careful remembrance of the particular images that so profoundly affected the narrator: the meat, the maggots, and of course the title card, “BROTHERS!” In beginning like this, Marker follows in a long tradition of the recollection of formative, personal cinematic experiences, a tradition that is particularly rich in accounts of seeing Potemkin dating back to the earliest reports from its tour-de-force premiere in Berlin. But A Grin Without a Cat’s account of Potemkin goes beyond mere recounting and recollection to achieve a sort of transformative mimesis at the level of form, reediting Potemkin’s images and imitating its montage at the same time, repeating its basic gestures (graphic matches, jarring directional and graphic contrasts, etc.) while incorporating Eisenstein’s film itself as filmic material. The effect is uncanny, at once registering the sheer distance in time and context between the “red decade” of 1967 to 1977 and the Bolshevik Revolution, a distance reinforced by the shift to color in the documentary footage, as well as marking the enduring continuity forged in struggle and defeat. What is compelling in this opening scene of A Grin Without a Cat then, beyond the obvious (for who cannot help but be moved by this sequence that so poignantly sums up the hopes and disappointments of political struggle in the last century), is that A Grin Without a Cat not only establishes the relationship across time between the event of the Bolshevik Revolution and the event of “Sixty-eight,” to use Alain Badiou’s philosophical concept of the event, but it also assays the long-resounding consequences of what I would like to call the event of cinema. We can think about the event of cinema precisely in the terms Badiou has used in his most succinct formulation of the concept of the event: “an event is not the realization/variation of a possibility that resides inside the situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility. An event changes not only the real, but also the possible.” For example, Badiou contends that the event of the French Revolution introduced the new possibility into the world of radical and universal equality and human emancipation. But accompanying the event, an idea also emerges, an idea that sums up the possibilities that the event generates as well as providing a symbolic form through which subjects are called to participate in the event. To continue the example, from the event of the French Revolution, what Badiou calls the “idea” or “hypothesis” of communism emerges, the conviction that universal emancipation is both possible and desirable. This idea then serves two major functions, one regulatory and one interpellative. As a regulatory idea it stands as an ideal against which social progress or change

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must be measured. As an interpellative idea, it serves a function not unlike that described by Louis Althusser as the function of ideology more generally: the idea “calls” subjects into being, constituting them in the appeal to devote themselves to a cause—a devotion Badiou terms “fidelity”—a notion to which I will return in a moment. Just as A Grin Without a Cat dramatically shows how the event of the Bolshevik Revolution drew on and further produced the hypothesis or idea of communism, so too does Marker’s film illustrate something like the hypothesis or idea of cinema: the conviction that cinema has expanded the realm of possibilities for art, that cinema has the possibility of a truly universal vocation or calling, that it cannot be content to exist as a minor art or as a commodity slated for mere consumption by one class so that another might be enriched, but instead that it must engage in the universal project of human emancipation. What A Grin Without a Cat so effectively portrays is this event and idea of cinema in their intimate linkage with the two great political events of the twentieth century that lie at the heart of the film, those of 1917 and 1968. The possibility of cinema, in other words, is one with the possibility of emancipation that those events engendered, and all of cinema’s subsequent efforts, all of its ambitions, and all that it creates must henceforth be assessed in reference to this ideal, to this new possibility, to what Badiou has called the “possibility of a possibility,” and to what I am calling in this book the utopia of film. It is also fitting that Marker chooses Potemkin as his reference point for the twin events of 1917 and the cinema, for beyond the film’s place within the imaginary of generations of filmmakers and political artists, the film itself is not only about the possibility of communism—and an active attempt to realize that possibility—but also, as we have seen, about the failure of communist revolt. The possibility introduced by an event implies the risk of its failure to be realized, and the real experience of both the idea of communism and the idea of cinema has been one of dashed hopes and repeated failure, a reality of which each filmmaker in this study is acutely aware. Not only do the images of the beatings and the blood on the Odessa steps anticipate the subsequent history of similar repression throughout the twentieth century—and here Marker’s film comes very close to expressing Godard’s conviction that the cinema can predict the future—so powerfully revealed in Marker’s montage, as I have already argued; but the battleship Potemkin’s revolt itself was a failure, a failure that Potemkin refuses to represent, as Eisenstein readily admitted at the time of its release in the short essay from 1926, “Constanta (Whither ‘The Battleship Potemkin’).” The

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essay, tellingly, begins with the question:“‘But where does the Potemkin go?’ That is a question that very many viewers ask. They met, they waved, they passed, but where did they go?” The film, however, does not offer the answer to that question; instead, Eisenstein writes: “We stop this event at the point where it had become an ‘asset’ of the Revolution. But the agony goes on.” In truth, the ship was eventually returned to the Russian navy, some sailors went into exile in Romania, and numerous others were executed as mutineers; and the idea embodied in the sailors’ struggle had to wait another dozen years for a renewed attempt at realization. “The agony goes on, but we stop the film when it had become an ‘asset’ to the Revolution”: Potemkin is thus a model reflection on how to come to terms with the failure of an event, and as such a reflection it is an important touchstone in the history of leftist film. The model put forth by the film proposes that one does not narrate a failed event in its fullness by constructing a richly detailed, “realistic” portrayal of the buildup to the event, the various causes and influences that unleashed it, and then offering an objective breakdown of what happened. Instead, the film suggests that one must extract from the event its essential—its useful—core; one must pinpoint and portray that which makes it an “asset” for the present, in this case what makes it an asset for the Revolution. That is, from the perspective of the present of 1925, when Potemkin was made, in the midst of the ongoing social transformation of the Soviet Union, one must look back to the event of 1905—the Potemkin mutiny—and find in it what speaks to the present, what energy or principle or possibility inheres in the event from 1905 and awaits its realization now. In a sense, this is an obvious point: if 1905 had been successful, there would be no need for Potemkin in 1925; in such a case Eisenstein could have made a historical documentary that commemorated the event, relegating it definitively to the past, incorporating it into the official historiography of the Revolution. But instead, there is still something useful in the event, something that demands revivification—or “reactivation” as Badiou would put it—because it has gone unrealized. Or, in Slavoj Žižek’s terminology, there is something in the event that demands repetition. And in one way or another, this summarizes a central problematic addressed by each filmmaker in this study, a central function or vocation that cinema is obligated to assume: to uncover just what in history—in the history of attempts at liberation and in the history of cinema—demands repetition. For Eisenstein, then, the proper way to deal with failure is not only to ask, “What did we do wrong?”—that is, to ask what strategic and tactical

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errors were committed, what should have been done differently, and so on—though of course one must ask those questions; more importantly, one must ask “what, in failure, did we do right?” That is, one must ask just what element of the event was its truly universal aspect, the part that persists across time and can still be, to switch to the language of Benjamin and Adorno, redeemed. As I argue in chapter 3, the early Marx had already articulated this stance toward failure in the famous lines from a letter to Arnold Ruge, lines which can be read as the watchword of Kluge’s entire project and as a guiding idea of this book as well, when he said: “it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that mankind begins no new work, but is consciously putting into effect its old work.” This explains why, in a sense, despite its grandeur and eloquence, and despite Marker’s personal reputation as a committed filmmaker, A Grin Without a Cat is itself something of a failure: after the initial promise of the title card “BROTHERS!,” the film devolves primarily into a reflection on what the Left did wrong, with little reflection on the ideal of brotherhood that begins the film, aside from the heartbreaking sequence on Salvador Allende. Or, to put it another way, should that judgment seem too harsh, it is difficult to rescue from the film a perspective on the red decade that is useful for the present, be it for the present of 1977, when Marker first made the film, or the moment of 1993, when he reedited it and composed a new narration in response to the changed situation following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Toward the end of that final version the voiceover declares, in rather defeatist lockstep with the voices of the mainstream media of the time, that “the communist dream is dead.” All the film can then rescue, at its very end, is an image of bare survival for opponents of what Marker calls the “almost abstract power” that reigns over the earth: to images of wolves being hunted from a helicopter, their bodies bursting under the impact of the high-powered bullets that slay them, we hear: “There will always be wolves.” This gesture toward an absolute minimum residue of resistance, I would suggest, is a far cry from Vakulinchuk’s appeal to his comrades at the beginning of Potemkin. Nonetheless, A Grin Without a Cat generates an affective charge through its opening montage (and often enough throughout the film), a sort of impact that recalls the effect Potemkin had on the narrator. To return again to Badiou’s philosophy of the event, we can understand this appeal to the

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spectator as precisely the sort of call that an event puts forth to an individual: when at the beginning of the film the narrator recounts her first viewing of Potemkin and how the word “BROTHERS!” “spreads itself all over the screen,” she effectively recounts a moment of what Badiou calls “subjectivation,” the moment when an individual is called into being as a subject faithful to a cause. It is the recounting of a moment when a subject’s fidelity to an event is founded. As should be clear now, the subject whose creation A Grin Without a Cat narrates is one who is called simultaneously to the idea of communism and to the idea of cinema as she commits herself to the continued propagation of the utopia of film. This account of the opening of A Grin Without a Cat provides, I believe, a fresh way to think about a problematic that lies at the heart of The Utopia of Film in various forms, and one which Marker’s film stages beginning with its opening lines: the relationship of the political cinema since the Second World War to earlier political cinema, particularly that of interwar modernism. The particular aesthetic problematic is, of course, representative of the larger problematic of the relationship between contemporary Left politics and the traditions from which its various forms emerge, especially at a time when many of the old coordinates of Left politics seem to have evaporated, most significantly the hope for the defeat of capitalism, and when so many of the tropes and figures of Left discourse seem no longer to have much purchase. The problematic is an important and vital one, which each filmmaker returns to almost obsessively in his work; and each provides different, provisional, and at times obscure resolutions or solutions for it. I should be clear: to posit that Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge share a fidelity to the dual event of cinema and liberation is not to say that their work together comprises, or emerges from, a tradition in any conventional sense of the term, as one can reasonably assert, for example, that Kluge works within the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Instead, it is to assert a shared engagement with a problematic, namely how one sustains a commitment or a fidelity to a cause or an idea even in the face of that cause’s failure. In each of these filmmakers one finds unique, though resonant, attempts to work through the failures of the project of liberation and of cinema as an art form. I think Fredric Jameson’s concept of “late modernism” is useful in understanding this problematic, and in thinking about the tension that arises in the period after World War II between a fidelity to older political and aesthetic ideas from the period of interwar modernism and a set of new

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historical circumstances that are not necessarily welcoming to those ideas. While in Jameson’s usage, as developed above all in A Singular Modernity, the concept of late modernism refers specifically to a conservative and depoliticized version of modernism arising after WWII, primarily in the United States, the term can be productively applied to the cinéma engagée that emerges in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe (as exemplified in this book in Godard’s and Kluge’s work) and North America, and across the globe as well, perhaps most notably in the form of Third Cinema, which in Solanas and Getino’s formulation has Godard’s “Second Cinema” as a reference point, and other variants of Third World film. It can usefully highlight the particular problematic of a durable subjective commitment (again, Badiou’s notion of fidelity) to a political sequence or to an idea (in Badiou’s sense) in a moment when that sequence is on the wane and has become residual, and when the idea begins to appear unseasonable. One can think of this tension in terms of base and superstructure, recalling Benjamin’s important (and seldom discussed) lesson from his essay on the “Work of Art,” namely that the development of superstructural forms can lag significantly behind the development of the base. From this perspective, the problem with late political modernism as an aesthetic practice, to bring together Jameson’s concept with D. N. Rodowick’s concept of political modernism, is that its efforts are constantly rearguard, as its commitments are constantly outflanked by the development of political relations “on the ground.” (Indeed, we will see in chapters 2 and 3 how Tahimik and Kluge try to turn this situation into a virtue when they argue that the proper stance for an aesthetic and political avant-garde is to be behind the times: as Kluge puts it, the aim of the arriere-garde is not to “establish the new” but instead to “bring everything forward” from the past). As a periodizing concept, then, the term designates a transitional aesthetic phase between the earlier moment of political modernism, when the political commitments of the modernists corresponded more fully to the political possibilities of the time, and a later postmodernism, when the forms of earlier political modernism have been drained of their seemingly necessary or transparent political significance and are open to appropriation and reuse at all levels of culture, appearing in even the most commodified and depoliticized cultural artifacts in a new dominant mode, what Jameson has famously labeled “pastiche.” To understand the value of the idea of late modernism as a periodizing concept, we can map it off against a model of earlier modernism. To do this, I would like to turn to Perry Anderson’s famous theorization of mod-

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ernism in his essay “Modernity and Revolution,” where he presents a tripartite “conjunctural” theory to explain modernism’s emergence, positing that it must be understood as a force field “triangulated amongst three primary determinants.” The first of these determinants was “the codification of a highly formalized academicism, . . . which itself was institutionalized within official regimes of states and society still massively pervaded, often dominated, by aristocratic or landowning classes,” classes which were “in one sense economically ‘superseded.’ ” This supersession was indicative (and the cause) of the possible frailty of that academicism, which had shown signs of crumbling at the turn of the century, and as such constituted an opening onto the possibility of modernism. A second determinant is found in the “still incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution: telephone, radio, automobile, aircraft and so on,” to which I would add the technology of cinema and the “attraction” that it offered in its early phase, to use Tom Gunning’s term. And the final, and for my purpose here the most intriguing, determinant Anderson identifies is “the imaginative proximity of social revolution,” a prospect that inspired a hope or apprehension that was “in the air” throughout much of Europe in the Belle Epoque and by the 1920s in Asia as well. While this is hardly an exhaustive enumeration of the determinants of modernism (and I would hasten to include, following Jameson, a broader set of determinations linking the emergence of modernism to the installation of the imperialist mode of production, the second in Jameson’s tripartite scheme of periodizing the history of capitalism and its attendant cultural “logics”), Anderson’s model is helpful in formulating the distinction between the modernist and late modernist moments I am outlining here. We can think how each of these three coordinates had changed or been replaced by the early 1960s, when Godard and Kluge, the oldest of the three filmmakers in this study, were in the early phases of their filmmaking careers, and when Tahimik was just beginning to emerge from his “cocoon of American dreams.” For late modernism, a formalized academicism can be seen to be replaced by classical Hollywood form and the institution of American cinema, what Godard has acerbically called the “American invasion” and which, as Anderson says about the earlier institutionalized and formalized academicism, provides “a critical range of cultural values against which insurgent forms of art could measure themselves, but also in terms of which they could partly articulate themselves.” This new, if not academicism, then classicism, as it is often called in scholarly studies

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of the cinema, is associated not with an economically superseded class, but with the class that secured prominence in the period of modernism. This classicism, though, was not monumental and was unstable in the period of late modernism, beginning to come apart under the pressure of competing forms such as television, as well as the various legal and political challenges to its monopoly. Hollywood, as both inspiration and enemy, is a palpable presence in the work of all three filmmakers in this book, just as it was a palpable presence in every new wave in the fifties and sixties, and in every film-producing region on the globe, all of which in one way or another had to come to terms with it. Second, by the onset of the sixties—we could say by the appearance of Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960)—the “mass consumption industries” Anderson points to were fully established, the technologies of cinema were no longer novel, and if anything the second industrial revolution was playing itself out or already had, at least in Europe, but increasingly so in the Third World as well. Godard’s early cinema, as I mention in chapter 1, represents these facts comprehensively, perhaps most notably in Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967), which shows how the consumption industries are now not only familiar, but have established themselves as fully unfolded second nature; no more do they purvey desired new things and exceptional luxury goods for a small consuming class, but fully unfolded, they have achieved the status of inescapable needs for the breadth of social classes. This fact poses a significant challenge to the politicization of the populace, a challenge aptly registered by Godard in the famous intertitle in Masculine Feminine (1966) about the “children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” This, of course, leads to the transformation in Anderson’s third coordinate of modernist determinants, the imaginative proximity of social revolution. Each of the filmmakers in The Utopia of Film engage a moment, or event, when social revolution was sensed as both possible and proximate on an international scale. For Godard and Kluge, the Sixties—here written with a capital “S”—either in the First or Third Worlds, represented that moment; for Tahimik, this moment was deferred until the 1980s and the rise of Corazon Aquino’s “People Power” movement, a point to which I will return in due course. In any case, as in Anderson’s vision of earlier modernism, the “haze of social revolution drifting across the horizon of this epoch” animated late political modernism as well, providing not only a generalized sense of social dynamism in which it could participate but also the fantasy of a possible effectivity for an engaged cinema, a field in which its transfor-

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mative effects could be felt immediately. This apparent proximity of social revolution gave to engaged cinema an imagined purpose and an imagined audience, and with that an imagined function for art, at a time when the function of art had been utterly co-opted by the classicism of commodified cinema. So when that social revolution failed, when the proximity of revolution was revealed as imaginative, the crisis that ensued was not only one for politics but also for cinema, as well as for the individual fidelities each filmmaker held to the political idea that animated this seemingly revolutionary moment. Each filmmaker in this study must negotiate this crisis in some way, and The Utopia of Film seeks out the effects of this negotiation in the form of the films and the conceptions of cinema that arise in its wake. These three coordinates, then, provide the points of orientation by which we can begin to map the utopia of film’s new place in the world, a world that is by all accounts hostile to it from every corner: cinema’s dream of being a universal art is taken away by the triumph of Hollywood and the sheer scale of its own commodification; its novelty is worn away, having become seamlessly incorporated into the landscape of the consumption industries, to such an extent that one can no longer, perhaps, sustain its revolutionary élan; furthermore, it is no longer dominant, television having usurped that status by the 1960s, soon to be followed by the New Media and digital culture; and finally, the proximity of social revolution, and the social agent—be it the revolutionary proletariat, Third World insurgents fighting for independence, or the revolutionary students and workers of ’68— who was to bring this revolution to pass and provide cinema its audience and ground upon which to do its work, have also apparently fragmented or faded away (though, as I suggest in the conclusion, one wonders if the nascent movements around the world, against dictatorships in the Middle East, or against Wall Street in the United States, do not promise a future social regeneration, and with it, an optimistic future for a revolutionary art). Despite all of this, none of the filmmakers in this study have abandoned their fidelity to the utopia of film. One of the goals of The Utopia of Film is to think of cinema as a form of thought. The ambition is not unique, and takes its cue from Eisenstein’s notion of “intellectual montage,” as well as from the clear and open attempts by Godard and Kluge to raise cinema to a level of discourse equivalent to that of philosophy or theory. Which is why I hope that this book will not be looked at only as a work in film studies but also as a work on critical theory, one that both explores the origins of the cinematic thought of Godard,

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Tahimik, and Kluge in the dual event and idea of cinema and revolution, and also assays how it contributes to the continued development of a dialectical tradition of radical thinking. Such a project—to make cinema into thought—is beset by enormous difficulties, not the least of which is to overcome the perceived opposition between the aesthetic and the conceptual that dates back to at least Kant, an opposition that can be seen operating at the most divergent ends of the aesthetic spectrum. For Godard and Kluge the resistance of high art to the concept, to philosophical or theoretical articulation, was one of its great strengths, and indeed, as Adorno argued, one of the sources of its utopian power, so the transmutation of art into thought runs the risk of evacuating the very utopian core of art that one wants to preserve. And of course mass culture, the place to which so much critical theory has relegated cinema, has traditionally been seen as the absolute opposite of critical thought, as the realm of the purest and most regressive ideology from which not only thinking is banished but also where the aesthetic itself has become utterly corrupted and degraded. All three of the filmmakers contend with this particular difficulty, each engaging the challenges and legacies bequeathed to them by the omnipresence of mass culture and its seemingly inescapable and scurrilous association with cinema, primarily in the form of Hollywood film. The other, related, obstacle each filmmaker faces is one articulated most forcefully by Adorno, with whom Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge share real affinities (even if it is not possible to trace direct influence on them, with the obvious and notable exception of Kluge): this is what Adorno notoriously specified as the inherent and absolute opposition between conceptual thought and the despised pretense of “thinking in images,” most famously codified in his notion of the Bilderverbot—the ban on graven images— within the realm of philosophical thinking. A near-instinctive, and at times explicit, suspicion of the tendency of images to freeze over into positive, reified verities that undermine thought, which must always sustain its commitment to a negative dialectic, operates in each of the filmmakers considered here. This can explain, in part, their common reliance on two techniques or formal tendencies: the first is of course the ubiquity, in multiple guises, of montage, which has the dual capacity to both undermine the indexical and iconic power of each individual image as well as to elevate images to the level of thought through their combination (here Eisenstein’s influence is again palpable). The second is what Bertolt Brecht, in the realm of theater, once termed the technique of “literarization,” which in cine-

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ma manifests itself in the radical and effusive proliferation of text: in the form of titles, in the form of filmed text from the profilmic world (images of books, Godard’s famous use of advertisements and billboards, a motif clearly imitatively deployed by Tahimik as well), and in the form of talking—sometimes endless talking—be it in the form of heady dialogue or an abundant variety of voice-over techniques. In its organization, The Utopia of Film can be seen to follow a roughly dialectical progression, recapitulating the famous antagonism between Adorno and Brecht already implicitly alluded to here. Though this way of thinking about the structure of the book simplifies matters somewhat, it is a useful way to map out in broad strokes how my argument moves forward. In chapter 1, the late Godard is presented as a practitioner of high— or autonomous—art as well as the bearer of a deep-seated cultural pessimism (which I do however, in the end, qualify), and he thus functions as a stand-in of sorts for Adorno. In the second chapter, Tahimik appears very much as a Brechtian didact, fully engaged in cultural-political struggle and constantly seeking out ways to even further embed his artwork in the immediate context in which he lives and works, while simultaneously seeking to estrange our understanding of that context. And in the concluding chapter, Kluge’s work is presented as the long-running attempt to reconcile these two divergent impulses by combining Brecht’s revolutionary didacticism with Adorno’s skepticism and his method of the negative dialectic, a reconciliation captured in the various seemingly paradoxical claims one can make about Kluge—amongst other things, that he is a filmmaker who adheres to Adorno’s Bilderverbot, that he is an avant-gardist who seems to dwell in the past, that he is an Enlightenment thinker who celebrates the unforeseeable and seemingly irrational consequences of rational human activity, and that he embodies and extols the virtues of energetic human productivity but works assiduously to bring about what William Morris so beautifully called the “epoch of rest.” As a consequence of my approach, to take cinema seriously as a mode of thinking, my tendency has also been to think of these filmmakers as thinkers and to consider their works as coherent, if at times discontinuous and contradictory, bodies of thought; or, to put it another way, I believe these filmmakers’ works create and form recognizable ideas, even if one has to patiently, and with some effort, work to divine what those ideas might be, thus translating them back from the realm of cinema proper into the discursive form of criticism (and thereby as well inescapably subjecting them to a form of symbolic or discursive violence). This aim explains in

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large part the apparent auteurist bias in the organization of this book into chapters devoted to individual filmmakers. Such an organization is somewhat at odds with the idea of the utopia of film, which avers that cinema is possessed of an intention to collectivity, to paraphrase Georg Lukács’s old notion of the intention to totality. The tension between these two poles of the individual and the collective is irreducible; it is, to return to Badiou again, marked in the fraught relationship between the universality of an event’s core significance and the unavoidably individual sense of fidelity that a subject exercises toward that event. It is a tension, as well, that each filmmaker in this book contends with directly and indirectly, and I would also say, productively, as they stage in their work the risks and fears inherent in any individual’s devotion to a cause larger and more important than him or herself. In chapter 1, in my reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro, 1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (JLG/JLG: autoportrait de décembre, 1994), I deal with the tension between individual authorship and collectivity explicitly. A crucial element of Godard’s own utopianism in his later work, which revisits in various ways his films from the sixties, is found in his acceptance—I am tempted to say his even courageous embrace—of the passing of the politique des auteurs, one of the great attempts in modern art to rescue the figure of the individual artist as originator and controller of his or her artwork. Godard, though, has said that what was interesting in the idea was not the auteur, but the politique, which unfortunately often took a backseat to the former. For Godard, the utopia of film prefigures not only the dissolution of the notion of individual creativity and genius but also the dissolution of subjectivity itself, or rather its dispersal, into its multiple and collective determinations. The traces of these determinations can be found in Godard’s increasing use in his later period, beginning in the 1980s, of an aesthetic of quotation and bricolage, a form of montage of received images, words, sounds, and ideas which make it very difficult to isolate Godard as the originator of any given cinematic utterance that bears his name. As he has said, when he puts something in a film, he cannot recall if he thought it or someone else; it just does not matter. The point here, though, is not to celebrate a properly postmodern conception of the decentered subject, but rather to foreground Godard’s insistence that a decentered, or fragmented, subject must be approached dialectically: on the one hand this decentering must be understood as the effect of the shattering pressures of life in late capi-

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talism, where existence suffers the alternating blows of compulsory, deadening wage labor and obligatory, compulsive consumption; on the other hand, the dispersal of subjectivity, as well as the fragmentation of the object world with which those subjects must contend on a daily basis, also opens up a view of the subject as deeply collective. This is then one way in which Godard comes to terms with, or tries to find the good in, failure: for at one level, in his late works, Godard confronts his own failure as an auteur, as a subject who makes films, to have fulfilled what he thinks of as the mission of cinema to participate in the salvation of the world, but one who, near the end of his life and the end of his career, shifts the terms whereby the work of the individual auteur might be understood. So, in good dialectical fashion, and despite his recent reputation for a debilitating pessimism and near melancholia, Godard constantly seeks out the positive underside of defeat and failure. Chapter 1 explores this tendency at several levels. One level is that of the individual biography and career, in which his own personal failures, as well as those of his works, are bravely faced down for their inadequacies as well as their successes. In particular, his return in his later works to his films from the 1960s evinces the same sort of treatment of failure I identify above in Eisenstein: as much as Godard asks what he did wrong, he also asks what he did right; which questions, characters, tales, problems, and scenarios from the earlier work still have purchase? And in asking these questions he calls on old characters from his old films, in particular Lemmy Caution, to almost literally come out of the receding past and give him the answers. At another level—the level of the political or historical—Godard is repeatedly concerned with the failure of communism or socialism, the legacy of which he most thoroughly and explicitly comes to terms with in Germany Year 90, which I read in conjunction with his earlier film Alphaville (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, 1965). Germany Year 90 ironically argues that communism’s failure was its success, for capitalism, figured in the new incarnation of the dystopian city of Alphaville as contemporary post-unification Berlin, has achieved everything it always accused “actually existing socialism” of having imposed upon its subjects, from pervasive surveillance to universalized compulsory labor. This means, of course, that capitalism is the real failure; not only has it achieved the un-freedom of its old adversary, but with the demise of the “East” (represented by East Germany in the film), so too has the “West” disappeared, for the East had always functioned as a negative support for the West’s identity, a support that has fallen away with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But beyond this

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critique of capitalism, Godard remains on the lookout for the nearly invisible traces of the collective impulse that animated even the most horrid instantiations of bureaucratic socialism, and his camera and his characters stumble across remnants of this collective impulse in the ravaged landscapes of a now-no-longer East Germany. The muted optimism of JLG/JLG and Germany Year 90 anticipates the less restrained utopianism that characterizes Godard’s apparently final film, Film Socialisme, which revisits virtually all of the themes and gestures I identify in his late work, but, as the obscure and syntactically challenging title of the film hints at, provides them with an explicit political specification as being fundamentally socialist. Chapter 2 shifts the frame of analysis to the Third World as it turns to the three major films of the Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik: Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong bangungot, 1977), Turumba (1983), and I Am Furious Yellow. Against those who might criticize the term Third World for the symbolic violence it exerts on vast regions of the globe and the people who live there, Tahimik remains stubbornly committed to the idea, proudly refunctioning the notion as he elevates it to the level of a utopian ethic that at once rejects the values and ideals of Western, above all American, consumer culture and the ideology of capitalist “development,” and puts forth a positive program for both politics and cinema based on the principles of communitarianism, self-reliance, and self-determination. Third World becomes a metaphor for Tahimik’s politics and aesthetics more generally, for as the product of colonial and imperial history, the notion of the Third World marks the failure of the resistance to colonial occupation (figured in Perfumed Nightmare in the character of Kidlat’s father), but it is a failure from which Tahimik insists that one must learn, just as one must learn from the breadth of the imperfect historical legacies of colonialism. Out of this conflicted legacy, out of this failure, one must craft a new world. This desire is embodied in numerous ways in Tahimik’s work, most notably, as I demonstrate, in his embrace of Catholicism (especially in Turumba), in his overall aesthetic of recycling, in which all of the cast-off items of history (including the detritus of consumer culture and the physical and ideological remnants of war and empire) are appropriated as raw materials for his films. Each of the three films I discuss in this chapter exemplify this principle with varying nuance and emphasis: as recycled products, made with obsolete technology and inexpert participants (actors and technicians alike are nonprofessional), their very method of construction prefigures a form of utopia, an ideal future made from the inheritance of an imperfect past and a deeply flawed present.

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Chapter 2 is organized around Tahimik’s masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow, an almost unknown film, rarely screened, at least outside of the Pacific Rim and Southeast Asia. It is a diary film made with his eldest son, Kidlat de Guia, that chronicles the momentous decade from 1981 to 1991, that saw the rise of the People Power movement, the deposing of Ferdinand Marcos, and the accession to power, by election and mass protest, of Corazon Aquino. The film tracks the energy and hopes invested in Aquino’s movement, and the subsequent crushing disappointments of her reign. Her victory did not usher in the general social revolution that Tahimik yearned for, and this failure is attributed to the influence of “alien,” consumerist American values that continue to co-opt Philippine culture. But Tahimik extracts from the event of Aquino’s political movement and the downfall of the dictator an essential moment of truth; he identifies in the failure what the Filipinos did right: for Tahimik develops the motto of Aquino’s “Yellow” movement (the color of her party and her campaign)—“People Power”—into the essential truth of his Third World politics. Third World, in Tahimik’s usage, means in the most literal of senses “people power,” embodying a vision of the dealienation of labor and designating the capacity of people to manage their own affairs and shape their own futures without oppressive intervention from the First World. For Tahimik, who never explicitly deploys Marxian terminology, the ultimate moment of the de-alienation of labor will find its articulation in spiritual terms, and his cinema embodies the hope that humankind will be able to get back “in touch”—to use his hippie- or New Age–inspired language—with what he calls “the cosmos,” which in his work is not a figure for some mythical God or earth spirit but instead becomes a sign for the grand and glorious combined creativity of humankind. Chapter 3 returns the focus to the First World again, where alienation, and its overcoming, appears as the central organizing concept of Alexander Kluge’s work. It is a concept that anchors not only his critical theory, providing the underpinnings for his political economy of labor-power and his philosophy of history, but one that also shapes his theory and practice of cinema. Its presence is felt not only at the most intimate levels in his understanding of spectatorship but also at the grandest of levels, as it dictates cinema’s overall purpose and mission as the attempt to help humans regain control and mastery over the use of reason, the creation of history, and the experience of time. For Kluge, cinema’s perhaps greatest ambitions and its most important critical work play themselves out in the domain of temporality: cinema’s battle—and Kluge often formulates its functions in such combative terms—

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is to prevent the erasure of the past and the foreclosure of the future. The utopia of film in Kluge’s formulation is deeply temporal; it opposes the “assault of the present on the rest of time,” as in the title of his 1985 film The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit, 1985), one of his last films before his turn to television and multimedia production in the mid-1980s, and one of the central foci of chapter 3. In Kluge’s analysis, the forces of television and the New Media carry out this assault, but these are merely the two most visible agents of the real power behind the transformation of lived time into an eternal present: in classic Marxist fashion, Kluge argues that the relentless development of the means and relations of production that attains under contemporary global capitalism shatters the human perception of different temporalities, closing down all temporal horizons, of both past and future, as it imposes an everexpanding present upon human existence. Against the dystopian monotony of a universalized “now” (not to be mistaken for Benjamin’s radical epistemological concept of the “Jetztzeit”), Kluge pits what he calls the utopian “principle of cinema,” a principle grounded in the material character of film (its intermittent projection; its capacity for montage), and its deep affinity with the functioning of the spectator’s mind (its almost natural scopophilic drive; its affective and emotive faculties; its ability to remember; and—above all—its capacity for reason) as well as in cinema’s historical obsolescence, which he sees not as a liability but as a virtue in a world where being “current” is a most cherished value, as essential to sustain sales as it is to guarantee one’s social status. But it is precisely as an obsolete medium that cinema finds its subversive usevalue: it is deeply temporal but fundamentally untimely; it is a talisman of a different time from the past and a cipher of a different future; it is a bearer of unfulfilled promises and possibilities that arose in history and it calls for their future realization. The ultimate goal of Kluge’s cinematic thought is taken straight from the passage in Marx’s letter to Ruge cited above: cinema’s function is to reveal to the mind what it has long since only dreamed of so that it might possess it in reality. Cinema, for Kluge, is here to do no less than help humankind complete the unfinished work of the past. I understand Kluge, then, as a Marxist philosopher of time who conceives of history, despite his enormous debt to the Hegelian tradition he has inherited from the early Marx, not as a grand march of progress but as an incessant succession of promises raised and never fulfilled, of possibilities created which have gone unmet. In other words, Kluge is a philosopher of failure and repeatedly returns to the question posed by Eisenstein in

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Potemkin, and each of the filmmakers in this book, namely how one learns from the failures and disasters of the past. I excavate this philosophy in a reading of his film theory and critical theory (above all his magnum opus, Geschichte und Eigensinn [History and Obstinacy, 1981], written with Oskar Negt), and readings of four of his major film and video works from across the span of his oeuvre. I present his early documentary on the Nuremberg Party Grounds, Brutality in Stone (Brutalität in Stein, 1961), as not only a condemnation of the Nazi past, as it is commonly understood, but also as Kluge’s first attempt to make a film that adheres to the Bilderverbot in its provocative attempt to rescue the collective or utopian impulse that Kluge believes animated the barbarity of National Socialism. Kluge’s first feature, Yesterday Girl (Abschied von gestern, 1965), continues the concern with the troubling legacies of the Third Reich, but shifts away from an analysis of the (un)intentional repression of the past to more assertively explore the eclipse of the sense of historicity through forces of contemporary cultural reification, a concern that culminates in The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, where those forces appear in their most powerful and advanced guise as the New Media. Kluge continues to resist this assault after his turn to television in the mid-1980s. His very recent work, the monumental The Fruits of Trust (Früchte des Vertrauens, 2009), attempts to nurture the utopian principle of cinema within the seemingly hostile medium of television in an era marked simultaneously by the “timelessness of the earthly eternity” of capitalism and a mounting economic and environmental crisis that suggests that human beings’ time on Earth might be all too finite. These two overwhelming objective forces, of relentless capitalist expansion and recurrent, intensifying crisis, project a contradictory set of perspectives on time that dominate our current moment: we are caught between the “expanding present” that obscures any sense of the future, any sense of coming difference other than the endless succession of new jobs to secure, products to consume, websites to visit, and pointless text messages to send, and the anxious sense that imminent apocalypse—either economic, environmental, or both— threatens existence as such. Such a moment in history, Kluge argues—as does this whole book— is in dire need of the utopia of film, whose essential gesture is toward a redeemed future, a utopian future, a future that seems almost unimaginable at this point. Cinema’s vocation is now not only to project and show us that “the world is there,” as Godard has said of its original obligation, but also to show us the world will still be there in the future.

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What Has Come to Pass for Cinema FROM EARLY TO L ATE GODARD

Utopia and Its Passing It might be useful to consider Godard’s career as if it followed a somewhat disordered, almost reversed chronology than the transition from modernism to postmodernism. By this view, Godard’s early films would be the properly postmodernist work, indulging in pure pastiche, working almost exclusively with surface play, chance, the fragmented and decentered subject, as well as reveling in the dedifferentiation of the categories of mass culture and high art. The euphoric celebrations of westerns and films noir in his articles for Cahiers du cinéma would fit nicely with such a characterization, and the later remakes of his early work (the Hollywood version of Breathless [Jim McBride, 1983] with Richard Gere) as well as the focus of his contemporary postmodern followers on the films of the early sixties (Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with the early Godard, most notably emblematized in the naming of his production company after Band of Outsiders [Bande à part, 1964]) would seemingly offer support for this periodization as well. Paradoxically, then, Godard’s early period would usher in a political moment, an impulse thought to have been vacated in the postmodern. This moment of modernist engagement would be followed by his experiments with video and television, a medium chronologically much newer than cinema that would lead him into the past. For oddly enough, video would spawn the rebirth of cinema for Godard, to which he would return in 1980, when he began to produce properly high modernist works. The films of the last two decades have much of the feel of “autonomous” works of art produced by a great master in his retreat, cut off from the world; his home in Rolle, Switzerland, has become his Pfeiffering, the rural, isolated abode of Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. So it

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is that Godard finds himself, late in his career and by his account near the end of his own life as well as that of cinema itself, projected back into an earlier epoch producing art in a medium which, as Godard himself has said, was hitherto unable to assume its status as art. Appropriately, then, Godard has found his way to something that one may emphatically call “cinema” at a time when it has become a commonplace to speak of its death, a topic about which Godard has spoken and filmed as much as anyone. Conventionally, this has been seen as a nostalgic or sentimental streak in Godard. Commentators regularly write of the elegiac or pessimistic tone of his late works, from Passion (1982) to Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) and the more recent work, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour, 2001). Godard himself readily admits to such lamentations, but in an interview precisely at the beginning of this late period (1983) he has supplemented this view with a more optimistic one, even if he does continue to believe in cinema’s passing: “It is true that for the cinema I have a sentiment of dusk, but isn’t that the time when the most beautiful walks are taken? In the evening, when the night falls and there is the hope for tomorrow? Lovers rarely ever walk about hand in hand at seven o’clock in the morning . . . for me, dusk is a notion of hope rather than of despair.” A hope always attends this gathering of the “shades of night,” to paraphrase a favorite passage in Hegel that appears in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro, 1991); this moment of an end, of a coming to pass of not only cinematic history but virtually all history, for Godard is not solely tragic, is not merely an experience or moment of irretrievable loss, but is shot through with a utopian energy, a sense of openness and possibility from which something good can emerge. These two moments, of passing and utopia, do not exist in a neutral relation to one another, but instead are inextricably, dialectically, intertwined. So it is that a profound sense of utopia imbues even the most pessimistic seeming of Godard’s films, including the three which I will focus on here, JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (JLG/JLG—autoportrait de décembre, 1994) and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, both films that are most definitely about the passing of many things, and Film Socialisme (2010), which is about their possible resurrection.

The Possibility of Love and Death These films address Godard’s own passing, about which he is relatively sanguine as well. In JLG/JLG, whose very title already registers an end, images of an open notebook are intercut into a sequence of Godard playing tennis with a young woman. On one page is written: “The past is never dead.”

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On the next appears: “It hasn’t even passed yet.” Then comes an image of Godard playing tennis again, dressed in his familiar hat (all that is missing is his cigar), vainly flailing at a passing shot. He remarks to his playing partner or the camera, it is not clear which: “I am as happy to be passed as not to be passed.” This is the remark, perhaps, of a mediocre tennis player (by his own admission) but also of one who has lived a life fully. In the same 1983 interview just mentioned, Godard continues: There is something, however, that I am beginning to find very beautiful in the cinema, something very human which gives me the desire to continue working in it until I die, and that is precisely that I say to myself that the cinema and myself may die at the same time . . . and when I say “cinema” I mean cinema as it was invented. In other words, cinema, which deals in human gestures and actions . . . in their reproduction, can probably only last, such as it was invented, for the duration of a human life. Something between 80 and 120 years. This means that it is true that the cinema is a passing thing, something ephemeral, something that goes by. . . . So now I accept that cinema is ephemeral. It is true that at times I felt differently, that I lamented the future, that I said “What will become of us?” or “How terrible,” but now I see that I have lived this period of cinema very fully.”

This possibility of passing is precisely the generative moment; mortality is the horizon of life by which it is defined. Indeed, the generative moment of such caesurae is underscored in JLG/JLG by the sheer beauty of the images of winter, the images of December, dispersed throughout the film—a snowcovered lane with trees, the Alps hovering over the shores of Lake Geneva, even a dreary wet day, when all the snow has melted—which then give way almost unnoticed to lush images of early spring (figs. 1.1 and 1.2). It is as if through these landscapes Godard wishes to foreground this intertwining of ephemerality and beauty. And it is here that we come to the heart of a dialectic that underlies all of Godard’s work, one of death and resurrection, in which death is the precondition for the life that precedes it as well as the resurrection to come. This resurrection is not, however, to eternal life. If in JLG/JLG a pessimistic or negative moment arises, it is not in the mournful reflections on Godard’s childhood or the recollection of the virtually instinctive knowledge he had as a boy that something was not right with the world, a knowledge that seems to have tainted the more joyful days he spent roaming his family’s various

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JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURES 1.1–1.2

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estates around Lake Geneva. Nor is it to be found in the sadness that accompanies the recognition of Godard’s own imminent mortality. Instead it arises as a consequence of the conflicted act of throwing one’s self into the world, of entering language or the symbolic order, of publicly being in the world at all. This potentially utopian act of subjective self-constitution is beset with enormous risks and the two moments cannot be separated, as another passage from the film reveals. Again, images of notebooks appear with Godard’s handwriting: “The temptation to exist.” “I am a legend.” A montage of shots of Lake Geneva follows, with waves breaking on the shores, the Alps and towns in the distant background. By the fading light of a match Godard writes an illegible text, and then his voice-over reads: When we express ourselves we say more than we want to. We think we express the individual but we speak the universal. “I am cold.” It is I who say I am cold, but it is not I who am heard. I disappear between these two moments of speech. All that remains of me is that man who is cold, and this man belongs to everyone.

As the last two sentences are heard, again the notebook appears: “I am legend.” “The eternal house.” The thought image that emerges from this montage is laced with a figure of utopia that is a constant throughout the entirety of Godard’s career. Similar passages on language which bear within them a sense of a post-individual inter- or trans-subjectivity appear as early as Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1967). But more than this, the very fact that the quote is unattributed (a hallmark of Godard’s later work), while perhaps considered a plagiaristic borrowing by critics concerned with outmoded notions of individual authorship and creativity, marks an uncanny way in which Godard himself, or his work, embodies a form of decentered, yet collective, subjectivity. In a telling remark during an interview in 1996, Godard cannot recall if the final words of JLG/JLG were his own or a quote: “I think it’s a quote, but now to me quotes and myself are almost the same. I don’t know who they are from; sometimes I’m using it without knowing.” Far from being a vanity of his, as if he presumed to be of a quality of mind capable of the thought of a Heidegger, a Sartre, or a Hegel, this remark instead points to the objective preconditions for Godard’s own expression: his passage into language, the house in which he lives, is predicated on the passage into language of those before (and beside and after) him. Subsequently this expression of a self through citation passes into an emptying of the self, a dispersal into citability in which all belong to him and he belongs to everyone.

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This image of subjective passing relieves the film itself, the work of art, of the burden of bearing authorial intention. It is here that we can locate a significant thrust of the late Godard’s (cultural) politics. Again, in an interview, Godard has made comments of relevance to this context: I believe in man as long as he creates things. Men have to be respected because they create things, whether it’s an ashtray, a zapper, a car, a film or a painting. From this standpoint I am not at all a humanist. François [Truffaut] spoke of “auteur politics.” Today, all that is left is the term “auteur,” but what was interesting was the term “politics.” Auteurs aren’t important. Today, we supposedly respect man so much that we no longer respect the work. . . . I believe in the works, in art, in nature, and I believe that a work of art has an independent purpose that man is there to foster and to participate in.”

When Godard speaks of the “work” or “works” here, one should understand these terms to refer to both the productive process in which an artist (or any person) engages during the creative act, as well as the object produced. The work of art is, as process and object, to use language more Adorno’s but wholly appropriate here, evidence of the manner in which subjectivity is and becomes objective, in which a subjective intention or impulse, predicated on a preexistent objectivity, alienates itself (willingly) into a work that will take on an autonomous life of its own, one in which the auteur is little more than a vanishing mediator. (To this theme of objectified subjectivity I will return shortly.) In this way one could say that Godard is a committed materialist, one perhaps more consistent and consequent than the one of the Maoist period. But I have asserted that this utopian moment of subjective passing bears a certain risk, a potentially negative or mournful moment that it must always confront. Where is that mournful image to be found in JLG/JLG? The image in Godard is never singular; it is always at least double. To the viewer familiar with Godard’s work, the notion of the “legend” in JLG/JLG immediately calls to mind the great confrontation between Lemmy Caution, hero of Alphaville (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, 1965), and Professor von Braun, creator of Alpha 60, the monstrous computer that (who?) regulates that tenebrous city of a reason so total and utterly reduced to mere calculation that it has turned over into unreason (fig. 1.3): Von Braun: Look at yourself. Men of your kind will soon no longer exist. You’ll become something worse than death; you’ll become a legend, Mr. Lemmy Caution.

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Lemmy: Yes, I’m afraid of death, but for a humble secret agent, death is a fact of life, like whiskey, and I’ve been drinking it all my life.

Lemmy’s rather clever reply, his full embrace of the inevitability of death as a “fact of life,” is perfectly consistent with the dialectic of life and death. But his answer sidesteps the true issue von Braun presents to him: the real threat is not death but the status of being a legend, the resurrection to immortality. The legend is the downside of the objectification of the subject in the work, of daring to lead a public life; it is a form in which all particularity and historical specificity is lost. It is the image of the abstract universal, a far cry from the universality of which Godard speaks in JLG/JLG. At the end of JLG/JLG, Godard (perhaps in vain) issues a corrective to this status, a plea for a modest reception of his objectified self as the work of “a man, nothing but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he.” But this is simultaneously a plea for the works as well, for to respect the work is to respect the man. While in language or art the individual (or collective) producer “disappears” and becomes universal, belongs to “all,” the dan-

FIGURE 1.3

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Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965). Still capture from DVD.

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ger exists that he will become legend, reified into the great auteur, a fate with inevitable consequences for the works themselves. Each of Godard’s films is implicitly (in JLG/JLG it is explicit) an attempt to shatter this status as legend, to “carelessly,” as he notes in JLG/JLG, and repeatedly (even against his will) attempt to thwart the expanding present of the status of legend, to in a sense make a plea for the author’s and his work’s own mortality. In the confrontation with his status as legend staged in JLG/JLG, Godard adopts the familiar standpoint of the artist producing a self-portrait. As Gavin Smith points out, the presence of the artist is felt in the shadow of the camera and the cameraman that falls over an image of a photograph of Godard as a child in JLG/JLG (fig. 1.4). Godard’s characterization of this gesture is very apt: “Just for once, I thought of the audience—a small one, so that it understands that it’s ‘me and me.’ [It’s like with] painters’ self-portraits, painting themselves holding the palette and paintbrush.” Whereas this position might be seen as an attempt to secure a stable image of the artist for posterity, Godard’s effort here is more open-ended, as indicated by the turning of empty pages of the very notebook where “I am legend” is

JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard, 1994). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURE 1.4

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written, empty pages that “seem like another image of the future, of history still to be written” as Gavin Smith has gracefully noted. Instead, Godard is creating and adopting a position of distance from this master signifier (himself as “legend”) that calls its very stability into question. To shift our frame of reference for a moment: this position is analogous to that prescribed by Slavoj Žižek for any contemporary critical intellectual whose goal should be to occupy a position from which one can “ ‘produce’ the Master-Signifier, that is to say, to render visible its ‘produced,’ artificial, contingent character.” This stance, for Žižek, constitutes a “ ‘step back’ from actuality into possibility.” This “step back” from actuality to possibility, from the empiricist claim that the world exists as it is given to the questioning of how it is possible that the world has come into being, that it exists at all, is, I believe, the perfect way to understand what may be the most enigmatic remark in all of Godard’s work: “The cinema projected and men saw that the world was there.” Unfortunately, according to Godard, cinema forgot this calling and instead of showing us that the world is there, the cinema and its pictures now wish to be taken for the world: the cinema like Christianity is not founded on a historical truth it gives us a narrative a story and then says to us: believe not: grant this narrative this story the faith appropriate to the story but believe whatever occurs and this can only be the outcome of a whole life

What does one make, then, of such comments in the context of a film such as JLG/JLG, one based we would assume on precisely the historical fact or actuality of Godard’s own biography? Clearly, one is not to believe this film and its narrative and its pictures, but rather to grant it the faith appropriate to it. The “step back” by the artist imposes, or requests, a similar distance from the viewer, from which to accept this film not as the actuality of Godard, not as the portrait of Godard as what he is, but more as an image of the conditions of possibility that he is and will continue to become. Perhaps this point can be illustrated through yet another intertextual moment between Alphaville and JLG/JLG. Recall that in the city of

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Alphaville love no longer exists. It is not to be found in any of the “bibles,” which function as dictionaries, updated versions of which are replaced daily in the bedside table in Lemmy’s hotel room as new words become obsolete; nor is it recognized or sayable by Natasha von Braun. It has been banished as act, emotion, and word from this world of universalized reason. Only in their final flight to the Outlands, after Lemmy has destroyed Alpha 60, can Lemmy bring Natasha to utter the word. In the very concluding passage of JLG/JLG discussed above, over a series of shots, the first of the empty lined sheets of his notebook as they turn, the next of an early spring landscape of farm fields and woods (the leaves have yet to bud on the trees) with long shadows draped across them, Godard’s voice intones in his familiar grumble the following words: “I said I love. That is the promise. Now, I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word ‘love’ means something, so that love exists on earth.” Godard here is careful not to specify an object of his love. He avoids attributing some sort of positive content to it; had that been the case, the film would all too easily be readable as a love story between Godard and another, be it cinema, himself, nature, art, etc., and as such recuperable within a logic of commodified culture. It would be one more trite story about the “legend.” Instead, the refusal of the object here asserts simply the very possibility of love, of love prior to its actualization; it is simply the demonstration, in a world in which the horrid predictions of Alphaville have come true, that love (just as the world in that final stunning landscape in JLG/JLG) is there. Godard has famously said that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun, that cinema in its function as a branch of the cosmetics industry, the industry of “makeup,” has degraded itself and reduced its offerings to “the two big stories” of “sex and death.” In so doing, because it has threatened the possibility of death and love by imposing its own actuality in their stead, cinema has eradicated them both as completely as Alpha 60 was ever able to. So it is that JLG/JLG confronts head-on these two great stories in an attempt to rescue them from cinema, as if to say: “do not believe that what in cinema has come to pass for love and death are in actuality love and death; but also do not fear that they have been taken from you by cinema. Have the appropriate faith in my film and know that they are still there.”

The Rule of Culture The hideous rationality of Alphaville has another figure in late Godard to which we have already alluded: the “rule” of culture. At one point in JLG/ JLG, Godard sits at a small table and speaks as he writes:

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There is the rule. There is the exception. The rule is a question of culture. It is part of culture. The exception is a question of art. It is a part of art. Everyone speaks the rule: cigarettes, t-shirts, computers, television, tourism, war. . . . It is part of the rules to want the death of the exception. It is the rule of European culture to organize the death of the art of living, which was still flourishing at our feet.

Culture by this view is fully commodified and administered culture, culture fully integrated into the circuits of capital and devoid of any autonomy or oppositional status; it is indeed another “branch” of industry, but clearly it is one that reflexively turns back on other branches of industry to give them their appearance (thus can “war” be seen here as part of culture, in a manner that anticipates my reading of Kidlat Tahimik’s I Am Furious Yellow in chapter 3). Art would then be something of a provisional ideal of that which somehow refuses this, which escapes tendential subsumption by capital. Art adopts the standpoint of the critical intellectual as described above. Within this context, one thesis that JLG/JLG presents is that the figure of the legendary auteur is a primary means by which culture attempts to assimilate cinematic art. The “politics of the author” espoused by the New Wave has unwittingly undermined itself; the cult of personality has become a means by which the exception of art is eradicated by the rule. It is Germany Year 90 that offers a view of Europe on the verge of the apparent victory of the rule of (European) culture in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dawning unification of Europe; the film takes one last look as if a blind were being drawn or a door being closed on a historical landscape that will henceforth exist only in future cultural representations. It is no accident that the picaro hero who wanders this landscape is none other than Lemmy Caution, played again by Eddie Constantine, but now slightly reconfigured as the “Last Spy,” a pointed reference to the “last man” in the original German title of F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924). Lemmy’s career, it seems (and it is never really clear), has spanned decades in Germany, from the Nazi period when as a Russian agent he swapped false documents with a Gestapo spy, through his tenure in East Germany doing god knows what, to his current predicament, where he has been living some time in East Berlin behind a hair salon (and he is behind on his rent). Now that the Cold War is over, he has not the slightest idea what to do with himself. Lemmy is sought out by one Count Zelten, a film historian just returned from a film festival in Leipzig who had found Lemmy’s name in his father’s papers, and who counsels Lemmy to “return” to the West and to rehearse, as it were, one last time the gesture of the spy

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coming in from the cold. The irony of Zelten’s role as a film historian should not be lost; that the festival from which he returns is the “X Festival,” and as such lacks all specificity and particularity, clearly slots the celebrated and self-aggrandizing milieu of film festivals and markets within the deadening domain of culture; that it takes place in Leipzig serves to indicate quite concisely and quickly in Germany Year 90 that the cultural annexation of the (former) East is moving apace. Recall as well that in Alphaville, Caution had gone to Alphaville (and one assumes in good Cold War fashion—as it turns out, wrongly—from the outset of Germany Year 90 that East Berlin is here the new incarnation of Alphaville) disguised as a reporter covering the great (and unnamed) festival, to not only seek out and kill Professor von Braun but also to find the last agent who had preceded him (one of a series including Guy Leclair and Dick Tracy) and who seemed to have been lost. In Germany Year 90, then, Lemmy has been reduced to precisely the doleful sort of figure Alpha 60 had declared he would become, a legend, and has thus not merely lost his job but, more devastatingly, has been reduced to a mere figure of cultural history to be catalogued and interpreted (by film historians) just like any other poor relic of the cinematic past. Similarly, there is a more general concern in Germany Year 90 with the passing of a whole epoch and the vibrancy of any number of its historical artifacts. Godard’s montage attempts to maintain some sense of this vibrancy, to preserve or rescue these chosen items from their permanent disappearance into the oblivion of total forgetting or of their annexation by the realm of culture. A scene near the middle of the film illustrates this point about Godard’s montage well. Lemmy, having apparently decided to come in from the cold, is out in search of the West and its border, the Wall. He encounters, of all people, Don Quixote trotting along on his horse accompanied by a modernday “Ossi” Sancho Panza, no longer riding a donkey but instead pushing a dull blue “Trabi” automobile which refuses to start. In the background rise old wooden windmills as well as their modern-day equivalent: massive strip mining machines slowly, violently, disgorging the earth of its resources. At first glance, Lemmy seems surrounded by classic markers of the failed East German command economy: the Trabi, a fiberglass-bodied 2-stroke (like that of a lawnmower) engine-powered car, a symbol of the vain attempts by the East to achieve the living standards of a Western consumer culture by mimicking its most obvious offerings; the massive strip mines indicative of not only the transformation of the once pastoral landscape through brutally extractive industries and collectivized industrial agriculture but also the notorious environmental catastrophes brought on by Eastern Bloc industry (the reversed rivers of the Soviet Union, Chernobyl, the all-but-dead Black

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and Baltic Seas, etc.). In the East, of course, these images had or still have very different histories and resonances than in the capitalist countries, and one might wonder how this film would be differentially received by East and West German audiences: the Trabi was indeed much in demand in its day, and after the Wall it became a nostalgic symbol of lost possibility, a quaint kitschy little toy by which the lighter moments of a darker era are remembered; and the massive industrialization of the landscape was a symbol of the superior productivity of Socialist organization (just glance through any Eastern Bloc magazine produced for export, such as old issues of “New Albania” or “Soviet Life” where hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, massive highways and newly dredged seaports are touted as the evidence of undeniable progress), a mode of representation of collective will that has seemed outdated in the West for generations. In the West, industry—private industry—is much more attuned to a postmodern consumerist environmentalism and has long since learned to hide its equally odious environmental and collective devastations behind glossy advertisements. One can only assume, now, that these tremendous machines in the Eastern landscape will end up privatized (and subsequently “modernized”) through the machinations of the cynically named Treuhand Anstalt (Institution of Trust), the public concern charged with the task of selling off state-owned properties from East Germany, or they will lie dormant; in either case they will be subsumed into the relatively seamless self-presentation of Western industry while simultaneously being held up as a marker of the former East’s inferiority. In a sense then, these pictures—the Trabi and the strip mining machines—present to us the non-synchronicity that lies at the heart of this film, no matter how ambiguous their relative valuations are. As images of products and instruments of the volkseigene Betriebe (quite literally “the people’s own industries”), now essentially disposed of historically, they represent a failed experiment in the production of a collective, the failed experiment of bureaucratic socialism as just such a creation, and the shot of a solitary Lemmy trotting before the great mining machines is as good an image as any of the fate of the individual, once dearly invested in that failed attempt and soon to be annexed, indeed expropriated, by the West (fig. 1.5). These collective energies have been dispersed, cut short, truncated. Their presence here, however, seems to suggest that they will not entirely disappear, and may live some subterranean life, unnoticed perhaps, except by the few attentive enough to sense their presence. As Godard quotes Heidegger, both in Germany Year 90 and elsewhere, “to be a poet in times of distress is, while singing, to be attentive to the trace of the departed gods.” Here

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Godard’s film comes close to the project of Alexander Kluge, whose central problematic is precisely the question of the fate of such energies (in Kluge Arbeitsvermögen or “labor capacities”) once their objects as well as the collective context for their realization are removed.

Learning to See the Invisible To grasp this aspect of Godard’s montage, we have to supplement our basic received notion of the inadequacy of the filmic image to its object. Generally one conceives of this, as Godard also implicitly does, as a false identification of an image with its referent or its “profilmic” reality, in which the object in its tangible three-dimensionality exceeds the grasp of the image. The image thus exists in a state of lack vis-à-vis the object. The misperception or error on the part of the viewer, then, is to mistake the image of the object for the object itself with dire consequences for a subsequently reduced and impoverished object world as well as for a similarly damaged spectator. Godard accepts this notion of the image fully, but adds another dimension to it.

FIGURE 1.5

from DVD.

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Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991). Still capture

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His montages suggest that what is missing in the picture of a Trabi or the strip mining equipment is not some tangible plasticity beyond the grasp of photographic reproductive technology, but rather something invisible in the object itself that can best be understood as a lack in the object filmed and which can only be called forth through montage. In a different context, Slavoj Žižek describes such a lack in a manner that illuminates its function in Godard’s images: the “preponderance of the object,” that which eludes our grasp in the Thing, is no longer the excess of its positive content over our cognitive capacities but, on the contrary, its lack, that is, the traces of failures, the absences inscribed in its positive existence: to grasp the October Revolution “in its becoming” means to discern the tremendous emancipatory potential that was simultaneously aroused and crushed by its historical actuality. Consequently, this excess/lack is not the part of the “objective” that is in excess of the subject’s cognitive capacities: rather it consists of the traces of the subject himself (his crushed hopes and desires) in the object, so that what is properly “unfathomable” in the object is the objective counterpart/correlative of the innermost kernel of the subject’s own desire.

The affinities of Žižek’s formulation with Kluge’s definition of the utopia of film, as something that “has been unable to unfold up to this point” should be apparent, and it is here that Godard’s and Kluge’s projects also find common ground. What is “invisible” in Godard is not only that element in the given, visible world which somehow exceeds the grasp of pictures, but is also something which is literally invisible in the real profilmic world: hopes, desires, and possibilities that never came to be or were cut short, truncated, somehow left out of the official passage of time. In essence, then, the lack in the filmic picture is twofold: that of the picture vis-à-vis its object, as well as that of the object vis-à-vis the image and its perceiving subject, and it is the utopia of film that it may well be able to let us see this lack. And it is here that we can anticipate a similar thought and motif in Alexander Kluge’s work: for the lack of which Žižek speaks, and the invisible of which Godard speaks, can also be understood to be the historical “insufficiency” that marks every present, as Kluge has put it, the incapacity of any given historical moment to encompass the totality of desires and utopian wishes it calls forth. At this point, it is important to introduce a basic definition of the “image” in late Godard, one which turns on a distinction between mere “pictures” and the more powerful, properly cinematic “image.” For Godard,

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an image is precisely this invisible moment that appears when two “realities” are brought together in montage; pictures in and of themselves do not have this status of image (though one can well imagine that an individual film frame could contain two pictures in an internal montage, as I have argued about Lemmy’s appearance before the strip mining machines and Godard’s representations of nature). Godard frequently uses and reworks a poem by the Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy, “L’image,” that provides a source for a shorthand theory of the image for Godard. It is excerpted in JLG/JLG (and appears in a number of other places in his work as well, including Histoire(s) du cinéma): The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of the rapprochement of two more or less separate realities. The more distant and just the ties between these realities, the stronger the image will be. Two realities with no relationship between them cannot be usefully brought together. No image is created. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of the ideas is distant and just.

As such, the image is invisible in the most literal sense, a purely aesthetic and cognitive creation, nowhere immediately apparent in the material, profilmic world. Godard’s whole project turns on the possibility of seeing the invisible, a task which is “exhausting,” as Isabelle Huppert notes in Oh, Woe Is Me (Hélas pour moi, 1993), and about which it is not self-evident that it is possible at all. But it is possible, in a metaphorical and also very literal sense, as Godard demonstrates to even the most skeptical viewer in a rather remarkable sequence in JLG/JLG. In the scene, Godard has hired a blind woman to help him edit Oh, Woe Is Me, and he now engages her in a small test of her imaginative skills. He asks her to imagine a cube with a point at its center. He then asks her to draw lines from that point to each corner of the cube. Godard: You have now divided the cube . . . Editor: Into six equal pyramids, each having the same face, base and half its height.

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Godard: This is true. But where do you see it? Editor: In my head. Like you.

The lesson here does not concern the cube; we do not need to learn anything about geometry per se. Instead, it is a lesson about vision and about seeing the invisible, precisely the type of conceptual or imaginary object that Godard is (some might say paradoxically) trying to show. JLG/JLG thus contains a sort of built-in user’s manual for the viewer, an integrated “Help” function, but not one in which an argument about the profilmic content of the film is asserted, or in which a coherent ideological stance is forwarded. It is rather an instruction in form itself and its use. This is also a lesson in estrangement, in a perfectly Brechtian sense, in that the viewers are taught, through an example that Brecht would surely appreciate, how they might denaturalize or dereify their own relationships to images. This is not simply about the dereification of the meaning of particular images, which Godard also performs, as we have seen through the repeated evocation of the lost historical dimension of images in Germany Year 90. Instead, this is oriented toward the dereification of more primary processes within the viewing public, of historically degraded perceptive and viewing capacities, conditioned by the general overabundance of images in contemporary culture in general and more specifically by the dominance of American television and cinema and their forms in the international marketplace. In other words, a preparatory phase must be undergone in which the viewer is made capable of receiving, and engaging with, the more properly historical-political lessons about images Godard would like to teach. The force of the lesson in this scene is brought home in a direct fashion, when immediately after the blind editor asserts that she “sees” the image in her mind, the screen goes black. Suddenly, when no image is apparent on the screen, as if by its own will an image appears in the viewers’ minds as well, confirming the lesson just witnessed, but also profoundly calling into question the givenness of the viewers’ habits of reception. Indeed, it is at such a moment that the viewer finds herself believing in the possibility of seeing the invisible, of accepting that the slavish faith in the visible is historical, hence open to change, and capable of being overcome. Moreover, the echo of Brecht is here very strong in the fundamental pleasure that arises in this scene, a pleasure that has little if anything to do with the various seductions of the gaze. Instead, the pleasure that one senses is a pleasure of realizing that something is possible, the pleasure of the shock of sudden insight which has the force of an encounter with the new, since the images before the viewer—as well as the world captured in them—

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suddenly appear afresh and full of potentially different, new meanings. Nothing less than the possibility of a new cinema is being taught here, the possibility of the utopia of film; to all the doubters who find Godard’s work too difficult, too obtuse, if not mystical in its propounding of a different cinema, their own experience of this one moment will strike with a powerful counterfactual force. If one wishes to find a moment in which Godard’s films train their viewers to resist what he calls the “American occupation,” it is moments like these that provide far better clues than the (albeit trenchant and acute) attacks, both on screen and in interviews, on Steven Spielberg, U.S. cultural imperialism, or Hollywood producers. All of those complaints remain at a level of coarse, if valid, opinions. Godard is not interested in teaching the viewer what to think; he wants us to learn how to think, and that cinema itself can think. In this manner a film such as JLG/JLG avoids the pitfalls of overly didactic film or art in general, eschewing as it does the direct and unmediated transmission of “knowledge,” information, or opinion that often only has the unfortunate effect of either convincing the previously convinced or alienating those who do not already share the standpoint of the author or the text. At the same time, it acknowledges the perhaps unfortunate tendency of “difficult” art which seems to defy human understanding by design and whose “message” is obscure at best. Often such art leads not to aesthetic or conceptual comprehension, but to either boredom and bewilderment or facile consumption at the level of conventionalized, unreflected-upon emotional reactions. But in the end, these lessons are as much about the “world” which is there as they are about the formal mediations with that world which we have available to us. Take, for example, the theme of nature, which in Godard is a metaphor or stand-in for art more generally. His images of nature are dropdead gorgeous—think of the fogbound waters of the Wannsee near Berlin in Germany Year 90, or the recurrent images of waves caressing the shores of Lake Geneva near Godard’s home in Switzerland in JLG/JLG—images at times so stunning (even on video) that one gasps as if seeing nature for the first time, or, as if one were seeing it not in a photograph but in a painting. It is as if art were accustomed to looking at itself in a mirror and then suddenly saw itself in its proper orientation for the first time, a form of defamiliarization known to all of us who, accustomed to our reversed images in a mirror, see ourselves in a snapshot: a birthmark or mole appears disturbingly on the wrong side of the face, the part of one’s hair seems oddly out of place. Nature of course is not purely “natural” in any meaningful sense, but is fully historical; we know well enough by now that the entire globe has been touched

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by human transformation and development in some way—even the remotest regions of the earth, the bottom of the polar seas, are contaminated by significant levels of industrial by-products. Godard himself indicates this in his shots of nature, which seldom appear without some human presence or trace thereof: the hunched figure of the auteur himself on a spit of sand stretching into Lake Geneva in JLG/JLG; the subtly registered, but nonetheless visible, careful landscaping of the shoreline where the waves break in seeming eternal rhythms; a path through the woods in Germany Year 90; an apparently otherwise “natural” landscape marred by the (obviously) nonsynchronous barking of a crow; or most astonishingly, perhaps, the trail of a jetliner across an otherwise pristine sky at the outset of Passion. But how do these images differ from all the other pretty pictures of nature familiar to us from travel magazines, advertisements, wall calendars, and the like? Any pretty picture can trigger a sort of “art effect” in the viewer, whose visual faculty drastically conforms to the standards of these cultural offerings. How, in other words, does Godard’s art engage in a world in which both art and nature are reified through and through? Somehow in the struggle for supremacy in the battle over the representation, Godard’s images must fend off these degraded pictures and visual clichés if they are not to disappear without a trace amongst them. It is clear that the effort here is not to create a picture more adequate to the real; as we’ve seen, for Godard the problem with pictures is that they have been mistaken too much for the real, that they have supplanted the real. One way to rephrase this problem would be in terms of the dialectic of death and resurrection: images, reified as surrogates for the real, contribute to the mortification of the very objects that they purport to represent. As Godard says in Germany Year 90, “Dürer put nature on his canvas and killed it.” But it is precisely by means of this very reification that art, to quote Adorno, whose own thinking on aesthetics at times seems very much at home in this world of Godard’s, as a “radicalized” reification “gropes toward the language of things. It approaches virtually the Idea of that nature extirpated by the primacy of human meaning.” With little manipulation, this principle can be seen at work in Godard’s montage. Godard’s own images are always close to but not exactly the same as the images of the world we know too well from commodity culture. This has been a hallmark of Godard’s work ever since Belmondo in Breathless grinned and dragged his thumb across his lip like Bogart. From late Godard, take as an example a simple, familiar shot of a man staring out a window (Alain Delon in Detective [Détective, 1985]). In contrast to classical narrative film, where the exposure would be balanced between interior and

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exterior, in Godard the exposure is set solely for the exterior; no fill light balances out the illumination between inside and out. What better image of the contemplative soul immersed in full interiority is there than this? But in Godard the exterior often dominates the interior, such that subjectivity appears as a matter of an encounter with overwhelming objectivity. Another example is illustrative as well. In JLG/JLG, there is a lovely shot of a field. The only sound one hears is the call of a crow from somewhere offscreen just before the cut to the next image. The sound is obviously nonsynchronous and non-diegetic, and foregrounds itself though its absolute out-of-placeness in the shot, thereby allowing what seems to be a moment in nature to appear as a metaphor or motif separate from any claim to emerge from the actual space being filmed. This is how Godard’s images “grope toward the language of things,” how they quite beautifully fumble their way, albeit never wholly successfully, toward the crude materiality and objectivity of the historically given world. No pretense is made to find a world before “man” and history; Godard had given that up already with Contempt (Le mépris, 1963), if not earlier. Instead, these images must retain some sense of their reified status, as well as of their process of becoming reified. Images in Godard bear within themselves a trace of their own historical becoming; but in their completion they are altered slightly in comparison to the degraded images they come close to mimicking—the exposure is “wrong” in an otherwise classic, familiar shot; the crow call is somehow out of place in the landscape where it seems to be heard; the urgent expression on the picture of a face does not match the indifferent tones with which it speaks (recall Jean Seberg in the final scene of Breathless)—and through that their very historicity is exposed. Again, the image is double: within one shot, the conventional picture is present, as well as its slightly skewed rendering. An image of a landscape does not open out onto innocent, unmarred nature prior to its reification (be it in images, as raw material, as touristic commodity, etc.) but rather reveals the second nature of nature—its “reifiedness”—as the two images pry apart. Only through its reification will the world not be left invisible or silent.

The Image of Language If Godard’s films grope toward the language of things, then they also grope toward that thing called language, which provides another site for producing an allegory of utopia. In Germany Year 90, language moves to the fore, both as material, almost plastic force and as a highly labile metaphor for

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the larger issue of the place of culture in a unified Europe. The sound track of Germany Year 90, like those in most of Godard’s late works, is highly textured and layered, and exists in a state of semiautonomy to the images on the screen. There is most definitely no stable hierarchy here between sound and image. At times this relationship is undecidable; one could say in Godard’s own terminology that no “image” in the strong sense is formed, for the relationship between sound-image and picture is too distant and not “right.” But that is okay as well, since an image does not have to arise in montage always; the materials can hover next to each other in comparative solitude, free from the overbearing influence of its neighbors, compelled in no way to “mean” anything beyond their own sheer visual or auditory presence, a point to which I will return later in my discussion of Film Socialisme. Yet at other times an image does arise, as in the case of the calling crow in JLG/JLG, where the emphatic naturality of the pictured landscape is revoked. But often in Germany Year 90 the sound track competes with itself in a virtually incomprehensible vertical montage of different types of sound materials and documents—literary or philosophical quotations, snippets of music, synchronously recorded ambient sound, as well as various wild sound effects—as well as different languages, primarily French and German, but also smatterings of English and Russian. At times the whole mess just devolves into noise, itself a veritable formal metaphor for the omnipresence of competing discourses in our lives, for the cacophony of media culture and cultural codes that surround us in even our most private moments. Within this collection of sound, the issue of language is staged primarily as the act of translation, which in turn raises the issues of linguistic and cultural cross-referencing that will inevitably arise in the process of European unification. Translation becomes, provocatively enough, another version of montage: one statement in two different languages, two different “sound pictures,” are brought together—one French and one German, for example—which both share a core text as the tie which holds them together. The image that arises from their relationship, the act of conversion and reconversion from one to the other, a movement in which it is impossible to reduce either version to the other, is a revealing, indeed therapeutic one: for it becomes obvious that in this situation, when it seems that somehow the two moments should ideally converge and become perfect replicas of each other, they cannot and indeed, they should not. The goal of translation, then, is not the perfect rendering of an original in another language, but instead the productive interaction between the two which produces

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another “version” altogether. This third version, however, is no homogenized blending of the prior two moments, but rather one in which the integrity and autonomy of each pole is maintained. The non-identity of the two versions must be maintained. This matter is raised at the outset of Germany Year 90: Count Zelten stands in the open door of his gleaming black Mercedes shouting into a cell phone, itself a perfect metonym for a deterritorialized present, “No one wants to be an American anymore! Why should one wish to be an American after the end of the Cold War?!” From the outset, then, Germany Year 90 calls into question the apparent victory of the West (i.e., the United States) in the Cold War, for it is clear that a certain vision of U.S. supremacy fully depended on the binary dynamic of the Cold War. The subsequent voice-over is a reading of the Owl of Minerva passage from the end of Hegel’s “Preface” to the Philosophy of Right, read simultaneously in French and German: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, one form of life has become old, and by means of gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known.” This voice-over is immediately followed by a title “Allemagne 90 neuf zéro” and the sequence closes with a shot of the Mercedes rather indelicately parked on top of a fallen street sign for Karl-Marx-Straße, which Zelten wishes a “happy non-birthday!” That these texts are simultaneously read in French and German (and passages from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History will later be translated into French by the Count and his assistant Delphine, even though these texts have long been available in French) serves to emphasize the reemerged need for the capacities and skills necessary for translation in Europe on the eve of its unification. This is not some form of training so that the distinct national or ethnic cultures can somehow communicate, but rather preparation of the ground for some form of post-national culture whose contours are as of yet undefined (but about which Godard has in interviews expressed serious reservations). The content of the texts, beyond their language of composition, is also significant. That an end of an era has been reached here is clear: not only the Hegel preface and the fallen street sign point us to that reading, but the Roberto Rossellini intertext (Germania anno zero) embedded within Germany Year 90’s title ironically reinforces the point as well: if any “zero” hour has been reached, it is one of an end, of a bottoming out or return to zero. (One should recall Lemmy Caution’s remark to Natasha in Alphaville that the city is no “Alphaville” but rather “Zeroville,” though also keep in mind that it is in precisely such a “zeroville” in Film Socialisme that Godard will seek out a form of renewal for much that

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seems to have passed in Germany Year 90, as we shall see.) The Hegel text stands then as not only an indication of the possibility of cinematic knowledge in a given historical epoch, a sign that cinema can only create its image when the shades of night are gathering, “in the dark” so to speak (a point which overlaps nicely with Godard’s favored citation from St. Paul that the image will come at the time of the resurrection), but also as a warning for us, for the film, and for cinema not to get ahead of itself and attempt to predict the future that will arise in the now cleared out space of history. In this context it serves us well to recall the remainder of the passage from which the Hegel quote arises, as it says volumes about the role of cinema for late Godard (simply replace “philosophy” with “cinema” as you read): Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, one form of life has become old, and by means of gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Against this, recall Godard’s oft-repeated maxim that cinema was once able to see into the future: Murnau’s Nosferatu already showed us the bombedout landscapes of Berlin, and Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game predicted the coming cataclysm of the Second World War. In Germany Year 90 it is as if this uncanny capability of cinema has been vacated and canceled for the time being: Alphaville was able to predict the future predicament of the last spy, though it did not know it at the time, which Germany Year 90 seems concerned to tell us. Germany Year 90, however, refrains from consciously making any such claims or predictions. Instead, Germany Year 90 directs its energies toward a unique form of retrospective historical observation that gives us some insight into the utopian moments of this film. If in Hegel the retrospective moment of knowledge is one in which the ideal “parallel” world to the real is “shaped into an intellectual kingdom” of rigid systematicity where philosophy can finally get all of its ducks in a row, in Godard such a moment of systemic closure

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is both there and not there. The end of the film, to which I will return later, seems to indicate that the forces of capital have indeed managed to order the world as it wishes (just as Alphaville predicted). But the fragmentation of the logic of the Cold War and the shattering of national integrities (spatial, linguistic, temporal) in Europe, which emphatically mark a moment of passing, is a moment in which history and its artifacts can possibly be liberated; this shattering occurs precisely at that moment when the systemic ordering seems total. Thus it is that the questions of language and translation also irrupt into Germany Year 90 in the sheer number and diversity of quotes—literary, visual, filmic, philosophical, musical—which present to the viewer innumerable problems of comprehension, not the least of which is how to translate between the various media of the quotes. Just how do we reconcile the irreducible differences of image and sound, text and voice? Godard has always quoted profusely in his films, in every possible manner, but in these later films quotation takes a significantly different form than in his earlier work. If the earlier films are characterized by a mode of pastiche, the later quotes seem to hold out the possibility of a deeper meaning at rest within them, to be exposed by montage, or at least capable of being assembled by the viewer into some form of greater significance than mere surface play. In this sense, my opening suggestion that Godard’s oeuvre can be arranged in a reverse chronology from postmodernism to modernism has some real meaning: it is as if with the passing of the Cold War and the fall of the Wall something has happened which may very well be liberating our historical cultural artifacts from the reign of the false image and made them accessible to us once again for a different use. It is as if an entire junk-heap of cultural history has become available for a process of utopian collective recycling. Though Godard will not, as the Hegel text indicates, present us with a view of the future product of this recycling, he does give us some guideposts to help us find our way there. Part of Godard’s technique, as we’ve seen, is to include at some level instructions for the use of his films within the filmic text. In this case, a moment where some unidentified (as usual) passage is being read, Zelten guesses that the text comes from Nietzsche, only to be told its source is Madame de Staël. Zelten here is of course in the same position as the viewer vis-à-vis this dizzying array of materials; his presence is a comfort, to say the least, as if he models a type of enjoyment appropriate to a postmodern form of pastiche in which the film becomes a never-ending high-culture episode of Name That Tune!

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Simultaneously, however, Germany Year 90 resists such superficial, or commercial, pleasures. For one, the absolute obscurity, not to mention high-cultural provenance, of the film’s materials thwarts any real success at such a game for the average spectator; what viewer could possibly identify each passage of Hegel, Hölderlin, Luxemburg, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Pushkin, de Staël, Marx, Mozart, Beethoven, Broch, or Malraux (to generate a very partial list)? At the same time, once the quotes become unrecognizable as the utterance of a particular author, they paradoxically regain new significance, however much they may be cleaved from their original historical context. Once the viewer gives up on attempting to identify the quotes, or even determine if they are quotes in the first place—is that Malraux or Godard?—they can have meaning separate from their creation by a particular legendary author or their imbrication within a particular oeuvre. Beyond this, part of the point is that these quotes are in some ways liberated from meaning: they are not all to be understood, identified, or located, especially on the one or two viewings that most viewers would ever receive of this film. Surely, one could get a videotape and use the remote and slow the experience down to gain a better advantage over the film’s montage, but even then the film will resist. In a 1994 interview Godard likened this aspect of his montage to music or science: “Most of the films won’t be seen more than once . . . because the distribution system doesn’t make them available. So people miss half the things that are there. But it’s like music: You don’t understand all the notes, yet there is still enough to make it worthwhile.” Musing further about the density of his style, Godard says his works are “complex in a scientific sense.” A century ago, he notes, “scientists believed that the atom was the ultimate matter. Then they discovered that in one atom there are many things, and in one of those there are many more things, and so forth. . . . In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and ‘get’ everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don’t understand each atom of the potato.”

As well as being a form of resistance to the continued “American occupation of Europe” (and the annexation of the European mind), Godard’s montage is also a figure of utopia. The elements of these films, and for that matter virtually every film Godard has made since Passion, have a certain autonomy or hard kernel that resists comprehension, that resists the imperialism of the concept. They resist even the sense that Godard’s films themselves try to

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give them through montage. Each of these elements is alone, unique; they exist in solitude, Einsamkeit. “Une seule chose était incontestable.” To subordinate these solitary beings to a regime of comprehension would violate them. In this way, Godard’s film becomes, at the level of form, an allegory or homological projection of a possible utopia at the level of the social. The encounter with the film becomes a learning process in its own right, one in which the spectator learns the lesson of utopia from within, as it were, by mimicking the various intellectual maneuvers presented to her or, perhaps more fruitfully, by living through the various frustrations, blockages, and deferrals built into the film. One could say that there is an objective lesson and a subjective lesson to be learned here: to refer to Adorno once again, it presents an objective lesson in the “nonviolent identity of the non-identical” and on the subjective level it provides the spectator a sense of the utopian experience of the “victimless non-identity of the subject,” unable to reconcile all of the offered materials within her comprehension. This point is illustrated emphatically in a sequence in Germany Year 90 in which an intertitle appears with each phrase of its sentence dispersed amongst a series of shots: “l’union .  .  . parfait .  .  . de plusieurs voix .  .  . empêche . . . somme toute . . . le progrès . . . de l’une . . . vers l’autre.” As the title unfolds, it appears to offer a caption to the pictures presented, and by the time the title reaches the penultimate phrases “le progrès . . . de l’une,” it seems to have presented the familiar critique of the “underdevelopment” of the individual in the collectivist politics of either National Socialism or the Soviet-style socialism of East Germany, or both: the valorization of the univocal collective hindered the development and unfolding of the individual. The long pause after this penultimate phrase leads the spectator to believe the title has ended there. But the sudden appearance of that final phrase, “vers l’autre,” shatters this assumption in its entirety and an entirely different critique emerges, one from the vantage point of collectivity; now it appears that the real tragedy of these various mass utopias was not the sacrifice of the individual so much as it was that they prevented the establishment of an authentic collective. This sentence attains the status of a veritable ethical formula for Godard that manages to hold together radically irreducible and discontinuous levels of the artistic, social, and political. It is at once a principle for his method of montage, in which a “just” distance between realities is maintained, through which paradoxically not the absolute separation of those realities is sustained, but rather in which an honest communication or translation is possible. It is a formal principle of the individual artwork as well, whereby its perfect “unity” (internal, comprehensible consistency) is eschewed. For

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the spectator as well it contains a lesson that she should not expect all of the materials she encounters to fit nicely into a unified regime of comprehension. As a sociological or political principle, it contains an implicit critique of the various forms of bureaucratic socialism that have rendered the term a caricature, as well as of the party forms that claim to speak for a unified collective. It applies equally well to the myth of nationalism, in particular its emergence in the process of German “reunification” and to the impending unification of Europe. And finally it is a mandate or design for living at a personal level, a suggestion that perhaps the intimacy and closeness one seeks in personal relationships can only be sustained through the maintenance of some distance or solitude on the part of individual partners.

The History of Cinema It is precisely into the nightmare of such a unified and leveled social field, against which this quote has warned, that Lemmy enters after crossing into no-longer West Berlin at the Glienicke Brücke. Now flowing with traffic, the bridge hovers above the waters of the lakes that skirt Berlin; whatever symbolism it formerly contained as the site of the great Cold War spy exchanges has now evaporated, its prior status as a terrifying expanse of distance between East and West, its role as a marker par excellence of the difference of East and West, of their proximate solitudes, or of the possibility of that distance being bridged, essentially forgotten, a fact that is all the more ironically registered by the unnoticed passing of the Last Spy across it. Upon entering the West, Lemmy seems to leave nature behind and enters a landscape of utter human construction, where a strange pessimism seems to reign; neon signs and illuminated billboards, one marketing “West” brand cigarettes by imploring buyers to “Test the West” (fig. 1.6), and sterile hotel interiors are all that Lemmy will find here. A title proclaims “Finis Germaniae.” This finality seems well registered in this sequence; having “found” the West after much difficult searching, for it had disappeared along with the Wall, what Lemmy finds is little more than an advertising slogan for its ideal. Perhaps more devastating a defeat than had the West actually “lost” the Cold War, it has been reduced to the empty status of commodity. As he stares into a boutique window along a West Berlin boulevard, Lemmy remarks, in English: “Well, Christmas with all its ancient horrors is upon us again.” Lemmy repeats this in French and continues: “The stores are all filled with the incredible plunder, but one cannot find what one actually needs.” What content the West had, as

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alternative to that “other” abominable system of unfreedom and barbarity known as “communism,” fully depended on the presence of that threatening alternative. Left “alone,” the West loses its substance and has little more than a strict geographical meaning, and the very nature of the West’s so-called victory over socialism is put into question: for if the West is also gone, what has, exactly, won? Ironically, Lemmy finds himself on Alexanderplatz, the center of former East Berlin, apparently without noticing that he had crossed the (former) border yet again. Here he finds sex shops and car dealerships, nothing much different than in the West, save for the names of some of the businesses: an Aeroflot sign hovers in the background. The sign for Karl-Marx-Straße from the beginning of the film is now replaced by a new one for Martin-LutherStraße; the process of erasing an intervening seventy years of history in a concerted leap back to the pre-socialist era is obviously under way. But this effort to restore some lost, fantasized utopia will be unsuccessful, as the stunning final sequence of Germany Year 90 makes clear. In Lemmy’s tired voice we hear: “Phillips light bulbs could no longer illuminate

FIGURE 1.6

from DVD.

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Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991). Still capture

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the streets of Karl Grüne with the glimmering lights of Karl Freund, but nonetheless the Last Man was still out doing his duties.” As this final comment is heard, a doorman appears who opens the door of a cab from which two women emerge (fig. 1.7). Lemmy enters the frame and turns to watch the women as they enter their hotel. In what should be an eyeline match, Lemmy does not see these women continue into the hotel as expected, but instead, astonishingly, suddenly finds himself in the black-and-white miseen-scène of Murnau’s The Last Laugh and appears to see two other women standing outside the hotel as Emil Jannings’s Doorman takes their arms and walks them to their car under an umbrella (fig. 1.8). The Last Laugh was, of course, a cinematographic tour de force, shot by Karl Freund, and the luminescent if grainy black-and-white images seem all the more alive and glamorous and filled with the attractions of a new and exciting mode of production when set against the silky natural light cinematography so characteristic of Godard’s late work. The Murnau film was a depressing one, however (no matter how one wishes to interpret its ludicrous “happy” ending), whose theme of the dispensability of a worker’s labor is not without its obvious resonances in Germany Year 90. If history has intervened to thwart the realization of the political promises of Murnau’s epoch, as well as the promises that cinema had still held open at that time, it nonetheless has confirmed cinema’s ability to foresee the future, a foresight that paradoxically required the production of a film such as Germany Year 90 in order to allow its image to be seen. As we have seen, Godard is fond of the idea, which he attributes to St. Paul, that “the image will come at the time of the resurrection.” In this view, Lemmy is the resurrection of the Last Man in the figure of the Last Spy. The image that arises between Lemmy and the Last Man is at least double: from our future perspective, Murnau’s film appears both as figure of the lost promise of film history and of the collective energies of the Weimar period, as well as the grim foreboding of our nightmarish present and future. It is as if Godard has managed in a few short pictures to portray Adorno’s historical maxim that “no universal history leads from the savage to humanity, but there is one from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. . . . The one and all that keeps rolling on to this day, taking occasional breathing spells, would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.” The tale of the Last Man, of the constant loss of a meaningful context in which living labor can realize itself, a tale of the disorientation and misery attendant to a loss of one’s function, and to the devastating consequences of abandoning one’s fate to the whim of the bosses, and for that matter the profound dehumanization that is the

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Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURES 1.7–1.8

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essence of all abstract labor, is to be retold and retold, most recently in the tale of one Lemmy Caution. After briefly stepping into Murnau’s film, Lemmy steps back into his own, but it is not clear at all if it is Germany Year 90 or Alphaville. Although made (and set, if one is to judge by the outfits) a quarter century later, the apparent sequel, paradoxically enough, ends where Alphaville began: with Lemmy Caution checking into a hotel. The chiastic reversal of history with which I opened this chapter thus returns within the relationship between the two films. Moreover, if any doubt remains at this point for the viewer, it is now patently clear that Lemmy has not, in Germany Year 90, returned to the human world of the Outlands, but is instead trapped within the reincarnation of Alphaville, but now surrounded by no discernible external space to which to flee. In the opening sequence of Alphaville, Lemmy Caution checks in to his vast hotel, itself a labyrinthine allegory for the complex dystopian surveillance system into which he has entered. He gruffly refuses to allow the bellhop to carry his metal briefcase. As he roams the room, his maid—who is actually not a maid but a “Seductress category III”—looks through the drawers of the bedside table. Caution asks what she is looking for, and she replies that she’s merely looking for the bible since there should be one in every room. In Germany Year 90, Lemmy checks into his posh West Berlin hotel room where the obedient seductresses are replaced by bellboys groveling for tips, and the ubiquitous voice of Alpha 60 is condensed into the militaristic figure of a bell captain who pipes on her whistle to send the maids scurrying to prepare Lemmy’s room. Lemmy can only retrieve his briefcase after offering a tip and he gladly accepts the help of the maids, even asking one to lay the few books he has apparently found useful enough to bring with him from “over there”—two histories of the Gestapo—under the mattress “for my feet.” Caution recognizes that the maid is an East German who has “come over,” and he asks her: “You must also have sought your freedom.” Her answer is, quite damningly, “Arbeit macht frei”: work makes you free, the famous phrase over the gates of Auschwitz. With this single remark, a “quote” really, that has at least in the world of this film penetrated the fabric of everyday discourse with no apparent sense of its historical baggage, we recognize that the horror of the National Socialist past has slipped by the guards at the gate unnoticed and insinuated itself into the life-world of a now-unified Germany. Moreover, the quote calls forth an entire complex of ideological representations of East Germany, and with it of communism more generally, that is internally contradictory. The East had achieved a paradoxical status in Western Cold War ideology. On the one hand it was a place of universalized, compulsory labor,

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a version of the forced labor camps of the Nazi era expanded to a national level, where labor was constant drudgery and the pleasures of consumption and leisure time were practically unknown; from this perspective, the maid’s remark that “work makes you free” would appear to be little more than her continued mouthing of the party line despite the fact that the party exists no more, evidence merely of the tenacity of communist indoctrination. But the East also was characterized as the place of overstaffed factories and public services, of the inefficiencies of the command economy. By this view, the heroic “workers” of the workers’ state barely worked at all; they were lazy, poorly disciplined, and inadequately trained. From this perspective, the maid’s remark seems more like evidence that she has begun the process of “reeducation” necessary to compete in a modern, Western economy. The image that arises here then is of the East as the truth content of the West, as the site onto which the West’s own essence and guilty image are projected. It is precisely this emphasis on work and its ubiquity, on the deadening effects of repetitive, abstract labor, that makes Germany Year 90 unique amongst treatments of post-unification Germany. The more explicit theme of fascist terror is already inscribed in Lemmy’s visits to the Topographie des Terrors, the museum built on the site of former Gestapo torture chambers, as well as in the citation of the blowtorch torture scene from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (for Godard the only true resistance film ever made). But this political moment would be incomplete if not filled out by the emphasis on the economic, as if the true topography of terror will be the deterritorialized landscape of Europe where capital and its imposed relations of production and its culture will evacuate the intellectual and spiritual (Geistig) capacities of its citizens. Lemmy’s reference to Spengler’s Decline of the West suggests as much: “The assault of money on spiritual power is titanic and a desperate battle rages in the world’s cities from which money will emerge victorious. . . . The final battle begins, the battle between blood and money.” While clearly evoking the outbreaks of xenophobia in Germany and Eastern Europe which at the time were in their relative infancy, the passage seems full of a dread and pessimism about the possibilities available for overcoming capitalism; whatever “blood” may signify—and of course it calls to mind Nazi ideologies of blood and earth—it is clear that the practical utopian alternatives of the past are no longer available. So it is with an attitude of defeat that the legend sits down to rest on his hotel bed and finds a book lying on the bedside table (fig. 1.9). He calls out to the maid that someone has forgotten it. She tells him in the most neutral of tones reminiscent of Alphaville’s seductresses: “No, mein Herr. That’s the

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bible. It belongs there.” Lemmy opens the book and sighs, “The bastards!” The bible thus appears like some totemic object from another time and shifts the film momentarily into the generic realm of science fiction and all its mind-warping plays with circular temporalities, as in a Schwarzenegger film like The Terminator (1984), where some sign from the future is suddenly found and recognized and becomes a call to save the world from its (already achieved) dystopian fate. But Lemmy is clearly at the end of his professional life (a fact sadly reinforced by Constantine’s own death two years after the making of Germany Year 90), and figures like him seem fated to pass as well, so the bible here stands more as a marker that he has returned full circle to the future nightmare world that was Alphaville. In his absence, they have won, they have preceded him here; in a sense, he has been passed.

The Smile That Dismisses the Universe It might seem that this sense of defeat continues to pervade Godard’s work, including his most recent—and what he has claimed would be

FIGURE 1.9

from DVD.

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Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Jean-Luc Godard, 1991). Still capture

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his last—film, Film Socialisme, where Lemmy’s final words (“Oh, les salauds!”) generate an echo after the passing of almost twenty years. At two different moments in this complex and baffling film one hears the almost identical line from two different figures: both agree that there will always be bastards, but “what has changed today is that the bastards are sincere.” The meaning of the phrase, like so many in Film Socialisme, is not immediately transparent within the contexts in which it appears: the first time it is spoken as a disembodied line of dialogue accompanying a gorgeous shot of the moonlit Mediterranean in the middle of the night, taken from the deck of the cruise ship that provides the setting for the first of the three sections of the film. The second time, it is spoken by a news reporter trying to get a story about the Martin family— the focus of the film’s second part—whose children seem to be (it is not really clear) running for local political office. In the latter context, the meaning seems to have something to do with the existence of Europe, continuing the abiding concern in Godard’s late work with questions of European identity and fate, for the reporter continues on to say that these “bastards sincerely believe in Europe.” But the Europe these bastards believe in is one no longer held together through a common sense of shared culture (in the good sense of the term) that Godard and the film seem to vaguely believe to have existed at some point in the past, but rather through the unifying, and poisonous, power of the Euro. Such a reading resonates particularly strongly with Lemmy’s final words in Germany Year 90, which express disgust with the bastards whose triumph is so compactly registered by the bible sitting on his bedside table. What prospects for happiness such European unity holds are grim; as one of the characters on the cruise ship sighs, she hopes not to die before she “sees Europe happy again,” but it is clear she does not expect her hope to be fulfilled. The “victory” represented by the unification of Europe is as hollow as that of the West and the Federal Republic in Germany Year 90, reduced to its manifestation as the effect of a soulless—and as we learn by the day, disastrous—monetary policy. The situation seems like it might be even worse than that projected by Germany Year 90’s concluding scene: for Germany Year 90 was still able to hold out a fairly emphatic notion of historical difference, a sense that things had once been other than they are now, and that such historical difference could be leveraged for some critical or political effect, be it in the form of the utopian longings of the former East or in the differences that have attained in the world since the appearance of Alphaville. In Alphaville the

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bastards were at least still not yet sincere: their language was one of euphemism and deception; their bible was only ironically a bible; and one still had a sense of some truth external to the discourse of Alpha 60, some sense of the meaning of a now-forbidden language. But today, in the time of Film Socialisme, in the age of the Christian Right and after the total triumph of the neo-liberal project, the bible is a bible. It contains not a list of proscribed words but rather the word of God himself. Likewise, no one any longer has to provide ideological cover for the rule of money and finance, for the domination of the world by capital and its ruling class. Obscene wealth, exploitation, and the transformation of everything into commodities are now justified in themselves, needing no ideological supplement, for they are unquestioned and unquestionable goods. As the opening lines of dialogue in Film Socialisme ironically exclaim: Money is a public good. Like the water? Exactly.

Who, today, challenges the acceptance of economic growth as the measure of our prospective well-being? The bastards are sincere because they can be. The cruise ship where the first third of the film takes place condenses the horrifying logic of this world in an even more intense version of no-longer West Berlin from Germany Year 90. Amy Taubin has called it a “floating Las Vegas,” a seaborne dystopia where the basest forms of commodified entertainment are pursued and the logic of money pervades all activity and all sensibility in every sense of the term. This floating world appears utterly isolated from external influence; the coastal ports and towns are observed from a hazy (if at times stunningly gorgeous) distance or are projected on screen accompanied by ominous tones on the sound track, as if land itself, the outside world, were somehow foreboding. The ship is a near-perfect metaphor for a globe that is now dominated by a sealed, near-perfect totality under the rule of commerce. But it is here, in this place that would seemingly offer neither a possible perspective on a historical past—there is no landscape haunted by figures of the past as in Germany Year 90, no art or culture bearing ciphers of different times—nor a vantage point to a different future beyond the next day’s aquacise routine in the pool, that the film nonetheless proposes a revisitation of earlier times and earlier ideas and finds a utopian impulse for cinema in a return to origins not dissimilar to what we saw in Marker’s A Grin

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Without a Cat in the Introduction. It is also here that what was hinted at in Germany Year 90 comes to (at least partial) fruition: for if Germany Year 90 demonstrated the ambiguity of the victory of the West, in that its success was also its failure, Film Socialisme suggests that a possible liberatory moment in the West’s victory is that one might just be able to begin thinking of socialism again, but beyond the Cold War oppositions of East and West, of actually existing communism and capitalism, a set of oppositions with which post-WWII socialist thought always had to contend. And it is here as well that many of the motifs and themes we have already identified in Godard’s late work will recur, but they will now be lent new significance and greater political force by their articulation with reference to the idea of socialism at work in the film. Characteristically for Godard, Film Socialisme proposes this return in an oblique manner. Toward the middle of the first section of the film, Alain Badiou appears in front of an auditorium on board the cruise ship, and on a stage more suited for the likes of a Wayne Newton or an Abba cover band than for a former philosophy chair at the École Normale Supérieure, he delivers a lecture on Edmund Husserl’s essay on the origins of geometry, a topic that immediately recalls the blind editor’s lesson about the invisible cube in JLG/JLG, which in retrospect can be understood as a lesson about Husserlian “ideal objects,” objects which exist not in empirical, tangible form in the world, but only as objects in the mind. Not a soul is in the audience. As we have already seen in that other lesson on geometry, the lessons contained for the viewer in Badiou’s lecture, which is only briefly excerpted, do not concern (only) geometry per se, but instead must be extracted through allegorization and projected onto the world; the ostensible issue at stake in the lecture is the origin of geometry, but it is a lesson more generally about the origins of things (in Husserl’s case ideal objects specifically) and one’s proper—a term I use advisedly, as will become clear in a moment—relationship to those origins. In this case, the origins to which Godard and the film return are already specified in the film’s title: whatever else Film Socialisme might be, it is an investigation of the origins of cinema and the origins of socialism, which at first pass we can simply define as a state of universal emancipation. One could say, it is an exploration of the origins of the utopia of film. Badiou’s isolation on stage only reinforces what I’ve already said about the ship: no one responded to the announcement of a lecture on philosophy that Godard’s crew had made over the PA system. Badiou was not upset in the least, reportedly having said “finally, I can speak in front of no one,”

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apparently content with his solitude. To that no one, Badiou says: “Geometry as origin. The origin is always what one returns to. There has been, for decades, especially in mathematics, a return of geometry. The idea is not that geometry would return to its origin, but rather that we return to geometry, as origin, and participate in the return of geometry.” As opaque as Badiou’s comments might be to a French-speaking audience, for those who must rely on the subtitles the difficulties are multiplied, for Godard famously premiered the film at Cannes—and subsequently released it in theaters and on DVD—with what he has called “Navajo English” subtitles designed to imitate the crude English that Indians were permitted to speak in the scripts of American westerns. They provide an interesting translation, continuing Godard’s refusal, which has already been discussed, to ever consider a translation adequate. Here the titles become a kind of auto-interpretation in the film, and one clearly inadequate or not “just,” as Godard might say, rendering Badiou’s lecture in a tersely condensed form: “geometry as origin”— “return to geometry”—“ourselves part of geometry” (fig. 1.10). To understand Film Socialisme and the return to origins that it proffers, one could simply (and reasonably) take a page out of Godard’s own book and replace the term “geometry” in Badiou’s text with the word “socialism”: “Socialism as origin. The origin is always what one returns to. . . . The idea is not that socialism would return to its origin [say, in the form of attempting to resuscitate pre-capitalist forms of social life] but rather that we return to socialism, as origin, and participate in the return of socialism.” And one can also easily imagine, then, the Navajo English titles that would render these lines: “socialism as origin”—“return to socialism”— “ourselves part of socialism.” Whatever naïveté one might suspect Godard harbors about the prospects of a return of socialism, or for that matter about a return of a certain form of cinema, is surely countered by this scene. The solitude of the setting is already enough to dispel such concerns, Badiou’s isolation a perfect image of Godard’s own, an image entirely at odds with the collectivism that must animate any worthy vision of socialism or film. Godard is fully aware that the audience for his films, as well as the “audience” for socialism, has dwindled to minimal proportions. The shot of Badiou lecturing quickly gives way to a shot of cruise passengers in an onboard bar, passengers who clearly have better things to do: a man gropes a woman’s buttocks as the rest of the passengers gaze at a massive video screen, watching a video of a cruise ship sailing the sea. These passengers are caught in a recursive loop of utterly mediated touristry; their tour through the Mediterranean is no tour of the Mediterranean, but a simulation of such a tour. If Adorno and Max

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Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). Still capture from DVD.

Horkheimer could famously claim that tourist photos offer not “Italy . . . but evidence that it exists,” these tourists could not care less about even the evidence of Italy’s existence: they are too preoccupied with doing what they could just as easily have done at home, and they watch their own vacation— as it happens—on television. There is no time here in this absolute Now—a perfect image of Kluge’s expanded present—for philosophy or socialism. So Godard is not unaware of the audacity of his return to socialism and cinema at a time that seems so utterly hostile to it. But this seems to be part of the point of this film: it is precisely at times like these, when hope seems most remote and optimism most unrealistic, that a fidelity to the causes of cinema and socialism must be maintained. But what, exactly, does Badiou’s lecture on Husserl say about origins and our attitude toward them? This becomes clearer a few moments later in the film, when Husserl’s lecture on geometry becomes the topic of conversation between Alissa, an adolescent girl and one of the main characters in the film (though to call her a character implies a conventional depth and complexity that no individual figure in the film ever really attains), and a woman whose role in the film remains quite obscure, as they are having dinner in one of the ship’s dining rooms. The woman reads aloud, apparently from Husserl’s text, seeming to translate on the fly from German into French as she does so: “Geometry, which never ceases to be valid or current, at the same time continues to develop [s’edifier], remaining in all of its new forms simply geometry [LA géométrie].” Then, she continues, citing the

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original: “In allen neuen Gestalten, DIE Geometrie.” The English translation renders neither Husserl’s original emphasis in German nor that of the French variation presented here very well at all: as the woman reading the passage goes on to point out, “Husserl underlines the ‘la’: “la Géométrie.” The point here, to risk simplification of Husserl’s original idea, is that despite its transformation over time, despite the fact that geometry continues to “edify itself ”—a quite literal translation of the French “s’edifier,” itself a graceful translation of the original German “Fortbildung”—over time it continues to “reside” (demeurer) in all of its new forms and remain nonetheless what we call “geometry.” That is, despite its inevitable change as the science progresses, geometry remains recognizably and practically itself. The Husserl citation and Badiou’s lecture thus raise a problematic that has been central to much of Godard’s late work, including Germany Year 90 and JLG/JLG, and one that can only be thought retrospectively (which is, as such, appropriate for a man at the end of his career and near the end of his life): namely the search for a certain constancy, the possibility of remaining valid (here, in French, rendered ironically in a specifically economic metaphor, “avoir cours”), the achievement of a form of identity, while constantly being open to transformation and change, open to further “edification,” but without succumbing to either the clichéd versions of such a problematic so familiar from Hollywood cinema and its three-act narratives of self-fulfillment or to reification in the form of being a legend. This problematic can be seen at work in Film Socialisme and Godard’s late work more generally at several different levels. At the most local or micro level, it concerns the ability to articulate a thought or an idea, either in the form of a sentence, in the form of a coherent sequence in a montage, or in the form of a thought in the mind. At this level, Godard seems torn between two incompatible positions, which, instead of attempting to resolve successfully in Film Socialisme, he attempts to sustain. On the one hand there exists the demand or compulsion to create a sensible thought or statement or a meaningful sequence, to generate something coherent that can be transmitted and received, expressed and comprehended, created and then followed. To return to the question of the film’s title—just what does it mean?—one can already see this demand in the history of its evolution. According to Godard, the film’s original title was simply “Socialisme,” but then he sent a friend, the philosopher JeanPaul Curnier (who has also participated in Notre Musique [2004] ), some promotional materials for the film. In those materials, the name of the film production company—Vega Film—by sheer graphic serendipity appeared

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next to the title—“Socialisme”—so that Curnier assumed the title was “Film Socialisme.” Godard adopted the misreading and made it his own. The change to the title, however, begs the question: why was “Socialisme” insufficient? Godard has said, in a telling turn of phrase, that the word “film” took away “some of the innocence” of the word “socialism”— “Ça déniaisait un peu le mot.” This is, one could say, an excellent way to think of montage more generally: one image loses its innocence when set into juxtaposition with another—it is akin to the very leap into the symbolic order of which we spoke earlier, the bravery required to become something other than what one merely is. So, to return to our starting point, Badiou’s reference to Husserl: for “socialism” to lose its innocence, for it to acquire the gravity and maturity of montage, for it to move to the level of a thought proper, it must allow itself to associate with the term “film.” The Husserlian question then becomes: what remains of socialism once it has been transformed via this montage, once it has “educated itself ”—perhaps an excellent translation for déniaiser—through its association with film? I will return to this question at the end of this chapter. On the other hand, the second, seemingly incompatible position Godard adopts at this level appears as the demand that things be left alone, that things be left to reside in their solitude and in their innocence, that they not be burdened with coherent thoughts, that they not be subjected to a signification that is imposed upon them or that appears to come from the things themselves. This position is embodied, for example, in the deep-running suspicion of language that accompanies even Godard’s most eloquent celebrations of language: his sense that words somehow violate and mangle the objects to which they refer and the ideas they try to express. Recently, he has joked that his next film (if there is to be one) will be titled simply Farewell to Language, as if his fantasy is to transcend the gulf between language and things and to escape the constitutive lack that the signifier introduces into subjectivity. And there are plenty of moments in Film Socialisme that could lead a viewer to assume that such a stance—to simply let things be—would be virtuous: think of the young boy and his most tender moments with his mother or when he conducts an invisible orchestra or makes a painting. These are moments of joyful and seemingly purposeless immersion in acts of play and creation and intimacy, beyond any symbolic or conceptual import. Or think, as a negative example, of the boy’s family—the Martin family—whose life is the focus of the second part of Film Socialisme: their overriding desire is simply to be left alone, but instead their peace is constantly threatened

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by the news reporters who want to turn their lives into yet another story for the evening news. In Godard, the name for things left in such a state of innocence is (paradoxically, since as such they should remain nameless) “des choses comme ça,” a sort of crude version of the notion of the Kantian thing-in-itself, which appears repeatedly throughout the film (and in Histoire(s) du cinéma as well), emblazoned across the screen in large intertitles, often with no apparent referent. These are things that are simply “like that,” to which one can only point in a purely gestural act, a fact reinforced by the random appearance of the titles—“des choses comme ça”—as if Godard were reluctant even to point at the things to which the film refers, the things whose likeness the film puts up on the screen. Such a reading is further reinforced by those passages in the film when this problematic is staged explicitly as a question of language, as the confrontation between “words” and the “poor things” to which they refer, and which, in their poverty “only have for themselves the name that we impose upon them.” It seems, then, as if the role of cinema is to point toward such things beyond their names, to lead us into the world of “things like that.” This yet is another way to think of the idea that cinema’s function is to “show us that the world is there”—not to show us the world, for that would be to substitute for it an image or a name—but instead to point to a state of things beyond or before such naming. James Williams makes a similar point about Godard’s thoughts on language, but in the context of Histoire(s) du cinéma, when he points out that Godard is not only concerned with the liberation of things from their names but also of language from its apparent obligation to impose names upon things: Godard achieves in Histoire(s) what he has been attempting for a long time: to dissolve the solidified word and so arrive (to use the terms of First Name Carmen [Prénom Carmen, 1983] ) at a stage avant le nom (before the name)—pure sound—and at l’image vierge (before the image). We might go further and say that each image is transformed into a pure epiphany, a manifestation of the mystery of cinematographic creation.

I think this is very well put, but Film Socialisme suggests that this epiphany cannot be pure, so to speak, that the mystery of cinematic creation revealed in the “image vierge”—the “virginal image”—is always tainted or corrupted—déniaisé—by those things toward which it must point. And on the other side—the side of things—the hope to leave things be is futile, even if

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it is virtuous: for just as the young boy inevitably loses his innocence—his painting, it turns out, is a copy of a Renoir and thus the determinate effect of a tradition and of instruction, and hardly the product of an innocent mind, and while he is painting he admits that he is thinking about the camera woman’s derrière—so too must anything that is to be brought into the orbit of human creation or signification—nature, other people, ideas, things— lose its innocence and be painfully wrested from its solitude. Even those “positive” moments, when we seem to be seeing things in their solitude and tenderness, are marked by an elegiac tone, a tone that expresses not only the futility of the hope that things could be left alone but also a fundamental guilt in Godard’s filmmaking, the realization that cinema always violates the solitude of things even when it provides the most beautiful images of them. It is important, though, to understand that such a loss of innocence is not tragic and is not solely bad, but a part of the larger process of edification toward which the Husserl quote from earlier in the film gestures. This point must be understood within the context of Film Socialisme’s reference to socialism. Godard has said that “the socialism of the film is the undermining of the idea of property, beginning with the idea of artworks,” which is expressed in the film’s most explicit—and most notorious—political stance, its clearly articulated opposition to the idea of the copyright of so-called intellectual property: Godard concludes the film with the FBI warning against copyright infringement familiar from every commercially produced DVD, followed by the closing title card that reads, simply and dismissively, “NO COMMENT.” This supersession, or dismissal—a term to which I will return momentarily—of private property can be understood as the baseline definition of socialism in the film; but Godard begins not with artworks, as he claims, but at an even more micrological level, the level of sense or meaning itself that we have so far been discussing: for the desire we have just identified and then qualified—to leave things as they are, to free the “poor things” from the names imposed upon them—is shot through with and determined by the notion and logic of private property. The idea that there is an authentic solitude, that things have an essential quality all their own, that they can reside in themselves and maintain their utter integrity without reference to anything outside, is an idea deeply determined and infiltrated by the principle of private property. Here Godard is perhaps again at his most materialist, having sussed out in the most intimate recesses of our understanding of the meaning of things a determination from without by objective forces, as Adorno would put it. The origin of the meaning of things will not be found in the things themselves, in other

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words; in fact, if it were, all one would ever be able to say about them would be that they are “things like that.” This blithe dismissal of private property recurs at the next level at which the problematic of constancy and change operates in Film Socialisme, namely at the level of the individual subject or (auto)biography, or, in the case of Godard himself, at the level of the individual life-course as manifested in the development of a career, in the creation of a body of work over time, and in the legacy that one establishes. Familiar from JLG/JLG and Germany Year 90, the issue takes on renewed urgency in the case of Film Socialisme, if we do indeed understand it to be Godard’s final film. Godard’s indifference toward his reputation and legacy has already been established, but the symbolic assertions of this indifference in JLG/JLG and Germany Year 90 have now been supplemented by the material act of selling his possessions, his office, and his studio to a private buyer, who will convert the offices into condominiums and sell off their contents: he has divested himself of his film collection and the famous collection of notebooks and raw materials from which he assembles his films. No museum will be built and no archive established where one might research the master’s career. The final act (though one should take his declarations cautiously) is once again one of subjective dispersal, an attempt, perhaps, to cut off any hope that others might return to the origins of his creations and attempt to find some final answer, some core meaning, there. From the perspective of Film Socialisme, whose very title brings everything Godard has done within the orbit of the idea of socialism, we can now confirm that the ultimate import of all of the gestures toward the abolishment of the self as fundamentally political gestures, as anticipations of a utopian situation when the very notion of the self has become unrecognizable. In this anticipation, Godard once again shares an affinity with Adorno, for whom even the seemingly primordial instinct of self-preservation can be understood as an “ideology” or “ideological mechanism,” as Jameson argues in a passage that merits quotation at length: All human societies, necessarily organized around scarcity and power, have had to program their subjects in such a way as to construct some seemingly primordial effort to preserve one’s self at all costs, which is to say at the cost of other people. This “self,” which one then jealously hoards and protects against incursion, is something like a form of property, the very first form, perhaps, around which all our personal and social struggles are organized. Adorno’s speculations thereby unexpectedly renew their ties with the oldest and most

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tenaciously rooted Utopian traditions: to abolish private property. Yet it is now the private property of the self which is to be abolished, with the equally unexpected result that death itself—the most private of all experiences, about which Heidegger affirms that it is “je mein eigener,” that only I can experience—loses its sting, no longer divesting us of what is most precious.

From such a perspective, then, it would make no sense to think of a return to origins as a return to something essential about oneself that has been lost along the way; Godard is not a pop psychologist, seeking a true self that has been buried or distorted over the course of a lifetime. If anything, one must think of what is generally called the self, even if it too can be easily demonstrated to be an ideology or an ideological mechanism, as having its origins elsewhere: precisely as the poor “things like that” have only the names that we impose upon them, the self too has only a name, an identity, a role, that it receives from someplace, someone, something else. This does not mean, however, that Godard puts forth a model of the individual self as a pure schizo-subject devoid of consistency and continuity, and the question still remains how one sustains a certain subjective coherence throughout the course of a life, especially in times like the present when objective forces militate against the possibility of the continued existence of the centered subject, shattering and oppressing it, as Godard has arguably shown since Breathless. And it remains a question even if one is a filmmaker who has embraced a vision of subjectivity where one’s words, ideas, images, and thoughts—even one’s voice—are never really quite one’s own as JLG/JLG so clearly asserts: indeed, one way to read the first part of the title of JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December is precisely as the assertion that JLG remains JLG on either side of the backslash—that is, across all of his continued development and edification, across the span of the signifying chain, JLG remains, simply, JLG in all of his new forms. As the father, M. Martin, says in Film Socialisme, “When I talk to myself, I speak someone else’s words . . . that I say to myself. When you hear your own voice, where does it come from?” That one’s ideas are never one’s own can be taken in a negative sense, of course, in that all we create and produce is done so in a state of alienation and as such the province of others, and that we are all interpellated from without, we all perform a set of clichéd and learned behaviors; our subjectivity is radically external to us, as the father’s remarks make poignantly clear. But one can also take this—and this has been the argument of this chapter so far—in a positive, or, rather, a socialist sense: our thoughts and ideas and innermost feelings are never

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really our own because they are shared and deeply collective; we are all collaborative works in process and in progress that can never really be said to reside in any single solitary—seul—individual. This entire issue of subjective constancy is staged most dramatically in the film in the middle section about M. Martin and his family. Besieged as they are by the press (albeit comically so, since there are only two newspeople after them, a reporter and her camerawoman, and they are easily foiled, as in a characteristically Godardian moment of slapstick when the young son shoos them away bearing only a stick that he uses as a sword), they are under threat of losing their identity to the cultural apparatus of television, rendered as usual in almost uniformly derisive fashion. It is the father who most directly addresses the issue, not only in his musings on speaking with himself but also by reframing it as a question in a moment of seeming despair at not only the indecencies of the press, but at the prospect of his life’s work—the garage—being sold off, a diegetic situation with obvious autobiographical resonances for Godard. In terms that simultaneously evoke Marx, Lacan, and Badiou, and a host of others, the father asks, translating the question of subjective identity into the language of the act: “Is there an act about which I could calmly say today: ‘I did it’?” As for the garage, after a lifetime invested in it the father seems to know nothing about how it runs and the work that is done there; as he says, “I know how to do the invoices, yes . . . ” and he leans over and briefly types away at an adding machine which we hear offscreen. This is all he can do. And with that the entire theme of money and its attendant evils from the first part of the film (and the earliest days of Godard’s career) is instantly evoked, but not quite in the same way that it was articulated there. Though Godard has long been disgusted by business and money dealings—one need only think of the opening scene of Tout va bien (1972) as the producer’s hands sign check after check after check, or its intertextual allusion from Contempt, when the American producer pronounces “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my checkbook”—here the suggestion seems to be that money, and the kinds of calculations that go along with it, distort work and our relationship to it to such an extent that the owner of a garage can have no idea how to repair a car or use a wrench. From the perspective of Film Socialisme, work with money is no work at all. But the father continues on and eventually mutters: “It is necessary to say ‘we’ to be able to say ‘I’,” a statement which now permits us to rephrase Husserl’s remarks about geometry from earlier in the film: instead of asking how geometry remains “geometry” in all of its forms as it edifies itself

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over time, Godard now asks how the collective—the “we”—remains the collective in all of its forms as it edifies itself over time, even as it transforms itself into the form—die Gestalt—that bears the name “I.” And in this Godard remains deeply Marxist: for what else is this gesture if not an elaborate version of classical Marxist critique, whereby the collective nature of all human endeavor is revealed, no matter how particular and individual it may at first appear? Thus this most individual of questions opens up to another level at which the Husserlian problematic of constancy and change is articulated in Film Socialisme: the level of social organization itself—of socialism “proper,” to use a term that Godard would clearly reject—the broadest possible horizon at which one can consider the issue. Before directly addressing this level, however, it is worth considering what socialism might mean in this film beyond its baseline significance as the rejection of private property. Film critics have already made some suggestions about its meaning. The more dismissive critics—of which there are many—work from the assumption that it is merely a mark of either Godard’s obsolescence or vanity (or both), at best a tepid gesture toward a collective who is no longer his audience, at worst an affectation toward a political relevance thwarted and belied by the very difficulty and obscurity of the film. How, indeed, can such a film have political effect if no one sees it? But such critiques miss the point that the film is not called “Socialist Film”—it is not agit-prop. More sympathetic critics have pointed toward the fact that the film’s production process embodies a socialistic ideal, being at once the product of the collaboration of four different cameramen, as well as the compilation of a vast number of video and film clips from other films. In this latter aspect the film embodies a principle of sharing, itself a waning virtue in the era of cynical tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor. And it also seems reasonable to speculate that socialism also refers to the imminent passing of the welfare state, the significant legacy of left-wing movements in the twentieth century, if not in word at least in principle inspired by the idea of socialism; from this perspective the passages in the film set in Greece and Spain seem particularly relevant, if not prescient, foreseeing as they do the austerity measures now being imposed upon those two countries’ populaces, and the resistance to such measures, exemplified by the demonstrators who have adopted the name “los indignados.” One cannot quarrel with these more sympathetic readings, for all these “socialist” moments find their expression in the film at various points. But I think it is important to understand them precisely as moments, as local

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manifestations of a larger principle of socialism embodied in the film, and one which is more interesting and productive to think of in terms of the dialectic between transformation and constancy at work in the Husserl passage heard earlier in the film. This dialectic can be seen to concern socialism from at least two perspectives. On the one hand, as a possible form of social organization, socialism has to somehow square the difference between the demand for security—that is, the security of existence, the durability of a form of social life, the absence of fear of the future and the dangers it might pose such as poverty, decrepitude, and so on—with the properly modern (or postmodern) demand that existence—either social or individual—be dynamic, open to change and transformation: what in the Husserl passage was called self-edification. Film Socialisme does not deal with this particular aspect of the issue to any real extent, though I think it is clear that for Godard advanced capitalism offers neither security nor any satisfying form of dynamism, only disruption and chaos. And it is clear that for Godard socialism, or what I earlier called the social utopia, does not need to be beset by the plague of boredom and stagnation that supposedly characterized actually existing socialism, for this film, which instantiates a form of “film” socialism, clearly revels in the activity of the creation of new forms and new associations, new things to do with images and sounds. In this sense we can understand Jean-Paul Curnier’s definition of socialism, conveyed in a letter to Godard about the film, as “the creation of forms”: socialism by this view is marked by both creation—the constant process of generation and development, self-edification and transformation—as well as the stability of forms, cohesive and coherent, stable and comprehensible, and Film Socialisme becomes a sort of “allegory in form” (a concept to which I return in chapter 3) for a future social organization. In the following two chapters I will deal with this more practical aspect of socialist organization again, for it is a problematic that both Kidlat Tahimik and Alexander Kluge contend with to a more significant degree. For Tahimik the problem revolves around the use of traditional or pre-capitalist societies as possible models for a future utopian society and whether or not a notion of time dissociated from a vision of progress can provide the basis for a compelling social existence; and for Kluge, the issue revolves around the capacity of individual and collective subjects to sustain control over the process of historical transformation so that the pace and disruptiveness of that transformation does not become an oppressive force in its own right. Film Socialisme, however, deals less with socialism as a practical matter and more with socialism as an idea in much the sense that I have giv-

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en the term, following Badiou, in the Introduction. And it is concerning socialism as an idea that the question of origins posed in Badiou’s lecture and in the passage from Husserl’s lecture on geometry takes on its greatest importance. As I have already suggested, Film Socialisme calls for a return to “socialism as origin”; just what this might mean becomes clearer in the third and final section of the film, and it is in this section as well that the relationship between film—as a medium, or form—and socialism as an idea becomes clear as well. The third chapter of the film is introduced by a title card reading “NOS HUMANITÉS” (“our humanities”) rendered in large red and white type. This title gives way to another, listing each of the major ports of call visited by the cruise ship earlier in the film—Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece, Naples, and Barcelona—all of which the film will revisit in its closing minutes. The label for these six places is a curious and confusing one; its most apparent meaning seems to refer to the tradition of humanistic culture represented above all by Greece, a culture whose fate is nicely summed up by the homophony between the Greek “Hellas”—as it is here named—and the French “hélas” (woe): the fate of our humanities is indeed woeful, and Greece has transformed itself from being the greatest creditor nation of culture, so to speak—that nation that bestowed upon Europe the greatest cultural endowment without asking or receiving anything in return—to its most calamitous debtor nation, as the new austerity measures imposed by Europe (in 2011–2012) have now rendered it. For Godard, this calamity is a scandal—if we were to take seriously the value of intellectual property, then Europe owes Greece trillions and not the other way around. The idea of socialism is most directly and clearly addressed by that “humanity” represented by Odessa, which commences, after an introductory title card, with reedited shots from Eisenstein’s October (1928): images of the young girl lying on the drawbridge as it slowly rises, cutting off the workers’ district from the rest of the city. The shots are cut not to Shostakovich’s original frenetic music, but to a slow organ march, already familiar to Godard’s viewers from the third chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma, a film which functions here as a crucial intertext. The organ slowly gives way, discordantly, to music from a brass band, and a sudden cut reveals its source: shot in vibrant color video that contrasts jarringly with October’s black and white, a small group of musicians welcomes passengers as they disembark from the cruise ship in what we can assume is Odessa. The sudden shift in setting is quite disorienting at first, until one realizes that the cruise ship has been transformed into the contemporary avatar of the battleship Potemkin.

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As in Germany Year 90, which cuts so eloquently from contemporary Berlin to the Berlin of F. W. Murnau and The Last Laugh, Film Socialisme moves the viewer from one film to another, from one period to another, though here the shifts are perhaps even more complex—for the viewer shifts not from Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) to the present, but from October to the present, and only then to Potemkin whose mise-en-scène is rendered only by a highly muted allusion through the image of the cruise ship: by means of a move forward in film history, from 1925/1917 to the twenty-first century, the film takes a step backwards in film history (from October to Potemkin) and also in historical time, from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the Potemkin revolt and the revolution of 1905. It is hard not to read this move as a subtle demand that we too step back beyond the origins of actually existing socialism in the Bolshevik Revolution to a time prior to socialism’s official institutionalization in the form of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). The realization that the viewer is now in a contemporary version of Potemkin is then confirmed, in uncanny fashion, by the images that follow the shot of the cruise ship: the brass band and its loud, schmaltzy music gives way—suddenly—to a pure silence; there is no ambient sound, the theater goes utterly silent and a highly saturated color image of a white owl fills the screen, framed in close-up, a set of stone stairs visible in the background, out of focus (fig. 1.11). The steps, of course, will soon reveal themselves to be the Odessa steps, but for the moment the owl reminds us of another filmmaker, not Eisenstein

FIGURE 1.11

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Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). Still capture from DVD.

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but Chris Marker, who had adopted the owl as one of his favorite animals, second perhaps only to his beloved cats. And this reminder adds another film, though only through this tender allusion, into the already quite complex montage that has been established here, namely Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge, 1977/1993), and its opening passage, inaugurating an homage to Godard’s former collaborator (on Far from Vietnam [Loin du Vietnam, 1967]) that is at once reverential and perhaps mildly critical. The gesture is in any case clearly one of solidarity, a subtle and gentle attempt at socialism, if only a symbolic and fleeting one. The subsequent montage evokes the opening sequence of A Grin Without a Cat in multiple ways: it imitates Marker’s combination of “historical footage” from Potemkin with contemporary color imagery shot on the steps, and even includes a tour guide speaking to a group of young students, reminiscent of the tour guide who appears immediately after the conclusion of the opening sequence in Marker’s film. Godard here thus performs a mimesis of form not unlike that which Marker had performed on Potemkin itself, which I have discussed in the Introduction. A brief audio overlap of the organ music, which now returns, anticipates the cut from the static image of the owl to a slow tracking shot through the trees, in color, and as such marked as coming from the present, as the camera descends alongside the stairs. The film then cuts back and forth between this tracking shot and images from the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin, finally confirming that we are indeed in Odessa and in Eisenstein’s film. The intercutting is interrupted by two shots from Gavriil Yegiazarov’s Hot Snow (Goryachiy sneg, 1974), a historical epic about the Battle of Stalingrad, and then footage of the tour guide talking to a group of young students in Russian, which remains untranslated. The montage then continues, this time with shots lifted from Potemkin of Odessans descending the staircases to the waterfront, joyfully waving to the sailors on board the battleship. And then the film cuts, yet again, to the present, to frame from behind a boy and a girl, perhaps in their early teens, waving to the cruise ship from the shore. Once again the cut conjoins the mise-en-scène of two separate films as the past of Potemkin cuts forward to the present of Film Socialisme. The battleship has now become a cruise liner, laden with retirees, about whom Andréa Picard has noted, aptly, that Godard chastises them not for growing old but for not working; far from being the proletarian “types” who peopled Eisenstein’s films, they are instead living from the fruits of the welfare state, while the youth who wave to them may well not ever enjoy such security when they reach their own old age.

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At this point the homage to Marker becomes tinged with possible criticism. Recall that Marker ended the 1993 reedit of A Grin Without a Cat with the declaration that the dream of communism was dead. But here Godard wishes to prolong the dream (and as the father says in part two, “dreams are what bring us together”), or the impulse, in a way that Marker perhaps no longer had the capacity to do: for the voice-over begins again as we watch the two children wave to the ship. The text, read in a man’s voice, is itself a montage, a condensation of Paul Valéry’s poem “Psaume sur une voix” and a passage from Denis de Rougemont’s Penser avec les mains, both of which are also cited (though at much greater length) in Histoire(s) du cinéma, to which I will return momentarily. It begins with a line from de Rougemont: “The demonstration [manifestation] was full of joy, of happiness,” which appears to refer to the procession in Potemkin. But then, as if interrupted, the voiceover suddenly seems to address the two children: “There’s the work. It’s your turn,” as if to say it is the children’s turn to take up the task of the demonstrators—or the sailors—in Potemkin. The voice-over then resumes, again apparently referring to Potemkin: “The soldiers began shooting from above because manifest . . . ” and at this point the text begins a play on the etymological root of the word “manifestation,” the French term for a political demonstration, continuing by borrowing more text from de Rougemont: “And in manifest there is a hand [Et dans manifest, il y a main . . . ].” Again, the allusions to Marker’s film become apparent, calling forth the central organizing motif of A Grin Without a Cat and the dramatic force of the match cuts between all the hands in Eisenstein’s film and the documentary footage of protests in the sixties and seventies in Marker’s, between fists clenched in defiance and between hands that gently wipe away the tears of loss, sorrow, and defeat. For Godard, anchored as this virtual image is in de Rougemont’s Penser avec les mains, the metaphor of the hand becomes a call for a form of thinking, that Godard, following de Rougemont, calls the “proletarianization of thought”: the dual demand that thought become a material force in the world and that material action—the action of the hands—be understood in all its cognitive and theoretical dimensions. The voice-over’s text then extends the motif and metaphor of the hand, shifting back to a citation of Valéry: “Not a dressed-up sentiment [un sentiment drapé]. An ideal, a smile that dismisses [congédie] the universe.” As this line is spoken, the audio shifts from the left to the right channels, as if in dialogue with itself, and after the boy and girl whisper something to each other, the film then cuts again, the sound track utterly silent, to the beautiful shot in Potemkin of the sailboats going out to greet the mutinying

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battleship, perhaps the most joyous scene in the entirety of Eisenstein’s film; it appears as if the girl and boy were watching it and waving to the sailboats, indeed waiting their turn to join in as the voice-over has suggested they do. At this point the difference between Godard’s film and Marker’s becomes clear: where Marker’s film, from the perspective of the 1970s and 1990s, could only see the disappointment and failure that were the final result of that initial promise announced by the grand title card that read “BROTHERS!,” here Film Socialisme resuscitates that impulse and concludes not with an image of revolt (nor of wolves being shot) but with a rare moment of success (much like Eisenstein concludes Potemkin), a moment of joy and promise, a promise that brings a smile to the faces of the boy and girl waving to the ship, a smile that is apparent even though their backs are turned to the camera and the audience, as if they are sitting in the rows before us, themselves watching the film that we are watching. The line, “a smile that dismisses the universe,” like much of what occurs in this scene, has multiple resonances, but I will mention only three. First, it continues Godard’s homage to Marker, for that smile might well be the grin without a cat from Marker’s film. If it is, then, it implies perhaps a further, albeit equally subtle, critique of Marker for “dismissing the universe” of communism and of the sixties and its revolutionary ambitions. I think, to state it plainly, that Godard cannot agree that the dream of communism is dead. The other two resonances, or allusions, are internal to Godard’s own oeuvre. First, both the Valéry poem and the de Rougemont passage appear in Chapter 4A of Histoire(s) du cinéma, entitled “The Control of the Universe,” and both are quoted there in more extended and contiguous versions, so that the brief snippets heard in Film Socialisme function like shorthand code for, or footnote markers that point to, those longer passages in Histoire(s) du cinéma. So when one hears the line “a smile that dismisses the universe” in Film Socialisme, one also hears—in absentia, invisible and inaudible—the entirety of the quotation as it appears in the earlier film. In Histoire(s) du cinéma, the significance of the Valéry poem is difficult to ascertain, but it is hard not to associate it with two distinct things: on the one hand, the line, read faithfully from Valéry’s original (“ce sourire congédiant l’univers”—“that smile dismissing the universe”) is heard after a series of images of women, all smiling the gentlest of smiles, including photographs of Virginia Woolf and Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard’s partner for decades, and culminating with a photo of Colette. As such the line appears as a sentimental expression of Godard’s often-acknowledged love

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and admiration for women (however marked it might be or have been by his sexism), and their centrality in his cinematic and intellectual universe, as if their smiles were capable of becoming the universe, dismissing all else. But those images of smiling women are repeatedly interrupted by an intertitle bearing the title of the chapter—“the control of the universe”—and it is tempting to read this smile also as one that dismisses that universe, the universe controlled and created by Hollywood and the Americans, the object of critique and chastisement in the fourth chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma. Denis de Rougemont’s Penser avec les mains is also cited at length (and in its original form) in this chapter of Histoire(s) du cinéma. The citation accompanies a stark black-and-white film image of a nude young woman— the opposite of drapé—anxiously and repeatedly placing her curled hand under her chin; she is utterly alone, framed in profile, looking off-camera to the left; the shot is borrowed from Sharunas Bartas’s Corridor (Koridorius, 1994), an agonizingly depressing film about life in immediately post-Soviet Lithuania. The voice-over reads: “The spirit is only true when it manifests its presence, and in the word ‘manifest’ there is ‘hand.’ Love is the epitome of spirit.” At this point the screen goes black and the voice-over continues, contrasting the young woman’s isolation with the prospect of the love for another: “And love for one’s neighbor [l’amour du prochain] is an act.” And then a shot from Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) bursts onscreen, literalizing in an image the metaphor that is about to come: it is the image of two hands reaching toward each other, framed against an idyllic landscape under a blue sky, modeled on Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, accompanied by the voice-over as it continues: “That is to say a hand held out, not a dressed-up sentiment, not an ideal on the way to Jericho passing by a bandit’s victim.” Valéry’s poem and de Rougemont’s philosophical work are heard several minutes apart in Histoire(s) du cinéma, but they are knitted together in Film Socialisme: the joyful manifestation from Potemkin—and it is crucial that it is the joy that unleashes the soldiers’ wrath, a utopian joy whose threat is far more powerful than the mere negative revolt against the Tsar’s army and navy— brings forth that smile, a smile that is not a dressed-up feeling, but one which will elicit the act (the love of one’s neighbor) that will “dismiss the universe.” The third resonance makes it clear that this dismissive smile is not only a sign of love—or a metaphor for it—but also a utopian image. It is a resonance made clear by a happy accident of translation. In the four-volume book published to accompany Histoire(s) du cinéma, there is a felicitous discrepancy between the English and German translations of Valéry’s “Psaume sur une voix.” The French “congédiant” is translated into English,

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FIGURE 1.12 Interview with Jean-Luc Godard (2010), from DVD of Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). Still capture from DVD.

correctly, as “dismissing.” But the German text employs the verb “aufheben,” the notoriously untranslatable Hegelian and Marxist term, usually rendered as “sublate,” “supersede,” or “transcend,” so that the whole phrase becomes in German: “Dieses Lächlen, welches das Universum aufhebt”— this smile that supersedes the universe. With that translation, the Valéry psalm is shifted into an entirely different register, bringing along with it a host of associations from the history of Marxist thought—socialism as the positive supersession (die positive Aufhebung) of capitalism, as the early Marx would have put it—that can only bring a smile to this author’s face. This accident of translation was prescient. In a video interview for the French website and magazine Mediapart, Edwy Plenel asks Godard point blank about the meaning of socialism. In response, Godard offers Plenel a photocopy of a photograph of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, taken in the 1960s (fig. 1.12). In the photo, Cohn-Bendit wears a broad smile—I am tempted to say it is a photo of a grin with a cat—as he confronts a police officer in riot gear. The joy on Cohn-Bendit’s face is evident; he enters this confrontation with the policeman—the heir to the Tsar’s soldiers who fired upon that joyful manifestation in 1905—with a smile. Godard has written over the image: “Socialisme?” And beneath it, he answers, of course, telling us as well what remains of socialism after it loses its innocence to film: “‘Un sourire qui congédie l’univers’!”

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2

Kidlat Tahimik’s “Third World Projector”

A World Unknown Kidlat Tahimik’s almost unknown, but according to some, his finest film, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), is a monumental autobiographical essay, which he made during the momentous decade from 1981 to 1991 with his son, Kidlat de Guia. It opens with the landscape of Monument Valley in the American Southwest, familiar from so many John Ford films, rendered here not in Ford’s Technicolor but in Tahimik’s characteristically grainy and poorly exposed 16mm film (fig. 2.1). A dirt road with a car traveling along it stretches into the distance toward a horizon of buttes and mesas; the sky is leaden. A young boy enters the frame from below, walking up a hill until he fills the frame and passes out of it. The boy is the young Kidlat de Guia, Tahimik’s son, perhaps known to attentive fans of Tahimik’s first film, Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong bangungot, 1977), as the baby born to the “Bavarian girl” played by Tahimik’s wife, Katrin de Guia, in the back of Kidlat’s jeepney in southern Germany. Then, the baby Kidlat was the “first Kidlat on this side of the planet,” who, as Tahimik wryly noted, “looked a little bit like me.” The young Kidlat’s presence in I Am Furious Yellow (as well as that of his father, to be sure) will serve throughout the film as a constant and gentle reminder of Tahimik’s past work; much as Lemmy Caution’s (or rather Eddie Constantine’s) presence in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero provides a reference point against which to triangulate the transformations in Godard’s cinema and in the wider world across the span of several decades, so too does the young Kidlat occupy multiple temporal planes in his role as an intertextual link. In Perfumed Nightmare he appears as one of “those born later,” to bor-

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KID LAT TAHIMIK’S “TH IRD WO RL D PRO JECTO R”

FIGURE 2.1

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

row a phrase from Brecht’s famous poem of that title, that future generation for whom one undergoes the trials and labors and risks of political work in the present, and from whom one begs forbearance, as Brecht does at the end of his poem, for all of one’s failures to bring about a just world. In I Am Furious Yellow the young Kidlat’s maturation brings that future home and Tahimik must confront his own mixed successes, if not outright failures, in living up to the promises made in his earlier films, promises embodied in the grand concluding gestures of both Perfumed Nightmare and Turumba (1983). At the close of Perfumed Nightmare his fictional doppelgänger “Kidlat” literally blows away the European dignitaries and heads of state who have assembled to bid his boss, the American friend and bubble gum magnate, a fond farewell. The symbolic gesture promises a grander reckoning with “progress,” figured primarily in the form of neo-imperialism, American commodity culture, and the money system more generally. This ultimate reckoning, of course, has not come to pass by the time Tahimik commences I Am Furious Yellow in the 1980s, and Tahimik’s sons must grow up under the influence of a ubiquitous, oppressive, and violent American culture and

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suffer the degradations that progress inexorably brings. At the end of Turumba, strengthened by the gathering forces of nature in the form of a typhoon (for Tahimik a recurrent and important symbol of revolt against the indignities perpetrated against both the earth and other humans), the young Kadu refuses to accompany his father on a business trip to Europe, instead remaining behind to participate in the local turumba procession in honor of the Virgin. Turumba’s conclusion repeats the gesture of revolt from the final scenes of Perfumed Nightmare, but adds to it a more emphatic politics of nativism, the return to the wisdom and collective forms of indigenous tradition in which Tahimik places his faith, but which have not been able to stem the tide of influence of the “alien values,” as Tahimik calls them in I Am Furious Yellow, imported from the Philippines’ imperial master, the United States. All of these failures become more acute in I Am Furious Yellow because Tahimik and his family end up thrust into a situation where success becomes not only conceivable, but seemingly within grasp: the central event of the film, from which it takes its title, is the rise of the great “yellow” People Power movement in the wake of Benigno Aquino’s assassination and the departure of the dictator. But the opening of a “new democratic space,” as Tahimik calls it, in the wake of Marcos’s departure does not bring with it the hoped-for political liberation and cultural renewal; Corazon Aquino’s promises go unfulfilled and the energy of protest in the People Power movement disperses. “Yellow,” the color at the middle of the rainbow and the one adopted for the banners of Aquino’s political movement, becomes not a symbol of revolutionary fury, but instead the symbol of the middle ground and stasis, and Aquino’s presidency devolves into the “change that let things simply stay the same.” But none of this disappointment is evident in the prologue of I Am Furious Yellow, though the opening scene does offer a possible solution to the failure of the Yellow movement, a solution that will only really become apparent and comprehensible at the end of the film, as we shall see. For the moment, the opening shot is followed by various images set in the ravaged yet beautiful landscape of Monument Valley: the father and son’s campsite as their tent blows away in a gust of wind, junk cars tossed about, the young Kidlat playing with old toy cars in the sand, and an extreme long shot of an RV slowly grinding its way down the dirt road. This RV is a modern-day covered wagon, as the young boy’s carefully read voice-over suggests: Young Kidlat (reading): “In the old West, before the multi-lane highways, covered wagons struggled along the dusty trail.”

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His voice-over becomes hesitant, and stops. His father then helps out, prompting the boy to continue his reading: Tahimik: “. . . daring to enter . . . ” Young Kidlat: “. . . daring to enter the realm of the unknown.”

Likewise, a cinematic adventure into the unknown has begun as well, for Tahimik and his son, working without a script in the “cups-of-gas” (more on this in a moment) style for which he is known, never sure if the funds or motivation or the cosmos, as Tahimik likes to put it, will allow the adventure to ever reach its end, if it even has one. After this beginning, I Am Furious Yellow unfolds as the document of a literal journey, an open-ended road-trip film, part travelogue, part personal essay and diary, part ethnographic film, part chronicle of a series of adventures that will carry the two main protagonists and their friends and family across several continents and into the Philippine cordillera; through the turbulent political events of the Philippines in the 1980s, from the last days of the Marcos dictatorship to the birth of a democratic state; through the utopian anticipation of the political movement that brought that state into being and its subsequent disappointing reality; through the young Kidlat’s farewell to the innocence of childhood to the onset of puberty and the tumult of adolescence; and through a series of natural disasters that threaten at every moment to bring everything— figuratively and quite literally—crashing down. Structurally, it is broken down into a series of eight chronologically ordered sections, each titled with a color from the “rainbow” (“I Am Furious Yellow,” “I Am Curious Pink,” etc.) and framed by an untitled opening section and a concluding “Epilogue.” In its temporal scope and thematic voraciousness it is a remarkable achievement, and given its ambitions one might think it would unfold at a breathless pace, but I Am Furious Yellow has its own usually placid temporality, its own pace and rhythm, what Tahimik calls a “Third World pace,” as it meanders through more than three hours of screen time.

The Cups-of-Gas Method Tahimik and his son’s perambulations in I Am Furious Yellow find an echo in Tahimik’s own method of filmmaking, which he concisely articulated in a short talk in 1986, right in the middle of the period when he was making

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the film. In this brief lecture, Tahimik described filmmaking as a journey that can take a couple of different forms: Making a film is like taking a long trip. The film voyager can load up with a full tank and bring a credit card along to insure completion of the voyage in as short a time as possible. The voyager can also load up with a few cups of gasoline and drive until he runs out and scrounge around for subsequent cups of gas to get to his destination, without worrying about how long it takes to complete the voyage.

Tahimik calls this first method “full tank-cum-credit card fillmaking [sic; emphasis added],” a term that arose from an accidental misspelling while composing the talk; it was an apt Freudian slip, an “objet trouvé” that imparted a “cosmic message” that perfectly describes the degraded form of filmmaking now called “content creation” in the age of the New Media. Such “FTC fillmaking” is the method of Hollywood and bears within itself an ethic utterly foreign to Tahimik’s own. It is the filmmaking of domination: the domination of people, of objects, of nature, and of time. Tahimik’s own method, the cups-of-gas method, is conversely as much a practical solution to the financial and logistical challenges of film production (one works with old cameras, short-ends of film stock, borrowed gear and amateur actors) as it is an ethical principle that applies to life beyond cinema: it is not clear in Tahimik’s simile—making a film is like taking a long trip—if the long trip is the allegory for cinema, or if cinema is the allegory for the excursion that Tahimik clearly understands life to be. I would suggest the issue is undecidable, and this undecidability is part of Tahimik’s overall point: FTC filmmaking treats the act of film production as a means to an end; the finished product, completed on time and on budget, guaranteed to yield certain results (profit, the proper audience reaction, etc.) takes priority. FTC fillmaking is cinema produced under the sign of alienation. In contrast, the cups-of-gas method transcends this separation of means and ends: the process of production is as important as the product, the making of a film is not to be separated from life itself, and the question of whether or not cinema is an allegory for life or vice versa becomes irrelevant. The ethic proposed by the cups-of-gas doctrine concerns two primary attitudes or principles, both of which are articulated in various ways in his films as well, and which will return in multiple guises throughout this chapter. On the one hand, it puts forth an ethics of “self-determination,”

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which should be understood quite broadly: it is at once a model of subjective freedom (and a rather classical one at that) whose core ideal is subjective autonomy and liberty from determination by overbearing circumstance; it also embodies a nationalist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial politics whose goal is national independence; and it is also a politics of the de-alienation of labor (including that labor invested in filmmaking) and the demand for the control over the production of the life-world by the people who actually produce it. As an ethic of self-determination, it is also deeply practical, for it avers that the positing of an ethic and its being put into practice are essentially the same thing: an abstract set of principles means nothing without the practical attempt to realize them. What is perhaps most radical in this method is the insistence that one can live by this ethic despite the overwhelming objective forces that deem otherwise: Tahimik demands, in a manner that borders on a Sartrean doctrine of authentic choice, that one live a life as if one were free, even if objective circumstance might say otherwise. In other words, to reverse Adorno: in Tahimik, wrong life must be lived rightly. I would suggest that Tahimik’s films provide the living proof that such a thing is possible. The other primary ethical principle of the cups-of-gas method concerns time: unlike Hollywood film and FTC fillmaking, which attempt to subordinate the movement of time to the demands of the bottom line, the utopian practice of cups-of-gas filmmaking does not try to dominate the force and movement of time, but instead resists any such antagonistic relationship, yielding to time’s vagaries and detours and inconsistencies: The length of the trip, TIMEWISE, is a matter of choice depending on the combination of ingredients—inspiration, resources, tools, and working materials available, personal circumstances like family or emotional disturbances, etc. Assuming the filmmaker has the optimal mix of these ingredients to complete a filmic work of art, he can still choose the time frame: either to follow the dictum “time is money,” and battle with the clock to finish his artwork in the shortest period, or to allow time to be his ally and open up to cosmic inspirations provided by a relatively free time frame.

The utopia of film in Tahimik’s work resides (in part) in the possibility of this choice of time frame, a choice which for Third World filmmakers is sometimes made of necessity, as he makes clear. The lived experience of the temporality of creation is the battleground where one contends for subjective freedom; but it is precisely in the renunciation of the attempt

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to dominate time that the filmmaker finds freedom, a freedom characterized by an openness to the cosmos, to inspiration, and to the world. Thus the politics of self-determination embodied in cups-of-gas filmmaking, the method in which poverty liberates one from the dictates of the producers and the masters, includes its dialectical opposite term, renunciation of (self)-control and an embrace of the influence of the world and the cosmos itself. As it is, the apparent control offered to the filmmaker, and by extension the guaranteed satisfactions offered to the audience, by FTC films—films that Tahimik describes as “formulaic”—actually constitutes a form of submissive social behavior, an acquiescence to an oppressive temporal regime. Film form is both a figure for the submission to this temporal regime as well as an agent in its construction: Formula films probably get the kinds of audiences they deserve, and even condition them to accept these as the only valid style of filmmaking. And I might add that the film-going public also deserves the kind of films they support. Producers call for a sex scene or a mugging about 45 minutes into a film, because scientific studies of ass-behavior show that Western butts get restless at this point. But when you think about the Indonesians squatting for days on end [e.g., watching puppet theater], is it possible that the quality of the performance affects the restlessness? Should butt-habits determine the quality of the film? Cups-of-gas audiences have to be developed over time. Those who have learned to accept the filmmaker’s time framework have probably learned to depose the butt-dictator.

As with Tahimik’s cups-of-gas method of filmmaking, so too does the structure of his films’ final form embody an ethical and political principle as well, one which not only refuses and negates the temporality and message of dominant cinema, but which puts forth a positive proposition, one which draws its substance from the material conditions of making films, from the difficulties and vagaries of the conditions of production in the Third World, as much as from a set of indigenous (I will return to this term in due course) cultural practices yet to be overrun by First World, “alien values.” Eschewing the form of dominant, classical narrative and its associated temporal relations, Tahimik’s films instead follow what he calls “Third World time.” I Am Furious Yellow, with its multiple digressions, lack of a core narrative, as well as its recursive temporal unfolding, moving back and

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forth in time as it does, is exemplary in this. This form of time is not, as one might at first suppose, simply the re-creation of an imagined mythical-cyclical time of indigenous, traditional, pre-capitalist, or “pre-contact” societies; it is not a time untouched by the temporalities of progress and modernity. It is instead a time caught between the compulsions of such divergent temporalities, simultaneously dictated by the demands of capitalist production, order, and progress, and adherent to the rhythms of a culture that remains, in however compromised or distorted a fashion, bound in intimate relationship to “the land,” “nature,” and the “cosmos.” It must be said at the outset, however, that “land” and “nature” and “cosmos” in Tahimik’s films are not quite what one might initially expect, an important point I will develop in due course. One might also assume that the First World would be immune to these sorts of tensions between the older and the contemporary or post-contemporary temporalities that Tahimik identifies; in the First World the older “pre-capitalist” temporal relationships seem to have long since faded to the point of vanishing, unable any longer to prompt or generate a sense of contradiction or conflict with the “eternal present,” as Alexander Kluge has put it, that characterizes postmodern time. But Tahimik’s films insist otherwise; the doleful experiences of the Third World do not remain isolated there, but are also to be found in the First World. Fredric Jameson has noted how Tahimik’s work foregrounds this fact, arguing that Perfumed Nightmare is marked by a kind of Brechtian inversion of perspective between First and Third Worlds that reveals that the essential experiences of Third World existence pervade the life of the First World. It is an estrangement that lends Perfumed Nightmare much of its didactic thrust and efficacy: Just as Turumba sets out to illustrate the ravages of a money economy, so also The Perfumed Nightmare [sic] may be read as a virtual textbook illustration of the classical account: “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones . . . all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto). What is paradoxical about the illustration . . . is that the proposition is demonstrated on the First World rather than on the Third. The lesson is learned in Paris rather than in Manila, and the political or pedagogical pathos that might have been expected to be aroused in the service of a properly postcolonial militancy is here displaced and redirected back to the source.

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A similar perspectival displacement also characterizes I Am Furious Yellow and the political ethic—what I will call Tahimik’s “Third World ethic”—it asserts: in a reversal of the contemporary didactics of aid programs and the now ubiquitous NGOs (non-governmental organizations), which are predicated on the little-questioned virtues of “knowledge transfers” and “technology transfers” that are so often “alibis,” as Gayatri Spivak would put it, for neo-imperial intentions and the further entrenchment of the ideology of “development,” Tahimik shows that the Third World has a great deal it can teach the First about things it does not know and things it claims to already know.

The “Third World Projector” These lessons already commence in the opening scene of I Am Furious Yellow. When Tahimik and his son arrive in the United States at JFK airport on the trip that will eventually take them to Monument Valley, Tahimik welcomes the young Kidlat to America with the words “Welcome to the First World!” But here, in the belly of the beast, upon finally arriving in what the bubble gum magnate called “Paradise” in Perfumed Nightmare, what Tahimik and his son find before them in Monument Valley is most definitely the Third World: an impoverished and tired land, subject to all of the abuses that inevitably accompany capitalist progress, yet enjoying none of its enrichment. The landscape is strewn with trash and the life is hard; the natives are reduced to mimicking the clichés of Native American life proffered by Hollywood: Tahimik’s Navajo friend makes extra cash by posing for pictures dressed up as a movie-style Indian at John Ford’s Point, a tourist attraction where Ford shot some notable landscapes. Tahimik here inverts the basic critique of the concept of the Third World, which is often accused of being a First World invention that imposes a damaging homogeneity on the spaces, peoples, and cultures that lie outside of it. Tahimik, by contrast, imputes to the First World a surprising, radical spatial and cultural heterogeneity, finding within the seemingly smug and comfortable confines of the First World a presence of the Third World itself. Within this bit of Brechtian didacticism, one can see an anticipation of Tahimik’s broader politics: in a body of work that has traditionally found an audience primarily abroad, in Europe, North America, East and Southeast Asia (Japan in particular), to point out the transnational presence of the Third World like this suggests a possible global alliance politics based not merely on First World sympathies with the Third, but on a

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commonality of class experience, a commonality of the experience of one’s place in the system of production that transcends the vagaries of capital’s geography: the political energies that Tahimik will later find in I Am Furious Yellow amongst the Igorot in the cordillera of the Philippines or on the streets of Manila might well find resonances in distant contexts and distant zones where the Third World may be found, even in the heart of the First. Thus just as Kidlat discovers the baleful aspects of progress in Paris and not in Manila, so too in I Am Furious Yellow does Tahimik begin to learn the virtues of Third World culture in the United States. It is here—in Monument Valley, not in the hill villages of the Philippines—that Tahimik begins to develop his own version of Third Worldism, a positive reinvestment of the controversial term with a politics and ethics that is the correlate to that of his cups-of-gas method. After the young Kidlat’s opening lines, the son’s voice-over continues as we see him and a man, whom we later know to be Tahimik’s Navajo friend, cobbling together some sort of machine out of rusted scrap: Young Kidlat: In the land of plenty, junk gathers dust . . . Tahimik: . . . or simply rusts . . . Young Kidlat: . . . or simply rusts into dust. In the land of not-so-plenty, wipe off the dust and what do you get? A rusty Third World projector!

And with that they produce what looks like a child’s imitation of a film projector, assembled from castoffs and junk from a forgotten time, all found on the desert floor (figs. 2.2 and 2.3). In this scene, the meaning of the “world” in the term “Third World” that courses throughout I Am Furious Yellow starts to become clear. This world, or better yet, this environment—the Umwelt or “surrounding world” in a Heideggerian sense—of this small spot in the First World’s Third World is comprised of two seemingly incompatible sets of features which Tahimik and his characters (and by allegorical extension, the spectator) will have to negotiate and draw on for future physical and spiritual sustenance: the almost conventionally gorgeous natural surroundings (here the iconic and archetypal desert landscape of Monument Valley) and the ubiquitous waste products of capitalist development and consumer society (rusting hulks of ancient automobiles, discarded household appliances and furniture), which can only be excluded from the image with judicious and selective framing, are gathered together here carefully, almost lovingly. There is little place in Tahimik’s work for either that degraded aesthetic of nature photography

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FIGURE 2.2–2.3

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

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found in Sierra Club calendars and National Geographic magazines (or for that matter in Hollywood westerns), or for the tragic documentary exposés of environmental ravages which now feel so ubiquitous and deadened. In a world of universalized human presence and influence, where even an image of unsullied nature is a cliché and hence of human derivation, it is not clear what sort of political or cognitive effect such images could have any longer: of what use is a picture of a pristine landscape, when just out of frame one would find a clear-cut or a tailings pond? And what of those images of environmental ravage, such as Edward Burtynsky’s famous photographs? They are essentially nostalgic images that project as their obverse or negative precisely the sort of natural world that no longer exists, if it ever did. I Am Furious Yellow charts instead a different course through the new environment of our time: if, as Jameson argues, the essential lesson of Perfumed Nightmare is the universality of the experience of constant agitation, insecurity, and disturbance of social conditions that accompanies capitalist progress, then that lesson is supplemented in I Am Furious Yellow, which brings to the fore something else about capitalist development, namely its relentless and incessant and overbearing production of waste, trash, rejects, and by-products that now constitute the fundament of a truly global second nature. This is what has become of what the early Marx called the ideal of a fully humanized nature; this is the new form of appearance of what Marx, following Hegel, called the substance of the individual, his or her inorganic nature: it is not the beautiful and liberatory products of human labor—be they historically developed forms of thought or modern technical forces of production—that lie ready to hand, available for appropriation by human subjects. Instead, it is the waste, the forgotten and obsolete matter that stands as the marker of historical progress and where Tahimik turns to find the substance of a new subject. While most of us in the “land of plenty” can shield our eyes from the trashed globe as the leftovers of our consumption and the by-products of production get carted off to the municipal dump, contenting ourselves perhaps with dutifully recycling our bottles and cans and newspapers (while ignoring what profits accrue to the recyclers and what further expansion of Earth-destroying capitalism it subsequently encourages), it is the fate of the transnational Third World to be the recipient of much of this waste. But the larger point here concerns First and Third Worlds equally: given the truly global dimensions of capital, and given the near universal sullying of the environment and near total destruction of anything remotely akin to nature, it is incumbent upon all of us that we must come to adopt

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this Umwelt of trash as our own and deal with it. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak has argued, in terminology also borrowed from Heidegger, that “[t]he village [Spivak’s code-word for the Third or Fourth World] must teach us to make the globe a world.” Tahimik’s films, and their pedagogy, pursue a similar goal, perhaps better articulated as the imperative that the village must teach us to make a world out of the dump: from the monumental mess that we have made, we must somehow render a world, one as yet unknown, but crafted from all too familiar—and at times repellent and distasteful—things. The young Kidlat’s “Third World projector” thus embodies a particular understanding of the world and the environment; it is at once descriptive of a particular historical experience of the world as well as prescriptive, for it projects, if I may put it that way, a particular relationship to that world, figuring yet again a proper ethical attitude. Tahimik’s films are full of characters who enact this Third World ethic: the workers at the jeepney factory as well as Kaya, the bamboo construction artist and blacksmith, in Perfumed Nightmare; the family who makes papier-mâché dolls in Turumba; and a whole host of artists, from Tahimik’s wife Katrin—a stained glass artist—to the craftsmen in I Am Furious Yellow, all of whom work with found objects and materials in their art. Tahimik’s films raise the particular creative activities of these artists and craftsmen—and Tahimik himself must be included in this group—to an allegorical level; their manner of interacting with and appropriating the environment becomes exemplary, worthy of imitation and variation by the spectators, who find themselves figured, as pupils, in I Am Furious Yellow in the characters of Tahimik’s three sons. But it is essential to emphasize that this ethical moment, this set of guiding principles, does not posit a set of unquestioned first principles; nor does it constitute a dogma derived from a catalog of preexisting beliefs, such as those of Christianity, found everywhere in Tahimik’s films, or even those of Tahimik’s beloved Igorot tribespeople. Instead, the Third World ethic is deeply materialist in its grounding: it arises organically, in the Marxian sense, from historical experience itself and from the very material conditions of social production that the term “Third World” names. Or, to put it otherwise, the notion of the Third World offers a (conceptual) bridge (to use one of Tahimik’s favorite metaphors from Perfumed Nightmare) or mediation between the realm of the economic (the totality of social production) and politics “proper”; it is a solution, in a respect, to the question of base and superstructure, a way to simultaneously designate a given historical situation in its brute economic facticity (“we live in the land

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of not so plenty”) and draw from it, again organically, a set of ethical and political principles. A scene in “I Am Frivolous Green,” the first major section of I Am Furious Yellow, beautifully and wittily illustrates the content of Tahimik’s Third World ethic and its grounding in material relations. In the scene, the young Kidlat has a loose tooth and is trying to pull it out by means of a string attached to his big toe; he wiggles his toe, and thus his tooth, back and forth, while his father films him. When it pops out, a characteristic bit of dialogue unfolds: Young Kidlat: It’s out? Tahimik: Galing [that’s great], Kidlat, you’re a real Third World dentist! Young Kidlat: What means [sic] “Third World?” Tahimik: I’ll tell you later. Hold up that tooth again.

And Tahimik starts to film the tooth in close-up. After a pause and a black frame or two, the dialogue continues, but this time accompanied by images that, in well-nigh Chaplinesque fashion, transpose the scale of Kidlat’s toe and piece of string to far larger—and collective—proportions: we see a group of men hauling a massive log, by means of ropes and with nothing but their own physical strength, with great effort up an improbably steep hillside in the jungle. These images are followed by shots of people building a wooden house. In each case, everything is done by hand (figs. 2.4 and 2.5): Tahimik: In America and Japan and Germany, it is mainly machines that work, like bulldozers, earth movers. Here, people power moves things. Young Kidlat: Ahhh. Third World is people-powered? Tahimik: More muscle with less help from machines. You know, Third World is a way of life. A road, a route for surviving without wasting. Instead of artificial energy, like electricity, the more dependent you are on your own strength, this means more independence. If you chop wood by hand or if you use power saw [sic], this affects the way you attack bigger problems. Young Kidlat: Third World is a way of solving problems? Tahimik: Yes. Third World is a way of solving problems.

This dialogue, as well as the notion of Third World that is articulated here, is deceptively simple, as is much of the pedagogy in Tahimik’s “naïve” art, which exploits the seeming inability of such apparently innocent figures

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FIGURE 2.4–2.5

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

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as Tahimik and his son to dissemble. The virtue held up here, at the individual or local level, is that of doing things for oneself, without reliance on external aid or unnecessary (or unavailable) technologies. In essence, the film asks: Who needs a dentist, with his tools and anesthesia and expense, when a piece of string and a bit of courage will suffice? Turumba asks similar questions: Why use an electric razor to cut hair when a hand-operated clipper will do? Why buy a record player when you have your own guitar? But the shift in scale in the image, from the string to the ropes, from the tooth to the log, from the individual to the collective, reinforces—and becomes a sort of “allegory at the level of form” for—Tahimik’s basic assertion: how you solve small problems affects the way you “attack bigger problems.” So the film repeatedly demands that one likewise transpose whatever minor lessons are taught within it to a larger scale; this principle of selfreliance must be extended and displaced onto broader social terrain, the terrain of political problem solving, social and economic organization, and national self-determination. Self-reliance stands as an implicit rejection of the neocolonialist projects of military aid, foreign aid programs, and the assistance provided by NGOs. While this is indeed a sort of allegorical pedagogy—if you can make a house by yourself, why can’t you also build a nation by yourself? if you can pull your own tooth, what else might you be able to do?—that demands the conscious shift between seemingly incommensurate social spheres, between the utterly intimate, the personal, or the domestic, and the realm of the nationally or globally political, there is an even more emphatically materialist epistemology at stake. Tahimik’s work asserts that certain collective, and individual, capacities for problem solving, for self-governance and self-regulation—in the end, capacities for the conscious construction of history itself—are utterly determined by the degree to which humans are intimately involved and sensuously engaged in the immediate production of their world. Thus, if you are conditioned to rely on experts for pulling your teeth, and if you are conditioned to rely on electricity to power your fan, and if you depend on your radio to provide your music and NGOs to manage your health care system and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to finance your dams, then you are less likely to take these things into your own hands, literally and metaphorically. But on the other hand, if you build your own homes, if you forge your own machetes, and if you create your own music, then you are more likely to be ready and able and willing to run your political affairs as well. That this is a lesson of desperate currency outside of the Third World should be eminently clear from even

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the most cursory glance around the contemporary political landscape in the land of plenty. It would be a mistake, though, to think Tahimik’s Third World politics consisted solely of the refusal of First World military and economic domination so that the Third World might pursue its own version of capitalist development as it sees fit. One should recall Jameson’s point that Perfumed Nightmare shifts its analysis from the “political” to the economic and from the “thematics of power” to that of “reification.” For the concept of the Third World alludes to a problem endemic to capitalist progress in any form—in Third and First Worlds—and one which inherently undermines that individual and collective capacity for self-determination and self-reliance so central to Tahimik’s politics. Tahimik thus raises a problem discussed long ago by Marx in the first volume of Capital, where the notion of the “composition of capital” comes to figure precisely the degree of involvement of human beings, as the embodiment of living labor, in the production of their worlds. The concept is most directly elaborated in the chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” where Marx identified the composition of capital as the “most important factor” in the “influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class.” It is worth quoting Marx at length here, for his discussion provides useful theoretical specificity for the sort of alienation Tahimik finds inherent in the increased technification of the human relationship to the world: The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labor-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living laborpower. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labor necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the valuecomposition, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this, I call the value-composition of capital, insofar as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital.

For Marx, an increase in the productivity of labor accompanies the increasing technical composition of capital. There is thus a general tendency in the

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development of capitalism for the organic composition of capital to increase as productivity increases; in other words, the amount of labor-power necessary to produce a particular quantity of commodities or values tends to decrease over time, so that overall less work becomes necessary to produce the same amount of goods and values. The liberatory potential in this is clear: it is a formula that expresses the utopian dream of the reduction of necessary labor to an absolute minimum. Tahimik clearly seems to share this fantasy, as one might conclude from all the images of people at rest to be found throughout his films—recall Kidlat sleeping under the tree in front of his family house in Perfumed Nightmare; or think of images of the grandmother sleeping away the day in Turumba. But capitalism does not permit this dream to be realized, for its requirement to expand demands the ever greater production of goods, goods which Tahimik would call unnecessary, or worse. This, in its most basic formulation, is the condition that Tahimik labels “overdevelopment”: the compulsory production of unnecessary goods. Against such a condition, Tahimik’s utopian dream is predicated on avoiding unnecessary labor in the first place by avoiding the production of such goods and commodities; his politics opposes economic growth conceived as an unquestioned good. But it is also clear in Marx’s analysis that the increased organic composition of capital entails a dear cost for the working class; in a passage that recalls the early Marx’s so-called humanist language of alienation (and which, as such, suggests a deeper continuity between the early and late Marx than many might like to admit), Marx argues that the increase in the productivity of labor appears, seemingly paradoxically, as a “diminution of the subjective factor of the labor process as compared with the objective factor.” This “objective factor”—call it fixed capital, machinery, or dead labor—is itself the product of human activity, but it comes to dominate the subjective factor to an ever greater degree. As such, it constitutes a real form of oppression, one no less powerful for its origins at the hands of laboring human beings themselves. In language that shows his continued indebtedness to Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx writes: “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.” This is, I believe, the fundamental lesson of Turumba. Now, to translate this into Tahimik’s terminology: the greater the organic composition of capital, the less the subjective factor in the overall production process; if understood at the level of overall social production, one could say that the smaller the contribution of the subjective factor to

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social production, the less “people power” is involved in the production of the world, of the humanized Umwelt. Here then the particular good fortune of the Third World, as “underdeveloped” or “excluded from progress,” becomes patently clear: the Third World in Tahimik is conceived of as a site where the composition of capital has not grown to the degree it has in the First World; it is a site where the “subjective factor” still holds (relatively speaking) sway, or where its presence can still be sensed. And it is from this perspective, then, that one must understand the critique of “progress” and “development” found in all of Tahimik’s films: development, that seemingly unquestionable good brought to the Third World by its benevolent masters, be they in the form of colonizers who took it upon themselves to lift the colonized out of poverty (Tahimik calls this later, as we will see, “killing us softly”), or in the form of the beneficence of the United Nations and NGOs, is nothing other than the (compulsory) increase in the organic composition of capital. The negative dialectic that inheres, then, in development, is that increased development leads to an increase in the domination of humans by the products of their labors, a development which, in the end, constitutes a decrease in effective freedom. In the passage from Capital just cited, Marx understands the effect of the changes in the organic composition of capital on the “subjective factor” in production in quantitative terms. Its value is measured quantitatively in comparison to the value of fixed capital, for instance. Or the increase in the organic composition of capital is comprehended as a quantitative decrease in the relative subjective contribution to social production. In either case, Marx presumes a sort of invariable subjective essence—an invariable subjective quality—that remains unchanged despite the various transformations in the composition of capital. For Tahimik, however, the increased use of technology leads to a transformation in the very nature and character of the subject, a qualitative transformation in the essence of the individual and collective subjects who employ the machinery to which they are attached. Turumba, for example, is a film not only about the replacement of pre-capitalist relations of production with properly capitalist relations; it is not merely about the destruction of older, indigenous traditions and their replacement with commodified forms. It is also about the transformation of human nature itself, a transformation figured most prominently through the figure of Romy, the father and entrepreneur who in his pursuit of wealth becomes something against his nature, so to speak—an unfriendly, calculating ogre, indifferent to the needs and desires of his family and the community to which he had belonged.

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How might one understand such a transformation in human nature? It has already been shown how Marx argues that human freedom or autonomy is reduced through the increase in the technical composition of capital, but this describes the simple quantitative reduction of human freedom, not necessarily an alteration in what it means to be either human or free: it does not carry through consequently Marx’s dictum from the sixth thesis on Feuerbach that “the human essence” is “in its reality the ensemble of social relations.” Adorno, interestingly, has noted this limit in Marx’s argument in a relatively overlooked aphorism in Minima Moralia, entitled “Novissimum organum,” where he discusses the concept of the composition of capital, rehearsing the basic Marxian assertion that the “social process” determines individual existence, rendering that existence not only the biological and subjective basis of that social process but also its “reflection.” For Adorno, changes in the composition of capital inexorably transform the individual subject in its very core. In other words, changes in the composition of capital determine changes in the very nature—the quality—of the subjective factor of the labor process, and not just its relative quantity: “the alteration of the technical composition of capital” is prolonged within those [subjects] encompassed, and indeed constituted, by the technological demands of the production process. The organic composition of man [sic] is growing. That which determines subjects as means of production and not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital. The pat phrase about the “mechanization” of man is deceptive because it thinks of him as something static which, through an “influence” from outside, an adaptation to conditions of production external to him, suffers certain deformations. But there is no substratum beneath such “deformations,” no ontic interior on which social mechanisms merely act externally: the deformation is not a sickness in men but in the society which begets its children with the “hereditary taint” that biologism projects on to nature.

This does not constitute a facile anti-technological stance, but is rather the assertion that technology in some ways precedes human essence, constituting it as much as it is constituted by humans. It should also be clear that Adorno is here speaking of the deployment of technology within the context of particular forms of social organization, where technology takes the form of “fixed capital” and humans the form of “variable capital”; in other words, technology’s determination of human essence would be different in a noncapitalist world. This helps us understand that Tahimik is not “anti-

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technology” in some nostalgic or simplistic way, for his critiques of technology (for example in his various representations of space travel in Perfumed Nightmare or as elaborated in Turumba) are also articulated within the context of a critique of capitalism and capitalist progress. In any case, it is clear that the increased technical composition of capital pushes through a dramatic transformation in the individual subject and its social relationships, captured in Adorno’s text in the movement from the reference to the “organic composition of capital” to the reference to the “organic composition of man [sic].” Later in the same section from Minima Moralia, Adorno specifies the nature of the transformation of the human as a move from an older form of subjectivity—here described as comprising “firm characteristics”—to a kind of automaticity that mimics the functioning of technology itself: Precisely this transition from firm characteristics to push-button behavior patterns—though apparently enlivening—is an expression of the rising organic composition of man. Quick reactions, unballasted by a mediating constitution, do not restore spontaneity, but establish the person as a measuring instrument deployed and calibrated by a central authority. The more immediate its response, the more deeply in reality mediation has advanced: in the prompt, unresistant reflexes, the subject is entirely extinguished.

In this passage, Adorno invokes Walter Benjamin, and in particular his notion that the increased technification of society, while bringing great comfort to those who can enjoy it, also leads closer and closer to subjective mechanization and to a loss of skills described in a manner uncannily close to Tahimik’s own rendering of the loss of subjective labor capacities. As Benjamin famously writes in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”: “Comfort isolates; on the other hand it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization. In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the match brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: a single abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps.” This seemingly minor invention—the wooden match—entails a whole transformation of subjective capacities; lost are a whole host of skills and with them an ensemble of particular relationships to the world. No more does one know how to start a fire with flint and steel; no longer must one maintain the burning embers in the hearth so that one will have a fire the next morning. And in Tahimik, the same can be said for the purchase of a transistor radio or an electric razor, for the construction of a supermarket or a hydroelectric dam,

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or for the purchase of a fast-food meal: in the end, the progressive enrichment of society via technification leads to subjective destitution. The Third World, then, in Tahimik’s work, as precisely a place where “people power moves things,” is a site which has yet to yield to this intensified alteration of the technical composition of capital and society more generally; it is a place where there is more involvement of the hands and the conscious mind in the creation of the lived environment. This is crucial for understanding Tahimik’s interest in the movements of indigenous peoples, above all those of the Igorot of the Philippine cordillera, who for Tahimik embody and enact forms of social organization that not only remain, to an extent, outside of the circuits of capitalist valorization, but that also sustain a more intimate and immediate involvement on the part of their members in the production of their worlds.

Furious Yellow “Third World is people-powered.” These words are carefully chosen. “People Power” is one of those frequent terms in Tahimik that function simultaneously figuratively and literally, assuming an allegorical function while maintaining their original denoted content: in referring both to the “subjective factor” of social production as well as the political movement that toppled Marcos and brought Corazon Aquino to power, the term “people power” constitutes another of Tahimik’s cherished cosmic messages (much like the misspelling of “fillmaker”), as if the near-mythical coincidence between its literal and allegorical functions offered a spiritual guarantee for the correctness and authenticity of both the political movement and Tahimik’s Third World ethic. The term implies that the People Power movement should realize the ideal of a people-powered politics. The titular section of the film, “I Am Furious Yellow (1983–86),” chronicles the rise of the People Power movement and portrays the general euphoria of those very promising days. This section of the film is stirring, in both its content and its editing, and captures a sense of the excitement of the time, as well as the real fear and hesitation that accompanied the public protests against military rule. The buildup to Marcos’s departure, as the Philippine populace anxiously waits to see which way the military will turn after the fraudulent elections in 1986, is palpably reminiscent of the tension before the mutiny in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin or before the assault on the Winter Palace in October. And there is a moment of thrilling anticipation when the dictator finally departs, a sense of openness and

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possibility that with the departure of this servant of American imperialism a truly autonomous Philippines, and with it a vibrant and independent culture, will finally be able to arise. Despite his general and relentless optimism, there are few moments of such sheer collective celebration like this in Tahimik’s work, except perhaps for the scenes of the turumba processions; most of his visions of community are retrospective (as in the recollections of grandmother’s youth in Turumba) or at best appear under the threat of its imminent demise (like the Igorot culture so celebrated in the “Indio-genous Brown” chapter in I Am Furious Yellow). In Perfumed Nightmare and Turumba, created under the dictatorship and with little apparent chance of its overthrow on the horizon, revolt is always truncated, an essentially negative and sometimes violent gesture (as in the blowing-away of the gathered heads of state at the end of Perfumed Nightmare or in the great typhoon that concludes Turumba) whose ultimate realization in the constitution of a new, future society is never portrayed. But the euphoria of these “yellow days” before the election, the elation felt at Aquino’s final victory, and the sense of triumph that accompanied the tyrant’s subsequent departure quickly give way to revolutionary disappointment and disillusionment, and the film casts about in search of explanations for Aquino’s failures to deliver on her promises, for the repeated attempts at coups d’état, for the simmering civil war between government troops and the various rebel factions, and for the general sense that things had simply remained the same. In the end, the explanation that the film offers is a cultural one, as is learned at the transition between the two long sections that follow “I Am Furious Yellow (1983–1986) and that form the backbone of the film: “We Are Colonial Red White and Blue” and “We Are Dis-Harmonious Disney-Color.” In these two installments, and in a nativist tone that is at odds with his normally open and internationalist expansiveness, a clearly bitter Tahimik argues that the failure of the Aquino regime is the result of the influence of “alien values”: Tahimik: War as a way of life connects best whenever a people are disanchored, disconnected, disoriented, de-colored by that avalanche of alien values which have no inner link to the land. Ask John Hay, he knows what I am talking about.

Here Tahimik refers to John Hay, the secretary of state under President McKinley, who was not only responsible for negotiating the Treaty of Par-

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is in 1898, which secured the acquisition of the Philippines by the United States for the sum of $20 million (about which more in a moment), but who also advocated the subsequent policy of “benevolent assimilation” as a means of dealing with the resistant and unruly Philippine populace. This policy, whose name the young Kidlat at one point aptly mispronounces— yet another cosmic interjection—“benevolent assassination,” becomes for Tahimik the ideal form of cultural imperialism more generally. “We Are Colonial Red White and Blue” and “We Are Dis-Harmonious Disney-Color” construct something of a genealogy of benevolent assimilation/assassination as a cultural politics distinct from, yet working in tandem with, economic and military-political domination. The genealogy that Tahimik constructs extends back in its earliest reaches to the period of first contact with Europeans, and it finds its myth of origins in the tale of Ferdinand Magellan’s slave, Enrique, an “actual” historical figure who is the central character in a film that Tahimik has been attempting to make for more than two decades. Long sections of this eternal work-in-progress, which has been provisionally and variously titled Magellan’s Slave or Memories of Overdevelopment, are excerpted in “We Are Dis-Harmonious Disney-Color.” These excerpts seem to serve two functions. On the one hand, they provide an opportunity for Tahimik to explicitly represent and thematize the sheer difficulties involved in his cups-of-gas method: he cannot secure funds to finish the film and he is constantly, even obsessively, on the lookout for a Spanish galleon to use as a set, boring Kidlat with his repeated detours on their journey in pursuit of promising leads which, naturally, never pan out. The content of this film-within-a-film is significant as well, as it stages the initial “cross-cultural” encounter between a Filipino and a European and thus allows Tahimik to explore the complexities of that encounter, complexities which are approached from two rather distinct angles. On the one hand, Memories of Overdevelopment enacts a now familiar form of counter-historiography, recounting the history of empire from the standpoint of one of its subjects and victims, instead of from the standpoint of the victors. For the conceit of Memories of Overdevelopment is that Enrique, and not Magellan, may well have been the first person to ever circumnavigate the globe: the story, as Tahimik tells it, is that Enrique was indentured by Magellan in what would eventually become the Philippines on an early expedition eastward from Europe. Magellan brought Enrique back to Europe, and later, when he undertook the journey westward that would eventually lead to the first European circumnavigation of the globe,

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he took Enrique with him. Magellan, of course, was killed in the Philippines, and Enrique stayed behind, having essentially returned home, thereby achieving a complete circuit around the earth long before any of Magellan’s shipmates made it back to Spain. On the other hand, the Magellan film, as it is excerpted here, establishes the central role of culture—figured primarily in the guises of language and modern science—in securing the dominance of the Spanish empire from its earliest origins as a global phenomenon. In doing this, it foregrounds two major features of the mechanics of cultural domination: first, Memories of Overdevelopment portrays cultural domination as a form of training in a “new” culture; this is precisely the imposition of alien values about which Tahimik complains so strenuously. But second, and more interestingly, Memories of Overdevelopment vividly portrays the tragic impossibility of ever returning to a moment “before contact” with European culture; it clearly shows that contact sunders any hope of ever bridging the originary “epistemic fracture of imperialism,” as Spivak calls it, and restoring some lost cultural unity. Enrique becomes an irrevocably modern figure, one capable of all sorts of European skills (he plays chess, speaks Portuguese, excels in math and science, etc.) and possessed of a (literally) worldly knowledge that forever severs his pre-reflective immersion in indigenous life. This is, crucially, a subject position analogous to Tahimik’s own biographical position, as well as one rehearsed in Perfumed Nightmare: Tahimik’s (and “Kidlat’s” in Perfumed Nightmare) own recuperative or protective stance toward the culture and traditions of his homeland has as its condition of possibility his intimate exposure to American and European culture. Indigenous culture, by this view, can only be protected once it appears threatened, and once that threat appears the original unity and integrity of the indigenous culture has already been lost. So cultural domination does not only function by simply “replacing” older cultures with a seemingly superior and invincible modern one but also by making an innocent return to earlier cultures impossible and thus making any resistance from a standpoint of utter exteriority to the dominant culture thoroughly untenable. Tahimik’s nativist tone, his critique of alien values, is thus immediately marked by a contradiction that it cannot escape and with which I Am Furious Yellow must come to terms in one way or another as it struggles to explain and work through the disappointments of Aquino’s failures. From this “originary” moment in Enrique’s tale, I Am Furious Yellow then goes on to spin out its genealogy of cultural domination—and of struggle against it—further elaborating and developing these two basic

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features of the mechanics of cultural domination, generating its version of counter-history while constantly reflecting on the complexities of overcoming the influence of alien values; the film continues on to the American purchase of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris (oddly skipping over the Spanish and Catholic culture that figures so prominently in Tahimik’s two earlier films), to American cultural policy (benevolent assimilation) during its colonial administration of the islands, to the subsequent presence of the Americans after formal independence in 1946, and finally to the ubiquity of a nefarious, and in essence American, commodity culture. In the political stance that emerges from this historical narrative in I Am Furious Yellow, and that marks Tahimik’s thinking more generally, cultural struggle against imperial domination assumes a priority and takes on a more immediate urgency than any overtly political, military, or economic struggle. In an interview about I Am Furious Yellow, Tahimik describes how his own experience of the Aquino government led him to this position: I began to see some contradictions. Why wasn’t it getting together in spite of all that yellow people-power energy? Why couldn’t this new democracy under a new leadership take off ? And I suddenly realized it’s not depending [sic] on who is in the presidential palace—it’s really that the cultural linkages were totally kaput [sic]. . . . Suddenly the footage of what were instamatic-like fragments could be contextualized in terms of this running thought: the political problem is, in the end, cultural.

But this discovery of the “last instance” of determination by the cultural is fleeting; despite his overwhelming insistence to the contrary, both in print and on film, it remains impossible for Tahimik to maintain an emphatic distinction between the sphere of culture and the spheres of politics and economics; every discussion he undertakes of the cultural ends up branching out, as if against its will, into the economic and the political. Take, for example, a sequence in the section entitled “I Am Furious Yellow,” introduced by an apparently innocent question from the young Kidlat. He misreads (once again practicing the cosmic politics of mispronunciation) a newspaper headline: instead of properly reading “Fighting the Dictator in the US,” Kidlat asks, confused, “Fighting the dictator in the us? In the us?” This elicits the response from Tahimik: “You’re right, Kidlat, fighting the dictator in us is harder than fighting dictators in the U.S. We should start with our earliest memories, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the movies we’ve seen, the games we’ve played” (fig. 2.6). In this sequence the echoes of

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FIGURE 2.6

from DVD.

I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

Perfumed Nightmare are quite strong, recalling the “Kidlat” figure’s youthful fascination with Disneyland and space travel, beauty queens and bubble gum, a fascination with deeply autobiographical roots for Tahimik, who, as he has put it frequently, spent his first “33 typhoon seasons in a cocoon of American dreams.” The son’s question initiates an almost bewildering montage of such “American dreams”: a family visit to a McDonald’s restaurant (where Tahimik petulantly refuses to go inside), a game of MONOPOLY, repeated shots of ATMs and store signs advertising “Open 24 Hours” in English, toy cash registers, and newspaper headlines detailing Marcos’s financial dealings in the United States. The sequence demonstrates that American culture does not merely consist of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the games children play. It is not merely the realm of commodified fantasy. Instead, culture itself is deeply economic and political; the market and money, air bases and the comprador oligarchy, are culture. The economic does not comprise the background or determinant base to the cultural superstructure: the pursuit of profit, the obsession with money and wealth,

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is the American way of life. Thus the images of board games and fast food quickly transform themselves into images of generalized consumption and the cash nexus, and the montage becomes a sort of serial equation positing each image and each item it represents as the equivalent to the one which follows, such that MONOPOLY = police repression = ATM = etc. In other words, all cultural “values” end up being dispensed at the ATM and from the barrel of a gun. It becomes clear in I Am Furious Yellow, as it does in all of Tahimik’s major films, that the embrace and consumption of American culture is a kind of learning process, to use a concept of Alexander Kluge’s; or, in another language, to embrace U.S. culture is to submit to an indoctrination into not only a whole set of alien values but also into a whole way of life, a notion that should be understood in the most expansive and far-reaching terms possible. What Fredric Jameson says about the consumption of Hollywood culture applies here fully to all aspects of cultural consumption: such consumption is “the apprenticeship to a specific culture, to an everyday life as a cultural practice: a practice of which commodified narratives are the aesthetic expression, so that the populations in question learn both at the same time.” By this view, “Hollywood is not merely a name of a business that makes money but also for a fundamental late-capitalist cultural revolution, in which old ways of life are broken up and new ones set in place.” From this perspective, then, it would again be a mistake to think of the cultural as merely cultural, for culture instantly folds back into the political and the economic: one cannot separate the ideological “message” of the game of MONOPOLY that little Kidlat likes to play, or the ideological interpellations that Hollywood cinema engineers in its subjects, from full acceptance of and engagement in commodity exchange, acceptance of the profit motive as the ultimate justification of all activity, discipline into the demands of wage-labor and the working day, the legitimation and naturalization of a class society, and the unthinking worship of economic growth, progress and development, and so on. This fact is demonstrated very well in Turumba. Tahimik has said that Turumba’s “theme was the traditional arts being corrupted by instant industrial development.” The issue for him was cultural, in a restricted sense, at the start; his specific concern was the abandonment of local traditional practices and the way craftspeople began turning out shoddy goods to make more money. But as the film shows and as I have already suggested with my discussion of Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital, this “instant industrial development” affects far more than the quality of

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the goods produced, and the very trajectory of the film’s logic branches out once again beyond the sphere of culture; the adoption of foreign values (in both the more literal Marxian sense and the sense of cultural values that Tahimik generally intends) leads to a complete transformation at all levels of social life in the village, and money installs itself as the central organizing concern of Kadu’s family. Culture, then, has a paraeconomic and paramilitary function; and the military—the American military, specifically—has a cultural function, a point captured concisely in “We Are Colonial Red White and Blue.” This chapter of the film features Camp John Hay, the American military base in Baguio City named for the author of the policy of benevolent assimilation. Again, the cultural and the political-military coincide: the base’s function now seems to be primarily cultural, continuing to promote benevolent assimilation in the seemingly innocuous form of ice cream parties and Fourth of July barbecues. In either case, either in its function as a repressive state apparatus or as an outpost of American culture, it “amounts to the same thing: killing us softly.” But far from merely assigning responsibility and blame to the United States, though blame clearly lies there, Tahimik also addresses a fundamental Philippine complicity for continued dependence on the United States as well. At one point in this section, Kidlat asks his father (while giving him a massage by walking on his back), “Does the word ‘contradiction’ [which he had seen in the newspaper, c.p.] have anything to do with ‘contradictatorship’?” To which Tahimik replies, between painful grunts as Kidlat’s feet work over his lumbar region, “it is like John Hay . . . Camp John Hay. You like their hamburgers and their ice cream . . . but John Hay is an infringement on the sovereignty of your country. You have to make a choice. You understand?” A brief passage of didactic voiceover then follows, in which Tahimik tells how Camp John Hay is an important force in spreading American “values,” specifically in the form of consumerism. What seems crucial here is not merely that the film pinpoints the rather long-running strategy to use the “beneficent influence” of trade and commerce in establishing political domination, but that Tahimik insists that a choice must be made about the matter of cultural domination: “You have to make a choice,” he insists, between ice cream and national sovereignty. One cannot easily escape the utter tangle that is the legacy of colonialism, so an emphatic decision has to be made, a forceful intervention into the current situation that will not resolve the contradictions, but rather that will attempt to dispense with them altogether—this is the action left to one trapped in the apparent catch-22 of cultural influence. One cannot

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adopt American consumerism and sustain authentic sovereignty or independence. Far from beneficent, or even neutral, the influence of trade and consumerism is lethal. It kills and annihilates local cultures and local ways of life, albeit “softly.” “We Are Colonial Red White and Blue” shows that all cultures are not created equal; U.S. culture, and all the baggage it brings with it, does not appear in the world as one peer culture amongst many. The cultural war is, so to speak, an asymmetrical war in which it is clear that one side is at a severe disadvantage to the other. Such a reading does not imply the superiority of U.S. culture in an aesthetic or moral sense; it is merely a frank assessment of the brute force, the material weight with which this culture, backed by massive financial and military power, makes its torrid way across the globe. The violence that lies at the heart of what might otherwise seem to be benign cultural “exchange” is demonstrated again in a comical scene after the July 4th celebration at Camp John Hay, when Tahimik’s sons are pestering him to go to a movie, excited by the newspaper ads for various action films, all of them clearly violent. Rambo films seem to be exemplary of the genre. Tahimik asks Nini, his youngest son, which film he would like to see. Lying on the floor, half asleep with his face plastered to a newspaper, Nini, too young to read, randomly points at some pictures of soldiers and police battling a group of demonstrators (fig. 2.7); he has unwittingly pointed to a story about the Mendiola Massacre of January 22, 1987, when thirteen members of the KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) were killed by the police and military while attempting to march to the presidential palace to demand agrarian reform from Aquino’s government. The headline reads: “Marines gun down Mendiola marchers; 13 killed, 16 injured.” Nini says: “I want this Rambo film.” To which Tahimik replies, aghast: “Nini, that’s not a Rambo film! That’s the front page of today’s paper!” On the one hand this little scene continues a recurrent preoccupation in the film with Tahimik’s own parenting and all of the difficulties he faces in rearing children in an environment fully suffused by the commodity culture and U.S. propaganda he so reviles: Tahimik is clearly opposed to violence in any form and has in good politically correct fashion forbidden the use of any toy weapons in the house; and he struggles repeatedly, and often ineffectively, to direct his children away from the easy pleasures of American culture. But beyond this immediate and personal concern, the scene makes a more complex assertion about the identity between military violence and cultural domination through a highly condensed set of images. The point is not only that culture teaches certain values through its narratives and characters, though it does

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FIGURE 2.7

from DVD.

I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

that as well; Tahimik’s fear that his children will learn violence through film by internalizing and mimicking the attitudes and postures of their onscreen “role models” has its place. But there is a larger point as well: this culture in itself is violence. But if culture is violence, it is a violence that one does not notice as such. It does not cause immediate pain or suffering; in fact, it can feel good, like an ice cream cone or a B movie. It does not appear on your shorelines like the conquering navy’s destroyer; it does not come to take you away in the middle of the night, never to return. I Am Furious Yellow offers an apt metaphorical image for this fact, one that captures the particular manner in which the material power of U.S. culture makes itself felt. The chapter “We Are Disastrous Gray (1989–1991)” chronicles the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The eruption does not destroy any houses or take any lives with a sudden flow of molten lava or burning rock, as Tahimik personally feared might happen, but instead layers the landscape with a fine gray ash that settles over everything, accumulating almost beautifully

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FIGURE 2.8

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

like the gentle snowfall in his son’s toy snow globe (fig. 2.8). As Tahimik remarks in the voice-over, this ash fall goes almost unnoticed until, finally, it builds up to the point that the roof caves in.

The White Carabao This perspective on cultural violence in I Am Furious Yellow allows one of the most enigmatic passages in all of Tahimik’s work—the circumcision scene in Perfumed Nightmare—as well as one of that film’s most mysterious figures or motifs—the white carabao (or water buffalo)—to take on new significance and become more comprehensible. The carabao first appears to Kidlat in a dream. Snoozing beneath a tree in front of his family’s home, Kidlat begins to dream of space travel, his favorite obsession other than the pinup girls he greets each morning with a kiss. He is, of course, the president of the local chapter of the Werner von Braun society and has grand plans to be the first Filipino in space. His

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dream has a sound track from a Voice of America broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s words as he took the first steps onto the surface of the moon (“One small step for man . . . ”); the image track consists of an extended closeup of the white carabao, sinisterly chewing its cud. Upon waking, clearly troubled, Kidlat drives his jeepney to visit his best friend Kaya, a local master of the vanishing art of bamboo construction, to tell him of his dream. In ominous tones, Kaya warns Kidlat with a prophecy that establishes the carabao as a stark metaphor for U.S. commodity culture, a culture exemplified by the chewing gum that Kidlat loves so dearly and that he will later sell on the streets of Paris for his American friend: “The white carabao is rare. It is born against nature. The white carabao is beautiful, but inside it’s cold and aggressive. One day Kidlat, you will understand that the beauty of the white carabao is like the sweetness of the chewing gum the American soldiers gave you.” Later in the film, while on a walk together in the forest, Kidlat recalls for Kaya that his first vision of the white carabao came on the day that he, along with his friends, “became a man.” He recounts the tale of the day when he and his friends were all circumcised, while the images show that ritual in all of its painful detail: extreme close-ups of the children’s faces as they endure the circumcision and close-ups of the children’s penises as they are cut with hammer and razor blade. Kidlat tells Kaya: “I was no hero. My balls jingled like ice-cream bells.” But his fear of the pain was unfounded: “while they were hammering at me, I could not take my eyes off a strange, leafless tree” where the white carabao (portrayed in the form of a mold for the papier-mâché dolls familiar from Turumba) sat staring back at him. “The white carabao stared so coldly,” Kidlat tells Kaya, “I felt no pain” (fig. 2.9). What seems crucial in this scene is that the carabao, already marked as stand-in for U.S. culture, provides a welcome, if haunting and suspicious, anesthetic for Kidlat at a moment of intense bodily pain, a pain bound, significantly, to a collective ritual that signals not only Kidlat’s transition to manhood but also his incorporation into a communal collective. The figure of the carabao posits then yet another function for commodity culture that supplements and reinforces its role as a force of violence and disruption of native culture—that of anesthesia, the false amelioration of the experience of pain. The amelioration is false because, as with the cruelly gentle benevolent assassination depicted in I Am Furious Yellow, a much deeper suffering underlies the superficial pleasure or numbness proffered by the carabao. The carabao is a figure for a commodity culture that masks the pain it itself induces.

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FIGURE 2.9

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Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, 1977). Still capture from DVD.

Jameson identifies the circumcision scene in Perfumed Nightmare as a moment when the body in Third World culture, in contrast to the supremely superficial concerns with the body in the First World, is inscribed “in a very different place, namely, that of ritual.” This inscription in ritual lets us account for the gratuitous and scandalous irruptions of the two shocking episodes of circumcision and childbirth “that oddly and arbitrarily punctuate this otherwise humorous text with all the jarring incoherence of Stendhal’s pistol shots at a concert. . . . But in Stendhal . . . those were the incursions of the political into the realm of the social and of what was apparently private life: these mark a similar intersection, where the collective, however, invests the great biological rhythms as they cut across individual lives.

I generally concur with this reading of the circumcision scene, but I disagree with the subsequent assertion that the scene “cannot have the . . . justification of a kind of realism and the representation of social customs still

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extant.” On the contrary, the scene’s function as just such a representation, as well as its status as a “reflection” of the “elements of the style of some indigenous culture on the point of collapse,” is pivotal, a fact reinforced by Tahimik’s use of actuality footage of a real ritual in the forest which Tahimik was somehow able to record on film. This comprises yet another moment in Tahimik when the literal or actual splits and takes on allegorical or metaphorical significance in addition to its documentary role: the circumcision scene is a moment not only when the body irrupts as an allegorical figure for all the transformations occurring at the edges of capital’s expansion but also quite literally or denotatively (or, I am tempted to say, ethnographically) as a document of the specific losses of traditions in the Philippines. Much of the political thrust of Tahimik’s films comes from this vehiculation of the allegorical on the back of the literal. It anchors, for example, the impact of Turumba’s lessons, which utterly depend on the portrayal of an actual social custom still extant, namely the turumba festival itself and all of the rituals and activities that surround it. This tension between an emphatically allegorical impulse and a grossly mimetic one underpins Tahimik’s political thinking as well: his usage of the term “Third World,” one could say, is at once realistic and allegorical, designating simultaneously the specificity of particular experiences in the various regions of the Third World as well as the commonality amongst them. It is only through this abstraction from the concretely specific that Tahimik can assert an equivalence— and ultimately propose an alliance—between the plight of the Igorot in the Philippine cordillera and that of the Navajo in the desert southwest of the United States. In each case, this constant splitting makes complex demands on the spectator, who must somehow reconcile the depicted documentary actualities with their abstractions as allegorical figures: the spectator must constantly oscillate between a realistic perception of reality and its allegorical role. The latter prevents the former from devolving into what Lukács would call “abstract particularity”—that is, a status as an utterly unique phenomenon incapable of being placed within the context of any larger determinant totality, while the former grounds and binds the latter to a determinate place in a given, actual historical context. Which makes it all the more stunning, if not uncanny, that the childbirth scene in Perfumed Nightmare, which is staged and fictional, produces a “real” baby—Kidlat de Guia—Katrin de Guia and Tahimik’s first son, who returns as a fully developed “character” in I Am Furious Yellow, both real and allegorical. Thus: to the same extent that one can find an allegory in the

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realm of reality—what I will call in Kluge’s work an “allegory in the real”— so too can the fictive produce something emphatically real. This latter, to use Tahimik’s language, is a cosmic production, a manifestation of the material effectivity and actuality of myth. It is, in the end, a grounding and justification for Tahimik of artistic practice in general, a figure for the manner in which art makes its presence felt in the world. And it is a place where Tahimik’s version of the utopia of film becomes apparent: for this cosmic production takes something that exists outside of the given present—outside of actuality, as Kluge will call it, following Hegel—something that is fictive and thus which escapes the coordinates of given material reality, and then gives to it actuality, allows it to live and breathe and come into being. In other words, Tahimik’s film produces something new. But to return to the discussion of the body and its feelings: the “scandal” that Jameson sees in the scenes of childbirth and circumcision arises, I would suggest, not only from their near-pornographic portrayals of women’s and children’s bodies, in particular the children’s genitals, nor from their making public of what are in First World culture conventionally understood as intimate and private matters, but also from their unreserved depictions of the physical, bodily pain bound up with these experiences. If pain and violence, as has been argued, is the dirty secret of commodity culture, the exposing of pain has a scandalous potential for real negative, critical, and cognitive force. Adorno perceived a similar potential in pain, or in suffering more generally, and his thoughts on the matter can help us understand Tahimik’s own attempts to leverage pain for a critical program. Adorno’s famous maxim from Negative Dialectics, “Weh spricht: vergeh” (“Woe says: go”), condenses his attempt to ground a utopian politics in bodily experience, paradoxically enough not in pleasure, as one might reasonably assume, but in pain: for suffering and pain in Adorno initiate the refusal of the current system and demand its supersession; that is its utopia. The mere presence of unnecessary suffering constitutes a somatic form of the negative that demands that things change, that they become something other than what they are: “The bodily moment announces to cognition that suffering should not be, that it should become something other. ‘Woe says: go.’ Around this idea, that which is specifically materialist converges with that which is critical, with practice that changes society.” Tahimik’s films, I would suggest, in many ways share this attitude toward physical suffering (as well as emotional pain, it should be said): it is clear that the pain induced by empire should spur its overthrow. But to do so, it must be felt.

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But before addressing any further the critical potential of suffering, it must be asserted that Tahimik, unlike Adorno, does not conceive of pain as a solely negative phenomenon. In Adorno, if pain has a positive function, that function is essentially negative, residing in its prompt for the elimination of its cause; suffering anchors negativity in the material experience of the body. In Tahimik, pain provides this reassuring bond to the authenticity of experience (even if that experience is but one of suffering), but it also provides, almost paradoxically, an anchor to collective life and stands as a marker of that collective’s authenticity as much as any spontaneous expression of collaborative joy might do. The two instances of childbirth and circumcision in Perfumed Nightmare, for example, both significant moments in the film’s overall development, are moments when such authenticity seems to burst forth onto the screen. The circumcision ritual is not only a way-marker in the life-story of the individual young boy as he makes his transition to manhood, but is also the moment when this young boy and his companions are integrated and initiated into the community. The childbirth scene in turn represents a moment when the vanishing art and craft of the handmade Zwiebelturm is compensated for by a painful physical act—the birth—that seems beyond reification. And to these two moments, one can add the scenes of self-flagellation in Perfumed Nightmare, curiously not mentioned by Jameson, but equally scandalous in their display of the body and equally significant as markers of communal participation, in this case in the community of worshippers of the Virgin Mary, centerpiece and motivation for the turumba festival itself. One can now see, then, the threat posed by an anesthetic consumer culture: not only does it conceal the suffering caused by cultural displacement, the pain of dislocation and separation from one’s traditions, and the miseries and anxieties attendant upon induction into a new way of life, but it also blocks the experience of collectivity past and future, of a collectivity that is bound together through the immediacy of painful physical sensation. But in both Adorno and Tahimik, the experience of pain remains fundamental to the initiation of their critical-political projects, and both thinkers dread the premature or false loss of the particular corporeal experience of pain in its physical immediacy. For both, bodily pain is the result of oppression, but also the necessary, indeed utopian, reminder that oppression must be eliminated; and if the experience of that pain is lost, and with it the impetus to the negative, the spur to critique and refusal is lost as well. In this sense, the experience of pain has an anticipatory function as a presentiment of a future without it, and to relieve human beings of that experience

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is to foreclose the anticipation of that future, and for that matter possibly any future: for what is the experience of anesthesia, if not the suspension of time itself ? When under anesthesia one not only avoids the pain of the present, one also does not know when one will wake up. There is a fascinating aphorism appended to Dialectic of Enlightenment, interestingly enough in the present context entitled “Le prix du progrès,” in which Adorno and Horkheimer portray the nightmare that would ensue if the experience of pain were to be falsely eliminated. The aphorism concerns the discovery of a letter by the nineteenth-century French physiologist Pierre Flourens. In the letter, Flourens argues that chloroform, though used as an anesthetic, actually intensifies the pain experienced in surgery; its anesthetic function is illusory and in actuality chloroform simply makes the patient forget the suffering induced by what amounts to a vivisection. Flourens asked if such intense suffering, incurred in the name of scientific research, where humans had become guinea pigs themselves, would “not be too high a price to pay for progress.” For Adorno and Horkheimer, the conclusion to be drawn from Flourens’s insight is consistent with their understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment: such oblivion-cum-suffering is the inescapable result of all progress, the precondition for science: If Flourens had been right here, the dark paths of the divine world order would have been justified for once. The animal would have been avenged through the suffering of his executioners: every operation would have been a vivisection. The suspicion would then arise that our relationship with men and creation in general was like our relationship with ourselves after an operation—blind against all suffering. For cognition the gap between us and others would be the same as the time between our own present and past suffering; an insurmountable barrier. But perennial domination over nature, medical and non-medical techniques, produce their strength through such blindness; they are made possible only by forgetting. The loss of memory as the transcendental condition for science [Wissenschaft]. All reification is a forgetting.

The affinities in this passage with Tahimik’s thoughts on pain are stunning. The domination of nature and fellow human beings induces a pain that cannot be recalled; it causes injury but forecloses the memory of that injury that could demand its supersession. As Adorno puts it in Minima Moralia, “it is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so

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far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.” And further: “The expression of history in things is no other than that of past torment.” In his own way, Tahimik shares this horrifying vision of progress and provides a figure for it in the image-metaphor of the white carabao, whose superficial beauty is belied by his inner coldness and aggression, whose ability to chill and numb does little to actually diminish the pain and suffering it induces. The pain, though, that Adorno and Horkheimer attribute to the moment of reification, a pain intensified by the very thing that makes us forget it, in Tahimik is not only the pain suffered in the process of reification (for example in the brutal suffering of learning to conform to the demands of the working day in Turumba) but also the pain suffered—and subsequently and simultaneously forgotten—in the cleaving of the subject from the community and the collective to which she belonged, by the power of the sweet and pleasurable alien values of American culture. The numbing and amnestic effect of reification thus not only forecloses our sense of the future but also of the past, of history. The philosophy of history that resides in this passage from Adorno and Horkheimer is not far from Jameson’s succinct formula that history is “what hurts”; but, of course, the movement of progress induces instantaneous forgetting, introducing insuperable difficulties for knowing the past, for what “hurts” is instantly forgotten. What is also particularly compelling in this passage, however, is the shift between two distinct objects of cognition: the “gap” confronting knowledge, or cognition, between two different points in time—“time between our present and past suffering”—is the same as the gap between two subjects—“between us and others.” Put differently, the inability to know the other, a seemingly synchronic problem, is recast here as being profoundly historical, not merely in the sense that every subject as an object of knowledge is constructed through historically evolved discourse (for example, the American subject knows the Filipino only through a historically evolved cognitive lens, one determined by a long history of imperialism and culturally biased representations), but that the movement of time, and with it forgetting, inheres in this very gap between us and others: this gap is in its essence temporal. So history is not what hurts, per se, but what hurt: past tense. And moreover, history is not only having been hurt but also having hurt someone or something else, having induced a suffering and forgotten it. The oblivion induced by the use of chloroform is a false comfort not only to the patient, but to the surgeon as

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well, who need not be bothered by the patient’s screams on the operating table, who can console himself with the belief that the vivisection causes no pain and that he is doing good. To express this in terms directly relevant to Tahimik: the benevolence in benevolent assimilation is directed as much toward the assimilator himself as toward the assimilated. That very act of inducing pain, of causing suffering, is a pain that must also be forgotten. The problem of intersubjective knowledge—in Tahimik figured primarily as the knowledge of the First World about the Third and vice versa—emerges then out of the movement of a history, and a brutal one at that, and the blockages that exist to knowledge of the First World about the Third include the forgetting of the pain that the First World has caused the Third. Tahimik’s historiographical-pedagogical project has to take into account the brutal history of colonialism and imperialism from both sides: the suffering of the victims demands to be heard as well as the accusations against the victimizers, whose benevolence must be unmasked for the benefit of victim and victimizer alike. Though they do it “softly,” the killers must be named for what they are.

A New Tradition An objection must be raised at this point, however, and one must ask whether or not Tahimik’s insistence on the body as a site where one can safely ground a politics is not already obsolete, if it is not already too late to rely on the immediacy of corporeal experience now that the body has been entirely reified itself in commodity culture. There are moments in I Am Furious Yellow that suggest as much, moments that recall Tahimik’s earlier efforts at such a politics and that thereby lend a certain poignancy to the film as Tahimik confronts the inadequacies and failures of his past work. At such points the sense of loss in the film is palpable, as if some of the hope invested in Tahimik’s more youthful obsessions has faded and the optimism of his more youthful dreams has begun to fray. This sense of loss is at its most acute during the celebration of Tahimik’s youngest son’s first birthday, when the family marks the moment by allowing each of the children to take a drink from their mother’s breast (fig. 2.10). The scene feels very much like the circumcision scene, “scandalous,” as Jameson might say, in its corporeal display as well as in its violation of common norms of physical intimacy between mother and child. Each child suckles in turn; milk spills here and there, and even a teddy bear gets into the act, as the (now not so very) young Kidlat remarks in the voice-over:

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“Today is Nini’s first birthday. As a celebration, we are all allowed to share mother’s milk, a nostalgic return to days gone by.” This remarked-upon nostalgia, openly redoubled by the tinny recording of “Auld lang syne” playing on the sound track, stands as a warning for the film itself against a more generalized nostalgia, something which Tahimik often tries to avoid in his explorations of premodern culture, old craft practices, indigenous traditions, and so on, but one which the film seems to worry over a bit, as if such a fall to the temptation of nostalgia were inevitable, despite the best of intentions. The sound track and the intertextual reference to Tahimik’s older work—his wife, Katrin de Guia, the former “Bavarian girl,” is once again nursing the young Kidlat “born” in Perfumed Nightmare—projects this nostalgia beyond the immediate context of the film’s diegesis and the specific nostalgia it represents for the innocence of childhood and the presymbolic unity of mother and child to a broader nostalgia for the immediacy of the body and the sorts of bodily practices and rituals discussed above: the circumcision and self-flagellation in Perfumed Nightmare, the pleasures in the physicality of work in both of the earlier films, and the

FIGURE 2.10

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

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seemingly inescapable natural functions of the body in childbirth, eating, and excretion (recall the scene of Kidlat and his female jeepney passenger stopping to urinate by the side of the road in Perfumed Nightmare) all stand as images of bodies before their reification and before their submission to a host of social norms and conventions that Tahimik wishes to undo. But the self-consciousness about this nostalgia marks an awareness on the film’s part that it will now be difficult to rely on these sorts of bodily immediacies to guarantee and ground a politics—for the scene of Katrin de Guia breastfeeding her children feels forced. This—the sharing of breast milk—is a practice that is clearly consciously planned and consciously learned and consciously adopted; it is an attempt at establishing a new tradition, one that does not emerge as-if-by-nature (in Marx “naturwüchsig”) from the rituals and practices of an organic community. If it is a ritual, it is an invented one, a learned form of spontaneity, which of course is no spontaneity at all, an attempt at a kind of new authenticity that feels inescapably inauthentic and that in the end cannot but disappoint. It is almost impossible not to feel a certain distance opening up between the act portrayed and its supposed ontological ground. This scene, in other words, illustrates a basic problem with any attempt to resuscitate tradition or create new ones based on older forms of social relations (including older ways of relating to the body itself), a concern that cuts across the work of each of the filmmakers in this book. Any attempt at a politics that celebrates “older ways of life”—as Tahimik’s so clearly does—and that tries to draw on them for inspiration as models for contemporary practice will inevitably confront the basic problem that the ontological ground for those practices has changed, that their “natural” context has been sundered and lost; it is simply impossible to resurrect older practices and attitudes and hope that somehow they might fit organically into a present with which they are inherently incompatible. Tahimik’s awareness of this fact, perhaps, accounts for the nature of the endings of Perfumed Nightmare and Turumba. In the first film, Kidlat’s great gesture of revolt and refusal is followed by scenes of village life, and of his mother solemnly closing the bamboo shutters on her windows. It never becomes clear in the film how one is to realize the revolutionary dreams of Kidlat’s father—to free the Philippines, to establish national independence, to live a happy, contented life of rest—in present circumstances; the final gesture must remain negative. In Turumba, Kadu refuses to travel with his father to Germany and a great typhoon hits. Nature takes its revenge against modern forms of travel and the temptations of the First World, and the tradition of

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the turumba festival goes on, despite the rain. Though each of these conclusions include gestures of refusal as well as of an insistent native or local culture that will persist, they do not really figure any sustained future, any reconstituted society that will appear in the wake of the revolt. This might well be understood as a rehearsal of the classically Brechtian insistence that one may ruthlessly criticize and reject the given without necessarily being able to tell what might replace it in the future; but nonetheless, Tahimik’s inability to realistically project a future built upon a passing or past tradition does remain a symptom of the problematic I have pointed to here, namely the irreducible gap between older practices and the contemporary ontological ground for those practices that inheres in any attempt to return to the past in order to constitute a politics of the future.

Learning . . . Despite this seemingly intractable problem, Tahimik insists that one must turn to the past and learn from it. For the moment, however, I would like to bracket the issue of how one learns specifically from the past and instead first address directly the question of pedagogy more generally in Tahimik’s films. That Tahimik’s films set out to teach is beyond doubt, and I have already discussed significant elements of his pedagogy, in particular the tension between the allegorical and mimetic impulses that animates it. Although his films are clearly didactic, Tahimik is hardly an overbearing didact. It is apparent, for example, in the staging of his relationship with his sons in I Am Furious Yellow, that he is attentive to the difficulties and pitfalls of a didactic enunciative position, a position he clearly wants to represent and investigate in its own right and with a sense of humor. On more than one occasion he shows himself losing his temper, frustrated, even immature and selfish in his attempts to make his children behave and learn the lessons he wishes to impart. In other words, Tahimik is aware that the stance of the pedagogue can be one of domination—in an interview he says it is too easy to “become the fascist enemy that you are fighting”; and he is also acutely sensitive to the fact that a lesson learned is not always the lesson taught, that an irreducible gap exists between a teacher’s intentions and a pupil’s desires and abilities. In portraying his own teaching, it also becomes clear that Tahimik is open to learning himself; he is a good post-1960s figure in that regard, unwilling to accept that teaching is a one-way process.

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In his essay on Perfumed Nightmare, Fredric Jameson has made some of the very few scholarly comments on Tahimik’s didactic method. Apropos of Turumba, Jameson describes this method as involving a “peculiar deixis—here is a phenomenon, in the richest philosophic sense of the word; it doesn’t matter what you think of it, it is simply here—[that] proves to have unusual pedagogical or didactic potentialities of what we may perhaps term a post-Brechtian kind. And it includes a paradoxical relationship to the public and the spectator by virtue of its very indifference to them.” According to Jameson, this method or technique of “demonstration” in Turumba points toward the brute “historical fact of the destructive effects of a new money economy” and development more generally without trying to “reinvent” the life of premodern societies or putting the spectator “imaginatively back into a concrete situation of otherness in which we might fleetingly recapture this historically unique event.” Clearly, this description does not encompass the breadth of Tahimik’s pedagogy, even in Turumba, which Jameson singles out as being possessed of a particularly “simple” method, and must be understood as a local description of one technique amongst many. But even as such an observation on a particular aspect of Turumba, Jameson’s comment seems a bit wide of the mark: for there are times when it feels as if everything in Tahimik’s films is being transformed into a lesson and even the most “naïve,” “documentary” moments of his films—shots of men putting the finishing touches on the last Zwiebelturm in Germany in Perfumed Nightmare, children swimming beneath a beautiful waterfall in Turumba, images of Igorot tribesmen building a bridge in I Am Furious Yellow—find themselves subjected to the abstraction of allegoresis, forced to tell a story or transmit a lesson that has sometimes little, if anything, to do with the immediate content and context of the footage shown onscreen. Take, for example, the scene in Turumba where Kadu and his father, Romy, who is also the “kantore” or lead singer in the turumba processions, are walking through the forest and suddenly, shockingly, come upon a massive construction site, with bulldozers and earthmovers slowly moving over the land as they construct an enormous hydroelectric dam. People power moves nothing here. The scene of this destruction-as-construction stands in stark contrast to the bucolic woods from which Kadu and Romy have just emerged (fig. 2.11). Kadu asks, “Dad, what’s hydroelectric energy?” (in a mixture of Tagalog and English, the English “hydroelectric energy” is clearly audible). His father responds with a matter-of-fact description of the physical principles behind hydroelectric power, describing how water,

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FIGURE 2.11

Turumba (Kidlat Tahimik, 1983. Still capture from DVD.

pulled by the forces of gravity, turns turbines and so forth. He indeed demonstrates this principle by cutting a palm sapling with his machete and building a miniature toy-sized turbine and pouring water over it to make it spin. Kadu takes the toy from his father’s hand and blows on it, turning it into a windmill, putting into action what his father goes on to point out, that other “natural forces can be harnessed, such as the wind.” The seemingly obvious relationship here between word and image is deceptively “simple,” I would argue; yes, the turbine spins with the application of water; yes, it turns when Kadu blows on it; and yes, something basic is learned about the generation of electricity and the physical forces behind the process. But much in the scene puts this demonstration into a clear allegorical context. Kadu’s question already registers the foreignness of the technology through the use of the English signifier “hydroelectric energy”; it seems to portend a threat similar to that heralded by the other foreign word Kadu has trouble pronouncing, the German “Einkaufsleiter” on the business card of the madwoman who has come to buy his family’s papiermâché dolls. There is also once again a dramatic juxtaposition of disparate

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scales, reminiscent of the “Third World dentist” scene in I Am Furious Yellow: here the tiny little turbine, and the simple tool used to create it, the machete, as well as the delicacy of the movements necessary to wield that tool and the gentleness of the breath with which Kadu manages to make the turbine spin, all stand in stark and ominous contrast to the technological behemoths creating the dam in the background. The scene contrasts, in other words, two starkly different levels of the “organic composition of capital”: this mini-turbine may be powered by wind and water, but its creation was “people-powered,” unlike the dam going up in the background. And this dam itself is an obvious and recognizable symbol of a whole host of neo-imperial social relations, dam projects being prominent exemplars of World Bank and IMF policies throughout the Third World, notoriously entailing not only environmental devastation but also enforced dependency through imposed technological transfers. Technology in this scene, then, is not merely a figure for an appropriate or inappropriate relationship to the land, but a marker for precisely the sort of economic policies the IMF and World Bank promulgate. It is also telling how Kadu takes in this lesson from his father (who in retrospect, after the completion of I Am Furious Yellow, can be read as a stand-in for the director himself), becoming the exemplary student and by extension the exemplary spectator who finds herself in an analogous position vis-à-vis the lessons taught in the film: the pleasure Kadu takes in watching both the creation of the toy and its use—his face breaks into a smile as he blows on it and it spins—is as important a bit of instruction as anything one learns about hydroelectric power (or, for that matter, the IMF). And it is in this that Tahimik might be at his most Brechtian and his most utopian: in demonstrating and providing to the spectator this pleasure in learning—a pleasure gained in not only the final discovery of a new fact, a new idea, or a new understanding of something, but also gained in the very act and process of learning itself, which has become an end in its own right. The lesson, though, continues as the scene moves on, when from off screen Kadu’s friends call out to him and beckon him to come play “water football” in a gorgeous swimming hole beneath an equally gorgeous waterfall, which appears in the next shot (fig. 2.12). The contrast with the ravaged landscape of the dam site is obvious: this is either an example of what was destroyed by that dam or the very object that will soon be. And therewith any temptation to read this only as a naïve depiction of daily life in the mountains is dispensed with, though of course it is that as well. It is impossible not to

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look at the users—Kadu’s exuberant friends—of this waterfall and swimming hole, which has yet to be converted into what Heidegger called a “standing reserve,” a resource subject to exploitation, and see them as the opposite of the technocrats who will be required—with foreign training of course—to operate the dam that will likely destroy the swimming hole. The cut to this scene of children purposelessly at play, using the gravitational pull of water for ends wholly other than that of hydroelectric power, is accompanied by a rising musical track: we once again hear the turumba song, which recurrently accompanies the myriad bucolic scenes of village life in Turumba, poignantly lamenting their imminent disappearance. This use of music clearly invests the image with a sentimentality that cannot be overlooked, a sentimentality that simultaneously registers the natural beauty of the place as well as the noninstrumental use to which it is being put. Tahimik is thus not averse to pulling heartstrings or to using various cinematic devices (and one could point to other nonmusical devices as well) as repetitive affective cues, a practice which seems at odds with the fundamental cinematic self-reflexivity at work in his films.

FIGURE 2.12

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Turumba (Kidlat Tahimik, 1983). Still capture from DVD.

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It is a technique that approaches the sort of calculation that the “butt dictators” might practice. My point here in this rereading of Jameson’s interpretation is not that Tahimik’s pedagogical method eschews demonstration or showing, which Jameson has also specified as the essence of Brecht’s own pedagogy, but rather to argue that this mode of demonstration or indication is not irreducibly or exclusively literal; it is instead constantly allegorized in a process that is both encouraged and directed and constrained by the films themselves, as well as by the spectator’s own particular reception of a film. This fact might itself best be demonstrated through reference to a work of Brecht’s. The seeming literalness of Tahimik’s pedagogy is anticipated in an early scene in Brecht’s Life of Galileo, a scene in which Galileo defends the wisdom of the common people, precisely the sort of nonexperts figured in the young boys swimming in Turumba, against his friend Sagredo: Galileo: In that case, Mrs. Sarti, perhaps you can help me. You see, a question has arisen where we [Galileo and Sagredo] can’t agree, probably because both of us have read too many books. It’s a question about the heavens, something to do with the stars. This is it: are we to take it that the greater goes round the smaller, or does the smaller go round the greater? Mrs. Sarti (cautiously): I never know where I am with you, Mr. Galilei. Is that a serious question, or are you pulling my leg again? Galileo: A serious question. Mrs. Sarti: Then I’ll give you a quick answer. Do I serve your dinner or do you serve mine?

After she departs, Galileo tells Sagredo: “Don’t tell me people like that can’t grasp the truth. They grab at it.” Mrs. Sarti’s literal interpretation of Galileo’s question is clearly allegorical, as is much in The Life of Galileo, and it turns on the degree to which details from daily life, or from basic physical laws about the universe (in this instance the law of gravity and the movement of the planets) are stand-ins for social realities: the Copernican revolution is an allegory for a social and cultural revolution that is yet to arrive. So Sarti’s response, though “ignorant” of the basic physics Galileo is trying to illustrate (that the earth would travel around the much larger sun), is actually far more knowledgeable about social relations as she translates the physics lesson into a social one. Her naïveté about physics is, in a sense, the precondition for her wisdom about social relations.

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. . . from the Past The key, then, to understanding how to learn from the past in Tahimik’s work is to treat the past something like the toy turbine that Romy cobbles together for Kadu. By this I do not mean, of course, that one should ignore historical fact or simplify it so that its lessons might be more comprehensible and accessible. Instead, one must grasp that the lessons of the past are the product of, or are subject to, a similar process of abstraction or allegoresis found in the scene with the toy turbine: by a similar process, past facts, past realities, past liberatory impulses and struggles, all now inherently incompatible with contemporary reality, must be transformed and made usable, applicable, and functional in the present. Is this not, in a sense, the very method I identified in The Battleship Potemkin in the Introduction, where Eisenstein transfigures past historical reality for use within a present context, thereby salvaging what still has purchase in the present? Let us consider this question in the context of Perfumed Nightmare. Jameson makes the compelling case that Perfumed Nightmare, in its representation of imperialism, makes a “crucial move from imperialism as outright political domination and gunboat power to imperialism as cultural domination in a far more contemporary media sense.” Relatedly, this move entails another shift in which the film “eschews the political for the economic, and the thematics of power for that of reification.” These are both issues I have already discussed in some detail in the context of I Am Furious Yellow. In this move, however, Tahimik does not entirely repress the thematics of power, for there remains in this film a fundamental substitute and “place-holder” (tenant-lieu) for the absent dictator and his regime; something like the ultimate reference itself, which, in a peculiar allegorical reversal, is now called upon to stand in for the signifier and, by taking its place, somehow to represent a phenomenon which was its own effect and secondary expression. . . . [T]he allegorical “substitute” is in fact American imperialism (itself the cause and origin of the Marcos regime) inscribed mythically . . . in the person of the murdered father.

Here Jameson is speaking of “Kidlat’s” father, who was killed by American soldiers at the San Juan Bridge so long ago, as we shall see in a moment. If Jameson’s argument is correct, and I find it convincing, it raises another set of questions. As an inscription of American imperialism—or rath-

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er, more precisely, an inscription of the resistance to American imperialism—the father occupies a difficult place in Perfumed Nightmare. The form of revolt he exemplifies—armed insurrection against an occupying force, anti-colonial violence, and the demand for national self-determination—is very specific, effective or appropriate only in a particular set of historical circumstances, circumstances where imperialism was better represented “as outright political domination and gunboat power.” But if imperialism is now better grasped “as cultural domination in a far more contemporary media sense” through a “thematics of reification” instead of “power,” it is not immediately apparent how one is to harvest the anti-colonial impulse and the specific form of struggle and politics that the father represented. The historical constellation of the late 1970s is entirely different than the one after the Philippine people became “U.S. military property” for “12 million dollars,” as Kidlat’s mother recounts it in her narration of the American acquisition of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris in 1898. In Perfumed Nightmare, one could still imagine that the sort of revolt represented by the father might be useful in ousting the dictator; but as has already been seen in I Am Furious Yellow, the removal of Marcos did little to temper the violence of U.S. economic and cultural might. From the perspective, then, of I Am Furious Yellow, one could argue that Tahimik has performed yet another “peculiar allegorical reversal” or substitution, but this time with unfortunate results: in the portion of the film that takes place before the disappointments of Aquino’s rule become clear, the Marcos regime served as a mere “place-holder” for American imperialism: the fantasy that led to the profound disappointment with the Aquino government was that the removal of Marcos would secure liberation from American imperialism altogether. One could say, to use psychoanalytic language, that the Marcos regime was a mere symptom that stood in for its underlying cause, and the removal of that symptom did not constitute a cure. So the challenge persists and has become perhaps even more acute: how does one take the specific form of political struggle represented by Kidlat’s father and transform it into a struggle against the far more diffuse and amorphous entity known variously as “cultural domination,” “alien values,” “reification,” or “benevolent assassination”? How, Tahimik’s films ask, does one draw on the political moment of decolonization, the anti-colonial struggles of years, even centuries, past, in an entirely different historical and political constellation, without resorting to the myth of lost origins to which one wishes to return or without setting up some false narrative of historical continuity, some nationalist or ethnicist narrative that posits an

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eternal and transhistorical national or cultural project that some day must be fulfilled? Tahimik effectively poses these questions in I Am Furious Yellow when he admits that it is easier to “fight the dictator in the US” than it is to “fight the dictator in us.” This problem is not unique, of course, to the Philippines or to the Third World more generally. It is a problem long faced by the entire political Left, which is casting about for ways to rethink a political way forward without abandoning all ties to the political past. Slavoj Žižek has provided a formulation for this problematic in his call to resurrect the Leninist impulse, almost a century after it had its historical moment in the Bolshevik Revolution. Žižek does not want to reconstitute Leninism in its original form, nor does he wish to reconstitute the Left according to the proper principles Lenin laid out so long ago, as if the intervening history of the Left were but a deviation from the standards he had set (this would indeed be a nostalgia for “lost origins”); instead, Žižek wants to “repeat” Lenin in a gesture borrowed from Søren Kierkegaard: Lenin is for us not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism.

Several aspects of this formulation of repetition are worth expanding upon and can help us think about Tahimik’s own attempts to revive the political impulses of the past. Using Žižek’s terminology, one could say that in Perfumed Nightmare Kidlat wants to repeat his father, or rather his father’s gesture of revolt from 1898, but in the radically different conditions of the late 1970s in the Philippines; certain coordinates of the historical situation remain similar, but not the same; others, obviously, are drastically transformed: the foreign occupier from Kidlat’s father’s time has now been replaced by the client-state administered by Marcos, and there is a persistent U.S. military presence. The project of benevolent assimilation has been replaced by the various forms of mass or popular culture, which are now a de facto vernacular, and the feeble attempts on the part of the regime at ideological indoctrination (“discipline and uniformity,” for example). The Philippines are no longer a formal colony and the country’s structural economic role in the global order has been completely transformed, having been fully and, in Marx’s terminology, really subsumed into the circuits of

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capital. The gesture, then, of expelling the occupying force cannot be simply re-created in the present of 1977 without change; one does not “expel” a set of social relations in the same way one expels an army or, for that matter, in the same manner that one deposes a dictator. So the act of repetition will necessarily involve simultaneously divergent impulses: on the one hand to attempt to “bring something forward” (as Kluge would put it) but to do so in an act of differentiation from that originary impulse. The act of repetition of the anti-colonial impulse must entail an act of differentiation as much as one of reenactment: the very process of repetition is a repetition in difference. Now, to return to my suggestion at the opening of this section of the chapter: in Tahimik this “repetition in difference” must be understood as a process akin to the abstraction or allegoresis at the heart of his pedagogy. In a way, it involves an appropriate transposition of scale like that we have seen in the case of the young Kidlat’s toe in I Am Furious Yellow and in the case of Kadu’s toy turbine in Turumba: repetition of the father’s project will involve this imaginative translation into new contexts, an abstraction out of the initial, core historical experience into the new contemporary situation. To think about Tahimik’s project in these terms, as the call for a repetition of past liberatory impulses, helps us also think about Tahimik’s stance toward the very past he wishes to repeat and may help us come to terms with the tricky issue of Tahimik’s nostalgia. Again, Žižek’s formulations can provide some insight. In The Ticklish Subject, in the course of a lengthy reading of Being and Time, Žižek quotes Heidegger: “The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero—is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness.” To which Žižek adds the following commentary: The point is that the future has a primacy: to be able to discern the possibilities opened up by the tradition into which an agent is thrown, one must already acknowledge one’s engagement in a project—that is to say, the movement of repetition, as it were, retroactively reveals (and thus fully actualizes) that which it repeats.

This repetition thus cannot be understood as the resurrection of some fully formed past that one wants to reconstruct in all of its former historical immediacy; obviously, this is impossible, and any such attempt to do so would end in violence or the repression of this fundamental impossibility—this is the dire risk inherent in the nostalgia for lost origins. In a

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complementary reading of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which, according to Žižek, articulates a notion of revolution that shares real affinities with Heidegger’s concept of anticipatory choice, Žižek argues that the possibility of repetition is founded not on prior historical successes—that is, in the hopes of restoring fully formed collectivities or social forms from the past—but on the historical experience of failure; what one can repeat, what is available for repetition—or, to refer back to Godard, what is invisible and available for revelation via montage—is only that which never fully realized itself: The present revolution . . . retroactively redeems all failed past attempts at liberation—that is to say, the point of view of a present agent engaged in a revolutionary project suddenly makes visible what the objectivist/positivist historiography, constrained to facticity, is by definition blind to: the hidden potentialities of liberation that were crushed by the victorious march of the forces of domination.

This latter point is crucial; it is what distinguishes a liberatory from an oppressive, a left-wing from a right-wing appropriation of the past: One must insist here on the opposition between the appropriation of the past from the standpoint of those who rule (the narrative of past history as the evolution leading to and legitimating their triumph) and the appropriation of that which, in the past, remained its utopian and failed (“repressed”) potentiality.

It is this failure, this unrealized project, the inability of a past movement to realize itself because of some historical force blocking it, that makes the past available for a “progressive” reappropriation in the present as well as what marks every historical past with a fundamental “radical antagonism.” As we will see, this notion of the antagonistic nature of the social has significant implications for Tahimik’s representations of seemingly idyllic communal pasts: it is, seemingly paradoxically, the antagonistic nature of past social forms itself that makes them available for repetition in the present. Had past forms of social organization been fully formed or fully “actualized” they could not be repeated. Whatever idyll is projected onto the past is deeply ideological, but also deeply utopian: it is a utopian fantasy, a projection backward onto the past a symbolic resolution of conflict or antagonism in the present, a resolution that in reality can only happen in the

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future. In this sense, the idyllic representation of the past is underwritten by an anticipation of a future utopian condition. Significantly, in Perfumed Nightmare, two versions of the father’s history are narrated, versions that correspond to the two possible standpoints on the past that Žižek articulates above: one version, according Kidlat’s friend Kaya, is “official.” In Žižek’s terms it is told from the standpoint of those who rule. The other standpoint is that of “the truth,” as told by Kaya. In Žižek’s terms, this version of the past is told from the standpoint of a failed “potentiality.” That is, the true version is told from the standpoint of failure. (Another such “true version” of history can be found in I Am Furious Yellow in the counter-history told from the perspective of Magellan’s slave.) At the moment when Kidlat is on the verge of realizing his dream of going to the First World—to “paradise”—with his American friend, he is taken aside by his mother and told the first version of the story of his father’s death. His father had been a happy cart driver, much like “Kidlat” is now a jeepney driver, who sang while he worked, until the day he was recruited by the Americans to fight against the Spanish. His mother recounts: “When the Spaniards surrendered, he sang again. While he was singing the sweet song of victory, the Americans were buying us in Paris. Your singing father tried to enter Manila at the San Juan Bridge. He was stopped by an American sentry. It was his last song.” Kidlat’s mother tells him that she carved a small wooden horse from the butt of his father’s rifle, which Kidlat then keeps and takes with him on his travels; it becomes a sort of fetish that holds the spirit of his father. His mother continues: “Killed for trespassing on U.S. property was the military report attached to his corpse. For 12 million dollars we became U.S. military property.” Immediately after this scene, Kidlat visits his friend Kaya, who tells him: “Yes, Kidlat, that was the official military version of your father’s death. The facts are suppressed to hide our true strength. Kidlat, it is time you know the truth.” And Kaya tells him the apparently true tale which he himself had witnessed: Kidlat’s father did not need his rifle, Kaya tells him, for he simply drew a breath, and with a force “greater than the winds of Amok mountain,” he literally blew away fifty American soldiers before he was killed. Kaya concludes his tale with a vision of revolution: “When the typhoon blows off its cocoon, the butterfly embraces the sun. The sleeping typhoon must learn to blow again.” It is precisely this gesture of the father—the literal blowing away of his enemies—that Kidlat will repeat at the end of the film. Kaya’s tale articulates a liberatory vision, one whose failure was guaranteed in the Treaty of Paris in 1898 when the Americans bought the “heart

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and soul” of the Philippine people, as Kaya puts it. It should also be clear that the “truth” of this version has little to do with historical accuracy, in any objectivist/positivist sense, as it is deeply saturated with mythical elements, from the superhuman strength of the father, to the odd fact that Kaya might be old enough to have witnessed the events which took place in 1898. This recounting of the true version is not a mere presentation of a different set of facts, but a complete shattering of the standard terms of historical narration itself: it dispenses with the obligatory “facticity” of historicism and incorporates mythical elements; it adopts a shamelessly partisan standpoint, it assigns blame, and it makes prophecies. And perhaps most interestingly, the redoubled telling of this tale in Perfumed Nightmare, the sequential articulation of the official and the “true” version, is also the moment when Kidlat begins the process of being called to his cause; it is the moment when he assumes a project and, to quote Heidegger from a moment ago, “chooses his hero.” One can understand the coming-to-be of this choice, this movement toward a political purpose, to be the process of Bildung that Kidlat undergoes as he progresses from his initial state of naïve—in the most conventional sense of the term—fascination with American culture to the emphatic identification with his cause. And it is immediately following Kaya’s tale, as the two are walking through the forest, that Kidlat suddenly recognizes that they are where he first saw the white carabao, and the entire circumcision sequence begins. Thus the white carabao, which I have already discussed as a marker of reification and the forgetting it induces, is recalled, and Kidlat begins the trying process of anamnesis, all prompted by the re-narration of the historical past and the pain of its failures.

The Historical Utopia This account of the past as marked by both failure and by a fundamental antagonism that prevented full actualization of its liberatory potential offers us one way to come to terms with Tahimik’s representations of a bucolic and idyllic communal life in the Philippine village, be they past or present: they do not constitute authentic representations of an actually existent historical past, but instead are projections into the past of a utopian resolution of contemporary conflict. They do not constitute a search for lost origins, an attempt to ground a contemporary politics on the basis of some vision of a primordial or eternal human nature to which humanity must return. Instead, these images of collective life are consciously and deeply

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historical: they present the possibility of creating what I call a historical utopia, one which asserts the possibility of creating something worthwhile in history without projecting its permanence or grounding it in some eternal, ontological first principle. Tahimik’s films are well known for such scenes of idyllic life, often presented as under threat or on the verge of disappearance, and thus always inclusive of the contemporary antagonism whose resolution they imagine. The images of collective production in Turumba, especially—those gently filmed scenes of the family making the papier-mâché dolls, chatting away the whole time, telling tales and laughing—and of home life in Perfumed Nightmare—Kidlat bringing his sister her own jeepney, the loving relationship between mother and son—and of the apparently “traditional” ways of life of the Igorot in I Am Furious Yellow, are images of a communal life unriven by the fundamental ontological antagonism which Žižek locates in every prior form of communal life. What antagonism does appear is not directly addressed, necessarily, and can only be inferred or interpreted; this, for example, is a primary place where Tahimik “writes women out of the picture,” as Catherine Russell has put it, suppressing the gender conflicts that might exist or have existed historically. It is not clear in Tahimik (or, for that matter, in Žižek) how one addresses these antagonisms, the ones which are not acknowledged as such, the ones which have not been identified as failures, in the act of political repetition. What nostalgia still marks these moments is tempered or complicated, however, by the profound sense of historicity that imbues even the most idealized representations of collective life. This sense of the historical nature of collective life comes to the fore at those moments where one might least expect them—in portrayals of religion and ritual. Take, for example, the representations of religious practice in Turumba. The film’s title refers to a Catholic religious festival dedicated to the Virgin Mary—“Our Lady of Sorrows”—in the small town of Pakil in the province of Laguna in the Philippines. The choice of a Catholic ritual is significant; Catholicism is no primordial or originally Filipino tradition in any emphatic sense, having arrived with the first European explorers and spread under colonization by the Spanish. It is, in other words, a tradition possessed of its own historicity, one entwined with the history of colonialism; it is a sign of the originary “cross-cultural encounter” embodied in the figure of Enrique in Memories of Overdevelopment. Turumba opens with a procession of the residents of Pakil on their way to the summit of Mount Ping-as. The young boy Kadu, the protagonist and

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narrator of the film, describes the procession and its tradition. From the mountainside, one can see the Catholic church in town and he remarks, “as we sing on Ping-as our voices fall like raindrops on our 250-year-old church.” A few moments later, from within that same church, Kadu’s voiceover continues as he and his friends and his father practice their music for the festival: “If our church is 250 years old, how old is our Madonna? Why is She the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows? Why seven sorrows?” This deceptively innocent questioning (again, the wisdom of the naïf) nonetheless gestures toward the historicity of an otherwise apparently historically transcendent belief and god. Even if his questions do not specify the Madonna’s age, they nonetheless point to her endowment with a finite historical age and duration. This sense of the historical nature of the religious is reinforced by the many images and sounds in Turumba that show the collective effort involved in creating the entire turumba festival, from the long takes of the careful manufacture of the papier-mâché dolls and animals, to the rigorous, if not exactly tuneful, practice sessions of Romy and Kadu’s band (fig. 2.13), to the meetings to decide important matters about the festival, and to the images showing the utter care and patience with which Madame Bernarda dresses and adorns the Virgin’s sacred statue. The utopia that Tahimik portrays here is deeply historical: it is a utopia that does not ground itself in any universal principle (of the divine, of a spirit, of the essence of the nation) projected retrospectively onto the past. It is a utopia whose pleasures border on those of performance and are akin to those we have seen Kadu take in the process of learning; they come from the repeated re-creation and regeneration of religion as something whose essence resides not in a sacred text or some transcendent God who fills out Being, but rather in the very act of performing and generating religion as a set of acts, practices, and significations. From this perspective, then, the cult of the Madonna in Turumba (and in Perfumed Nightmare, where she plays a significant role) takes on the Feuerbachian overtones familiar from I Am Furious Yellow: it does not so much constitute the irruption of the divine into the presence of humans, but rather the human production of that divine presence. One should insist, however, that for Tahimik the cosmic or the divine (or the spirit of the land, as we shall see) is a kind of supplementary product of collective life and not, as in the early Marx, its direct effect or expression. That is, collective life does not only manifest itself in the finite set of practices and interactions that go on between people, nor in the immediate sum of the products of those interactions, but instead this collective activity

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FIGURE 2.13

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Turumba (Kidlat Tahimik, 1983). Still capture from DVD.

itself produces something in excess of itself—thus, for example, when people work together, they do not only produce the thing they are making— a house, for example—and they do not only produce sociality itself—the way they chat with each other, enjoy each other’s presence and the sense of cooperation—but they also produce something “above” that, a kind of surplus energy that cannot be captured in any objective description of the work process and which takes on the appearance of being nonhuman. It is, to veer into semi-Lacanian language, something that is in us more than ourselves, and that only appears in collectivity. In Marx, the “fetishism” that attaches to the commodity designates a similar by-product of social labor—albeit in alienated form—that proper consciousness is supposed to recapture. In Alexander Kluge, as I will show in chapter 3, this supplement of collective efforts constitutes what he calls our “guardian angel,” the “inheritance of the unexpected,” the “supra-human knowledge” and “unintentional intelligence” that we, as a collective, possess but do not know that we possess. Where Tahimik’s and Kluge’s projects converge is in their disparate, yet shared calls to reclaim or rescue this expression of human soci-

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ality: Kluge will call for cinema to reveal it so that we might be consciously guided by this unintentional intelligence, and Tahimik will call for us to “get back in touch with the land,” a land, which we have seen at the outset of this chapter, that must be understood not as some inviolate nature, but as a fully humanized second nature. Tahimik’s insistently historicizing stance, however, is marked by two potential problems or contradictions. One, even the most consequent attempt to render the historicity of religion or belief while attempting to sustain that belief ’s cultural purchase seems fated, against its best effort, to fall into the kind of nostalgia that it hopes to avoid, even if only fitfully or episodically. In Tahimik this becomes apparent, for example, when his films lapse into the use of sentimental music, often precisely at the moments when a historical utopia seems most at risk of disappearing, as in the waterfall scene in Turumba. Why might this be? Because belief in the divine, such as the belief in the Virgin in Turumba or Perfumed Nightmare, or the belief in the spirit of the land in I Am Furious Yellow, is always at least minimally predicated on blindness to its human origins; that is, one cannot directly acknowledge the human origins of the Virgin’s divinity without sacrificing belief in the Virgin as divine, so a politics or art that appeals to such belief while bringing its profane origins to consciousness finds itself caught in an inescapable double bind. In the case of I Am Furious Yellow, the faith in the spirit of the land, the desire to shape one’s life and community in accordance with that spirit, has to be indifferent at some point to the fact that the very idea of that “spirit” is of human origin, and moreover, that the “land” itself has been determined, worked over, sullied, and influenced by human beings. Or, to put it differently and refer once again to Žižek’s reading of Heidegger, a political movement cannot “directly refer to its historical-ontological foundation.  .  .  . Ontological insight necessarily entails ontic blindness and error, and vice versa—that is to say, in order to be effective at the ontic level, one must disregard the ontological horizon of one’s activity.” In a sense, the fall into nostalgia is precisely a moment of such necessary blindness. One consequence of this trap in Tahimik is that occasionally the enunciative position of his films splits, producing an oscillation between mutually untenable or incompossible positions toward the communal practices he is portraying: namely between conscious representation of a fully historical heritage and blind faith in the forces of spirit, nature, and god. In the end, it becomes quite difficult to decide between the two positions, the embrace of the human—the “people power” that drives the Third World—and the embrace of the divine—the spiritual, the natural, the

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cosmic that prompts or thwarts all human effort. The lesson that Tahimik holds out, however, is that one should not even try to decide between these two positions and accept the mutual predications of the one and the other, resolving oneself to the constant back and forth between them: from one vantage point the spiritual becomes a supplement to the human, and from another, the human itself appears to us as a supplement to the spiritual. The second problem that arises is perhaps even more vexing and holds potentially more serious consequences for the politics of Tahimik’s films, and it is that Tahimik’s Third World politics is founded on two opposed tendencies or drives, one deeply dynamic and one deeply conservative and static. On the one hand, Tahimik’s politics insist on the human origins of social life, on the centrality of people power to the creation of all things and all forms of social existence, a fact that introduces an inescapable dynamism to social life that in itself is an object of great fascination for Tahimik: Tahimik’s films, as Jameson has rightly noted apropos of Perfumed Nightmare, allow the second nature we inhabit to “reveal itself as historical and as the result of human actions,” and they “thereby once again ‘lead us to take pleasure in the possibility [sic] of change in all things.’ ” In a world where second nature is almost uniformly oppressive, in which tradition weighs upon the minds of the living like a nightmare (Marx), such a perspective has obvious political and didactic value. But on the other hand, the idea of a historical utopia, the conviction that the products of human creation may well be worth preserving and sustaining, is underpinned by a deeply conservative drive that finds itself inevitably in conflict with the dynamism of existence—and not only that form of dynamism known as progress. It asserts that the historically evolved can become an object of great attachment, cathexis, and love; and love, as Alexander Kluge reminds us, “is a conservative drive” that rails against the impermanence and fluidity of human creation. Tahimik’s films brim with objects of such love and attachment, so much so that they barely merit mentioning: they can be as simple as a child’s toy, or as dear as a home, lovingly made by hand and maintained for years in carefully tended surroundings; they can be as whimsical as a papier-mâché horse or water buffalo, or as grand and collective and inspiring as the turumba festival or a political movement to oust a dictator. So in the end, such love conflicts with the dynamism that is the inevitable effect of people power. But it is the strength of Tahimik’s Third World politics that it compels us to accept the possibility—or rather the inevitability—that the permanence and durability of all these things we create and find so worthwhile in histo-

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ry are not guaranteed: the bamboo houses eventually decay and disappear into the forest; children outgrow their toys; the rain renders the papiermâché animals sodden masses of newspaper and running paint. This politics thus embraces, to adapt a phrase of Stuart Hall’s, a “politics without guarantees,” and compels us to imagine a utopia that does not depend for its strength on its perfect security, nor on its ultimate justification in a transcendental, incontrovertible ground, but rather on the collective and individual satisfaction that the very process of its creation provides, as well as the joy and contentment that it continues to provide once it is complete, for however long that may be. What this means, then, is that one should not read Tahimik’s references to the past as references to closed and hermetic social forms that he wishes to revive and reinstate to their former integrity; the very historicity of these forms, the fact that they have come into being (as Adorno would put it, that they are a “Gewordenes,” something which “has become”)—as we have seen in Turumba’s representation of the cult of the Virgin—is a prophylactic against such a misconception of the past. But the endorsement of a politics without guarantees means as well that Tahimik’s oft-acknowledged critique of progress (to which I will turn in a moment) is not a critique of change as such; his work is not against dynamism as a principle. And indeed, it is quite easy to demonstrate the contrary, for dynamism—at least in noncapitalist form—is a principle which his work embraces enthusiastically, finding its ultimate figure or metaphor in the typhoon, that force of cosmic nature that sweeps across the Philippines some twenty or thirty times per year (by Tahimik’s count), bringing with it great destruction, but also renewal, transformation, and wonder. But how is one, then, to understand Tahimik’s critique of progress within the parameters of this tension? Tahimik’s scandalous proposition, I would suggest, is precisely what I have already hinted at: that one can delink the concept of change or transformation from the idea of progress, and that one can think about social dynamism—and the elimination of social ills and suffering—without succumbing to the irrevocably tainted rhetoric of the sister concept to progress, namely that of development. As I have already argued, development can be understood as compulsory progress, essentially a form of coercion from abroad, a compromise to self-determination at the level of the social/national and at the level of the individual; it is an alien value that simultaneously displaces and corrupts local values and acts as an alibi for imperial interests. It manifests itself as the obligatory increase in the organic composition of capital, with the inev-

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itable downstream effects of the increased organic composition of human beings. But one must not understand development as a mere conspiracy on the part of the First World (though clearly it is that as well): Tahimik’s films push us to understand that progress and its related concepts of development bear within themselves an internal logic separated from their original intents; in other words, progress and development have established themselves as ends in themselves regardless of the effects they produce in the world. This, I would further suggest, is a deeper meaning of Tahimik’s concept of overdevelopment: overdevelopment does not only refer to that condition where countless unnecessary commodities are produced, and by extension countless hours of human effort are expended—and wasted—in production of those commodities; overdevelopment signifies the condition when progress and development have become unquestioned goods. Overdevelopment, then, is development for development’s sake. And at such a point, at the point of utter reification when development transforms into overdevelopment, overdevelopment becomes a figure for alienation—in the Marxian sense—writ large, conceived of at the broadest possible level of human social organization: for the very thing—progress, development— which is supposed to contribute to the well-being of those people being “developed,” appears as an alien force arrayed against them, as a form of oppression and domination in its own right. It becomes at once obligation and, as every one of Tahimik’s major films demonstrates, a nearly compulsory object of desire. This particular mode of oppression is hinted at in a passage in Perfumed Nightmare that takes place soon after Kidlat’s arrival in Paris, while he is still learning his way around the city and adjusting to its very foreign language. As Kidlat wanders around Paris, he comes upon an old stone house that has been partially demolished; the shot of the house initiates a brief montage sequence, which cuts quickly to a nineteenth-century building undergoing renovations, then to a modern building in the midst of construction (what is later revealed to be a gigantic supermarché), and finally to a bamboo hut in Kidlat’s home village in the process of being framed, all the work done by hand. The logic of the sequence makes clear that the old house in Paris must make way for progress; a new structure will soon take its place. Over this montage Kidlat is heard practicing his French, gleefully mangling, as usual, its pronunciation, as a final cut ushers onto the screen images of the facade of the Chapelle de l’Humanité, the sole extant church of August Comte’s positivist “Religion of Humanity.” Emblazoned on the facade is Comte’s grand motto, which Kidlat reads aloud in his inimitable

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French: “L’Amour pour principe et l’Ordre pour base, le Progrès pour but” (“Love as the principle and order as the basis, Progress as the goal”). At this point in Kidlat’s journey of Bildung, he is still a naïf and has as yet to fully comprehend the notion of progress here literally enshrined on the chapel’s facade. But Kidlat’s first hints of the meaning of progress will only emerge in the sequence immediately following this one, when he learns of his friend Lola’s worries that her stall in the Market of the Four Seasons, where she sells her double-yolked eggs, is under threat. But for now, the montage and the voice-over present little more than a subtle hint to the viewer who might know the building: here is the church whose god is Progress, a god who demands unquestioned belief. And though the inscription above the entrance implies that progress should be based upon love and order, one can understand Comte’s motto to ironically anticipate the critique of progress and development laid out in the film: for in this motto progress is the aim. Not freedom. Not liberation. Not the end of suffering or the end to human subjection to myth, but progress is the goal, an end in itself, not a means. And the echo here—the emphasis on order—of a slogan heard earlier in the film is telling: in the opening sequence of the film, Kidlat notes that the bridge in his village is used by many people, including “those who promote discipline and uniformity,” a reference to an old propaganda slogan of the martial law regime. The identification, though highly mediated and tangential, is nonetheless clear: progress oppresses in a manner equivalent to the dictator and the martial law he imposes. But Kidlat himself comes to an enlightened and critical understanding of development only over time in a process of learning that takes him from his initial enchantment with all the great figures of progress and its acceptance as an unquestioned good (in a letter home from Paris, Kidlat declaims “Kaya! You cannot build rocket ships from bamboo!”) to his final realization, in an epiphanic experience, that progress is an unnecessary yet obligatory charade. This epiphany comes toward the end of the film, when he suddenly recognizes that the “paradise” he had imagined the First World to be is not fulfilled in actuality. It is prompted, it seems (for it is not exactly clear in the film), when his American friend, the bubble gum magnate, announces that he and Kidlat will be traveling by Concorde the following morning to the United States. “Tomorrow, Kidlat,” he says, “you will be with me in paradise!” But Kidlat’s enthusiasm suddenly evaporates, as if the accumulated experience of his whole journey from the Philippine village to the Parisian metropolis had reached a tipping point, and he asks (apparently of himself): “Will it be the paradise I prayed for? Will it

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be the paradise I dreamed of?” As if in answer to this latter question, the film cuts to a shot of the rump of the white carabao, as if Kidlat suddenly grasps the ultimate meaning of his earlier nightmares about the carabao. Immediately after this—after a cut that graphically matches the carabao’s rump to one of the great, white super-chimneys at the construction site of the supermarket—we hear an announcement of the supermarket’s completion, paraphrasing the first lines of La Marseillaise: “Felicitations, enfants de la patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé!” And then, as the great chimney is raised—much like the Zwiebelturm had been raised in Bavaria and as the bamboo huts had been erected in the Philippines—the announcer declares: “Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! Su—per—mar—ché!” And therewith the first three terms are rendered equivalent with the fourth: the utopian principles of the French Revolution revealed now as only realized and realizable in the form of consumption. The prospects of then going to America become horrifying for Kidlat when his American friend tells him not to be too impressed with the giant supermarché: “Wait until America, where everything is even more super!” To which Kidlat responds, to no one in particular, in a despondent tone that soon gives way to anger: “If the small chimneys work, why the superchimneys? If the small markets work, why supermarkets? If small airplanes work, why super flying machines!?!” This, then, is Tahimik’s challenge to the very idea of progress: why must it be inevitable? Why must it constantly move in this direction of ever greater technification, ever greater increases in the organic composition of capital and humans, ever more intense disturbance and agitation, and ever more stuff to be rendered obsolete, left useless, and wasted? And this is perhaps Kidlat Tahimik’s most provocative proposition, one almost unthinkable today from within the heart of the current global recession, when growth is not a mere good but our projected salvation, and because of that apparent inconceivability, one of his most urgent: as a correlate to the idea that one can delink the notion of historical change from its seemingly permanent association with the notion of progress, Tahimik suggests that one can set limits to development or progress, that one can simply decide to slow down, and say, perhaps, “Enough!”

Conclusion Tahimik’s critique of progress returns us to the opening of this chapter and our discussion of the concept of the Third World. Tahimik’s celebration of that which seems opposed to progress, of handicraft production and

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small-scale agriculture, of local culture and of the indigenous, including the seemingly naïve belief in the Igorot’s deep connection to the land, are kept from devolving into either mere nostalgia, or worse, a kind of New Age re-exoticization of the indigenous, by the sibling notion that always accompanies it, the celebration of waste, trash, and debris and all the wonderful things one can do with those things, including make the very films and artworks—like Tahimik’s—that condemn the sorry state of the world and anticipate a better one. And this alternative world is what is at stake in Tahimik’s critique of progress. One must be clear about this: Tahimik’s critique of progress, his demand for a form of historical change that is other than progress, is not about saving the past and resurrecting it unchanged in the present; the critique of progress is about saving the future. This is a seemingly paradoxical idea, that progress—perhaps the ultimate forward-looking concept to emerge from modernity—is antagonistic toward the glorious future it supposedly anticipates. But Tahimik is not alone in this idea; a similar critique is put forth by Alexander Kluge with his notion of the “assault of the present” on the “rest of time,” time that notably includes not just the past, but the future as well. In a sense, both Tahimik and Kluge supplement a standard reading of the postmodern, in which the atrophy of historical consciousness is generally understood to mean the passing of a sense of the historical past and with it the sense that the present has come to be and could have come to be something different, with the provocation that a sense of the future has been eclipsed as well. Jameson has also recently pointed out this baleful and contradictory characteristic of progress, which must be seen not merely as the attempt to break with the past and the inertia of tradition but also as an attempt to colonize the future, to draw the unforeseeable back into tangible realities, in which one can invest and on which one can bank, very much in the spirit of stock market “futures.” . . . Where Benjamin observed that “not even the past will be safe” from the conquerors, we may now add that the future is not safe either. . . . This is the future prepared by the elimination of historicity, its neutralization by way of progress and technological evolution: it is the future of globalization, in which nothing remains in its particularity, and everything is now fair game for profits and the introduction of the wage-labor system.

In Tahimik’s language, such a future—which clearly does not deserve the name—envisioned by progress is that paradisiacal place and time where everything will be “even more super.”

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But for Tahimik, that future will always produce some form of a past, though it may take greater effort and ever more sensitive organs and tools (perhaps fashioned from bamboo?) to detect it. That past, which will be produced, is a placeholder of difference, or in Adorno’s language, a placeholder of the non-identical (das Nichtidentische) that accompanies any attempt at totalization and that will relentlessly prevent the future from ever being fully extirpated; it will relentlessly forestall the realization of the dystopian vision of an evacuated historicity that Jameson describes. And that past is found all about us in our environment, not necessarily in the form of ancient practices of dwindling tribes retreating to the hidden recesses of the Philippine cordillera, but in all the waste and junk that a future-consuming progress inevitably produces. This constant emphasis, in the attempt to imagine a better future, on old matter and on the reworking of the artifacts of history and of time itself, as well as the persistent critique, if not outright dismissal, of progress, inevitably leads to the question of the status of “the new” in Tahimik, the question of the possibility of the emergence of fundamental difference in the future, the question of where it might come from and just what it might be. History, though, as Adorno once put it, cannot “leap over its own shadow,” and in keeping with his embrace of a politics without guarantees and his ideal of a historical utopia, Tahimik portrays the new itself as bound inescapably to a past that has already occurred—the new society he wishes to construct is inescapably tied to the history of colonialism, and his future films will be made out of his past failures. In this sense, the new is deeply historical. But the new is also historical in the sense that some day it too will recede into the past, as something fragile and fleeting, possessed of its own temporality; to again, if I might, refer to Adorno, it too is something that will itself one day decay and fall apart and lay about us in ruins. Tahimik fully accepts the impermanence of the historically created; to do otherwise would be to fall prey to the ideology of progress, which hopes to establish its own thousand-year reich and which paradoxically threatens our very sense of the future. This idea, that the new itself must be conceived of as being one day old, is beautifully illustrated in the images of the plastic super-chimneys that are installed on the supermarché in Perfumed Nightmare, objects which figure, not by accident, centrally in Kidlat’s epiphany about the hollowness of progress. As with so many objects in Tahimik’s films, their function splits in (at least) two. They have a fictive diegetic role as elements of the architecture of the supermarket, and subsequently in their refunctioned

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purpose within the diegesis as the spacecraft that transports Kidlat home to the Philippines after his great revolt. But they also serve a documentary function and become another of Tahimik’s metaphors in the real: for in the profilmic world they are not the chimneys of some supermarket but have rather been found on the construction site of the Centre Georges Pompidou, just being completed at the time of Tahimik’s filming, which, given its “real” function in Paris as a cultural center, ironically appears as a “supermarket of culture,” so to speak, another figure for culture’s relentless transformation into the basest of commodities. Beyond that, though, they are construction materials for a building that has yet to be built, and the beauty of it is that Tahimik films them not as if they were lying about on the construction site waiting to be installed on the new rooftop, but as if they were already trash, as if they had already begun the very process of decay to which the new inevitably succumbs and which, paradoxically, makes it available for new uses (in this case as both profilmic material for a film and as Kidlat’s spaceship). Tahimik’s films unfold, then, in an exceedingly complex temporality: they look to the past to “bring it forward”—to insist that the epistemic fracture of imperialism is incomplete, the ties to the past are not fully severed—while simultaneously looking toward the future as if it had already happened. They unfold not only in the past conditional—what else could have happened had the victors not won?—but also in the future anterior—what new things can be imagined that will have happened once the new has become old? The new has begun to decay before it is even completed. So, in this complex temporal universe, the old appears under the guise of the new (what Brecht might call the “bad new”), and the new appears under the guise of the old, the discarded, the decayed and impermanent (what Brecht would call the “good new”). Though this example pertains specifically to capitalist progress or development, it should already be clear that the relentless transformation of the new into the old and the old into the new is for Tahimik a near-universal process, if ever there was one. It figures in his films in multiple ways. At one level, it can be understood to be an authentically natural process, repeatedly registered in all of his films, but perhaps most on display in I Am Furious Yellow: vines creep in from the jungle to overtake old building sites; vegetation emerges from decay, drawing nutrients from formerly living biological matter; typhoons tear down homes and forests and new ones rise in their stead; streams overrun their banks, forging new courses; and earthquakes—like the Baguio City earthquake in 1990 that almost destroyed Tahimik’s home—level whole cities. This unrelenting process is

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also deeply registered in Tahimik’s own biography and his own personal attitude toward existence, as an anecdote or two illustrates: his home, lovingly made by hand from found materials, the very one almost destroyed in the earthquake, was burned to the ground in 1994, and with it his irreplaceable collection of folk art; and typhoons, or rather the mold they cause, have ruined the originals of a number of his films, including a three-hour cut of the Magellan film, which is so severely damaged that it can no longer be run through a flatbed editor. It will likely never be projected on screen. But so deeply is this sense of constant passing and renewal ingrained in his existence that Tahimik seems to accept this all in stride. Which does not mean that he does not struggle at times. In the penultimate section of I Am Furious Yellow, Tahimik becomes almost despondent, unable to find a way to conclude the film, hardly facing the challenge with equanimity or grace. He falls asleep at his flatbed, and descends into a hallucinatory dream where he encounters a stream of characters from his films and a host of figures from his “real” life who speak to him in prophetic tones. Werner Herzog, who gave Tahimik his first role in film as an exotic in a sideshow in Kaspar Hauser, makes a hilarious appearance by way of footage excerpted from Burden of Dreams (1982), Les Blank’s documentary about the production of Fitzcarraldo. In a redubbed voice, and amidst several Teutonic belches, Herzog admonishes Tahimik for attempting to imitate others: “Nein, nein, Kidlat. You can never [belch] be a gut Bavarian filmmaker!” And his Navajo friend from the opening of the film reinforces Herzog’s lesson: “And you’ll never be a good Indian storyteller. Just be your own Baguio filmmaker self.” And when he awakes, Tahimik seems to have experienced his own epiphany and he returns to the film with a renewed sense of purpose, convinced he might find his own, proper path to a conclusion of the film. And indeed, his waking prompts a transition in the film to its final section, announced by a voice-over and entitled simply “Epilogue,” as if it were intended to merely dangle at the end of the film as retrospective commentary on the almost three hours of film and ten years of experience that have unfolded prior to this. The epilogue is narrated as a letter from Tahimik to the young Kidlat, who is now away in Manila at high school. In it, Tahimik recounts the story of the powerful 1990 Baguio City earthquake and its aftermath, accompanied by images of the devastation that it wrought: a crack in the street that barely spared Tahimik’s house; crumpled buildings (not built from bamboo!); improvised field hospitals where the injured are cared for. But it is precisely here in this landscape laid to waste by an uncontrollable natural

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force that Tahimik finds a place to work and complete his film, as he disappears deep beneath what appears to be the rubble of a building to set up a new editing studio in its cave-like basement. “I’ve just found my film ending!” he declares to his other children, who have come to find him. Here, in this grotto, we see on Tahimik’s flatbed editor images of the beginnings of the reconstruction of Baguio City, accompanied by a sweetly sentimental folksong: a makeshift hospital where, as Kidlat puts it, rich and poor alike receive their care, for “earthquakes are great levelers too, if you know what I mean”; here too “the babies still continue to come into this world.” This disaster becomes a great opportunity, unleashing not only an intense activity of renewal and regeneration but also a learning process with great power and potential. Not only does the earthquake function as yet another metaphor in the real, leveling out the distinctions between rich and poor and thereby figuratively anticipating a classless society, as if the cosmos and nature itself were imparting a symbolic message to Tahimik and his audience, but it also offers a practical opening, quite literally jostling ossified social relations so that new ones might begin to appear. As Tahimik tells his son, “Life goes on. And those whose native strengths were awakened by the earthquake, we must learn from them.” In many ways, then, this entire epilogue thus replays the scene between Romy and Kadu at the dam site in Turumba: in the epilogue to I Am Furious Yellow, Baguio City is now the site of disaster, and the images the film shows of recovery and rebirth are like so many images of Kadu’s toy turbines from which a lesson is to be drawn and which are to be abstracted into distant contexts where disasters—cosmic, natural, and human—unfold with unrelenting regularity. The film then closes with images of a local craftsman, Maestro Lopes, who had been introduced earlier in the film as an artist-cum-engineer who built bridges—literal bridges—for his people from discarded and natural materials, billboards and logs, ropes and massive stones. Lopes is now shown at work fashioning sculptures from wood and making new tools from old truck parts, much like Pati did in Turumba. Tahimik’s younger children help him, fanning the flames of his blacksmith’s fire, and they videotape him as he goes about his work (fig. 2.14). Here at the end of the film, in the final, affectionately assembled shots of Maestro Lopes, it is as if Tahimik suddenly remembers his earlier films and the scenes of the manufacture of jeepnies in Perfumed Nightmare and the creation of papier-mâché dolls in Turumba, and he returns to the realm of production proper, to the working of materials and the working of the land. In the midst of this, the filmmaker—here figured indirectly in the images of Tahi-

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mik’s sons videotaping Maestro Lopes—appears much like Vertov’s cameraman in Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatum, 1929) as he works alongside coalminers and industrial workers: he is a kinok, a cinemaworker, engaged in an activity analogous to that of the blacksmith, producing the tools and artifacts of culture. We are thus once again reminded that for Tahimik, production is culture, and thereby his entire emphasis on the primacy of the cultural struggle, and the importance of combating “alien values” takes on a whole new valence; culture is not (only) the symbolic systems and ritual practices of a particular social grouping, but the very way whereby collectives go about producing their worlds and all the equipment they use within those worlds. It is here that Tahimik uncannily and ironically embraces a stance often associated with the postmodern, sublating once again entirely the opposition between base and superstructure, as culture falls from the heights of the superstructure and production rises to meet it. And it is here that Tahimik’s most utopian figure may well be found: for is this not the ultimate vision of a redeemed world, where culture is no longer a document of barbarism?

FIGURE 2.14

from DVD.

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I Am Furious Yellow (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981–1991). Still capture

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A vision of what just might happen, what culture might be—what collective life itself might be—if the violent antagonism at the level of social production, figured so succinctly in the great leveling performed by the earthquake, and between humans and their environment, were one day overcome? In such a redeemed world, it would make no sense to even speak of culture as a separate realm from work. It is at this point that Tahimik gives his final advice to his son. He suggests that the teenage Kidlat might want to sign on with Maestro Lopes: Tahimik: OK Kidlat, when you finish at university, you might want to consider enrolling with Maestro Lopes. OK, you won’t get a master’s degree in bridge making, but there’s a chance you might discover some hidden bridge that will reconnect us with the spirit of the land. Yeah, just check out Maestro Lopes.

With this parting advice, Tahimik recalls the central metaphor of his first film, Perfumed Nightmare: that of the bridge. We have thus come full circle in Tahimik’s life as an artist, and I Am Furious Yellow now appears to be a continuation of his earlier work, as if Tahimik had indeed managed to realize his long-standing fantasy of creating a never-ending film, of taking a journey and making a film whose conclusion cannot be foreseen, one cup of gas at a time. This unending story is simultaneously a sign of a deep perseverance, a recognizable continuity found in Tahimik’s style, thematic obsessions, and personality, and of an inescapable transience. Not only does this film (or rather films) document Tahimik’s own passing and the passing of a whole host of worlds, from the village life of the rural Philippines to the urban culture of Paris, but its very form, which embodies a sheer provisionality, changing constantly as Tahimik edits and reedits its various iterations, refuses the comfort that any final, definitive product might offer. And in this revisiting of his earliest work, Tahimik finally comes to terms with the failures of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter: he does not finally fulfill the promise of revolt that comes at the conclusion of Perfumed Nightmare, nor does he succeed in completing the nativist project of Turumba. But neither does he close the book on them. Though I Am Furious Yellow does not keep the promises made in his earlier works, it keeps their promise—their liberatory anticipation—alive. And it is telling what Tahimik does not show at the end when he suggests that Maestro Lopes might help the young Kidlat discover a “bridge that will reconnect us with the spirit of the land”: we do not see serene landscape

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images of Kidlat’s beloved cordillera or images of the Igorot tilling their terraces; we do not see images of typhoon clouds gathering over the bay or images of an undisturbed bamboo forest. Instead, we see a man using his hands and his tools, helped by his friends and neighbors, surrounded by dirt and dust and rust, the essential elements of the Third World, working scrap metal—springs from an automobile’s suspension, truck parts, etc.— working the decaying castoffs of a global capitalism, as the blacksmith Pati did in Turumba and as the workers at Sarao Motors did in Perfumed Nightmare, transforming the metal from old Japanese war vehicles, converting them into the tools of life. This metal, this rust, and this dust and all the byproducts of human history make up “the land,” the environment to which Tahimik wants us to connect, more so than any sublime and sacred space of a conventionally beautiful landscape. And perhaps, in the end, the greatest lesson in Tahimik can be found in this idea, this gently suggested plan for living out a finite existence in a finite world (mostly) of our own making, but one possessed of an infinite array of possibilities. The utopian hope of Tahimik’s films is to become just such a “bridge that will reconnect us with the spirit of the land.” This spirit, as I hope I have shown, does not have to be taken as some New Age resurrection of a dead god, nor as the invention of some falsely immediate tradition, nor as the resuscitation of a lost world; instead, it is the sign of an irreducible tension of human existence, namely that between the durability of things and their radical impermanence. It is a sign of love for the past from which we will craft a future, and for a future which will some day come to pass.

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3

The Actuality of Cinema: Alexander Kluge Adorno lived this aporia his entire life: how can one avoid being made stupid either through the power of the powerful or through one’s own powerlessness? —Alexander Kluge, Reformzirkus Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete [überholt], remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. —Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

The Actuality of Cinema It would be fair to say (to paraphrase the first line of the “Introduction” to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics), that for Alexander Kluge, perhaps the most significant heir to Adorno’s thought working in Germany today, the cinema, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment of its realization was missed. As does Adorno, who alludes to the Marxian principle set down in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—that philosophy must put itself into practice to realize its ideals—and who saw in the twentieth century the consistent failure of Marxist philosophy to realize itself in the construction of a truly human society, so too does Kluge see in the history of cinema the failure to realize its originary utopian vocation—which I will try to define in the course of this chapter—and in this failure find the very reason for it to continue on. The original German in Adorno, überholt, is somewhat inadequately rendered in its conventional translation as “obsolete”; a better one would be “passed,” to evoke Godard, or “overtaken,” like a slow-moving car on the highway, as if philosophy and cinema have been left behind by the passage of time and the shifting of gears in the mode of production that has brought into being a social context in which they can no longer realize themselves, in which they can no longer “make themselves

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actual” (sich verwirklichen, to quite literally make themselves real) in the Hegelian sense of the term. For Kluge, the cinema has been overtaken by the development of new forms of culture, first by broadcast television and then by the New Media, which appeared in their earliest guise as cable television and have now transmogrified into the Internet and all sorts of digital forms of communication and entertainment. And though Kluge has in one way or another embraced all of these media, working tirelessly in television with his private production company since the mid-1980s, establishing a growing Internet presence in the last few years, releasing his old films on DVD, producing new ones for DVD distribution, and working in the medium of gallery installation, all while continuing to write literally thousands of stories and publish numerous works of theory, he has remained committed to cinema and its “principle”—what he calls das Prinzip Kino, in an echo of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope—and to the forms of intelligence and politics, the forms of a public sphere, and the forms of subjective constitution that go along with it. It will be my task in this chapter to specify just what this principle is and what its ramifications for utopian cinematic thought might be; and I hope to come to an understanding of Kluge’s stubborn adherence to a form and medium that, by his own admission, is archaic, and which has, at some deep level, simply failed. It should be understood from the outset that the notion of a principle of cinema (as with Bloch’s principle of hope) does not designate a transhistorical and unvarying first principle that defies historicization or de-reifying critique. On the contrary, for Kluge a principle is something deeply historical, something that emerges only in a specific historical context; it achieves the universal status proper to a principle only based on its historical spread throughout a particular social formation. In this, the principle of cinema is structurally analogous to Badiou’s “idea” of communism (discussed in the Introduction). For those familiar with Kluge and Oskar Negt’s monumental theoretical opus, Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy), an excellent illustration of such a process whereby a historical phenomenon establishes itself as a principle can be found in their discussion of the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation. In their account, this phenomenon, which in Marx designated a punctual and singular event (even if it did carry out over decades or longer in different national contexts) whereby agricultural producers were separated from their means of production, becomes a permanent feature of the landscape of social production. Permanent in this case means two things. On the one hand, the effects of the event are irreversible and felt forever, its consequences changing the course

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of history irrevocably; there is no possible return to the historical condition prior to primitive accumulation. On the other hand, primitive accumulation becomes a principle, a central dynamic feature whereby capital, even after it has fully established itself as a self-sustaining system, nonetheless must constantly seek out new terrain (in literal and metaphorical senses) to annex to its system of valorization. Thus the inaugural event establishes itself as a recurrent series of events; it becomes, in other words, a principle. The example of the principle of primitive accumulation, however, differs from the principle of cinema in one key aspect. In the former case, the principle establishes itself because of the success of the initial event: because of the ever greater expansion of capitalism and its tendential totalization and self-establishment as a seemingly natural form of social organization. In the case of cinema, however, its principle established itself by the strength of its failure: for Kluge, the cinema provoked a social, utopian wish that could not be met by the contemporary circumstances that followed in its wake. (To refer back to the Introduction: in Badiou’s language, cinema opened up a set of possibilities that remained possibilities, unrealized, unactualized, and unfulfilled.) This wish will not go away; instead, it constantly presses forth in its demand, a demand cancelable only by its actualization or realization. Thus the principle of cinema is not one that humans hold to like a doctrine or dogma, adopted and lived by through the virtues of stringent and repressive discipline; instead, the principle of cinema holds onto us—it “calls us,” as Badiou would put it—and is characterized by its necessity. Necessity, though, must here be understood in the precise sense given it by a motto of the late Marxist philosopher Rick Roderick: “Once a possibility, always a necessity!” The central paradox of Kluge’s conception of utopia lies in this generative notion of failure, a paradox with which any viewer or reader of Kluge’s work must eventually come to terms: only in failure, only in the thwarted realization of a social project, be it of the cinema or of emancipation more broadly, can the hint of a future utopia be found. There is a ham-fisted or commonsensical logic to this idea, of course, a Brechtian sort of plumpes Denken that always seems to accompany Kluge’s more nuanced and dialectical thoughts: once something is achieved, it cannot be sought after in the future; desire, including that “desire called Utopia,” as Fredric Jameson has recently called it, only emerges in the absence of its object and in the constant deferral of its satisfaction. This longing called utopia, and the longing that cinema seems to provoke in so many of its practitioners as well as in so many cinephiles, who constitute a large portion of Kluge’s dedicated fan base it must be said, is one that is predicated on a constant deferral of

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cinema’s actual achievement. As a consequence, it bears within it a degree of melancholy about opportunities missed, chances wasted (as well as a ressentiment toward what has succeeded). It can come across as a neurotic hope, one that does not really want to find what it purports to seek, but that instead wishes to sustain itself in a manner similar to that Proustian wish to wallow in and prolong suffering and the sense of loss. By such a view, utopia would constitute little more than a symptom that a patient does not want to be resolved, a mere subjective phenomenon and personal issue, a private delectation divorced from any anchor in the real. All of which points to the fragility of the concept of utopia as a ground for a political or aesthetic project: if, as an intertitle in The Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed (Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos, 1967) says, “utopia gets better and better while we wait for it,” do we then really want what we claim to want, a utopian society, and a successful art? Or do we really only want to persist in our desire for it, to project it as a lack that gives our lives and work meaning and structures our existences? Does our pleasure in utopia arise merely from its deferral? What disappointments would greet us if we ever got what we claim to want? Kluge, though, approaches this issue dialectically and openly acknowledges this apparently self-undermining dynamic, arguing not only that one must overcome such deep attachments but also that such attachments spur us on to their overcoming: the love of cinema demands cinema’s supersession. One must recognize that the fulfillment of cinema’s goals will be its overcoming and one must have the courage and strength to let cinema “come to pass,” to recall Godard’s poignant metaphor. In Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed, this point is given a “negative” or inverted formulation when the voice-over (in this case in Alexandra Kluge’s voice) explains how Leni Peickert, the heroine of the film who wants to create a grand, new “reform circus,” finds herself trapped in a double bind. It is a passage that immediately recalls Kidlat Tahimik’s struggles with the conflict between the conservative drive of love and the dynamism of social and natural forces that he also embraces: Leni Peickert says: “I want to change the circus because I love it.” Answer: Because she loves it, she will not change it. Why? Because love is a conservative drive.

Leni Peickert’s love for the circus parallels Kluge’s love for the cinema; as a conservative drive, this love stands simultaneously as an obstacle—a structural blockage—to cinema’s realization of its utopian aspirations and as

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the very impetus toward cinema’s transformation into something new and different. Love, in other words, is not only a conservative drive. This deep ambivalence, or aporia, that lies at the heart of Kluge’s love of cinema is an allegory for an attitude toward the given world as well: for the concern to transform the world, the desire to make it something other than it is, cannot be born solely from negativity; it must be born also of a profound affection and care for a world that is far from perfect. Otherwise, why would one bother changing it? So what might appear as a neurotic desire that fears its fulfillment and seems content to tarry in failure is not in the end necessarily afraid of success. Jürgen Habermas has said of Kluge that he is not only a materialist but also the “archetypal anti-defeatist,” two attributes that seem to me quite intimately related: Kluge is not a materialist and an anti-defeatist but rather he is an anti-defeatist because he is a materialist. Because Kluge’s thinking constantly seeks out ways to realize itself in the practical transformation of the world, it cannot imagine itself without its material realization: as Kluge has said, “When I have understood something, I set myself in motion, travel, act, or I write a theoretical book.” His “thoughts”—his films, stories, theory—cannot be easily separated from his enormous practical activity, his almost unfathomable productivity, the relentless energy with which he generates endless numbers of possible (if mostly provisional) solutions to the problems that pose utopia as a question in the first place. The optimistic phrases scattered throughout Kluge’s work are not mere throwaway lines, but practical principles by which to live and to live better. A well-known scene in The Power of Feelings (Die Macht der Gefühle, 1983) demonstrates the nature of Kluge’s anti-defeatism. In the scene, a reporter, played by Alexandra Kluge, interviews Herr Kammersänger, an opera singer “well known for his passionate expression in Act I.” The reporter asks repeatedly how he can play the first act with a “spark of hope” in his eyes (as a reviewer has apparently remarked) when he knows, as “a reasonable person,” that the fifth act will have a terrible outcome (fig. 3.1). His responses recall those of another Herr K., Brecht’s Herr Keuner, famous for his dialectical inversions of common sense: Kammersänger insists, much to the interviewer’s frustration, that in Act I, despite having played the role eighty-four times, he does not know how things will end. The interviewer is equally insistent: Interviewer: But you know from past performances that at 8:10 p.m. in Act I, what is going to happen at 10:30 p.m. in Act V.

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Herr Kammersänger: So? Interviewer: Then why do you have “a spark of hope on your face”? Herr Kammersänger: Because in Act I, I can’t know Act V. Interviewer: You mean that the opera could end completely differently? Herr Kammersänger: Of course. Interviewer: But it doesn’t end differently. Not in 84 performances. Herr Kammersänger: Yes, because it’s a very successful piece. Interviewer: Yes. Thus 84 performances. But it doesn’t have a happy ending. Herr Kammersänger: Are you against success? Interviewer: No. But it does not end well in Act V! Herr Kammersänger: But it could! [könnte doch aber!]

“But it could!”: this is the motto of anti-defeatism, an optimistic motto that does not shun success, but which refuses the sort of success that seems inevitable. Such anti-defeatism sees in every moment in the present an openness toward other possible successes—and not only toward the one that seems inescapable.

FIGURE 3.1

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The Power of Feelings (Alexander Kluge, 1983). Still capture from DVD.

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It is important here that Kammersänger’s enunciative position within the diegesis is split between his role as “Kammersänger” (the singer) and the role he plays in the opera. As “Kammersänger,” he knows full well that Act V has ended badly eighty-four times; he knows, to switch to the obvious allegorical register that the scene invites, that the fifth act of “History,” so to speak, will find a similar end. But as the character in the opera, he cannot know in Act I what will happen in Act V. He must act as if a happy ending were still possible. One could describe these two subject positions as that of the defeatist and that of the utopian. But what is then even more important to note is that these enunciative positions actually overlap: when Kammersänger appears in Act I with the “passionate expression” and a “spark of hope” in his eyes, it is impossible to distinguish between the two subject positions: the “passionate expression” and the “spark of hope” belong fully as much to Kammersänger as they do to the character he is playing. And it is the dialectical position any subject must occupy who does not wish to fall between the two poles of defeatism and näive utopianism: one must rigorously confront the brute facticity of the given and the deadly outcomes it seems to project, yet also assiduously perceive, seek out, and hold open the possibility of its overcoming, its transformation in time. This is also the position the spectator occupies, oscillating between immersion in the image on screen and the transformation and abstraction of that image into something else, a new meaning, a new idea. And, in the end, this is also essentially the “subject position,” if one may put it that way, of cinema itself. As a photographic medium it is bound to the given by its “thingliness” (Dinghaftigkeit), as Adorno would put it, the ontological continuity between image and the profilmic world it reproduces, and as such constantly risks devolving into “defeatism”: the mere reproduction of the given world. As a temporal medium, and consequently as one capable of a form—montage—that calls that “thingliness” into question, cinema holds open the possibility of overcoming the given, the possibility that the given, which includes cinema itself, might “become something other,” to again refer to an appropriate phrase from Adorno. Kluge, then, is immune to that withering criticism leveled against Adorno by Georg Lukács, who famously remarked that he and his fellow members of the Frankfurt School had taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” eschewing from their comfortable lodgings any real practice that might ameliorate the horrors from which their critique drew energy and vital sustenance. Kluge’s method is not marked by what Fredric Jameson has recently described as the “desperate attempt to avoid all

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positivities” that characterizes Adorno’s philosophy, a stance that in the end “is a prophetic but unsatisfying response to our historical situation,” which more desperately than ever demands a rethinking of Left politics and a Left cultural politics as a positive program. In Adorno, no matter where something like a positive program is hinted at, there is always a persistent sense that any attempt to realize it would be beset by the pitfalls of all positivities and fall prey to the worst sorts of identity thinking—a sine qua non of all practice for Adorno. Thus, for example, in the famous closing lines of Minima Moralia, where Adorno declares that a “responsible” philosophy must “contemplate things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption,” the nature of that redemption and the practical steps necessary to get there remain but a fantasy, not even hinted at; and so philosophy remains contemplation. While Kluge shares Adorno’s fundamental critique of identity thinking, as a “non-defeatist” Kluge generates positive programs as if governed by a compulsion, constantly experimenting in the truest Brechtian sense of the term, combining and recombining all the materials he collects and all the friends he has made and all the coworkers he has gathered around himself with the relentless optimism that one of these arrangements might just eventually do the trick and lead precisely to a standpoint from which things would be redeemed. Cinema remains “this side” of redemption, however. Kluge, one must keep in mind, emerges from an intellectual tradition that considered cinema—as a branch of the culture industry—to offer a false image of redemption in the present, so any claim that cinema could anticipate, or offer an image of, a redeemed world, no matter how mediated or qualified that image might be, will merit the most acute suspicion. The idea that cinema has offered a false image of redemption shares something with Godard’s notion, which I explored in chapter 1, that cinema has forgone its original obligation or compulsion to “show us that the world was there” and instead dedicated itself to the culinary pleasures of classical Hollywood narrative and the establishment of an ersatz-reality that supplants and effaces the very world it was supposed to point toward. Like Godard, Kluge maintains an ambivalence and at times antipathy toward Hollywood film and its derivative offshoots in commercial German cinema, originally derided as Papas Kino (daddy’s cinema) in the earliest days of the Young German Film in the 1960s. In Kluge’s formulation of it, the Konfektionsfilm (“manufactured” or “ready-made” film) hijacked the mission of cinema, whose original vocation was most closely realized in

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the variety and ribald anarchy of early cinema, a period prior to cinema’s codification and reduction into what is now called “classical” form that offered far richer possibilities for human experience and artistic expression. This original function also had to do with cinema’s initial promise of a different public sphere in its earliest days and its subsequent use by radical social movements and the avant-garde, uses represented for Kluge primarily in the figures of Dziga Vertov who, as a documentarian, was the consummate collector of artifacts of reality and the greatest early practitioner of montage, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko, whose films uncannily, even in their general conformity to Aleksandr Bogdanov’s dictate that cinema organize collective experience, provided the sort of space necessary for a spectator’s mind to operate autonomously. It is in this potential to promote the mind’s autonomous movement that cinema finds its most compelling vocation and project. This project is at one with that of enlightenment more generally, and it is part of the utopia of film that cinema—perhaps in ways possible for no other art form or medium for thought—can fulfill that program, one which Kluge understands in classically Kantian terms. Kluge argues that his montage, marked by a radical heterogeneity, does not “isolate some truth” to be ingested by the spectator in unaltered form; instead, he contends “that the differences narrated in the different forms” that coexist in his films provoke the spectator to work toward a truth. This is the main question of enlightenment. We believe in the new encyclopedia, which would, however, be decentralized, which would not be one row of volumes, which would not only be written, but written, told, acted. That is the program we live for, which I would summarize by quoting the introduction from the second part of Kant’s transcendental philosophy concerning the architecture of reason. Adorno read it to me one evening, this one page. That program is neither modern, nor postmodern, but classical. Even if everything has been said, it has not yet been realized.

This is the sense in which one must understand Kluge’s claim that cinema belongs to the “classical” public sphere: it is a public sphere where the possibility of enlightenment still attains, one where cinema can function as a vehicle and medium of edification and not of mass obfuscation and mystification. I will return to this idea in a moment. For now, though, it is worth quoting at some length the passage to which Kluge refers from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the following passage, one can replace Kant’s term

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“knowledge” with Kluge’s notion of the “truth” toward which the spectator “works” to create a summary of Kluge’s “classical program”: Our knowledge springs from two main sources in the mind, the first of which is the faculty or power of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions); the second is the power of cognizing by means of these representations (spontaneity in the production of concepts). Through the first an object is given to us; through the second, it is, in relation to the representation (which is a mere determination of the mind), thought. Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can afford us a cognition.

The opposition between “intuitions” (Anschauungen) and “concepts” (Begriffe) reflects the fundamental distinction in Kant between the body and the mind, between “sensuousness” or “sensibility” (Sinnlichkeit) and “understanding”: We apply the term sensuousness [Sinnlichkeit] to the receptivity of the mind for impressions, insofar as it is in some way affected; and, on the other hand, we call the faculty of spontaneously producing representations, or the spontaneity of cognition, understanding. Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought.

Consequently, in a phrase often cited by Kluge, and one that is absolutely central for understanding Kluge’s concept of cinema, and to which I will return shortly, Kant argues: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its concepts sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under concepts).” Kluge adopts Kant’s description of this basic movement of cognition and turns it into the foundation of his theory of cinema. In doing so, he interprets Kant’s concept of intuition quite literally, relying heavily on the visual connotations of the German Anschauung, whose etymological roots lie in the verb anschauen (“to look at” or “watch”) the very same verb

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one uses to refer to the activities of watching a film. This linguistic coincidence—much like the one that anchors Tahimik’s notion of people power— anchors and grounds Kluge’s conception of a utopian cinema, as if it were one of Tahimik’s cosmic messages. As early as 1964, in his first essay on the cinema, “The Utopia of Film,” when he began outlining his program for a Kantian cinema, Kluge already claimed quite frankly that “film is oriented toward cognition.” A year later, in “Word and Film,” he and his coauthors cite this same passage from Kant and argue for an acknowledgedly utopian cinema that replicates the movement of cognition between the two poles of sensuousness and understanding, between intuition and concept. For Kluge, cinema provides—in a way no other art or “aesthetic” can (and recall, Kant’s definition of the “aesthetic” as a discipline or science is the “science of the rules of sensuousness in general”)—an object for the understanding in the form of an image; in other words, cinema can make concepts “sensible” (sinnlich). On the other hand, cinema can—through the power of montage and other modernist techniques such as the “literarization” of cinema—make the mind’s intuitions “understandable” (verständlich) by “bringing them under concepts,” as Kant put it. What is crucial is that cinema moves between sensuousness and understanding, between the image and the concept. Cinema may not tarry at either pole; it may not rest in the realm of the “aesthetic” and sensuous, and it may not aspire to the arid realm of contentless logic. Cinema, for Kluge, thus has a particular affinity with the human mind: its essential structure oscillates between the realm of visual documents and stimuli (what Kluge refers to as the “radical intuitions” of the photographic image) and the “conceptual possibilities in montage,” and it thereby mimics the basic structure of human cognition as Kant defines it. Similarly, just as in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant identifies a particular human capacity that mediates between the realms of sensuousness and understanding, namely the power of the “imagination” (Einbildungskraft), so too does Kluge identify an essentially analogous capacity of the human mind that cinema is uncannily capable of addressing. Kluge labels this capacity— which he has repeatedly called the most significant productive power of the human being—Phantasie, a term that translates equally well as fantasy, fancy, or imagination. Phantasie is the central term whereby Kluge conceptualizes and assesses the relative autonomy of spectatorial activity. Though the concept draws heavily on Kant’s own concept of imagination, which I will address momentarily, it appeals as well to more common psychoanalytic uses of the idea of fantasy, especially in Kluge’s earlier work: as

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such, it also designates the mind’s proclivity for fancy (its inherent tendency to wander, to daydream, to lose itself in reverie, to fabricate fanciful ideas, and so on), as well as its compulsion to produce eroticized imaginative scenarios. But even in those instances where Phantasie designates such apparently irrational functions and movements of the mind, its cognitive moment is emphasized: for example, in Public Sphere and Experience, written with Oskar Negt, escapist and erotic fantasies are essentially manifestations of an “inverted consciousness” and as such constitute an expression of the truth of an inverted world, precisely as religion, in the early Marx, provides an inverted consciousness of a world that is itself upside down. In this form, as a “mere libidinal counterweight to unbearable, alienated relations, Phantasie is merely an expression of this alienation. . . . Yet by virtue of its mode of production, Phantasie constitutes an unconscious practical critique of alienation.” If such manifestations of Phantasie appear “confused” or unrealistic or fanciful, then this confusion is the reproduction or reflection of a world that is confused and that does not “take into consideration the specific mode of production” that is proper to Phantasie. The cognitive function of these psychoanalytic aspects of Phantasie can be understood within the Kantian determinations of the concept of the imagination. Kant distinguishes between two forms of imagination, the reproductive imagination and the productive imagination, both of which reappear and play a role in Kluge’s notion of Phantasie. Reproductive imagination, as Rudolf Eisler puts it, “depends on” and is “derived” from sensuous interactions and encounters with the world; it connects newly acquired and previously existing “representations [Vorstellungen] according to laws of association.” By contrast, the productive role of imagination—its transcendental role—“precedes” the sensuous interaction with the world; it is a capacity or power that allows one to “connect intuition [Anschauung] (sensuousness) and understanding (conceptual thought [Begrifflichkeit])” and belongs to the transcendental capacities of the human mind. Productive imagination follows “a priori laws of understanding.” In Kluge, Phantasie can be understood precisely as this capacity or power to bind the multiple stimuli and intuitions that bombard the human being—in short, all of the sensuous input—to the conceptual level of the functioning of the mind. Phantasie, most simply put, is the capacity to mediate between the sensuous and the conceptual. In other words, Phantasie is the human capacity to generate what Kluge (and Negt) call experience (Erfahrung) from the sensuous interaction with the world. Kluge has inherited this term, which has a long and complex

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history within the tradition of the Frankfurt School (in particular in the work of Benjamin and Adorno), in all of its complexity. But at its most elemental level, experience can be understood as the simultaneous raising of sensuous perception to the level of the concept and the filling out of the concept with the necessary sensuous content. The mere, immediate sensuous encounter with the world does not constitute experience in any emphatic sense (this would be roughly akin to Benjamin’s related notion of Erlebnis); similarly, conceptual activity lacking content does not constitute experience either. We can thus understand better the significance for Kluge of Kant’s assertion, to which I already referred above, that every expression .  .  . oscillates between concept [Begriff] and intuition [Anschauung]. “Intuition without concept is blind; concept without intuition remains empty.” . . . Film . . . combines the radical concreteness of its materials with the conceptual possibilities of montage; thus it offers a form of expression which is as capable of a dialectical relationship between concept and intuition as is verbal language, without, however, stabilizing this relationship.

This formulation also contains a vision of where and how autonomous Phantasie can operate between the two poles of Anschauung and Begriff, between intuition and concept: autonomous Phantasie does not remain blind, bound to the falsely immediate material world offered up onscreen. And it does not remain empty, because the image on screen provides it with the content of concrete materials. This formulation also lets us understand from another perspective Kluge’s attribution of a utopian function to early cinema: early cinema was able to provide an immense variety of new and unexplored sensuous data for the mind—for the concept—in ways that had hitherto been inconceivable: actuality films from the ends of the earth, news accounts, and more provided a broad and variegated assortment of possible sensuous perceptions. This is, in part, cinema’s utopia: it can “show us that the world is there,” as Godard has put it, in all of its sensuous variety beyond the confines of our provincial entrapment in our immediate life worlds. For Kluge, to show us that the world is there means to fill out the empty mind; cinema becomes something like a prosthetic sensory organ, bringing to the subject objects of intuition that lie far outside of its normal range of perception. Conversely, the utopia of montage lies in its ability to render perception capable of sight (that is, it can alleviate perception’s blindness) not by providing more content, but by raising sensuous perception—Anschauung—to the level

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of thought—Begriff. And Phantasie is there as the mediatory capacity of the mind to shuttle between the poles of sensuous perception and thought. In German, Kant’s term for the imagination—Einbildungskraft—contains a linguistic serendipity (in a similar manner to the term Anschauung) that allows Kluge to easily assimilate the notion to his Marxist vocabulary: the suffix -Kraft signifies “strength,” “capacity,” or “power,” precisely as in the term “labor-power” (in German Arbeitskraft.) Kluge understands Phantasie, modeled as it is on Kant’s notion of Einbildungskraft, as a form of labor-power: it produces and it works, it performs labor as important as any exertion of more muscular powers—and it can be exploited and administered and disciplined in much the same way as well. As with other labor capacities, Phantasie seeks its realization in the world: in terms taken from Marx’s early writings, Kluge argues that Phantasie seeks somehow to objectify itself in the transformation of the world, precisely in the way that labor-power more generally seeks to objectify itself in some sort of product. The term’s usefulness for a Marxist theory of cinema and the media becomes immediately apparent: in addition to providing a clear specification of what might constitute spectatorial autonomy, it also provides a concept that explains how the imagination contributes to the production of value. Consequently, it then allows Kluge to theorize how cinema or the media contribute to the overall exploitation of labor-power by capital. For Kluge, alienated media—the Konfektionsfilm, the New Media, mass culture more generally—function to constrain and channel the activity of Phantasie; they attempt to mobilize it as a form of productive labor-power that can be annexed to the valorization of capital: cinema, in its dystopian form, attempts to make it possible for the spectator’s mind—for the spectator’s Phantasie—to realize itself only via the mediation of forms provided by capitalism itself, in the very same way that capital permits labor-power to realize itself only in the form of wage labor. Capital, so Negt and Kluge argue, permits “use-values” to realize themselves only through the “needle’s eye of exchange value.” Mass culture provides that same “needle’s eye” to Phantasie, leveling and reducing the labor of the imagination to the level of abstract labor. Against this leveling, a political cinema would provide an alternate means for Phantasie to act autonomously and realize itself on its own terms. Consequently, Kluge rejects two very different forms of cinema, both the prefabricated forms of the Konfektionsfilm and the overly didactic “associative” montage, exemplified, for instance, by the abattoir scene in Eisenstein’s Strike (Stachka, 1925), on similar grounds:

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If I were to structure my montage in an associative fashion, then I would neglect the proportions [between the shots] and that would be a very arbitrary act. This is basically no different from the situation where poets write poems and schoolchildren are forced to memorize them—why on earth should people with a Phantasie of their own be forced to learn something by heart which was conceived in an associative fashion by somebody else?

One can now articulate the basic element of Kluge’s critique of both the culture industry and film propaganda: they provide both Anschauung and Begriff to the viewer. Blind sensuous perception or intuition (Anschauung) is provided in the form of the falsely immediate image, at a remove from the actual object, the mere reproduction and illusion of the original profilmic world; concepts (Begriffe) are provided in the form of pedantic montage and the rote forms of narrative realism whose identities are merely confirmed by the perceptions the film provides. The culture industry and propaganda supplant both aspects of the innate human capacity for imagination: both the reproductive imagination—that aspect of imagination that “depends on experience” and which is “derived” from sensuous contact with the world—and the productive imagination, those a priori characteristics of the imagination that “precede” experience are colonized and displaced by the forms provided by film. It would be a mistake, however, to think that Kluge’s utopian cinema is animated by an ideal of the complete, unfettered freedom of the spectator’s Phantasie; Phantasie, like any particular capacity of the mind or body, needs objects against which to work, and a film must provide material to be worked on in the form of images and sounds and the relations between those images and sounds. Hence Kluge’s insistence that a film provide places of friction (Reibungsstellen) and conflict, unease and perplexity. Moreover, Phantasie, again like labor capacities more generally, is historical: it is the product of a learning process that unfolds at the onto- and phylogenetic levels; its shape, abilities, forms, and powers are as determinate as any comparable skill or ability of the body: just as the early twentyfirst-century subject has mostly forgotten older skills (like spinning yarn or making paper by hand or growing food) and learned new skills appropriate to a digital age (typing with the thumb, pointing-and-clicking, multitasking), so too has the mind changed shape and Phantasie acquired a host of new coordinates. To describe the shape that Phantasie assumes and has been given, Kluge has developed the notion—perhaps his most controversial—of the “film

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in the spectator’s head.” This “inner film” is comprised of a millennia-old accretion of stories and images and fantasies with which the medium of the motion picture has a particular “structural affinity,” an affinity that became apparent once cinema arose on the historical stage and which accounts, in part, for the medium’s dramatic and sudden popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, the existence of the film in the spectator’s head precedes the emergence of cinema. Kluge makes this clear in the “Foreword” to Cinema Stories, a recent collection of fictional and semifictional short stories: I would also like to make clear right away that for me these stories deal with the “principle of cinema.” I consider this “cinema” immortal and older than the art of film. This conviction is based on the idea that we can share with one another in public something that “moves us inwardly.” In this regard, film and music are like cousins. Neither form will perish. Even if the clattering of projectors disappears, there will be something—I firmly believe—“that functions like cinema.”

An earlier formulation, from a 1974 interview with Jan Dawson, begins to make clear how Kluge understands the relationship between what he here calls “the art of film” and the older film in the spectator’s mind: The invention of film, of the cinema, is only an industrial answer to the film which has its basis in the film in people’s minds. The stream of associations which is the basis of thinking and feeling . . . has all the qualities of cinema. And everything you can do with your mind and your senses, you can do in the cinema.

“An industrial answer to the film which has its basis in the film in people’s minds”: others have commented at length on Kluge’s assertion that the flow of images in the mind resembles the flow of images that can be constructed in cinema as well as on the similarities between Kluge’s formulation and those of phenomenological film theory, but I am interested at the moment in the model that is presented here of the encounter between the “art of film” as an “industrial answer” and the older film in the human mind. I do not think this should only be understood in crude, almost biologically determinist, terms, though to do so would not necessarily be entirely wrong: Kluge does seem to suggest that there existed a basic human tendency, a physical disposition, desire, or need that allowed a new technology

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to suddenly become dominant; such an explanation would be, for example, akin to explaining the rise of tea or sugar as commodities based on their appeal to a universal natural proclivity toward stimulation from caffeine or a universal neurobiological response to the sweetness of sucrose. But such models tend to retrospectively naturalize the historical origins of human need, as well as to legitimize the origins of industry and capitalism itself, as if their emergence were inevitable as the most efficient and effective way to satisfy preexisting human wants. Kluge, however, historicizes the need itself as a result of both human history and biological evolution, as will be clear in a moment. I think a more interesting model of the history of cinema is also at work in Kluge’s explanation of the appearance of cinema “proper” (that is, the industrial-cultural medium we think of as the cinema, including its technological and economic infrastructure as well as the various forms and genres that films themselves took on) as the “industrial answer” to the ancient cinema in the spectator’s head. This model of cinema history shares something with Benjamin’s historiographical project, which attempts to create, as Miriam Hansen has put it, a “superimposition of modernity and prehistory.” For Kluge, cinema precedes its own appearance and only with the “invention” of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century did we really become aware of that older cinema of the mind. The historical claim Kluge makes is not that something in human nature changed in 1895, though he clearly believes that cinema and other media have transformed “the human essence,” which, as Marx famously put it in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, is constituted by the “ensemble of the social relations”; instead, Kluge argues that something in historically constituted human nature became apparent—it came into view—with the unfolding of the cinema as a mass medium. This is a profoundly materialist stance, which finds its precursor in Marx, who articulated its fundamental gesture in a passage in his famous letter to Arnold Ruge, which merits quoting at length, so central is it to Kluge’s entire program: The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it. Like Feuerbach’s critique of religion, our whole aim can only be to translate religious and political problems into their self-conscious human form.

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Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analysing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between past and future but to complete the thought of the past. Lastly, it will become plain that mankind [sic] will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the completion of its old work.

Cinema, for Kluge, possesses the same force as that claimed by the early Marx for critique: it is capable of arousing humanity from a dream and not destined to merely lull humanity into new ones; it is part of the mission of cinema to present to the world something which it has yet to see, to make it aware of a form of consciousness about itself that had hitherto remained unknown. Marx’s project of historical critique—”critique” because it brings to light what was hitherto invisible, “historical” because it is oriented toward an excavation and completion of the work of the past—which is summed up neatly in this passage, articulates as well the essence of Kluge’s cultural-political program, his version of “partisanship” or Parteilichkeit: it is here where one finds the roots of Kluge’s claim not to be part of an avant-garde, but of an arrière-garde, whose mission is to “bring everything forward.” This is precisely what Kluge means when he speaks of “redemption”: it is the “completion” of the “thoughts of the past” and the putting into effect of humankind’s “old work.” Cinema, by the strength of its “structural affinity between the film on the screen and the ‘inner film’ ” and by dint of its privileged address to the faculty of Phantasie, gains a privileged place in helping humankind complete or redeem its old work; for that inner film contains not only the dreams and the underground work of a slew of generations that have yet to be realized, it also embodies or captures something essential about the functioning of reason—in the individual, in the collective, and in the world—which cinema can bring to light. For Kluge, cinema can expose the utopian dimension of reason. It is here that one encounters the full degree to which Kluge is a utopian thinker and simultaneously the point at which his work borders on metaphysical foundationalism; for despite the lessons learned from Adorno and Horkheimer about the dialectic of enlightenment, despite the horrors of all the historical attempts to realize reason in the world, Kluge insists that rea-

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son, borne within and between human subjects, yearns for utopia, anticipates it, and constantly seeks its creation in the world. Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, has famously said that there is no direct history that takes us from barbarism to humanitarianism, but that there is a straight line from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. For many readers of Adorno, that latter telos seemed to cancel out the liberatory impulse that might animate the former; the dialectic of enlightenment usurped forever the promise of liberation through enlightenment, rendering the liberatory narrative of enlightenment a mere alibi for the dual suppression of nature and humanity imposed upon the world by an irrational reason. Against this assumption, Kluge’s utopianism insists that reason is possessed of a wish for its true and authentic realization, that it is possessed of a wish and impulse toward liberation. This suppressed dream of reason, despite its failures, despite being obscured to the point of fading from our awareness, continues to press its demand underground and in unconscious form. In other words, the unconscious in Kluge is not the domain of irrationality and unreason; it is, instead, where reason resides when it cannot realize itself in reality. It cannot be emphasized enough the degree to which Kluge remains a “partisan of the Enlightenment” and why his project, in the end, is only improperly understood as postmodern, as more casual commentaries on his work often suggest. Kluge’s partisanship of the Enlightenment has not faded in the least over the course of his career. A 2005 interview between Negt and Kluge, for example, demonstrates the utopian character of reason. The interview, entitled Selbstdenken (“thinking for oneself ”), takes its title from Kant’s famous “maxim” of enlightenment, “always thinking for oneself is enlightenment,” a maxim that is as close to an unquestioned ethical first principle as one will ever find in Kluge’s work. At stake in the idea is the nature of autonomous thought, and by extension, the nature of the sort of autonomous spectatorial activity that Kluge hopes to foster with his films. The style of the interview is typical for Kluge’s recent television work— he interrupts Negt repeatedly, often finishing his sentences, putting words into his mouth, reformulating things in his own language, asking questions which are really only statements for his interlocutor to confirm with a nod of the head or a brief “that’s right” or “yes.” The result, though at times frustrating for both viewer and interviewee, is a conversation where the thoughts of two individuals become indistinguishable from one another. Thought becomes collaborative and collective in this performance of what Negt and Kluge have elsewhere called their “gemeinsame Philosophie”—a

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“collective philosophy” or a “philosophy in common”—that extends back to the early 1970s and their collaboration on Public Sphere and Experience. Against the impression that “thinking for oneself ” constitutes a deeply individualistic notion of enlightenment, as if to “think for oneself ” is to act only in one’s own interests, Kluge and Negt emphasize the ineluctably collective nature of thought: to think for oneself, they argue, only makes sense in the context of a collectively produced and shared thinking. The autonomy of thought (and by extension the autonomy of the spectator’s own fantasy or his or her own activity in general) is predicated on the individual’s immersion in a public. The echoes of Marx’s definition of communism, as an “association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” are very strong in this utopian vision of reason. As if to enact and demonstrate the collective nature of thought, in the interview Kluge half states, half asks: “If I cannot express my ideas to others, then my thoughts have no value. Thinking is a collective process, actually the most collective thing [das Gemeinschaftlichste] that humanity can do.” To which Negt responds: That is correct. . . . And the freedom of the pen is the necessity and the possibility to make public use of my own reason. . . . Thinking is not something monadological, like a monad that thinks in itself. The problem is not just that you cannot express yourself, but Kant says that you cannot even think properly [without the public expression of ideas].

One can immediately see here the origins of the imperative for a politics of Öffentlichkeit—of the “public sphere” or “publicness”: the public sphere is not necessary only in order to provide a sphere of debate and discussion so that human affairs can be organized reasonably and fairly, and so that injustices and inequalities can be brought to light and corrected and so on, but also—and even more importantly—the public sphere is essential to the constitution of human beings as reasoning beings, as beings capable of thought; without the collective expression of ideas, reason itself loses the very substrate of its existence. So, when Kluge fights for the public sphere, it is not only to prevent the constraint of public debate and discussion, but to prevent the eclipse of reason. These are the stakes, conceived of at the broadest level, of Kluge’s cultural politics. But another aspect of reason’s collective nature concerns Kluge, what can be called, following Adorno, its natural-historical dimension. The interview with Negt continues: “And because people have learned to think

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as humanity, that is through the collection of their ancestors, through evolution, as if they had another extremity, they have an invisible extremity which is called ‘thinking.’ It is not contained in the head, but amongst people, amongst humankind.” The exact same thing can be said of the film in the spectator’s head: it is not an individualist concept, though clearly each of us has a unique archive of attributes and capacities, including the associations and thoughts and images in our minds, that have arisen in the course of individual experience. It is, instead, emphatically a concept of collectivity: Kluge’s “conviction . . . based on the idea that we can share with one another in public something that ‘moves us inwardly’ ” amounts to the assertion that the condition for the possibility of that inner experience is precisely that it can be shared and that it must be shared. As a collective concept, the inner film is thus deeply historical, the result of biological evolution as well as the product of the historical education of Spirit. To return to the passage from Marx’s letter to Ruge cited above: the utopian function of cinema, and of the public sphere to which it should contribute, is not merely to provide the collective substrate of thinking itself, but, as that “industrial answer” to the age-old film in the spectator’s head, it is also an instrument or technology, as well as a set of social relations, which allows humanity to become conscious of its own deep collective nature; the emergence of cinema, one could say, is the emergence of a technology and an institution capable of showing humanity an image of its own reason, so that humanity might indeed become conscious of what it has only dreamed, so that it might become aware of the historical need which is reason, so that it might complete the thoughts of the past. But this promise of the cinema has gone unfulfilled, as the contemporary state of cinema attests all too clearly; cinema, since early in its development, has increasingly taken on the streamlined forms of classical narrative and has increasingly become the province of business (this latter only becoming worse under the reign of the New Media). Writing in 1964, in “The Utopia of Film,” Kluge remarked: The utopia of film, that is the idea that there could be something other than this insufficient present of the moment, has been unable to develop up to this point; the promises that are contained in the history of film are not wellknown enough. But it suffices, nonetheless, to get a sense of utopia. Utopia is a conservative idea, the search for a quality about which one vaguely knows that it existed at some point in the past.

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From this perspective, cinema is something of an “unrealized project” (to borrow a concept from Habermas), whose history is one of repeated broken promises and unmet possibilities, all of which are still alive, if in muted form, and make a claim against a present which is “insufficient” and incomplete in itself. As with philosophy in Adorno, cinema exists in a state of temporal discontinuity or difference with the present; it marks a moment of internal contradiction or non-identity, a place (or what Kluge calls a “timeplace” [Zeitort], one of his favorite neologisms) where the system or totality finds itself unable to achieve perfect closure or self-identity. One of cinema’s virtues then, ironically, is precisely its lack of what Adorno would call “actuality.” As Max Pensky has described it, in German (Actualität) this notion combines a sense of both being “up-to-date” and “in fashion” with a somewhat different significance for the present, a sense of “relevance for the present and its concerns.” Cinema’s actuality in this latter sense, its relevance for the moment, what it can offer the present in terms of critical potential and commentary, lies in the fact that it is out of date: it persists in a state of temporal disjunction with a time that Kluge has described as an “ever-expanding present” engaged in an “assault on the rest of time.” Cinema, as an avatar of both past and future, stands as a burr under the saddle of the present, an irritating reminder of different times and different temporalities. This vision of cinema is far from that elaborated in Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry” chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where cinema appeared under the sign of identity: “under the monopoly,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “all mass culture is identical,” the products are essentially the same, and the process of their production and distribution and consumption is pervaded by an overarching roteness. In a present characterized by a tendentially uniform, identical temporality, in which a sense of past and future have been eclipsed, cinema, in its very obsolescence—in the fact that it is überholt, as Adorno said philosophy once seemed—offers a refuge for the non-identical.

The Assault of the Present Despite his unparalleled success on virtually every cultural front, Kluge’s own film career can be read as an unfinished project in its own right, given his inability to rescue cinema from its apparent obsolescence; failure, in other words, marks his career as it does cinema more broadly, but not because of any particular individual fault or subjective deficiency on his part. Instead, overwhelming objective conditions have thwarted this

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herculean attempt to make cinema a vibrant component of the contemporary public sphere and to permit it to fulfill its past ambitions. His own work—by which I mean not only the products of his labors but also the effort—and the wish that this work has bodied forth, face the risk of becoming another of those impulses forgotten by history, left to burrow underground, waiting for future realization. Where, as I have argued in chapter 1, Godard hopes to forestall the inevitable reification of the meaning of his life into the figure of a legend, Kluge, despite his apparently irrepressible optimism, has feared the closing off of the very conditions for the possibility of cinema: he fears, despite his firm conviction that the principle of cinema is immortal, that it will lose its living place in the world. This pessimism finds its most pointed expression in Kluge’s classic essay film, The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit, 1985), his penultimate feature film for the cinema and his last as sole auteur. The Assault of the Present forms a poignant bookend to Kluge’s cinema oeuvre, one delicately reinforced by the faint echo in the title of that of his first feature, Abschied von gestern (1965)—“farewell to yesterday”—an allusion lost somewhat in its unfortunate official translation as Yesterday Girl. Both films share a similar concern with the repression of the past, with Yesterday Girl working against the mythology of the German “zero hour” after the Second World War, in which the traumas of the past were repressed (the question of complicity and guilt for Nazi crimes and the war; the “inability to mourn” a lost national unity and the Führer; the willingness to abandon oneself to the present of the “Wirtschaftswunder,” etc.), and The Assault of the Present distressed by the “temporal imperialism” of the New Media. Though Yesterday Girl was deeply pessimistic in its content and narrative (to the extent that it had one), in its form, and as the expression of the new collective energy and possibility represented by the emergence of the Young German Film, it exuded a great optimism that cinema could fully participate in forging a social future that completely embraced an awareness of the past. The Assault of the Present, coming near the end of Kluge’s cinematic career, and on the eve of his move to television production, expresses by contrast an almost terminal angst about cinema’s prospects and its role. In terms that directly recall the original German title of Yesterday Girl—Abschied von gestern—Kluge has called The Assault of the Present a “taking leave [Abschied ] of the classical cinema,” by which Kluge did not mean a departure from the Hollywood classicism of the 1930s to the 1950s, but rather from cinema’s anchoring in the so-called classical public sphere.

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In the script published to accompany The Assault of the Present, Kluge provides a condensed account of the expansion of the present—the effect of the temporal imperialism of the New Media—in terms almost as absolute as Adorno and Horkheimer’s condemnation of the culture industry: “Every prior present had the tendency to eliminate the past and to set a limit to the future. For the first time, in our days, the forces of the present [die Gegenwärtigkeiten] have the objective powers necessary to seal off the horizon of the future and to sever ties with the past.” This expanded or distended present, though, is a parasite that consumes its own host, and in its expansion it undergoes a dialectical transformation of quantity into quality, wherein lies, perhaps, its utopia: its intention toward full identity nullifies itself. “Without a horizon of the future, that is, without hope, people would not even have the strength to reach agreement about a present.” The consequence of the eclipse of the temporal horizons of past and future is not, then, that one is condemned to live in an eternal present, but rather that one floats in an atemporal space without any prospect of temporal orientation. Without past or future, the present itself lacks all significance. In such a situation, the cinema takes on great importance: “Every quantum of time says: ‘I was, I am, I will be’ and when one looks a little bit more closely, it also says: I have a hunch, I could, I may not, I wish, and so on. At least the time of film works this way.” But the question remains, nonetheless: if the objective powers of the present are so overwhelming, how does the time of film even find a temporal niche in which to operate? Has the present of the New Media become the dystopia that Adorno always feared: a social edifice identical with itself, where all trace of negativity has been extirpated? To refer back to the passage from “The Utopia of Film” cited earlier: has the present become so totalized that it no longer appears “insufficient”? Has it become so total that one can no longer even pose the question of its sufficiency? The Assault of the Present offers some hints at answers to these questions, which we will return to again and again in the following pages. But before proceeding any further, let me first offer a brief description of this film, whose sheer formal heterogeneity and complexity presents a challenge to any such attempt at concise summary. In the published script, Kluge remarks that his original desire in making the film was to “narrate as in a feature film [Spielfilmartig erzählen]” as much as possible. He quickly realized, however, that the “backlog demand” that exists between the “present and filmic expression” had compelled him to resort to the form of the “essay film.” Though he never defines the genre, its advantage appears to

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be that it permits a density of expression that in turn allows Kluge to work through this backlog more efficiently: “I know no other possibility to quickly provide for a certain plenitude of material.” A muted desperation thus seems to have inspired the form, and The Assault of the Present does indeed feel as if it is stuffed full of ideas and stories and epigrams in a mad attempt to say as much as possible before it is too late. The film’s main themes, which are approached with a mix of directness and allusiveness, include the temporality of the present (as already indicated in the film’s title), the historical promise held forth by contemporary cities, the role and function of the family in the temporal landscape of the present, and the fate of cinema. Structurally, the film proceeds episodically, combining half a dozen small, highly condensed fictional scenarios with several fictional television interviews with “experts” in various and eclectic fields that include scrap metal processing, “historical periodization,” opera, and cinema. Added to these are various didactic montage sequences about the nature of time, the invention of the motion picture camera, astronomy, and so on. Many of these episodes and sequences are accompanied by Kluge’s voice-over, which often provides compact epigrammatic theoretical statements, and at other times provides narrative information that would otherwise require greater narrative development in the diegesis. In short, The Assault of the Present comprises a complex and enormously rich combination of elements that challenges description and that only with great difficulty allows itself to be reduced to any singular message. Several of the narrative sequences attempt to represent the lived experience of time in the present through the form of the individual life story or “case history,” a form Kluge has returned to repeatedly not only in his fiction and film but also quite frequently in his theoretical work, especially Geschichte und Eigensinn, since publishing his first work of fiction in the sixties under the title Case Histories (Lebensläufe). These sorts of micrological narratives continue the formal gesture of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which sought out a perspective on social substance through the detail of particular, individual experience; in Adorno’s aphoristic structure, and in Kluge’s case histories, what seems most personal is always a cipher of its mediation and determination by objective forces, an exposition of the manner in which “the most hidden recesses” of personal life, as Adorno would put it, are determined from “without.” An early episode in The Assault of the Present exemplifies this formal gesture. Entitled “The Superfluous One” (“Die Überflüssige”), it is hard not read it as an autobiographical reference, as if Kluge were here coming

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to terms with his own failure and his own loss of function in the world, a rare moment in a long career for a “filmmaker who talks about everything under the sun, but who does his mourning work in silence,” as Thomas Elsaesser has put it. The central character in the episode is not a filmmaker, but rather a middle-aged doctor who quits her job in frustration: despite her years of service, and the devotion of all her patients, she has been replaced in the practice by a young hotshot who brings with him the latest techniques and a “200,000 DM machine.” In other words, she has been rendered superfluous. The passage dramatizes a long-running concern of Kluge’s (one most thoroughly elaborated in Geschichte und Eigensinn): the consequences for a person—the subject of living labor—when she loses her function, when the context in which her life gains meaning suddenly falls apart or is torn asunder and when her labor capacities, her learned skills and capabilities, no longer have a proper object to work on or an interlocutor to address. These labor capacities immediately seek out new outlets in which to realize themselves, but her frustration only mounts. Every attempt to use her skills and to be of use ends in failure: out and about in the city, she comes across an accident (a pedestrian seems to have been injured) and she rushes to help. The paramedics, however, have everything under control and she can only look on, useless and helpless. Later in the evening, unable to sleep, she takes to the couch, where she tosses and turns as a lightning storm rages outside the windows. Kluge’s voice-over remarks: Someone who loses her job does not take the next best position, but rather the sixth worst, as long as it is provisional. She acts provisionally. For a hundred years people have been living their lives provisionally because they would not be able to survive otherwise. The present is expanding and spreading out.

The provisionality of existence is a fundamental fact of life under capitalism. It forms the background, in many ways, to Kluge’s entire project, including his work with Oskar Negt, which builds on Marx’s insight into the dynamism of capitalism, articulated most succinctly in the Communist Manifesto, in a passage we have already had occasion to mention in reference to Kidlat Tahimik’s films: Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their

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train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid, melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

This dynamic in capitalism, which was only emergent in Marx’s time but has now become the defining characteristic of the global order, produces the situation where subjects are rendered superfluous on an ever-expanding scale and at an ever-increasing pace, and so much so that the basis of all existence, at the most universal and particular levels, has become “uncertainty and agitation,” not stability, comfort, and security; it must be understood as the source of the basic subjective attitude in the post-contemporary world, the ontological background of a daily existence marked by perpetual anxiety; it is a society whose essential movement is summed up in Ulrich Beck’s succinct formulation: “I am afraid! ” This fear, which at one level is about what the future might hold (“What will tomorrow bring?” as an intertitle in The Assault of the Present puts it), is also a fear that there might not be any future whatsoever: this fear is not only that the world might end, through nuclear war (a primary angst in the mid-1980s, when a central struggle of the West German left was against the stationing of American missiles on West German soil) or environmental collapse or terror attacks, but also that the constant pace of existence, the incessant disturbance of social conditions, the constant revolutionizing of the tools of production (the “200,000 DM machine”) will eradicate any meaningful sense of the future. For in such a condition of constant transformation it becomes impossible to imagine a stable future that might come into existence and possess durability; all one can anticipate is a new set of fleeting circumstances, all equally marked by their utter provisionality. Kluge’s work is populated by any number of characters who live provisional existences, beginning most notably with Anita G., the protagonist in Yesterday Girl. Anita is down and out, a clown of sorts formed in the tradition of Chaplin’s Tramp, who, as André Bazin has pointed out, was marked by a similarly constant provisionality and innovation: One way [to define the interior constants of his character] would be to examine his reaction to a particular event, for example his complete absence of obstinacy when the world offers too strong an opposition. In such cases he tries to get round the problem rather than solve it. A temporary way out is enough for him, just as if for him there was no such thing as the future. For

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example in The Pilgrim he props a rolling-pin on a shelf with a bottle of milk that he is going to need in a minute or two. Of course the rolling-pin falls onto his head. While a provisional solution always seems to satisfy him he shows a fabulous ingenuity in the immediate circumstance. He is never at a loss in any situation. There is a solution for everything even though the world (and especially things in it rather than the people) is not made for him.

The differences between Chaplin and Anita G. are clear: not just things, but people (as things) are arrayed against her. She is not exactly ingenious; and often she is at a loss. But the similarities are striking. Her solutions to her problems are always and only provisional: a boyfriend means a place to stay for the night; forged sales slips for the language study LPs she sells get her through a day’s work; a short stay in prison will suffice to let her deliver her baby. The list could be extended. And her actions are marked by a persistent sense of dramatic irony: their provisionality is obvious to the spectator who watches the (dis)organized buildup of the disaster which is her life. For Anita there is clearly nothing like a future and the world is clearly not made for her, a fact that only exacerbates and exaggerates her existential incompetence. And in the end is this not, perhaps, Kluge’s ultimate point: though the world compels us to live provisionally, it is not made for those of us (most, if not all of us) compelled to live in such a manner? Where change and transformation are the unchallenged norm, where transience is the structuring principle of existence, and where life is reduced to the provisional, time evaporates into a present that constantly expands and “spreads out.” This expansion constitutes the “assault” of the present on the rest of time. The difference between the accounts of time and the constructions of the relationship between past, present, and future put forth in The Assault of the Present and Yesterday Girl, made in 1965, is telling: in Yesterday Girl, the foreclosure of the past was constituted by an act of historical repression, variously figured as the inability to mourn or as the more sinister desire to “master the past”—the much maligned project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—and get on with things unburdened by questions of history. By the time of The Assault of the Present, such foreclosure of the past happens as a matter of course; it is part of the foundational logic of the present. In a twist with despondent overtones worthy of Adorno, in The Assault of the Present the very concept of repressing the past makes no sense, for such repression has become superfluous: the trauma that must be repressed has no place in a universalized present, since the past has no place there. From the perspective of this dystopian temporality, a question

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posed in an intertitle in Yesterday Girl takes on utopian valences: “Will yesterday come tomorrow?” In the mid-sixties, at the time of Yesterday Girl’s release, the intertitle was able to express an anxiety, to be sure, that the past might return in the guise of a revivified fascism; but it also marked a utopian hope, or even certitude, that is absent from The Assault of the Present, namely that the past can never fully be past, that some trace of the utopian pain Adorno speaks of in Minima Moralia can still be called forth to leverage a critical project. It is here that Kluge’s analysis of contemporary temporality comes close to Tahimik’s analysis of the numbing effects of mass culture: the threat posed by both is that the past, and with it the future, might be fully effaced. This totalizing threat of the present appears in an even more daunting guise in some of Kluge’s most recent work. His 4-DVD compilation film, The Fruits of Trust (Früchte des Vertrauens, 2009), though explicitly presented as a sequel to the equally monumental News from Ideological Antiquity (Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike, 2008), is perhaps best read as a continuation of the meditations from The Assault of the Present, but this time occasioned by the great financial crisis of 2008, which once again, as with other crises of such magnitude, has prompted utopian speculation about the end of capitalism and dystopian speculation about the prospects of the future. The significance of the title, and the film’s central thematic concern, turns on the tension between two competing conceptions of the trust, or Vertrauen (which could as easily be translated as “confidence” or “faith”), that underlies contemporary social relations. The first notion of trust refers to a rather immaterial fact about capitalism, namely that exchange, as duplicitous and exploitative as it is considered to be in the Marxist tradition (in the Grundrisse, Marx characterizes the inherently unequal exchange in the extraction of surplus value as an act of “theft” on the part of the capitalist), nonetheless rests on an act of faith. This faith is not only the simple kind that anyone involved in exchange is familiar with—the faith that the money at stake will change hands, the faith that the product being bought or sold is the right one and of good quality, etc., all of which are backed up in contemporary capitalist societies by consumer protections, warranties, and legal guarantees of all sorts—but also another sort of faith that remains unacknowledged on the surface of everyday phenomenal life. This is the faith that value, which has no material substance whatsoever, will endure; in other words, behind the fetishism of value lies an inherent uncertainty that can only be overcome by an act of collective trust.

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The other meaning of trust is modeled on the Freudian analyst Erik Erikson’s concept of “basic trust” or “Urvertrauen.” This capacity, which has its origins in early childhood experience, allows the individual to have confidence in herself and in other human beings; it is as much an intersubjective bonding force as it is a foundational orientation to the object world as a stable and continuous reality. One can thus understand this basic trust as a precondition or basis for the trust that underlies exchange. Kluge characterizes this basic trust as “an account from which we make withdrawals on a daily basis until we die, without, however, exhausting it.” It is the “dowry [Mitgift] granted us by evolution: human beings, on their long march into the present, would not have survived without this ANTI-CAPITAL.” This form of trust is thus structurally analogous to labor-power: it is a human capacity that gets consumed daily but that has the magical ability to regenerate itself on an ongoing basis. But these two forms of trust—that which underwrites exchange and the basic trust that binds human sociality—exist in a state of perpetual conflict. Human basic trust comprises a form of “anti-capital”; yet the forces of capital, drawing on the faith that underlies exchange, constantly sunder the social bonds grounded in this basic trust, repeatedly testing it, slowly exhausting it and wearing it down. Basic trust is thus like labor-power in another way: though opposed to the very logic of capital, which thwarts it and stands over and against it as an alien force that constantly threatens it with destruction and disappointment, this basic trust contributes to capital and is ultimately a source of its power. This follows precisely the logic Marx outlines in the theory of surplus value: just as living labor contributes directly to its own exploitation through the enrichment of the capitalist and the strengthening of capital, so too does the human capacity for basic trust provide the foundation for a set of social relations which undermine and exploit it. The capital it produces, the wealth it generates for the capitalist class, turns against it, and further entrenches the power of capital. At some base level, this human ur-faith lends itself over and over to capital, even though capital stands opposed to it, lives off it like a vampire, and mocks it, in the vain hope that someday it will also receive its due compensation in return. This concept provides some context in which to understand the question which forms the title of the fourth and final DVD of The Fruits of Trust: “In what can we place our trust?” If social relations are constantly in flux, if our employment cannot be secured beyond the near future, if our pension plans are being emptied out in the various restructurings and austerity

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budgets being designed to counter the crisis, if capital is grounded in such recurrent crises, and if our trust is betrayed at every turn by capital, then in what sort of stable object world, or in what sort of stable human relationships, can we place our trust, something which by its very nature demands a sense of durability, a guarantee that things will last, a promise of durée? In other words, The Fruits of Trust reformulates the fundamental gesture of The Assault of the Present: without anything in which we can place our faith, we are compelled to live provisionally. In short, other than the endless capacity of living labor to regenerate itself and seek out its realization—including the limitless line of credit of human trust—one can trust nothing: not the bosses, not the managers of the economy, and definitely not the bankers who are both the cause and benefactor of the crisis (and who are castigated in the film by Kluge in a paraphrase of Marx as “worse than usurers”). And one most definitely cannot trust the future, which capital rapaciously consumes “like an addict,” as Kluge notes in one of the many talking-head interviews that make up the bulk of The Fruits of Trust. In the interview entitled “Capital’s Addiction to the Future,” Kluge asks the literary critic Joseph Vogl, “How can you say that capital has an eternal life?” Vogl lays out his response in classic Marxian terms, pointing not only to the dynamic Marx describes in the passage from the Communist Manifesto quoted above (“all that is solid melts into air . . .”) but also to the utter necessity for capital to constantly reproduce itself and keep itself in motion as a condition of its continued existence (in Marx’s terms, capital must always be “capital in process”). Vogl says: Capital, . . . once it has been set in motion, and also when one thinks above all of the credit system, functions only under the condition that this movement never comes to an end. That means that a sort of earthly perpetuity establishes itself. The system, if you will, is structurally—permanently—bankrupt and only functions on the promise of its continued functioning. That means that every transaction occurs under the condition that further transactions will occur.

The consequences of this basic fact are chilling. Consider it from the following perspective. Since at least the publication of Public Sphere and Experience in 1972, Kluge has adopted as a basic operative presupposition the early Marx’s doctrine of alienation (to which we will return in greater detail below): human beings, under universalized wage labor and private property, create a product and a whole ensemble of social relations

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which in the end appear to them as an “alien force opposed to them” and not as something of their own making. Geschichte und Eigensinn, as well as whole realms of Kluge’s vast literary production, can be read under the sign of alienation, as they chart out the degree to which the most intimate and micro levels of human experience manifest the symptoms of alienated existence. But there is a macro level to the experience of alienation as well, which this interview points toward. For Kluge (and Negt) the entire movement of history—what, in effect, amounts to the ultimate product of human labor—has wrenched itself out from under the control of the human beings who produce it. Human beings appear not as the direct producers of their own history, but as mere “guardians and observers” of the “production process” of history, just as they are the mere guardians and observers of the immediate process of the production of the goods and services they produce in their daily work. Similarly, Vogl’s image of the fearsome instantiation of an “earthly perpetuity” that capital brings into being is a figure for alienation writ large: the experience of time, as an effect of the movement of capital in its utter ceaselessness, is a product of human labor. Time thus reigns over us like an alien force, shattering our sense of historical and biographical continuity and flow, imposing upon us a perpetual state of provisional existence. The provisionality of existence appears in direct proportion to the interminability of the present.

The Future of Illusions In the published script for The Assault of the Present, Kluge interestingly projects the effects of these transformations in the nature of time onto spatial reconfigurations in the late twentieth century, specifically those of the city and the metropolis (die Großstadt). The interest in urban space and the urban public sphere of production (Produktionsöffentlichkeit) has been another constant in Kluge’s work, a topic worthy of an entire essay. For our purposes, though, suffice it to mention that The Assault of the Present’s concern with the city puts it into intertextual dialogue with a number of Kluge’s other films: Yesterday Girl was an urban film that pasted together the picaresque wanderings of the main character through a number of (relatively) unidentified German cities; In Danger and Great Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (In Gefahr und grösster Not bring der Mittelweg den Tod, 1974), which focuses in long sections on the Haussmanesque transformation of Frankfurt’s West End in the early seventies, is one of Kluge’s most interesting attempts to generate a filmic montage that corresponds to the

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ideals of a counter public sphere; In Danger and Great Distress was conceived of as something of a “city symphony” in the spirit of Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of the City (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), both of which, as reflections on urban temporalities and urban spatial configurations as sites of social production, also comprise very important intertexts for The Assault of the Present; and finally, The Power of Feelings returns to Frankfurt and its skyscrapers and bank office towers, whose mirrored surfaces are filmed in time-lapse against dramatic weatherscapes as they hover over the city. Though the cities in all of these films are significant as objects of documentary representation, they always take on an allegorical function as well, abstracting outwards from their particular denotative referent and the specific historical context to which they refer. Kluge’s signature time-lapse images, for example, condense in their internal montage (the juxtaposition of multiple elements within the individual frame) much of Kluge’s appreciation for and thoughts about urban life and space: against the backdrop of an only apparently “first” nature figured in roiling clouds, themselves estranged from any emphatically natural status through the use of timelapse, the city rises as a figure of second nature, that realm of dead, objectified labor that has sealed over and presented itself to us as if it were our new natural environment (fig. 3.2). The city, then, becomes an index of alienation, an object that presents itself to its inhabitants as hostile and difficult to contend with, and the site where capital is most at home—so often one sees in Kluge’s cityscapes the anonymous office buildings that house the power of capital. Despite this, I am not sure that I agree with Jameson’s assessment that for Negt and Kluge “the vision of a purely urban utopia is impossible,” for the city is as well a marker of the historicity of the human environment, a place where human shaping of the world, for good or bad, is most easily perceived and available for comprehension. The city as such is not dystopian, and second nature more broadly in itself is not bad (as Tahimik has shown); nor could it be, for it is only on the inheritance of prior generations—such as the dowry bequeathed to us of our basic trust, the objectified forms of knowledge that we appropriate as our own, the historically evolved forms of cinema that we love—that we build a future world. Nor is the particular form of second nature which we know as the built environment—that second nature of transformed space that ranges from the architectural forms of individual buildings to the landscapes of cities and transurban conglomerations of the new megacity to the vast cultivated landscapes of the countryside—neces-

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Figure 3.2 from DVD.

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The Power of Feelings (Alexander Kluge, 1983). Still capture

sarily a bad thing; for just as Kluge follows the early Marx in his analysis of alienation, he also endorses Marx’s utopian call in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to bring into being a fully humanized nature. The city, in other words, embodies this utopian dream just as it stands as a repository of untold generations of utopian longing for collective life, of failed and missed opportunities that continue to press their cause long after the buildings have crumbled, the streets have been rerouted, and the avenues and boulevards cut through the old neighborhoods. In the alienated city, this longing is of course thwarted, a fact captured so poignantly in those frequent telephoto shots in Kluge’s films, taken from the window of one skyscraper to another, of people at work, eating, or getting ready for bed, all in splendidly dreary isolation from one another though the distance to their neighbors is but a few feet (fig. 3.3). This isolation is a tragedy, one which Kluge tries to symbolically overcome in his editing by creating a collectivity in montage, much as Vertov constructed an ideal city and an ideal national community in Man with a Movie Camera from images of three distinct cities in the young Soviet Union.

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The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Alexander Kluge, 1985). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURE 3.3

Kluge has recently commented on his love for cities, in terms that make their utopian dimension clear: When you see the earth from orbit, how it glows, it can be quite intoxicating to imagine the number of people down there who are making the effort to communicate with one another. When I think about that I can sleep wonderfully. In Paris, for example, I sleep like a bear because I know that the others are working and living. It’s the same in Berlin.

As such a utopian site, the city is important not only in its actual, physical, historical examples; in its more fantastical and imaginative forms the city becomes a symbolic figure of utopia. For Kluge, this figure is bound up with the story of cinema, as this passage from the script to The Assault of the Present makes clear: There is a promise that consists of built and transformed space [umbauter Raum]. This promise is some 8000 years old: the metropolis [Großstadt].

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Films have dealt with the strength of this illusion from time immemorial: a person arrives in the city, looking for happiness, fate rears its head . . . ; in recent years our cities—the cities in which the five women in this film live—were caught up in change: subways, underground shopping, new city centers, pedestrian zones are being built. For many people, these renovations are accompanied by the illusion that they will continue until cities come into being that conform to our human tastes, cities that correspond to the idol of the commercially vibrant yet livable city. Real relations show no ambition to move in this direction. . . . The idol of the city, for example Florence during the Renaissance, belongs to the inventory of illusions.

As ever in his work, Kluge emphasizes the historical character of the human project, its promises and the corresponding desires for those promises to be met, as well as the subjective and objective possibility for those desires to be fulfilled, the obstacles and opportunities that real conditions present to the realization of those desires. Again, one should read this idea of the “promise of the city”—and the promise of transformed space more broadly—precisely in the spirit of the early Marx, and by extension Hegel: as second nature, the city is a figure of “inorganic nature”—of historically constituted substance—from which the individual and the collective lives. Of course, for Kluge (following the logic of the early Marx), the problem with the promise of the city and of inorganic nature is that it remains unfulfilled so long as it is produced in alienation: it is an object ranged against the very subjects who produced it, an alien force. The promise of the city thus remains elusive and illusory: the “idol” of the city belongs to the grand historically evolved “inventory of illusions.” But we must remember that for Kluge the concept of illusion is not simply negative. Kluge’s critique of illusion follows the logic of Marx’s critique of religion that we have already had occasion to refer to, but with a significant deviation. For Marx, religion was not, as the common understanding of his critique asserts, merely an ideological veil which obscures real relations; as an “opiate” it was not merely a mask of suffering and its true causes: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions

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about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

The illusion that is religion thus has a substantial truth content: it is simultaneously a mystification of real suffering and its “expression”; as an enabling illusion it prolongs suffering insofar as it makes intolerable conditions tolerable, but it also constitutes a “protest” against that real suffering. This complex rhetorical structure—the condensation of illusion and cognition, as well as of expression and protest—recurs in Kluge again and again. It continues an interpretive stance toward phenomena inherited from the Frankfurt School, one that comes very close to the hermeneutic model (itself deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School) proposed by Fredric Jameson in the conclusion to The Political Unconscious. There Jameson controversially argues that even the most illusory (or regressive) of cultural phenomena must be read from a dual perspective: they must be engaged by a “negative hermeneutic” that dispels illusion by finding its causes in its material source, and by a “positive hermeneutic” that excavates a properly utopian wish within that illusion. To put this another way, as Slavoj Žižek recently has, Walter Benjamin’s famous maxim on barbarism and culture must be read simultaneously in two apparently opposed directions: not only is every document of culture also a document of barbarism, but every document of barbarism is also a document of culture. Similarly, Kluge’s critique of the illusion of the city must be understood from a dual perspective: it is an illusion that calls for its own dispelling, but it also one that calls for the authentic realization of the utopian wish it embodies. It calls for the creation of the collective life that would attain in a properly human city. It is at this point, though, that Kluge’s theory deviates from the early Marx. Unlike Marx, Kluge does not want to call on people to “give up their illusions” in their entirety and live within a fully demystified universe. On the contrary, he expresses a distinct anxiety that illusions are on the verge of disappearing under pressure from the ever-expanding present: “One could say: the principle of the present rages against the principle of hope and all the illusions of the past. We live in a present which is, for the first time, in a position to install itself as ruler over all other times. This is denoted by the phrase: uncanniness of time.” Illusion, for Kluge (in a manner quite influenced by Adorno), has a necessary and important function in human cognition: every concept has an irreducibly “aesthetic” moment, as Adorno has put it. It is tempting to see in this claim a sort of proto-Althusserian insistence that there is no outside to ideology and that subjects, even those “in the know,” remain inescapably

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caught in a web of illusions and misrecognitions that are constitutive of subjectivity as such. But I think the inflection here is somewhat different. Kluge, to be sure, does not believe in an objective discourse of science; he is well schooled in Adorno’s critique of identity and fully accepts his unrelenting critique of the adequacy of any act of cognition to its object. Instead, Kluge sees in the eradication of illusion the “totalitarian” or “imperialist” dream of the logic of capital itself: the logic of capital wants to destroy illusion. This can be understood as an updated version or shift in emphasis of the dialectic of enlightenment: if in the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment transforms itself into the very myth it was supposed to banish from the world, in Kluge the utter eradication of myth (or illusion) from the world would constitute the real dystopia. This comprises a remarkable inversion of the canonical Marxian principle laid out in the Communist Manifesto (in the passage cited earlier), namely that the revolutionary dynamic of capitalism will lead to the disenchantment of the world, a situation where “man [sic] will face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Though Kluge shares with Marx the conviction (that manifests itself in Kluge as an anxiety) that capitalist progress will tendentially disenchant the world, he sorely doubts that the confrontation with the “real conditions of existence” will lead to revolutionary action. Kluge has long held that the prospect of revolution in countries where the “industrial mode of production” has unfolded is utterly remote, the revolutionary impulse barely palpable any longer. But where Kluge most significantly diverges from Marx is in his belief in the necessity of illusion as a placeholder or marker of the nonidentical within a world tendentially colonized by (instrumental) reason. Kluge’s defense of illusion is an indictment of the disenchantment of the world through an ever-expanding, secular logic of capital. The crucial point is that illusion is both a veil or mask to real relations as well as the form in which their utopian promise appears. Thus, the emptying out of the inventory of illusions, the eradication of “every illusion of the past,” entails simultaneously the eradication of the delusions of myth and the destruction of the principle of hope, the extirpation of the deepseated sense of anticipation that underlies every epoch in which promises go unmet. The nightmare of an expanding present is that it at once is rent by a fault that makes illusion necessary (the universalizaton of the principle of private property, class struggle, etc.) and at the same time it eradicates the utopian promise that every illusion holds forth. This situation threatens Kluge’s entire project: for where, then, might the aesthetic find its place if

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illusion (or, in a more Hegelian language that is wholly appropriate here, Schein, appearance/semblance) has been banished? Adorno essentially asked this very same question, though in a different intellectual context, in Minima Moralia. In the aphorism entitled “Baby with the bath-water,” Adorno critiques a tendency within Marxist cultural criticism to view all “culture as ideology,” and he identifies a central motif of such a critique as “that of the lie: that culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of man [sic] which does not exist; that it conceals the material conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence.” For Adorno, such a critique all too easily flips back over into a form of ideology itself, since such “cultural criticism . . . demand[s] that relationships be entirely reduced to their material origin,” thereby unwittingly realizing the dream of instrumental reason. It is clear that such a vision of culture goes against the spirit of the critique of religion in Marx that I outlined above: But to act radically in accordance with this principle would be to extirpate, with the false, all that was true also, all that, however impotently, strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition, and so to bring about directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering indirectly.

Cultural criticism, then, must avoid the temptation to reduce culture to its function; the cultural superstructure cannot be reduced in criticism to its determination by the economic-instrumental base without merely replicating capital’s logic. The critique of instrumental reason cannot itself reduce everything to mere instrument, even when it criticizes the very forces which tendentially reduce culture to mere means. Criticism, in Adorno, and radical cultural practice, in Kluge, must insist upon the irreducibility of culture to its economic determination; it must insist on the persistence of some moment that escapes this determination. Otherwise, both merely reproduce the logic of capital itself, which tendentially extirpates all illusion, and with it the hopes that it bears, in its drive toward the functionalization of culture.

The Realism of Protest This dialectical critique of illusion helps us understand Kluge’s “antagonistic” theory of realism, which is most thoroughly articulated in a fascinat-

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ing, and somewhat perplexing, short essay entitled “The Sharpest Ideology: That Reality Appeals to Its Realistic Character.” “The motivation” for Kluge’s notion of realism “is never the affirmation of reality,” as one might take a fairly conventional view of realism to be, “but rather protest,” and its method presupposes not that we can accurately or adequately portray reality in all of its plenitude, but rather that “it must be possible to portray [darstellen] reality as the historical fiction which it is.” The basic outlines of this theory follow a path we have already seen: “reality” is analogous to Hegel’s notion of “actuality” (Wirklichkeit), an actuality that can only establish itself based on the repression of protean drives and wishes that cannot make themselves appear in the form of this actuality: Reality is actual [wirklich] insofar as it really represses/oppresses [unterdrückt] people. It is unreal [unwirklich] insofar as every repression merely displaces [verdrängt] these powers [Kräfte, as in Arbeitskräfte, labor-powers]. They disappear from the world above but continue to work underground. That which is displaced performs all the work beneath the terror-of-the-real [Realterror].

In addition to the fundamental coordinates of Kluge’s theory of realism, we can also see in this passage a concise formulation of the basic model of the bourgeois and proletarian public spheres, defined by Negt and Kluge in Public Sphere and Experience as “horizons of experience”: the bourgeois public sphere corresponds to “reality” or that “world above” in that it sets the context and horizon of the possibility of human experience. It sets the terms whereby human labor capacities might realize themselves (sich verwirklichen): quite literally, it sets the terms whereby these capacities might make themselves real and become a part of reality. It constitutes the “needle’s eye” through which experience must pass. By contrast, the basic components of a proletarian public sphere are the displaced and repressed powers, capacities, desires, and wishes that have no place in that world above. They are forced to live an existence that is de- or unrealized, ghostly, thwarted. The “terror” of the real is the overwhelming coercion, the veritable compulsion, that reality imposes upon living labor if it wishes to realize itself. In effect, reality says: “If you wish to realize yourself, you may—and must—do so only by my terms.” Kluge illustrates the power of the terror-of-the-real with a striking example: in clear reference to his film Part-Time Work of a Female Slave (the essay appears in the book that accompanied the film), whose main character, Roswitha Bronski, “maintains an abortion practice . . . in order to afford more children,” Kluge writes:

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A so-called love scene is, for example, such an invention of the real [eine RealErfindung]. We are all accustomed to judge such a scene in a film—or in actuality [Wirklichkeit]—according to the “standards of realism” which are supposedly contained in this scene. But the love scene is only realisitic if, for example, the future abortion is cut in. But also the history of all prior abortions. . . . The entire prior experience . . . even that of the grandparents and all other love scenes, is present [gegenwärtig] in the concrete scene. The conflict between tenderness and the un-tender consequences, the rabid expectations and what of that expectation can be fulfilled, precisely this is the real content. All other perceptions measure themselves against this conflict. Isolated from them, only “present” [gegenwärtig], the love scene becomes ideological. The scene also becomes ideological if all illusion is cast out. Then it wouldn’t even happen.

We can see here how the critique of the “principle of the present” coincides with Kluge’s critique of conventional or Hollywood “realism,” here referred to as the “cinema of enjoyment” (Genussfilm), which relies on an ideology of “presence.” Yet another felicitous linguistic coincidence, this time playing on the dual meanings of “present” (gegenwärtig), unlocks the critique: the ideology of Hollywood cinema consists (in part, at least) in its establishment of a self-sufficient present, a self-sufficient here and a self-sufficient now that excludes all other time-places, all other prior and future “presents.” You could say, in Kluge’s terms: the ideology of the temporal “present” (die Gegenwart) is its apparent self-sufficient “presence”: it needs no past (the prior abortions, loves, etc.), it needs no future (the future divorce, abortion, etc.), it has completed its assault on the rest of time, it is all there and all there is. In other words, the ideology of the temporal present—the now—is its claim to be fully present—there, fully constituted, all accounted for, as in a classroom roll-call. To make this clearer, Kluge’s critique of Hollywood realism can be usefully rearticulated along the lines of David Bordwell’s well-known rewriting of the formalist distinction between “story” (fabula) and “plot” (syuzhet). The story of a film is a construction of the spectator’s mind, and the plot consists of the narrative elements made available in the film: from Kluge’s perspective, one could say that the story of a classical realist love scene appears to overlap neatly—with no remainder, surplus, or insufficiency— with its plot; that which is “present” in the plot is all one needs to comprehend it; no knowledge of prior history or future consequence is required. Indeed, information supplemental to the plot might well disturb the spectator’s smooth transformation of the plot into a story. By contrast, Kluge’s

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realism of protest attempts to shift our perspective on the story and compel us to read into it not only the “before and after” of the film’s diegesis—the protagonists’ own personal biographies and the future consequences of their amorousness, their past failed loves and the future abortion, and so on—but also the extra-diegetic elements that constitute the context within which a film and its interpretation comes into being. These extra-diegetic moments include extra-filmic moments as well, moments that fall outside of the filmic reality (be it plot or story) altogether: that is, the real sociopolitical context in which the film comes to be in the first place. Classical realism, by contrast, attempts to foreclose the recognition of such extra-filmic moments and achieve self-sufficiency. This explains, at least in part, Kluge’s love for early cinema: in many earlier films the overlap between story and plot was incomplete; some form of prior historical knowledge was necessary to their comprehension. The fragmentary actualities of the early period, or the various short historical reconstructions of famous historical events (for example, the Edison films about the Spanish-American War) made little to no sense without some prior knowledge of the events they depicted. Similarly, the condensed and elliptical nature of early literary adaptations such as Edison’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) demanded from the spectators a familiarity with the literary source if they were to be understood in any meaningful way. In contrast to these early, open forms, the present of the classical love scene offers a unified, self-sufficient totality—it eclipses other temporal horizons and as such becomes illusory. So, in one sense, the “realistic character” to which reality “appeals” is its appearance as a self-sufficient, comprehensible totality in which all of its constitutive elements are present in both senses of the term: present, in the sense of in attendance, in place; and present in the sense of tense. To critique the reality of the “present,” to portray it as the “fiction” which it is, is to dispel this illusion. Clearly, though, as we have already seen in our discussion of The Assault of the Present, and as Kluge states in the passage just cited from “The Sharpest Ideology,” any attempt to fully dispel such illusion runs the risk of transforming itself back into ideology: “The scene also becomes ideological if all illusion is cast out.” In Kluge’s discussion of the love scene cited above, this process of inversion—the transformation of the critique of illusion back into ideology—can be understood to occur in (at least) two ways, depending on whether or not one assumes that Kluge is speaking about fictive (or filmic) love scenes, or if the lesson of the passage is being applied to love scenes “in actuality” or real life.

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Let us consider the first scenario and assume that Kluge is talking about a fictive love scene: if one were to eradicate all illusion within the film, there simply could be no film. It is clear in Kluge’s thought that though a film must begin with the real and the concrete (that is, it begins as a document of profilmic reality), it nonetheless remains a “Kunstgegenstand”— an object of art, an artificial product that in its very existence differentiates itself from the object it portrays. In other words, there is an irreducible element of fiction within every film, no matter how documentary it might be. Further, if in order to dispel illusion one were to expand the explanatory horizon of the film to include the entire determinant context in which a plot unfolds—that is, if one were to expand the plot to the degree that it encompasses the whole possible story—one would create a film like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous map that expands until it becomes the landscape it purports to represent. A realist work—even in the form of the realism of protest—always differentiates itself from reality; it is always rent by an irreducible gap between itself and the object it portrays. The second way to understand how disillusionment can generate its own ideological effect is to begin by recalling Kluge’s insistence on the constitutive necessity of illusion for the emergence of subjectivity. To return to the scenario of the love scene: if we assume that Kluge is talking about an actual love scene between two non-fictive people, the participants must be immersed in illusion in order for love itself to even be possible. This can be understood in basic Freudian terms: since all amorous investment amongst adults is always an attempt to find a replacement for an absent original love object (i.e., the mother, in classical Freudian theory), then every subsequent object choice will be grounded in illusion: a lover’s current love object is but a chimerical replacement for his or her original love object, i.e., a mere illusion. The son, for example, constantly seeks out ersatz mothers. Eliminate the illusory element, and love disappears along with it. One can also understand the necessity of illusion in Adornian terms, which are in this instance entirely appropriate: subjectivity is predicated on a gap between the subject and its object of cognition, and subjectivity arises from this gap; were this gap to be overcome, subjectivity itself would dissolve, desire would evaporate and become meaningless, and something like love would become impossible. Any attempt to deny this elemental persistence of illusion—by claiming, for example, that one’s “true love object” had finally been found—would be deeply ideological, in that it would deny the constitutive role of illusion in the passion that we call love. Thus, the twofold interpretive stance toward illusion—the positive and negative hermeneutics at work in cultural critique and in engaged artistic

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practice—requires a third moment. For not only must one find the barbaric within documents of culture and seek out the utopian within the most barbaric of ideological structures, one must also—in the critique of illusion itself—sustain the awareness and sense of illusion that inheres in every critique. The question, though, that The Assault of the Present poses, is whether or not now—in the epoch of the postmodern, in the timelessness of the eternal present—the real relations which characterize the principle of the present have already achieved the full functionalization of culture and the eradication of all illusion that critique and art were to avoid.

A Return to Yesterday To comprehend the consequences of a fully totalized present that can “in finality” eclipse the past and its illusions, we need to more fully understand Kluge’s conception of the past. In the tradition of Benjamin and Adorno, and not unlike Tahimik as we have seen, Kluge believes that there is something akin to official history, what Benjamin called history as told by the victors, that does not provide an adequate concept of the past. Benjamin rejected this form of historicism, exemplified for him by von Ranke’s famous maxim that one must recall history “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist [as it actually was]”; such historicism amounts to identity thinking in the form of historiography. Against this conception of history, Kluge’s historiographical project does not attempt to excavate the positive history of the past; that is, it does not attempt to renarrate events as they unfolded in their topical superficiality, as they existed in their positivity or actuality. Instead, if we understand illusion in the precise sense articulated above, we can say that Kluge goes on the hunt for the illusions of the past: he seeks out illusions not only as the mask of the insufficiency of the past’s “presents,” that is, as veils of the wound or antagonism—what the early Marx called the “fundamental error” in society—that generates the necessity of illusion, but also as expressions of a utopian wish or demand whose realization that wound blocks. To express this project in terms of Kluge’s theory of realism: illusion can be understood as that which did not become actual or real (wirklich); it stands as a marker of the excess that remains in the process of instantiating the actual. Its elimination, then, would be tragic, for it would amount to the elimination of any sense that another world could have been possible. Kluge’s historiographical project thus seeks out the materials from which a different past could have been made. This stance toward the past is thus perfectly complementary to the anticipatory optimism demonstrated

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by Herr Kammersänger in The Power of Feelings: recall that when he was asked how he could act so optimistically despite knowing that the opera would end in tragedy, he replied that with each performance “it could” end differently: “es könnte doch aber!” If we could somehow ask him about the historical past, he would reply: “es hätte doch aber anders sein können!”— “It could have been different!” In this approach to the past, Kluge’s project resonates with the other two filmmakers in this study: to greater or lesser extents they all conceive of the object of representation, the profilmic world or the “model” in the Bazinian sense, as essentially absent from the image on screen, be it for the simple fact that any photographic image is never adequate to the object it purports to portray or, more interestingly, because the object of interest is inherently invisible. When their films take as their object of representation the past and historical experience, their object is literally absent from the scene. As I argued in some detail in reference to Godard, this is not only because the past has passed and is no longer a visible object per se but also because the history that interests them—the very thing that has passed—is a history of failure, a history of the inability of some historical potential, of some utopian, authentically collective impulse, to realize itself. As such, it has not left its positive mark in actuality. One can thus supplement the realism of protest as I outlined it above, and also reformulate the historiographical project of all the filmmakers in this study: each adopt the “negative” project of realism to present reality as the fiction which it is; but they also pursue the “positive” project of realism and attempt to portray everything that never became real, all that never realized itself. As we have seen with Godard, seeing these invisible things is “exhausting,” and Godard creates his own set of figures and methods to represent such vision. In Kluge, the sort of tenacious cognitive activity necessary to root out the invisible object is most pointedly represented in the figure of the history teacher, Gabi Teichert, the heroine of The Patriot (Die Patriotin, 1979), who spends a great deal of time and energy in a futile attempt to root out what she calls a “positive” (in the sense of “good”) history of which she, as a German, might be proud. Her method, if one may apply the term to her often random and asystematic probings, is sensuous and assiduous: she stops at nothing in her explorations, from digging around in archaeological sites with shovel and brush to literally drilling and cutting into historical texts; most astonishingly she attempts to literally ingest history by making a cocktail from the pages of a history book and drinking it.

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As has been pointed out by a number of commentators, Gabi Teichert’s activities enact a characteristically Klugean wish in their attempt to expand the scope of cognition from the abstract realm of a conceptually and categorically ordered consciousness, familiar from the tradition of German idealist philosophy, to include what the young Marx called practical-sensuous activity. As Kluge put it once, in somewhat exaggerated terms (for he does believe in dialectics as a mode of abstract thought as well): “I don’t believe in dialectics as a mode of abstract thought. I believe in a dialectics we can feel with our fingertips.” The theme of sensuous cognition is a constant in Kluge’s work and embodies—quite literally—what for now we will call a utopian ideal (for later in the chapter we will see its limitations): the attempt to harness the entire human organism, from the least tangible and tactile of affects and emotions and inspirations to all five of the conventional physical senses (above all, though, sight and touch), for the act of knowing. The manner, then, in which Kluge’s work literalizes metaphors—the digging for history, the digesting of the facts, and so on—in turn functions as a metaphor or allegory for Kluge’s most deeply held utopian ambition, one that places him in a Utopian tradition that stretches back through William Morris to the Marx of The German Ideology: the supersession of a historically imposed and inherently debilitating division of labor, both as it manifests itself at the level of the social and as it appears within the individual human organism as a separation and specialization amongst the individual senses and labor capacities. All the specialists and experts who almost overpopulate Kluge’s work in fictive and real guises—from bomb defusers and bridge engineers to scholars of Marxist theory and the twelve-tone scale, from elephant trainers and chauffeurs to astronomers and neurobiologists and more—no matter how erudite in their particular fields, are far from being the ideal that Kluge himself—or his work—embodies. As a parallel movement, Kluge emphasizes the deeply material aspects of what seems like utterly immaterial thought, updating Marx’s famous call from the “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right for theory to become “a material force.” It is instructive to compare Negt and Kluge here to Althusser, who was similarly inspired by this line in Marx. In Althusser, ideology achieved material effect only when borne by a subject—when it had, in effect, “gripped the masses” as Marx hoped theory might—materialized in that subject’s practices; similarly, theory needed such a bearer for its force to be felt in the world. But in Negt and Kluge there is a sense that theory (or thought) is already a material, physical fact, possessed a priori of a presence and force (as is all dead labor) that

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makes itself felt. It has material substance, quasi-objective status, as physical as any other object one might find on the theoretician’s desk or on the filmmaker’s editing table. To illustrate the material qualities of ideas, Negt and Kluge have more than once turned to a favorite line of theirs from Brecht: “Concepts,” Brecht wrote, “are the handles with which we can move things.” To fully understand its meaning, the sentence must be rendered in the original German, as its lesson turns on the etymological roots of the German words for “concept” and “to conceive”: “Die Begriffe sind die Griffe mit denen wir die Dinge bewegen können.” “Griffe” (handles) shares a root with “Begriffe” (concepts), the nominal form of the verb “begreifen,” which translates, usually, as “to conceive” or “to understand,” but which quite literally means “to grasp” as one might grasp an outstretched hand or the handle of a tool. One should be careful, however, not to mistake Kluge’s interest in the body and its role in cognition for an undialectical valorization of the immediacy of sensuous perception; Kluge believes in a dialectics that can be felt with the fingertips. Sensuous perception without concepts would be blind; experience is constituted only through a conceptual processing of sensuous input, a dialectical procedure that moves between the extremes of the abstract and the sensuously concrete. Sensuous experience arises, in other words, only on the basis of transcendental conditions. In this interest in the material and corporeal aspects of thought and of the mind, Kluge also follows Adorno, who sustains a similarly dialectical interest in the somatic moment that inheres in thought—though with a telling and significant difference. In Adorno, as I argued in chapter 2, the somatic moment generally appears in the figure of physical suffering; Adorno was possessed of a deep distrust of pleasure and happiness, which, though they are the positive draw toward utopia, are impossible in a world so marked by suffering as ours. To acknowledge the somatic as pleasurable would be to concede to the given and forget the suffering of the world. Kluge, by contrast, clearly revels in bodily pleasures in a more Brechtian manner: just as Brecht’s Galileo, for example, can resist neither an old wine nor a new thought (which he savors in a well-nigh physical manner), so too do Kluge’s characters succumb to all sorts of fleshly temptations, refined and otherwise: they raptly listen to opera and gluttonously drink the brine from cans of sausages; they stuff their faces in Chaplinesque fashion with outsized pieces of cake and languish in bathtubs over breakfast; they argue arcane points of jurisprudence or ancient philosophy; and they tell stories, usually with a passion and gusto that manifests itself in emphatic hand

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gestures and facial expressions that make one realize just how physical an activity the recounting of a tale can be. This sort of corporeal joyousness is also not foreign to the experience of watching one of Kluge’s films, which prompt a host of diverse pleasures, and not just those of thinking; and one senses as well that similarly sensuous joy was taken in the crafting of these films by the auteur and his team, which we receive not as mass-produced industrial products but as handcrafted treasures that bear the trace of their makers’ touch. Yet few of the pleasures in Kluge’s work are of the more conventional mass-cultural forms: the body types are all wrong, the sex is all awkward, the love scenes rigid or clumsy. The bodily pleasures in these films do not really lend themselves to use as affirmations of the given, sitting as they do crosswise to the present and its dominant forms of pleasure taking. Instead, they seem to open up new horizons, simultaneously prompting us to recall lost forms of enjoyment from prior eras and anticipating new ones we have yet to imagine. In any case, in Negative Dialectics Adorno asserts the primacy of the somatic moment in what appears to be unequivocal terms: “Everything spiritual [alles Geistige] is modified bodily impulse.” The “modification” is crucial, though, as “such modification is the qualitative transformation into that which is not merely existent [das was nicht bloß ist].” Typically for Adorno, the formulation is dense: “that which is not merely existent” refers to the effect of the inexorable working of the mind as it takes the given “impulse” (the sense data, sensuous perception, the corporeal reaction to stimulus from the world, a text, or a film) and turns it into something else (a thought, an idea, a concept); the immediacy of sensibility is fleeting and becomes other than itself. Cognition, therefore, cannot be reduced to the somatic moment any more than cognition can escape it. Similarly, when Kluge speaks of a “dialectics we can feel with the fingertips,” that “feeling” is always there to be worked upon by the mind and transformed into something else, something that is not merely existent. The “power of feelings” is indeed great, but it cannot provide a harbor of immediacy or a guarantee of knowledge in a world that is wholly mediated. This idea from Adorno, that the modification of the somatic impulse is a “qualitative transformation into that which is not merely existent,” points beyond the restricted act of individual cognition and experience to the larger world; a figure of utopia can be glimpsed here. This becomes clear in the very next passage in Negative Dialectics (already referred to in my discussion of Tahimik’s politics of the body): “The bodily moment announces to cognition that suffering should not be, that it should become something

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different [anders werden soll ]. ‘Woe says: go.’ Around this idea, that which is specifically materialist converges with that which is critical, with practice that changes society.” Thus, the “qualitative transformation” of the “bodily impulse” into “that which is not merely existent” is not only the metamorphosis of the concretely somatic into the abstraction of thought, but subsequently also the metamorphosis of a bodily impulse into a demand that society itself “become different,” that society become “that which is not merely existent.” In this way, Adorno, in a manner wholly consistent with Kluge’s thought and artistic practice, shatters the image of the body as the last reserve of immediacy and as a refuge for a naturalized individuality; the body, here, is social—social not only in the sources of its suffering but also social in the solutions to that suffering that it projects. From this perspective, the valorization of immediacy would amount to little more than the demand for things to remain the same. Adorno continues: “The abolition of suffering . . . is not up to the individual who feels the suffering, but solely to the species to which she still belongs even when she has subjectively renounced it and has been objectively driven into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object.” If, in Adorno, the archetype of such suffering is the experience of Auschwitz, in Kluge (who has been strongly, and rightly, castigated for his relative lack of attention to the Nazi genocide as well as his potential equation of “German” suffering with that of the victims of that genocide, though see below) suffering takes on four primary forms (though of course it cannot be reduced to these): the historical experience of war, in particular the experience of the allied bombings of the German cities at the end of the Second World War; the experience of so-called primitive accumulation and the subsequent universalization of alienated labor in all of its guises; the general provisionality of existence and our inability to “orient ourselves” in this world, as we have already seen in the discussion of The Assault of the Present; and, relatedly, the generalized sense of unease, the Unbehagen in contemporary society, about which Kluge once said, in reference to Yesterday Girl, that we all feel it but it is not so bad that we feel compelled to do anything about it. Compared to the experiences of administered murder and war, these latter three forms of suffering are much more amorphous, much more difficult to capture in a poignant image or compelling narrative, yet equally disastrous: as Kluge and Negt have said, war is but the intensification of the state of emergency in which we live in so-called normal times, a different organization of the activities—above all the work—we engage in on a daily basis into a combination that takes the appearance and bears the

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name of war. Tahimik, as we have seen, has come up with an apt image to capture the violence behind such seemingly innocuous forms of suffering: the images in I Am Furious Yellow of the ash from Mount Pinatubo, which accretes gently like the snowflakes in a child’s snow globe, but which in the end is as lethal as an explosive volcanic eruption. There is, however, an image in Kluge’s work that conveys the degree to which the individual “has been objectively driven into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object” by these seemingly benign and diffuse forces in advanced capitalism. It comes in a sequence toward the end of Yesterday Girl, after the protagonist, Anita G., has learned that she is pregnant, and her lover has given her 100 German Marks so that she might travel to North Rhine-Westphalia to get an abortion. She wanders through the urban and suburban landscape of Frankfurt. The shots are iconic for the film: Anita crossing and recrossing bridges, isolated in telephoto framing against the sky; she sleeps in an abandoned villa; she takes refuge in a bus shelter. All are images of a figure compelled to move, with nowhere to rest or call home, every decision provisional, every solution to each problem temporary. The sequence closes with a series of long shots, cut together in soft jump cuts, taken from a car rapidly circling a massive traffic roundabout. Anita sits on her old battered suitcase in the middle of this landscape that consists of some trees and a large patch of grass encircled by speeding cars and trucks (fig. 3.4). This is an image of an artificial landscape that we now interact with in its immediacy, a landscape that is now second nature to us, unquestioned, encountered with mild annoyance or general indifference. A soupy, sentimental (and nearly unrecognizable) version of the children’s song “Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär” plays on the sound track, the absent lyrics mutedly reinforcing Anita’s solitude. The isolation of Anita’s figure in the center of this landscape recalls a passage from Benjamin’s essay “Experience and Poverty” in which he speaks of the effects of World War I: No, this much is obvious: experience has deteriorated in value and that in a generation that from 1914 to 1918 went through one of the most monstrous experiences of world history. . . . A generation that had gone to school in horse drawn carriages, now stood beneath the heavens in a landscape in which nothing but the clouds had remained unchanged and in the middle, in a power zone of destructive forces and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, human body.

Anita is not the immediate victim of the gas bombs and explosions of the war, but instead sits here on her suitcase, battered by an existence which

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permits her no secure place in the world, where she lives from man to man and from stolen sweater to stolen sweater. Hers are a set of humiliations and injuries nowhere near as dramatic as those of World War I or Auschwitz (the touchstones for Benjamin and Adorno, respectively), but they do sorely devalue experience and shatter subjectivity, even if only through the slow accumulation of insults and indignities. Here now sits Anita G. and her tiny, fragile body—a fragility emphasized and reemphasized throughout the film, most notably in the scene where she “delivers” her baby—beneath the heavens in which nothing but the clouds has remained unchanged (think, again, of all the clouds in Kluge’s movies, shot in time-lapse, traversed by jet planes—even they are no longer the province of untrammeled nature), not in a dramatic landscape of bomb craters and explosions, but in one of the most forgotten places one can imagine in the wilderness of second nature: the interstices of the highway system, places always passed by, unnoticed, thought of more as obstacles to be overcome than as destinations to travel to. It is the magic of Yesterday Girl, and many of Kluge’s films, that he captures the tragedy

FIGURE 3.4

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Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1965). Still capture from DVD.

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of this situation and lends it a valence of urgency that is otherwise hard to convey. The emphasis on the body in both this sequence in Yesterday Girl and in the passage from Benjamin’s essay points toward the issue of its status as something natural. Kluge’s position is dialectical. It is clear, as I have already noted, that in Kluge’s work the body cannot function as an unambiguous guarantor of the immediacy of experience. Not only must experience transcend the somatic, but the body—as much as Spirit—is a historical product, a fact exhaustively demonstrated by Geschichte und Eigensinn in its exploration of the historical education of the senses and the historical training of individual labor capacities. In a manner very much like that of Adorno’s notion of “natural history,” Kluge comprehends the human being as “most historical” precisely in that place where the human seems “to rest most deeply in itself as natural”: in the body. And Kluge’s work is stuffed full of characters marked in various ways by the historicity of their bodily beings: from the freakishly modified and adapted physiques of humans living on various planets in outer space in his science fiction (like the prisoners of the planet Dubna in Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, whose bodies have experienced the most fantastic transformations in response to the intense gravity of that planet), to the particular, peculiar, and hardly natural eating habits of the various characters in his films (like Doktor Busch, Leni Peickert’s friend and lover in Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed, played by Alfred Edel, who likes to eat his sausages in the tub while watching television). In other words, in addition to rejecting the body as a site of immediate and undetermined experience, Kluge’s work also tells us that the body can no longer be thought of as merely first nature and as a transcendent ground for a politics. If we think of the body only as first nature, we again fall into an ideological trap—the trap of identity thinking, of speaking immediately of the immediate—thinking not only that we have both bridged the gap between subject and object (for the body is the object that is the subject) but that we also have escaped the realm of history. Moreover, if the subject as a body is reduced to nature, subjectivity itself is wiped out; humans would be no different than the beasts, “doing nothing.” But one cannot dispense with a notion of nature altogether. If we conceive of the body as purely historical, we have, as Adorno might put it, “forgotten” nature: we have forgotten the organic substrate of the beings that humans are. Such a mistake would be tantamount to the completion of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” the ultimate triumph of reason over

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nature, nature’s utter extirpation and simultaneously that of the subject, which would be reduced to pure determination “from without,” reduced to the status of an automaton of instrumental reason. It would be a situation analogous to that of the eradication of illusion. Thus one must, as Adorno has phrased it, cultivate the “memory of nature” in the subject while simultaneously refusing the false immediacy such nature would suggest. In Adorno, the dialectical character of this relationship between first and second nature becomes apparent when he writes, in an essay on Balzac, that “Balzac may have addressed the constellation of the chthonic and Humanität [human-ness or humaneness]. Humanität is the memory of nature in human beings. Balzac tracks it to the point at which immediacy creeps away before the context of the functionalization of society and is ruined.” As always in Adorno, truth emerges in the mediation of the extremes; “humanity” arises in its coincidence with its extreme opposite, nature. Which is why to end up doing nothing, like a beast, is not only a bad thing (as can be seen in Minima Moralia): Rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, “being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment,” might take the place of process, action, fulfilling, and so truly redeem the promise of dialectical logic to return to its origin. Not one of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

Though Kluge generally adheres to Adorno’s ban on graven images—the prohibition of any direct representation of utopia—there are moments in his films when this utopia of lassitude is hinted at, though never figured in complete positivity. There are many images of his characters seemingly doing nothing—Leni Peickert, for example, lying on the couch, naked, snuggling under the cushions, or, for that matter the beasts themselves, her elephants lounging about, enjoying a bath, idly sweeping the ground with their trunks—but the utopia of remembered nature lies just beyond their reach. For the humans, these moments are often moments of respite from the onslaught of daily life, moments of recovery from failed and thwarted efforts, a time when those failures are contemplated. They are not moments of authentic, or full, rest. And for the various elephants in Kluge’s films, these moments are also but sad reminders in themselves of the sheer distance between the human world and the nature whence they came (fig. 3.5). So these moments of respite cannot be enjoyed as a sustained utopia, but

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FIGURE 3.5

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The Patriot (Alexander Kluge, 1979). Still capture from DVD.

only as its hint, as a muted gesture toward that condition, for their peace is not eternal, but fleeting. The closest, though, that Kluge comes to an image of such peace in his films is, fittingly enough, precisely when there is no image on screen: in that 1/48th of a second between each illuminated frame (at least in the cinema), in the moments of black trailer, when the mind has the time and peace to function on its own; and in the absent image that arises through montage. In an interview with Gertrud Koch, Kluge addresses this matter directly: Kluge: One shot, a second shot, and neither are the image, they injure each other through their contrast, their difference or tautology. A third image leaps forth that is hidden in the cut [Schnittstelle] and which is itself not material. The third image is the quiet ideal that has existed in the spectator for a long time [ist längst vorhanden]. Koch: The third image is then the utopia, which follows the ban on graven images.

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Kluge: In the most literal sense, because it does not exist [es ist nicht vorhanden].

To reemphasize: utopia is “längst vorhanden” in the spectator—it has long been present—precisely in the same sense that Kluge defined utopia in “The Utopia of Film” in 1964: it is something of which the spectator has only dreamed, of which he or she has been unaware or at best dimly aware in conscious life, and it is the role of film to bring this utopia to light. When Kluge states that “that which has not been filmed [das Nichtverfilmte]” criticizes what has been filmed, he means not only that all the untold films that have never been realized (as Godard says in JLG/JLG Self-portrait in December, 1994) of such unrealized projects, these are his best work) stand as scolding reminders of the imperfections of the films that have actually been realized; he also means that the images which are not on screen— those black and empty spaces, the third images that arise in montage, the things, to use a phrase of Richard Dienst’s, that “remain to be seen”—are the time-places where utopia resides. In that time-place, not only is the spectator nudged into autonomous activity, but also the images present on screen undergo a “transformation into that which is not merely existent.”

The Scrap Yard of the Merely Existing Present There is an episode early on in The Assault of the Present in which the businessman Herr Doktor von Meltzig, who specializes in Schrott—scrap metal—is interviewed by a news reporter. The news reporter is a figure caught between an older version of the public sphere—the classical public sphere, for Kluge cinema’s proper public sphere—and the new industrial-commercial public sphere unfolding under the pressures of the New Media. This reporter, whose own field of specialization is actually “the New Media and art,” is filling in for a colleague who usually covers the metal processing beat. Though it might be expected that the reporter is hopelessly out of his realm, it turns out that his skills and expertise are as relevant in the domain of Schrott as they are in the area of art; the objects in question are equally fungible, and art has the actuality of scrap. What distinction that might once have attained between art and scrap has faded: Herr Doktor von Meltzig is, after all, a self-described Tauschkünstler, an “artist of exchange.” The interview format, in this case taking the form of a fictive Reportage, has become a hallmark of Kluge’s later work, the dominant element of his television broadcasts and the films produced for DVD release. The staging

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of this interview is highly artificial: the minimalist setting gestures in only the most schematic way toward von Meltzig’s place of work. But the fake interview, shot with a rather harsh unfiltered key light, much like a hastily arranged news interview would be, is intercut with gorgeously filmed and naturally lit documentary footage of an automobile scrap yard, yet another landscape of waste to add to those of Godard and Tahimik: here disused cars are dismantled, their carcasses gracefully and almost delicately lifted by a crane so that a worker might puncture their gas tanks and oil pans to drain them (fig. 3.6). One can only imagine, though, what one of Tahimik’s characters might do with the steel and rubber and glass piled about—the machetes that could be made, the new vehicles that could be assembled, the artworks that could be created. Such possibilities remain unremarked upon by von Meltzig, however, for whom these materials are reduced to their abstract status as bearers of exchange value. The fictive reporter wants to know: how does von Meltzig see the future of scrap? Von Meltzig replies: “I don’t see it. I experience [erleben] it.” This experience, though, is not that

The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (Alexander Kluge, 1985). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURE 3.6

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of a Tahimik character. Nothing new will be produced from this scrap, no utopian refunctioning or recycling will occur. Von Meltzig’s experience— he uses the term erleben, not the stronger notion erfahren—is an experience of the future as a mere distension of the present. But the spectator can sense this absent utopian moment, helped along by the gentle suggestiveness of the cinematography, whose care—even beauty—projects an unrealized utopian potential for this waste, for the camera and the cameraman here have, after all, made something new out it, even if it is only a picture: for the aestheticization of this junk through the skillful cinematography transforms the profilmic materials into “something not merely existent,” augmenting and opening up a deeper fascination that the footage of the scrap yard holds. And the documentary material resuscitates (at least for this viewer) pleasures akin to those felt long ago as a child while on an outing to the car wash or while watching after-school TV documentaries about pencil factories and steel mills. These were the small joys that came with the discovery of what lies behind unquestioned familiar realities, secrets generally obscured from everyday experience. “So that’s how they do those things!” sums up the sort of astonishment at the given world that lies before Kluge’s camera as if inert: the movements of the worker who deftly avoids injury as the tons of metal move about him; the apparent magic of the giant claw on the crane which can grasp and release an entire Opel with the kind of dexterity one would associate with a surgeon or painter; the sheer amount of waste whose very quantity shocks and amazes. It is as if the spectator is being exposed to the alluring mysteries of the production of second nature while simultaneously being let in on the dirty secret about the world of the new; the processes behind the more polished and glamorous aspects of this second nature are revealed, its future as rubble and waste is held forth. This is indeed part of Kluge’s work as an “image destroyer” or iconoclast, as an “artiste démoliseur”: to destroy and dereify the smoothly unified surface spectacle of reality, to reveal it for the constructed fiction that it is. To speak again in the terms of Kluge’s analysis of the love scene in “The Sharpest Ideology”: just as a love scene would only be realistic if the future breakup and abortion were somehow included, so too would an ad for a Mercedes only be realistic if it showed its past and future on the scrap heap and the lives of the workers who must spend their days surrounded by industrial decay as they reclaim its rusting chassis. This landscape of waste holds enormous figurative potential for Kluge, much as it does for Tahimik. Schrott, for Kluge, is a trope not unlike Benja-

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min’s notion of the ruin. It is what is left after an object has been used, consumed, and spent; it is what remains after an object becomes superfluous. In other words, Schrott is a figure for dead labor; and that these superfluous objects, these bits of scrap and ruins, include subjects—that the subject itself is dead labor as much as living—goes almost without saying after the lessons of the episode in the film about the doctor, “The Superfluous One.” A passage from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in the section “World Spirit and Natural History,” helps open up an understanding of the figure of Schrott in Kluge. Citing Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, Adorno writes: “When history made its entrance onto the stage in the tragedyplay, it did so as script. On the countenance of Nature stood ‘History’ as the signifying text of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of Natural History, which was introduced to the stage through the tragedy-play, is truly present as ruin.” This moment when natural history appears on the stage and becomes legible to the spectator/reader of the tragic drama, is, as Adorno reads it, the “moment when nature and history become commensurable”; this moment of commensurability, however, is “a moment of passing,” of Vergängnis. In this passage Adorno builds on his earliest plans to develop a concept of natural history in the early lecture entitled “The Idea of Natural History,” to which I have already referred in the context of the discussion of Kluge’s representation of the body. In that lecture he summarized the idea as the attempt “to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature.” This moment in thought where nature and history become commensurable is, however, deceptive, insofar as neither pole of this dialectic can really persist and rest in itself: the commensurability of Nature and history is a moment of passing or transience not only in the sense that it is fleeting but also in the sense that it consists in transience. The essence of the commensurability of Nature and history, what would seem to be their enduring mutual identity, the stuff which they share in common, is transience itself, a substance that by its very definition resists any durable identity. Why might this be important for a discussion of Kluge and Schrott? On the one hand, as a philosophical stance, Adorno’s concept of natural history amounts to a thoroughgoing critique of metaphysics that illuminates Kluge’s own stance: in good Nietzschean fashion (and one could also argue Marxian fashion), the seemingly transhistorically unwavering essence of Being is revealed to be historical, or rather, revealed to be history: this

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is “the transmutation of metaphysics into history. It [the transmutation] secularizes metaphysics in the ultimate secular category itself, that of decay [Verfall].” (Kluge’s frequent use of time-lapse renders visible such “decay.”) From this perspective, “No remembrance of transcendence is possible any more except by virtue of transience; eternity appears not as such but as shot through with what is most transient [das Vergänglichste].” In one sense, we can understand Schrott to be an image for this “transmutation of metaphysics into history”: Schrott is nothing other than the very historical substance, in the Hegelian sense, of the individual and collective, the “past existence [that] has become an acquired possession of the universal spirit.” But what is absolutely crucial to comprehend is that this historical substance is not understood to be the enduring matter of history, as it is in Hegel; instead, it is history’s waste, its dregs and detritus, the castoffs that lie about in a state of perpetual decay. So, what should be durable, the deposition of history over time, its concretion in actuality, is actually a fleeting product that decays; and what seems to be natural, the terrain of waste that surrounds us at every turn, is revealed to be historical. Schrott is thus a mournful figure, one that shows us that all that we achieve is transitory—yet another figure of life’s provisionality—and also that what humanity has achieved is only so much waste; but it is a utopian figure as well, for it shows that the unjust and decrepit world that seems to have come into being as if by nature is actually historical and thus open to the possiblity of being transformed.

Tarrying with Cinema This conception of natural history leads Kluge into a significant deadlock that poses real difficulties for his politics and for his commitment to the principle of cinema, a deadlock not unlike that confronted by Tahimik’s vision of a historical utopia. It is not clear, for one, how to distinguish between the transience from which capital feeds and the transience that is part of any historico-natural world. Further, the decay and transience that are the hallmarks of natural history and historical nature must also plague cinema, which is a historical artifact, despite its ostensible immortality. Godard, as we have seen, is quite sanguine about cinema’s passing, even finding in it a figure of beauty. Kluge is far more ambivalent about the necessary impermanence of cinema, a medium he clearly loves. The conservative moment of love—recall that it is a conservative drive— not only stands in opposition to the transformative dynamism of capital, but it also resists

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the transience of all objects. It is difficult to embrace, or love, a world that constantly recedes before one’s grasp. So when Kluge’s voice-over narration in The Assault of the Present asserts that the New Media treat the cinema as if it were superfluous and relate to it as so much Schrott, this can be read not only as an expression of regret and anger at the usurpation of cinema and the eradication of the set of social relations cinema embodied but also as an almost therapeutic coming to terms with cinema’s inherent impermanence and inevitable passing. The Assault of the Present is an “Abschied vom Kino” in both of these senses. Cinema, though, will simply not disappear from the scene after its passing, just as anything superfluous is never emphatically left behind. Instead, it becomes so much dead labor, objectified substance to be appropriated in the future. From this perspective, the New Media appear not merely as cinema’s degraded descendant, but instead as a subject that comes into being by living off the inorganic nature that cinema has become; to use Hegel’s language again, it takes possession of cinema for itself. The Assault of the Present is a film aware of the passage of cinema from living, vital form into ossified and objectified substance, as if the film were putting the final strokes in gray on cinema’s own image—as Hegel said of philosophy—and fully conscious of it. But there is a twist here, one which distances Kluge from Hegel and brings him very close to Adorno yet again, and it is twofold. First, as I have already suggested, the notion of passing in Kluge—as in Godard—has a utopian dimension: against Hegel’s dictate that when “one form of life has become old, and by means of gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known,” Kluge’s wager is that cinema does not need to wait to know itself, but can rather anticipate its future—in Bloch’s sense of evincing an awareness, however dim, of the “not-yet-conscious”—and perhaps evade it. In this sense, Kluge’s cinema is fully consistent with a negative dialectic, one which wants to intervene, in anticipation, against apparently inescapable determinate negation, against its own untimely obsolescence and incorporation into the scrap yard of history. It wants to press its continued actuality. In other words, Kluge thinks cinema can buck the inevitable course of history. On the other hand, The Assault of the Present knows that what cinema embodies, what dreams and fantasies and wishes it has produced and evoked, what utopian projects it has begun, will not all find a place in the “empire” of the New Media (which is, as we shall see in a moment, an ambiguous situation). Or, in other words, what will become the future “substance of the individual,” what will remain as its “inorganic nature,” will

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be but a pale shadow of its former living self. This is an implicit critique of progress. As Negt and Kluge demonstrate repeatedly in Geschichte und Eigensinn, the movement of history is not a movement from one level to the next in an ever-ascending trajectory toward greater richness and complexity. For them, Hegel’s choice of the color gray is apt: for the richness and variety of living existence is reduced, leveled, and simplified as it passes through the needle’s eye of an actuality defined increasingly in terms of exchange value. This is yet another way to understand history as a sequence of failures: each step forward in the progression of history is not an act of completion or addition, but one of subtraction: a host of materials incompatible with the newly emerging form of life is excluded in each movement forward in the dialectic of history and cast aside. Now the second aspect of Kluge’s wager becomes clearer: not only can cinema know in anticipation, but it also claims that an older “form of life”—albeit a failed one—can be rejuvenated. In fact, the failure to be incorporated as “immediacy which has been mastered,” (as Hegel terms it in The Phenomenology), the failure to be wholly subsumed within the coordinates of a new “form of life”—that is, to be the subtrahend—is the precondition for such a rejuvenation. This point clarifies a passage in The Assault of the Present that could easily be misunderstood: immediately following the scrap yard sequence, the scene shifts to a room—perhaps it is an office, it is hard to tell— where two men pace back and forth in front of a large window. The shot is exposed for the exterior, so that the men appear almost in silhouette: their rhythmic pacing, almost in time to an old tune on the sound track, and their few words are the focus here. They are not characters in any significant sense, but mouthpieces of an argument, mere mannequins for the staging of a problematic to be observed and evaluated by the spectator. The voice-over—again by Kluge, and in that familiar tone that simultaneously comforts while registering a hint of the anxiety and loss that requires that comfort—tells us that these men are under enormous pressure to make a decision: will they put their money into a shipment of Schrott or will they invest in the New Media? That no further explanation is offered reinforces the parallel or equivalence between Schrott and the New Media already suggested in the interview with von Meltzig. This gives us one aspect of Kluge’s theory of the New Media in nuce: they are culture that has been forced through the needle’s eye of exchange value, shorn of any extra-economic worth or function. Whatever organic function culture might once have served—be it as a vital element of a public sphere, as some social bond for a community, or as a reserve of negativ-

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ity—is secondary, if it is important at all any longer, to its function within the circuits of exchange. Kluge’s voice-over continues in oddly prescient anticipation of the contemporary “smart phone”: “Should the cinemas be abolished and the images explained over the telephone?” After a pause, and some more onscreen pacing, Kluge’s voice-over continues: “Much of what the superfluous people in this country dream of will not fit into this project [of the New Media].” At first pass, this latter sentence seems deeply pessimistic, if not mournful: the New Media will do little to satisfy human wishes, wishes which too will become obsolete. This will be yet another step in the further leveling and reduction of the human capacity for imagination, yet another subtraction from the richness of actuality. But the sentence is dialectically ambivalent, marked by optimism as well: it is an assertion that the New Media will not be able to contain or gratify the historical needs of a large portion of the population, and it is in this gap between historically constituted need and the capacity of a particular moment to satisfy that need that “the energy of protest” resides. The “superfluous” wishes and dreams will not be annexed to the valorization process of capital and will thus retain their autonomy and distance from capital’s logic. Adorno and Horkheimer’s nightmarish vision in “The Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, of a cultural landscape where “something is provided for all so that none may escape,” cannot, in the end, be realized. What is superfluous thus becomes another moment in Kluge’s work where the concept of the non-identical makes itself felt; as I have argued elsewhere, Kluge’s politics of the non-identical draws heavily on Adorno’s understanding of the dialectic between identity and non-identity. Continuing Adorno’s critique of epistemology, which focuses relentlessly on the manner in which an object of knowledge escapes the identity imposed upon it by thought, Kluge attempts to articulate the moment of non-identity into a positive politics. Adorno himself was not unambiguously sanguine about its potential as a source of protest energy; rarely if ever does he take his identification of that which escapes the universalized domination of instrumental reason as a starting point for a positive program. What power there is in the non-identical is muted at best, almost purely negative in its thrust. Take, for example, a passage from Adorno’s posthumously published essay “Schema der Massenkultur,” one occasionally cited as evidence that Adorno’s dismissal of mass culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment was not as total as generally assumed: “[S]ince as subjects humans are still the limits

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of reification, mass culture must attempt again and again to take hold of them in bad infinity: the hopeless effort of this repetition is the only trace of hope that this repetition will be in vain and that humans cannot be wholly grasped after all.” But whatever optimism this passage might express is elsewhere tempered, if not turned into its opposite. In a classic passage from Negative Dialectics, one that Kluge definitely knows well, Adorno articulates a similar idea but with a telling caveat: That is why the philosophical critique of identity steps beyond philosophy. That it requires what cannot be subsumed under identity—in Marxian terminology, use-value—so that life can continue to exist even under the ruling relations of production, is what is ineffable in utopia. Utopia reaches deep into that which secretly forswears its realization. In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong condition.

The utopia to which Adorno points here, and which Kluge wants to take as the starting point of a political-aesthetic project, is a deeply attenuated one, constantly on the defensive, forever playing a rearguard strategy against the loss of what it thought it had, or left pointing out how identity never fully succeeds. This figure of a utopia that penetrates that which “forswears its realization” captures perfectly the dialectical structure of Kluge’s concept of “basic trust,” for example. The ontology of the wrong condition, however, demands that one also invert this perspective: in perfect consistency with Marx’s own arguments about use-value—that it is necessary for exchange value to be possible at all—Adorno points out that this utopian moment— the persistence of use-value, the non-identity of the subject, the fact that labor has to even live in any meaningful way at all—is also necessary for “that which forswears its realization.” Identity needs the non-identical to sustain itself. Similarly, capital, without some source of energy from outside of itself, would grind to a halt; capital needs something that lies beyond its limits, a place into which it can expand in its ever-renewed need for growth, be it through the “extensive” expansion into new geographical space, or the “intensive” and recursive expansion into uncolonized realms of individual and collective experience within those areas of the globe already subsumed under capital. The dystopia of a perfectly and hermetically sealed totality in capitalism is thus an impossibility: capital needs that which is not yet part of it, so something other than capital must continue to exist. But, from the bleakest perspective, one can as easily say: utopia itself is necessary for dystopia to reign. It is the condition of dystopia’s possibility.

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The nightmare of capitalism and its attendant processes of commodification is not, then, merely that human subjects become completely reified, wholly determined from without, cast in stone in a perpetual mimesis of the commodity form; in some ways, a far worse prospect is held forth here, namely that human subjects get locked into the bad infinity of repeated attempts by culture, and by capitalism more generally, to “grasp” them, to take hold of them in an ever-renewed assault that leaves no refuge and that permits no peace. This is yet another way to understand what it means to be compelled to “live provisionally”: one never knows from where the next parry will come, or when capital will launch its next attempt to seek out some as yet uncolonized space and some moment of time that is as yet free. Kluge gets at this conundrum in The Assault of the Present, in a scene where Alfred Edel plays a character who is in “Zeitnot”—in a hurry or rushed, quite literally “in need of time” or caught in a “time emergency”— for some unknown reason (and which, in the end, is irrelevant). Despite his urgent need to get going, he finds himself trapped, listening to a classics professor lecture him on the ancient Greek distinction between two forms of time: chronos or time as it passes (time as durée), and chairos, or time conceived as the opportune moment to be seized, a form of time when significance and urgency peaks. Chairos (incidentally the name of Kluge’s original film production company) is by definition intermittent and punctual. A moment of time in this sense gains its significance only in its stark differentiation from other moments in time. The paradox, though, or rather the dialectical inversion that attains, is that in an ever-expanding present of unceasingly provisional existence, moments of such intensified time follow upon each other in such rapid succession that the experience of time cancels the difference between chronos and chairos and the two terms fall into one another. Thus the experience of time as it passes—chronos—is the experience of an endless succession of opportune moments—chairos— moments that in turn come more and more to resemble each other and thus lose their significance. The perfect figure for this sort of experience of time is available to us today: the time of the present which assaults all other time is the time of the person constantly fiddling with her personal electronic devices, constantly checking email and messages, constantly sending out new ones as well. Each email or message or call marks a moment to be seized; time is experienced as constant chairos. But in the end, these messages are all insignificant; their sheer accumulation renders them identical. Time is experienced as the ceaseless anticipation of moments of utter import that in the end lack all significance and which, in turn, eradicate any

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real sense on the part of the subject of the passage of time, of the experience of durée. The eternal present, though clearly a time of great Zeitnot, is thus utterly empty of time.

The Eternity of Yesterday That the forces of the present conspire to sever all ties with the past (and eclipse the horizon of the future) is a long-held anxiety that has animated Kluge’s filmmaking since its beginnings. Some twenty-five years before he made The Assault of the Present, Kluge and co-director Peter Schamoni made the short film Brutality in Stone (Brutalität in Stein, 1961), often described as an experimental or critical documentary about the legacy of National Socialism, portrayed primarily through an exploration of the monumental architecture of the Nazi period. The visual documents in the film’s more than 200 shots over the course of a mere twelve minutes are predominantly static and tracking shots of the contemporary remains of the Reichsparteitagsgelände, the Nuremberg Party Grounds that were the site of the notorious, massive Nazi party rallies, intercut liberally with stills of Hitler at work on architectural plans and sketches and models of various massive construction projects, as well as file footage from newsreels and educational documentaries from the Nazi period. The sound documents are equally diverse, consisting of a rather dry and sparsely informative voice-over, sound recordings from newsreels and films, readings from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s diaries, snippets from various Hitler speeches and a poem from the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the National Socialist youth organization for girls. Brutality in Stone was re-released in 1963 with the title The Eternity of Yesterday (Die Ewigkeit von Gestern), a title that registers an ambiguity that lies at the heart of the film: it at once expresses the fear that yesterday might just last forever, that some form of fascist or Nazi sentiment, culture, or attitude might continue unacknowledged into the present, and it makes the demand that the past not be forgotten, for fear that it might thereby have its return enabled. The film is thus rightly understood, as Eric Rentschler has argued in his study of the film, as an unseasonable attempt to “militate against collective forgetting” of the Nazi past, as much of the Young German Film did, and to insist on a conscious and active engagement with the history of National Socialism, precisely so that fascism does not persist—“forgotten” and unacknowledged—into the current historical moment. Given the orientation of Kluge’s project toward the redemption of the past and the materials it has left behind, Brutality in Stone might seem like

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an odd document in Kluge’s oeuvre; it might seem questionable whether the materials that comprise the object of representation here are worthy of that redemption. Nonetheless, the fallen object world of National Socialism calls out for that very thing, as the opening intertitle suggests: “All edifices left to us by history testify to the spirit of their creators and their age, even when they no longer serve their original purposes. The abandoned buildings of the National Socialist Party, as witnesses in stone, allow the memory to come alive of that epoch which led to the most terrible catastrophe of German history.” The language and tenor of this intertitle anticipates Kluge’s later formulation, and his insistence, in terms influenced by constructivism, that one must “respect” the “materials” with which cinema works—the documents it photographs and records—“which are living” and accept their “autonomy.” Here Kluge is perhaps at his closest to Benjamin’s theory of montage and his understanding of the documents, as he calls them, that comprise its basis as almost sentient in their effectivity; Kluge’s notion of montage relies on an almost mystical belief in the vitality of historical materials—materials which are not mute and inert objects, but which are so vital as to be virtually capable of speech in Brutality in Stone; they are “witnesses” which give “testimony,” possessed of something approximating agency, an agency that will appear to consciousness when revivified in the medium of film. But the intertitle also speaks to the manner in which these buildings from the Third Reich “allow . . . memory to come alive” in the spectator: as Kluge has put it, not only do these materials live, but they also condense a particular historical “experiential content” (Erfahrungsgehalt) of the subjects who once knew those objects, who once knew those materials, who created them and lived amongst them. Thus the redemption of these materials—their revivification—is as much a matter of providing the care and respect to the materials themselves, as it is an attempt to engage the human subjects whose experience they condense. I concur with Rentschler’s argument that Brutality in Stone constitutes a “critical enterprise” and “negative project,” like much of the Young German Film, in a period in German history when many would have been happy to forget the historical experience of the Nazi period and all the uncomfortable questions that came along with it. The film does indeed spend a good deal of time and effort recalling the violence of the Nazi period clearly registered in the film’s title, perhaps most notably through its use of the Höss diaries and the recitation of the truly horrifying BDM poem. But we must keep in mind Kluge’s dual hermeneutic, discussed earlier, for it applies to Brutality in Stone with full force: an exclusive emphasis on

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the portrayal of the brutality of fascism in a reading of Brutality in Stone, a singular focus on the barbarism that inhabits the documents of Nazi culture in the film—the Party Grounds, Nazi architecture more generally— misses a significant portion of the film’s analytical and redemptive thrust if it does not also acknowledge the film’s attempt to unearth the utopian aspects of the fascist project. It is a particular strength of the film—and perhaps also what makes it most useful as a model for critically representing fascism—that it manages, by means of a dialectical montage (of admittedly varying subtlety), to juxtapose these seemingly antithetical impetuses in Nazi ideology and practice: the horror registered in the film’s title is set off against the visions of a transformed future that Nazi architecture embodied and the collective energies that had been invested in that future. Thus it is that the most horrific of documents in the film—the Höss diaries—are juxtaposed to other less brutal documents, if one may put it that way, through montage: as the diaries are read in an utterly dispassionate voice-over, the camera tracks up the stairs of a building on the site (in a

Brutality in Stone (Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni, 1961). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURE 3.7

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Brutality in Stone (Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni, 1961). Still capture from DVD.

FIGURE 3.8

manner not unreminiscent of certain shots in the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin) and then slowly tracks down the empty colonnades and corridors of this massive structure (fig. 3.7) to end up in a room with a solitary, glassless window, shot from within and overexposed, so that it appears like the open door of an oven in a crematorium (fig. 3.8). The shot brings together two distinct spaces so central to the National Socialist project—the massive, overzealous, utopian architecture of the Party Grounds and the crematoria of the camps—and by extension brings together the striving toward collective construction and genocidal destruction in such a way that they are inseparable, yet irreducible to one another. I am tempted to say that this image provides another type of image to be added to Deleuze’s set of categories. Alongside the time image, the movement image, and so on, this one could be laid, an almost perfect image of the dialectic of enlightenment; the utopian dream of progress, embodied in the buildings through which the camera tracks, ends up in its opposite: administered destruction, revealed only as the image and sound track simultaneously fade to silence and black. The sound track in the scene

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plays its role as well: at first the track has a slight echo or reverb, as if it were diegetic sound emanating from the hollow spaces of the empty building. But the echo or reverb gradually disappears, and the track appears to be much more proximate and dry, and thus much more intimate, possessed of an eerie, uncanny acousmatic effect as if a private, guilty voice were speaking to the individual viewer. To emphasize the utopian aspect of fascism is, of course, in no way to defend or advocate for fascism, but is instead intended to point toward its particular ability to engage its subjects in a collective project. The documents of this ability are found throughout Brutality in Stone, not only in the images of the ruins of the party grounds but also in the ambitious architectural plans and models, some shown in excerpts from Nazi cultural films, as well as in the sound track: in cheers from assembled crowds, and a repeated passage from a recording of a Hitler speech where he intones that “only the smallest of minds can see the essence of a revolution only in terms of destruction. We, on the contrary, saw in it a gigantic construction [Aufbau]!” This giant construction entailed an awesome capacity for mass mobilization, something which Negt and Kluge were to analyze just over a decade later in Public Sphere and Experience in terms that are very illuminating for our consideration of Brutality in Stone: National Socialism promoted a particular human faculty: a sense for the outstanding achievements of industrial firms, of military apparatuses, and also of individual fighters, for the reorganization of material and human beings. It managed to give workers self-confidence in their own power—by recourse to forgotten types of past activities: plunder, violence against other peoples, standing the test, using everything one has, playing the hero, but also displaying initiative, being practical, finding solutions, ruthlessly drawing connections between disparate areas, and so on. National Socialism mobilizes, in a technically effective manner, labor-power as a whole, whereas capitalism is capable of exploiting it only piecemeal.

This formulation of National Socialism’s ability to “mobilize labor-power as a whole” is both utopian and dystopian. It is utopian insofar as it gives form to the fantasy of the full unfolding of the human powers of creation— a similar fantasy has already been noted in Kluge’s ambition to harness the whole human organism for the purposes of cognition. But it is dystopian in that it violates all sense of human proportion (as does the architecture), fully instrumentalizing the subject to the point of its utter evacuation and

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extirpation: the human organism, as Negt and Kluge point out in Geschichte und Eigensinn, cannot endure complete mobilization without falling ill, the Nazi practice of working its inmates to death being the most extreme manifestation of this fact. Fascism’s total exploitation of human laborpower is analogous to Kluge’s later characterization of the New Media: they are an attempt, by private capital, to mobilize the entirety of human laborpower—including every remnant of the living labor of human Phantasie— within the circuits of capitalist valorization. Thus the New Media—like fascism—attempt to do what capitalism has hitherto been incapable of: total mobilization and complete exploitation. Negt and Kluge’s analysis of fascism thus leads to a significant conclusion: fascism cannot be explained or understood as an individual predisposition or tendency. Individuals are not fascist in and of themselves; there is no individual “authoritarian personality.” Instead, fascism must be understood in its collective dimension, as Kluge states in a line that is as insightful as it is simple: “No one, as a lone individual, is for himself nationalsocialist.” Again the principle from Marx’s sixth thesis comes forward: the human essence must always be grasped as the ensemble of social relations. Thus, to the degree to which Kluge’s work engages in the labor of mourning for the fascist past, as it does in Brutality in Stone to a degree and elsewhere in his work to greater and lesser extents, it confronts a loss that is deeply collective. The loss associated with fascism is not merely the loss of a charismatic leader (as in the Mitscherlichs’ Inability to Mourn), but also a loss of the collective element, the figuration of utopia, no matter how false or distorted, that fascism offered. Clearly there is a serious risk involved in foregrounding the utopian moment in fascism (and I will return to this in a moment), but there is also a risk in ignoring it. As Negt and Kluge argue in Public Sphere and Experience, in a near replication of the logic of Adorno’s “Baby with the bathwater” aphorism in Minima Moralia, a single-minded critique of fascism as pure ideology (without any of the dialectical, dual-hermeneutical nuance that I have spoken of) can lead to a generalized suspicion of collective life. The risk in ignoring the utopian moment is that the energies and utopian impulses of fascism, the degree to which it satisfied the emotional needs of the workers, will be left to the (extreme) Right to articulate and appropriate for its political purposes. On this point, Kluge and Negt’s theory of fascism resembles Ernst Bloch’s thoughts on fascism, which were similarly concerned to avoid ceding important political energy to the political Right. Bloch’s central concerns, which he develops in Heritage of Our Times, are

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summarized nicely by Anson Rabinbach in a manner that could easily describe Kluge’s project as well: Because Bloch takes seriously the power of myth in the contemporary world he is able to take seriously precisely those “irrational” or mythic elements to which fascism appealed: not only does he attempt to reveal the fertile and productive soil from which these ideas emerged, but he is concerned with them as an unclaimed radical heritage passed by the Left in its abstract critique of the illusory and “false consciousness” of fascism. Clearly, by 1935, Bloch no longer sees in myth only those elements of redemption which could, in 1918, provide light at the end of the desert. But the fact that it was the Nazis and not the Left which gave political form to the utopian substance embedded in the romantic anti-capitalism of the German peasantry and Mittelstand does not reduce the authentic impulses to be discovered there. Thus, the accent of Heritage of Our Times does not lie in the unmasking of an ideological illusion, but on the careful examination of what still can be salvaged from that which remains positive in these ideas. This approach, a Novum in Marxist interpretations of fascism, rests on Bloch’s commitment to the view that even if fascism’s claim to earthly transcendence is itself false and hypocritical, the myths behind it are not exhausted by their misuse. These images retain their power despite their appropriation by the Right. They do not become historically discredited examples of the ever present danger of irrationalism or millenarianism. For Bloch “we need not be afraid of taking note of and distinguishing the hunger for happiness and freedom, the images of freedom for human beings deprived of their rights, images which are contained in these dreams.”

It should be clear that neither Bloch nor Kluge is blind to the horrors of fascism in general or Nazism in particular; Brutality in Stone demonstrates this quite plainly. But the point remains: the critique of fascism cannot be exclusively negative; it must acknowledge the utopian aspects, the collective identifications and libidinal attachments, the figurations of collective life that the fascist project entailed and which remain unclaimed. If these materials can be reclaimed by a leftist cultural politics, then they cannot be in any way inherently fascist or proto-fascist. Simply because National Socialism exploited collective energies does not mean that the Left must shy away from them as well. Slavoj Žižek has recently made a similar point apropos of the debate around Leni Riefenstahl’s early films and their purported fascist or proto-fascist tendencies. Žižek—of course—defends Riefenstahl against her liberal critics:

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None of the “proto-fascist” elements is per se fascist. What makes them “fascist” is only their specific articulation—or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms, all these elements are “ex-apted” by fascism. In other words, there is no “fascism avant la lettre,” because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements fascism proper.

Žižek argues further that the “proto-fascist” elements of Riefenstahl’s films—the mass performances, for example—are “not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right—it was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ movement, their original creator.” One must insist, though, following Kluge, that if there is no fascism avant la lettre, there is most definitely a fascism “après la lettre,” so to speak: if, as Kluge argues, the material documents of fascism—its art, its cinema, and its culture more broadly—condense a historical experiential content, one has to come to terms with the durability of that experiential content. One has to account for and manage its historically generated and lingering resonances and affiliations with the “letter” of fascism itself. One cannot freely cite and refer to historically fascist materials—especially in a nation like Germany so deeply marked by the historical experience of National Socialism— without regard to their former and continuing affiliations with fascism. The “life” (as Kluge calls it) of the materials, which must be respected, is not politically indifferent or inert. In other words, highly ambiguous and indeed ideologically dangerous ground must be tread in order to develop a redemptive understanding—and critique—of fascism and its ideology. It is crucial to note how Kluge’s redemptive approach toward fascism overlaps with his cinematic arrière-gardisme, his attempts specifically to redeem the history of cinema by bringing everything forward. Kluge’s search for a political cinematic form—his use of montage in Brutality in Stone—reaches back over the intervening Nazi and immediate postwar period to the silent era and to the revolutionary tradition of Soviet montage, in particular that of Eisenstein; if we take seriously Žižek’s assertion that Nazism “stole” the ideological portrayals of collective life from the workers’ movement, then Kluge’s attempt here to “reclaim” a radical heritage from fascism is also an attempt to revivify the original tradition from which those portrayals came. Thus, the implicit (but clear) appeal to Eisenstein in Brutality in Stone is not merely a formal borrowing or superficial mimicking of style, but an active attempt to reclaim the collective heritage of the workers’ movement itself, as well as the aesthetic traditions that it had generated and which had been appropriated or suppressed by

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National Socialism. Thus, to claim that Kluge returns to a “pre-fascist” past is in some ways a misnomer: it is a return to a past that had its own afterlife in the Nazi period as well and is thus an attempt to disengage the legacy of the workers’ movement from its articulation within the political form of National Socialism. But Kluge is also willing to engage Nazi film and its traditions and to try to somehow work through the experiential content that Third Reich film was able to organize and which, to be sure, was still quite present in the minds and bodies of many spectators living at the time of Brutality in Stone’s release. As Eric Rentschler has pointed out, Brutality in Stone is a form of updated or subversive Kulturfilm, a genre of documentary shorts, usually on cultural topics, that were screened in cinemas during the Nazi period much as newsreels were. Brutality in Stone makes liberal use of footage from such films, which are also subsequently incorporated into many of Kluge’s later features, most memorably in the “Labor of Mourning” sequence at the opening of Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed. But beyond this specific use of Nazi cinema, one also cannot overlook the obvious fact that the primary mise-en-scène and object of study in Brutality in Stone—the Nuremberg Party Grounds themselves—was also the stage and shooting set for Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), a film which thus constitutes an inescapable intertext and object for which the contemporary party grounds in their disused and abandoned state function as a placeholder. Brutality in Stone incorporates its reference to Triumph of the Will in an uncanny fashion: an early sequence, introduced with the voice-over (read as if it were an intertitle), “Motifs on the Party Grounds,” combines static shots of the various buildings on the grounds in a manner that echoes the repetitive editing patterns that Riefenstahl’s film used to construct a coherent space of graphical orderliness and conventional symmetrical beauty. That orderliness is undermined, however, by the sound montage whose dissonance makes the visual symmetry all the more overbearing and disturbing. Yet so effectively does Brutality in Stone document and allude to Triumph of the Will that one has the feeling after viewing it that portions of its sound track and visual track had to have been lifted from Riefenstahl’s film, though not a frame is included. In doing this, Brutality in Stone thus achieves the ideal that Adorno’s work gestured toward, a veritably imageless form of mimesis: an adherence to the Bilderverbot. And so it is that Brutality in Stone is able to evoke the “utopia” of fascism, to allude to its “experiential content” and its organization, without ever directly imaging the utopia it attempted to realize and instantiate. It

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is significant that no motion pictures of living human beings appear in the film; the only human figures which appear are the occasional image of Hitler poring over plans captured in a still photograph, a couple of stills of members of a cultural parade, and drawings of people or figurines in miniature scale in architectural renderings and models. The masses that populated and ornamented Riefenstahl’s film are nowhere to be seen. If, as Kluge believes, these images condense significant historical experiential substance, a danger would exist in using such images of mass spectacle: instead of therapeutically processing that experience, the film would run the risk of simply re-creating and extending it, virtually unmodified, into the present and encouraging the direct imitation of older collective practice. Such mimetic power lies behind the perhaps apocryphal story about Luis Buñuel, who claimed, when asked to reedit Riefenstahl’s film into antiNazi propaganda during the war, that the task was impossible, so powerful and impressive were the images in Triumph of the Will that even a reedit would have convinced audiences of the invincibility of the German people. Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of fascism provides a compelling model to help understand the particular might of Triumph of the Will— and of fascist spectacle more generally. At the heart of their analysis lies fascism’s capacity to control and manipulate human mimetic activity. As Michael Taussig summarizes it, “Fascism [in Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis] is an accentuated form of modern civilization which is itself to be read as the history of the repression of mimesis.” But fascism’s power also lies in its seemingly opposed capacity to induce—and not merely repress— mimetic behavior; for Kluge (and perhaps Buñuel), to use the images from Triumph of the Will may well be to risk simply reproducing this power, which Adorno and Horkheimer describe as follows: The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefully thought out symbols (which are proper to every counterrevolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaric drum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices, the mimesis of mimesis.

As ever with Adorno, though, even this seemingly totalized repressive force retains and relies upon a trace of utopia that it exploits: for fascism, in its organization of mimetic activity, “seeks to make the rebellion of suppressed nature [in the form of mimetic activity] against domination directly useful

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to domination.” The structural similarity of this analysis to Kluge’s twofold hermeneutic should be clear: the barbarism of fascism lies (in part, to be sure) in its evocation of repressed nature, whose rebellion is then turned against itself and contributes to its further domination. These formulae of fascism—“the mimesis of mimesis,” the “organized imitation of magic practices,” the use of “the rebellion of suppressed nature” for the ends of “domination”—are also the formulae of the culture industry, and they define the sort of spectatorial reaction Kluge rejects: the imitation of imitations, the rote mimicry in the spectator of images and intuitions (Anschauungen) which are themselves mimetic, and the repressive desublimation of authentic wishes. Such reactions by the spectator constitute little more than blind perception and empty understanding at their purest, a form of reception akin to the schoolchild’s rote memorization of poems that Kluge so detests. The culture industry, then, amounts to a generalized and legitimized form of fascism within actually existing democratic societies. When Adorno famously wrote, in his lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” that he considered “the survival of National Socialism within democracy” in the young Federal Republic “to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy” (in the form of neo-Nazi groups or parties, for example), he was referring not only to the persistence of authoritarian psychic structures and identifications, the development of new authoritarian administrative institutions, the continued presence of former Nazis and collaborators within the institutions of government and education, and the willful submission of the population to the regimented organization of labor within the unfolding “economic miracle” or Wirtschaftswunder. He was also referring to the universalization of commodity culture in the new Germany and the ubiquitous reach of a culture industry possessed of the power to induce these dangerous forms of mimetic behavior. This perspective on the multiple persistences of fascism, as well as on the double treatment of mimesis in fascism as both rebellion of repressed nature and as repressive behavior, thus offers a clue to the strategies of Brutality in Stone. In the struggle to work through the Nazi past as well as to combat the rising dominance of the culture industry through the development of new countercultural forms, the repressive mimesis of fascism—as well as of the culture industry—must be avoided, scrupulously subjected to the Bilderverbot for fear of its mimesis-inducing powers. Simultaneously, the mimetic impulse of Brutality in Stone, its attempt to immerse itself in

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its objects, is an exercise in the reactivation of that mimetic impulse which was repressed by fascism. But Brutality in Stone eschews a direct image of the fascist mass, and through its formal techniques of dialectical montage and its ironic juxtapositions of audio and image it provides an “unsensuous likeness,” an image that adheres to the ban on images that could induce unthinking mimetic behavior. This, then, is the trick that Brutality in Stone attempts to pull off, and the question it poses: how to engage, evoke, represent, and work through the utopian element of fascism without creating one’s work and oneself in fascism’s image.

The Strategy from Below One gets the sense from Brutality in Stone that Kluge, at the outset of his career, was engaged in a sort of Wiedergutmachung, a payment of reparations or making of amends, for the failure of cinema, not unlike Godard’s famous attempts to rectify cinema’s failure to prevent—or at least document—Auschwitz: the making of a film about fascism, some thirty years after it could have helped prevent its rise, is implicitly an acknowledgment of cinema’s (and the Left’s) failure. Cinema, it seems, can predict the future as Godard says, but its messages, its tea leaves and tarot cards, have only been read after the fact. Cinema always seems to be behind the times, which, as we have seen, can be a virtue—for it marks it as a site of non-identity with the present, it grants privileged access to the past—and a painful liability. The tardiness that has plagued philosophy (Hegel’s owl of Minerva) has thus also plagued cinema. For Hegel, philosophy’s inescapably retrospective standpoint calls into question its ability to guide human action: Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom.

For Kluge, this tardiness is characteristic not only of philosophy and cinema but also of the (historically constituted) human condition more generally; it is raised to the level of an ontological condition within modern

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societies: human beings, as individuals or as collectives, are caught in a trap, always finding themselves behind the times, forced to play an endless game of catch-up that can never be won, bound perpetually to a historical situation for which they are inadequately prepared and improperly equipped with instruments of perception and cognition that are always already out of date and obsolete. Here one finds yet another way in which cinema has a structural affinity with the human mind: they share an ontological obsolescence. This is a stance not dissimilar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s depiction of the condition of the human subject in “Das Schema der Massenkultur,” where they write in typically sobering, if not pessimistic, terms: “As they conform to the technological forces of production, which are forced upon them by the system in the name of progress, human beings become objects which, without protest, allow themselves to be manipulated and thereby fall behind the potential actuality of the technological forces of production.” But in Adorno and Horkheimer, there is a sense, itself not unfamiliar to traditional Marxist analysis of the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, that this disjuncture between subjective capacity and the potential actuality (Potentialität) of the technological forces is a marker of a possible, even greater human productivity than has been realized so far. As we will see in a moment, Kluge also shares this belief. But in order to achieve that potential, to overcome the alienation that separates human subjects from that realization of their powers, Kluge repeatedly shows that human beings must work with a set of tools that lie far behind the achieved level of technical development. Here Kluge finds a common ground with Kidlat Tahimik that might not be quite obvious at first: just as Tahimik and his son make projectors from rusting scrap found in the desert and art from castoffs found in dustbins, so too must Kluge’s human beings make their future guided by ideas from the last century, with senses from the wrong millennium, and with feelings from yesterday or years long past. In other words, this marks yet another manner in which human beings are compelled to live provisionally, like ragpickers using what comes to hand, like Chaplin using an umbrella for a weapon or a table cloth for a napkin. With the increasing pace of the development of the productive forces and the consequent transformation in social relations, this condition only intensifies: obsolescence is the order of the day; the distance between the subject’s capacity to comprehend its world and intervene in it meaningfully and the objective possibilities of doing so grows ever greater.

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This problem is illustrated by Kluge most acutely in his tale of the schoolteacher Gerda Baethe, a character who first appeared in Kluge’s seminal story “Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945.” The story and character reappear in The Patriot, where Gerda Baethe’s case history is used as documentary material for a high school history lesson in Gabi Teichert’s classroom. It also appears in fragmentary form in Geschichte und Eigensinn, where the more properly theoretical implications of the story are explored. To summarize: during an Allied attack on Halberstadt (Kluge’s hometown), Gerda Baethe takes refuge with her three children in a basement bomb shelter. At this point it is too late for her to do anything to stop the bombings. It is, in Kluge’s terms, too late to develop a “strategy from below” to counter the “strategy from above” being carried out by the collective powers of the Allied air forces: “All she can do is pray and hope.” The story is clearly allegorical: though it does deal with the real historical experience of the bombings of the German cities in the final year of the war, the metaphors of “above” and “below” clearly refer to larger political and social structures and can be mapped on to the basic opposition between bourgeois and proletarian public spheres we have already discussed: the strategy from above is that of capital, state power, accumulated dead labor, international politics, etc.; the strategy from below is the strategy of living labor, of the individuals and collectives who must somehow generate a response to that deadly strategy from above. Individual strategies can only be provisional; an effective strategy from below can only be developed through collective organization. However, even conscious collective organization confronts the same temporal delay that prevents Gerda Baethe’s effective resistance to the assault from above: “the question of organization and the question of the emergence of the consciousness . . . belong together, but they fall apart in the concrete historical relations described here. The grounds for the motive, to organize oneself, is provided by perceptions in 1945. The objective possibility to organize exists around 1928.” Gerda has missed her chance by almost twenty years. It should be emphasized: this point does not only concern fictive characters, for Kluge develops this point repeatedly in his analysis of real historical situations as well. Most recently, for example, in The Fruits of Trust it becomes clear that actions to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 would have had to have been taken years, if not decades, before the crisis appeared to have begun. But this account of human perception and action is too pessimistic—it is defeatist. The “disappointment,” as J. M. Bernstein calls it, that characterizes Hegel’s philosophy, the sense that its knowledge is always too late and

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inadequate, is thus by Kluge’s account itself deeply ideological, an acquiescence to given actuality as immutable in its current form and inevitable in its past becoming. By extension, from such a standpoint as Hegel’s, the future appears as if it must unfold in the terms and within the parameters of contemporary given actuality. To give this a concrete illustration: what this means is that given that our contemporary actuality is the actuality of capitalism, that life today appears only on the terms dictated by the market, the profit motive, and the needs of the labor market—in other words that life itself must pass through the needle’s eye of exchange to be life at all—then all the solutions to today’s problems and all the future possibilities of human development and change appear to us as if they must unfold as continuations of the same capitalist actuality that confronts us today. The terms for the future have already been set: the solutions to environmental disaster must be “green capitalist” solutions; education is for the market and governed by it; our future physical health and our inevitable death can only be conceived of as administered by profit-earning insurance companies and for-profit hospitals; and the very meaning of our future lives, what glorious options we have before us and all that we hope to achieve in our existences, is defined for us entirely within the parameters of consumer and career choice. From Kluge’s perspective, the entire retrospective stance of knowledge in Hegel constitutes a form of historical defeatism, an accommodation to the world as it has arisen, an acceptance that there is nothing other than the “insufficient present of the moment” that the utopia of film denies; the whole that is false (as Adorno famously put it in Minima Moralia) comprises not only the totality of contemporary actuality but also the official historical development that has led up to the present moment and the future toward which it seems to lead. Žižek has argued that Marx critiqued Hegel in similar terms: In contrast to Hegel, who was well aware that the owl of Minerva takes off only at dusk, after the fact—in other words that Thought follows Being (which is why, for Hegel, there can be no scientific insight into the future of society)—Marx reasserts the primacy of Thought: the owl of Minerva (German contemplative philosophy) should be replaced by the crowing of the Gallic rooster (French revolutionary act), Thought will precede Being. Marx thus sees in Hegel’s motif of the owl of Minerva an indication of the secret positivism of Hegel’s idealist speculation: Hegel leaves reality the way it is.

Similarly, one could say: in contrast to Hegel’s philosophy, Kluge’s is a philosophy of anticipation, one which resolutely believes that in the past,

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and in the present as well, there are signs of a different future, historical demands that exceeded past actuality and that must be recognized and that must be realized, and it is the utopia of film that it can make them known; Kluge’s work, as much as it anchors itself in the past, hopes to practice the art of Zukunftskunde—the telling of the future, a future as different from the one we seem about to receive as the past could have been if only things had turned out differently. While the story of Gerda Baethe might seem to suggest that we will fail to see the future and that conscious human activity will always fail in the present, being as it is behind the times, Kluge’s assertion is actually quite the opposite: his point is that if we see the present in its clarity we can act in advance. That is, while Kluge, in true Benjaminian fashion, formulates the idea of revolution as the redemption of unmet desires and needs from the past, the actual effort—the planning, the necessary organization—must take place as if it were already the future: Kluge’s lesson (much like Tahimik’s) is that one must act as if one has already achieved what one has set out to do. The revolutionary must act as if the revolution has already occurred: you must see clearly into the past and present to know that things could be different, that one can act now and change the things that will come. To return to the example of Herr Kammersänger, the exemplary anti-defeatist opera star from The Power of Feelings: we must seek from him a third answer. In addition to his reply to the reporter (“Es könnte doch aber!”— “But it could!”), and his reply to our question about the historical past (“Es hätte anders sein können!”—“It could have been different!”), we must seek a third reply: “Es wird so geschehen sein!”—“It will have happened thus!” The problem, though, is that we need to know which question to ask to elicit that response. But if there were a character in Kluge’s work who would know what question to ask, it would be Herr Kammersänger’s fellow traveler in antidefeatism, Gabi Teichert. In an astonishing scene in The Patriot, she, as a fictive character, attends a real convention of the Social Democratic Party. Much like the Bavarian girl in Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare, who as a fictional character produces a real baby, Gabi Teichert wanders amongst the delegates, baffling them with her questions and her fictiveness, asking them to create a better, “more positive” German history so that she might teach it to her students. Her demand perfectly embodies the anticipatory principle I just outlined: she does not simply want a better future, a more perfect Germany where people might live in harmony, and where the conflicts and divisions of the past have been overcome; instead, she wants better

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“instructional materials”—she wants better material to teach in her classes. She does not want better textbooks or better technology; she wants better “raw materials of history” for her students to explore. Her request to the party delegates, in other words, is that they create a more positive future history—to create things that will have happened—a history that she will be able to tell and teach at some point yet to come. It is this demand that is truly radical: for she is asking the party delegates to act as if the future has already occurred, as if it had already come to be, so that she might wander into her classroom and say to her students: “It will have happened thus!”

The Bad New Media A utopian demand such as Gabi Teichert’s demands that we begin somewhere and some place, and there is no other time-place—Kluge’s Zeitort— than the present, regrettably yet thankfully insufficient. Brecht’s advice on the matter is well taken: “Do not begin with the good old things, but with the bad new ones.” But it is far from clear how to begin with the bad new thing called the New Media, which may have killed that good old thing called cinema. It is a bad new thing that does not want to even let you remember the good old ones, except on its terms: if fascism for Brecht recalled the old only in the most mystified of forms, reconciling it to the most advanced forces of production, the New Media call forth the past in mostly sentimental sepia tones to create an on-demand world of reified nostalgia; it presents the future to us in similarly clichéd terms, oscillating it seems between the false utopia, forever deferred, to be brought into being by unlimited economic growth, and the various natural and human disasters that supposedly threaten that growth at every turn. It is not clear where the good old cinema fits into this hostile new landscape, what cause for hope (which as we have seen resides in the past’s orientation toward the future) might still remain. As Miriam Hansen has pointed out, Negt and Kluge consider the era of the New Media to have constructed a new form of public sphere, an “industrial-commercial” public sphere, which has surpassed the old “classical” public sphere, to which cinema properly belonged and where public debate occurred and consensus was established. This new concept, I believe, is Negt and Kluge’s name for what Jameson has called the “cultural logic” of late capitalism, or, postmodernism, a place in which the autonomy of the public sphere has been displaced by its total annexation or incorporation into the market. As Hansen summarizes, the “object of appropriation” of this new industrial-commercial public sphere is

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the very “life context” of its consumers. Founded with the explicit purpose of making a profit, these public spheres voraciously absorb, as their “raw materials,” areas of human life previously bracketed from representation—if only to appropriate, commodify, and desubstantiate that material. Likewise, they often cater to social constituencies that had not been considered before as a public—if only to integrate them into the community of consumers.

Thus, the industrial-commercial public sphere is a far more totalizing construct than its predecessor, one that is capable of recuperating all opposition and giving it expression in the terms of the dominant public sphere— in short, in the form of the commodity—because those are the only terms available for expression. As such, it constitutes the “horizon of experience”—of all experience—the very conditions and terms whereby experience can be effectively constituted. In other words, little to no experience exists any longer that is not explicitly or implicitly articulated in the language of profit and exchange: the value of art is clearly expressed in financial terms; education has become the mere training in skills necessary for employment; in academia, research secures jobs, further research gains salary increases; children’s play is thought of in terms of future financial reward, the fantasy of scholarships animating the mind of many a sideline parent; and a young child’s pleasure in drawing a line is an indication of her future fitness for university. All of which leads inevitably to an intractable contradiction, and to a sense of the inadequacy of the concept of a horizon of experience: the industrial-commercial public sphere seems neither to have a horizon nor to offer the chance to realize anything vaguely approximating meaningful experience. Kluge has developed some stunning figures and parables to capture the scope of the difficulties posed by the new form of the public sphere. In 1983 he published a second essay entitled “The Utopia of Film” that revisits some of the territory covered by the 1964 essay of the same title, but which displays far less optimism than the earlier work. In a daunting extended metaphor, Kluge compares the new postclassical industrial-commercial public sphere to a linguistic thought experiment known as the “game without end.” As Kluge describes it, the game’s basic rule is one of semantic reversal: two players communicate with each other, but each utterance means its opposite. Once the game gets going, it becomes literally interminable, because any utterance intended to end the game (such as “let’s quit”) means the game should go on. The game does not permit any properly “meta” utterance that could be definitively about the game (that is, external to its

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set of rules) as opposed to being part of the game. Even the utterance “let’s keep playing” could lead to its doubled inversion by the other player (who might think “my opponent is really trying to say ‘stop the game’ and thus really she means ‘keep playing’”) and be understood as the demand to keep on playing. Kluge, though, ever practical, proposes three ways the game could be ended, all of which unfortunately demand that a decision about the game be reached before it even begins: (1) the players could decide on a second language where the rules would not apply and “normal” communication would attain, much like a so-called “safe word” in S&M sex; (2) the players could decide on a temporal endpoint before the game begins (by setting a timer, etc.); (3) a third party who is not subject to the rules could referee, and when one player asks that the game ends, the game could be terminated. Such ideas would work well for the game, but not, so it seems, for the context of living that arises in the wake of the New Media and the devastation it has wrought. Each of Kluge’s proposed solutions has a problem: the very real situation brought on by the New Media “has no referee, no set endpoint, and the individual foreign languages in which one could reason critically about the end of the game are comprehensible to but a tiny minority (like Hebrew, Latin, philosophy).” One can assume that the principle of cinema occupies a position analogous to that of such a language. Simply because it is spoken by only a tiny minority is no reason, of course, to stop speaking that language. But despite his concerns about the overwhelming power of the New Media, concerns which have only become greater since the publication of the 1983 essay, Kluge does sustain a dialectical sense of their possibilities. In a remarkable recent interview, Kluge argues that the Internet, for example, is revolutionary, in the very same way that capitalism more generally is revolutionary, just as Marx averred in the Communist Manifesto: The human being is capable of far more than capitalism permits. But one must recognize: capitalism can produce connections which people would not come up with by themselves. Three quarters of the Communist Manifesto are a hymn to capitalism, how it led humanity out of the lethargy of the Middle Ages and produced initiative. Just as the Internet is mobilizing a new public sphere.

The dialectical nature of this analysis might not be apparent at first: on the one hand, capitalism, as a form of “collective intelligence,” is capable of generating connections and ideas which individual human beings, or (self-)

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consciously acting collectives, could never generate on their own. But as always in Kluge’s analysis, even these massively productive relations are not able to encompass the totality of human desire, ability, and possibility: “the human being is capable of far more than capitalism permits.” Thus, as totalizing as the New Media and their public sphere might be, they are still incapable of fully accommodating and satisfying the multifarious and protean wishes and needs of human beings. The self-identity of the public sphere does not succeed. It constantly generates something non-identical to itself. This vision once again invokes the old Marxist dialectic of the forces and relations of production, the conviction that the relations of production under capitalism, though once revolutionary, having unleashed the astonishing collective productivity of the bourgeois epoch, eventually become so many fetters on that productivity, restraining the very forces they have developed. It is from this perspective that one must read Kluge’s further comments from the same interview: The future is present [vorhanden] in the pasts [Vergangenheiten] and it is heading toward us. You have to think: have we human beings survived because we have something in our inheritance that is more clever than we are? Then the future would be the potential that we bear within us. We would have perished long ago without some kind of guardian angel. It might be somewhat overstated, but in this sense there is not really a future isolated from the subjunctive case, from wishes, and there is no future that has been freed from the past.

So, not only does capitalism in its organization of collective life exceed the capacities of individuals and collectives to “come up with things by themselves,” at the same time it has been incapable of permitting human beings to fully realize their own potential. The consistency in this vision in Kluge’s work over the decades is remarkable, already animating Kluge’s 1964 version of “Die Utopie Film”: “The utopia of film . . . is the idea that there could be something other than this insufficient present of the moment.” From this point of view, capitalist relations, incapable as they are of permitting human beings to fully realize themselves and the potential they bear within them, is not only a fetter on the human capacity for development at the current moment, as a restriction on human potential and possibility it is a fetter on the production of the future. But what is this guardian angel, this something that is more clever than ourselves? About this historical potential, Kluge says:

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You don’t learn it, you have it. Our genes are not our only inheritance, that is a misunderstanding. We also have that inheritance of the unexpected. The desperately poor [die Elenden], in Marx’s words, have a large portion of this. They have abilities which have little to do with what we call culture but which LéviStrauss, who died this year, could have studied. He was wonderful at describing how we are unintentionally intelligent. Every one of us has this dowry and it is our only chance to avoid impotently confronting the innovations of the 21st century.

The description of this “dowry” of the unexpected, of how we are “unintentionally intelligent,” immediately evokes other such gifts from the naturalhistorical evolution of the human being: Kluge describes the “dowry” of “basic trust” (Urvertrauen) in The Fruits of Trust, and the film in the spectator’s head, in almost identical terms, as inheritances of which humans are at best dimly aware. In each case, a similar assertion is made: humankind is more than it appears to be. And cinema is there to reveal this. Immediately after this passage, Kluge develops yet another apt metaphor to characterize the “innovations” of the twenty-first century and their sheer scale and scope. It is a near-sublime image of the universalized alienation that accompanies the inheritance of the unexpected and our unintentional intelligence as their underside: The world of things has triumphed. Like the weather, things rotate around the world with all their chains of coincidence and probabilities in the form of pension funds, machinery, and data. This is the second global weather system [das zweite Weltwetter]. The global weather system of second nature.

The global weather system of second nature: what better image to show that second nature has accumulated to the point that it has taken on a fully formed, autonomous life of its own and become the equivalent of a great natural force against which we must defend ourselves and over which we no longer have any control? Kluge follows this image with a comment that seems almost like a non sequitur. It dispels any suspicion that Kluge’s insistence on our fundamental accidental intelligence is a sign of his taking leave of the project of enlightenment in favor of a properly postmodern vision of a purely aleatory mind: [The global weather system of second nature] is supra-human [übermenschlich]. But I will ground the following principle on the dowry I just men-

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tioned: one may not allow oneself to be made stupid by the power of others and one may not allow oneself to be made stupid by one’s own powerlessness. That was one of Adorno’s guiding principles.

And with that we are brought back to the epigram that opens this chapter, Adorno’s reformulation of Kant’s famous definition of enlightenment, cited by Kluge on public television more than four decades before this interview published on the Internet. The statement is not, however, a non sequitur, but is instead the declaration of a fidelity (precisely in Badiou’s sense of the term) to the project of the Enlightenment, to the sustenance of a fundamental intelligence amongst human beings in the face of the apparent triumph of the world of things. This conviction does not, however, constitute a form of idealism, in any sense of the term, but is instead grounded in the real relations of the overwhelming present: the complex jumble of this world of things— the revolutionary productivity of the current moment—produces not only unprecedented oppression, exploitation, and pressure upon the fragile human being, it also produces ever more remarkable forms of accidental intelligence as yet unknown and unperceived. Part of the productivity of the present, the collateral productivity, so to speak, of its assault on the rest of time, is that it constantly produces more than itself, an excess of capacity, ability, and demand that will insist on being met in a redeemed future. Kluge’s figures of the guardian angel of history and the mighty weather system of second nature invoke another image, of course: Paul Klee / Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, whose wings are caught in a terrible storm blowing from paradise. In this same interview, Kluge offers his interpretation of Benjamin’s angel: Interviewer: Paul Klee’s angel of history flies backwards into the future and looks in horror at our past. Kluge: Yes, but one can also interpret that positively: that is not only a malevolent wind which drives us from the past into the future. But it is also a wind that blows to us from the future because it had long existed in the past [er war schon längst vorhanden].

For Kluge, that future is a redeemed future, a future in which cinema’s promises, all receding into a past that no longer feels like one, will be brought forward. And when those promises are kept, cinema will be no more, just as Adorno implied about philosophy in the opening of Negative Dialectics: it

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will have seized the moment for its realization. Though a future is unthinkable without cinema, cinema must nonetheless think that future. Cinema’s vocation, in the global storm of the present, is to show us that that redeemed future—and, frankly, that any future—is possible. But if the present seems to want to say that cinema is already no longer possible, well then, it is also saying that the cinema is now more necessary than ever.

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Epilogue

In the small book that accompanies his recent collection of short films, Wer sich traut, reißt die Kälte vom Pferd (2010), Alexander Kluge reproduces a fragment of correspondence between him and his friend Theodor Adorno. Adorno had written to him in 1967 about plans to “write an essay about the cold,” plans which for Adorno bring to mind Kluge’s first feature film, Yesterday Girl (1965), in which Anita G., played by Kluge’s sister Alexandra, is convicted of having stolen a sweater. Her explanation? Although it was summer, she was cold. Adorno was inspired by the scene, and refers to it when describing his plans for his own essay: I have in mind the truly incomparable moment in Yesterday Girl, when Lexi, in response to the judge’s reproaches, says: I also freeze in the summer. In all seriousness, that is what it is really all about.

In this early correspondence lies Kluge’s impetus, more than forty years on, for taking up Adorno’s plans to write about the cold, as well as the plans they had shared to make a film on the topic; Wer sich traut is precisely the sort of attempt to come to terms with a past failure that I have been discussing throughout this book. This case, though, is a utopian attempt to bring to completion past plans—plans cut short by Adorno’s untimely death, by other projects that intervened, by more pressing matters. Indeed, the promise held by these plans lives on because the moment of their realization was missed. These plans, of course, will have to be realized in a time vastly different from the moment in which they were born; Kluge will yet again have to figure out just how to navigate the problematic so central to this book:

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how to remain faithful across the changes in time and circumstance, how to demonstrate fidelity to a cause, in this case the cause of critical theory and the cause of a friendship, of art, and of politics all in one. It is a gesture much like Godard’s homages to his friends and collaborators from times past—Chris Marker, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Agnès Varda—in the closing sections of Film Socialisme, or like Tahimik’s repeated deferrals to his craftsmen friends—Pati and Kaya and Maestro Lopes—all of whom practice the outmoded arts he holds so dear. Kluge’s title marks yet another turn in his recent work to timely meteorological metaphors and thematics, the cold now seeming to dominate the tempestuous global weather system of the present. It is easy enough to see why he does so, given the imminent threat, in the form of global warming, to human Kultur from a seemingly first nature that has become truly second. And just as global warming should not be thought of as a natural phenomenon, but rather be assayed for its potential as another figure for its human foundations, as Tahimik has done with what he calls the cosmos, so too should Anita G’s line—“I also freeze in summer”—be understood not only as a response to the weather. Her chill has human origins. Though almost fifty years have passed since Yesterday Girl, and though, as Yesterday Girl’s opening epigraph told us, we are separated from then not by an abyss but by the “changed situation”; and though we can count on the majority of the world’s scientists to agree, against the raving of their highly powerful skeptics, that things are getting warmer, it nonetheless feels like the chill that prompted Anita to steal that sweater is still in the air. If anything, it’s gotten colder. So perhaps at this point it is worth emphasizing not only the differences that attain across the span between two distinct historical moments, posing as they do so many challenges for fidelities to causes born long ago, but to insist on the similarities, not merely to demonstrate the constancy of failure and defeat so eloquently chronicled in A Grin Without a Cat, but instead to draw some utopian hope from them. In an old interview, Kluge describes the old Federal Republic of Germany that appeared in Yesterday Girl as a society incapable of giving people “what they can demand”; it was a society, however, that was insufficiently “aggressive to arouse people to direct struggle.” It was a society that did not, to use Kluge’s rather stiff formulation, promote “the construction of a will,” be it collective or individual; if anything, it thwarted it. It is another description of a system that ends up “killing us softly,” as Tahimik said about U.S. culture. But Anita G., despite such obstacles and despite her existential incompetence, attempts nonetheless to “repeatedly and perma-

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nently construct such a will.” This incessant striving to generate something one could call a will was her utopia, her refusal to be captured, as Adorno might put it, by a system that ceaselessly tries to ensnare its subjects for its ends. In the same interview, Enno Patalas and Frieda Grafe describe Anita as a “seismograph” or “scientific probe” who makes her way through this society of mild discontents alert to what tremors, imperceptible as they might be, were there to be sensed in the social landscape of the Federal Republic: Yesterday Girl, one could say, using Anita as its instrument, continued the fine cinematic tradition of trying to see the future—and to help, perhaps, bring that future about—a future that would however only reveal itself but a few years later, and subsequently have its cinematic history put down in Marker’s film. So one wonders: are we capable of seeing—now—in Wer sich traut what was perceptible in Yesterday Girl only retrospectively? Perhaps Kluge is onto something again, keenly aware of the chill in the air, yet attentive to a change that some of us have yet to perceive. If ever there were a society today, be it in a single nation like the Unites States or my new home of Canada, or more globally wherever the present weather system of second nature makes itself felt, that cannot deliver what people demand, then it is today’s. Although it is clear, as one scans the globe and the daily papers, that many are being aroused to direct struggle, still many are not, though it is hard to imagine that that will not soon change. And when it does, perhaps a new audience for a new kind of filmmaking indebted and dedicated to the utopia of film will come into being. One should be ready. Thus we need to embrace this notion of the cold in all of its dialectical richness. In German, with its capitalized nominative form—die Kälte—it is so much more palpable as another of those concepts in Kluge that bring home the materiality of thought. And the short excerpts from Adorno’s letters in Wer sich traut, exposing as they do an intimate exchange between Kluge and his mentor and friend, reveal a small bit of a relationship bonded in admiration and love, as well as a moment of warmth, grounded in a mutual consideration of the cold. Commenting in Wer sich traut, Kluge writes about the cold: “Significant attributes [Eigenschaften], without which humanity would not have survived, emerge from the Ice Age. For example, the distinction between hot and cold that is so important for warm-blooded animals: it is the foundation of all FEELINGS. In this respect one can say that we human beings come from the cold.” This figure—that we warmblooded creatures come from the cold—condenses a basic argument in this book: to put it in Marxian language, the utopianism of Godard, Tahimik,

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FIGURE 4.1

Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1965). Still capture from DVD.

and Kluge lies in their ability to extract from the realm of necessity—from the brute fact of a human-produced existence that leaves so many in want, out in the cold, so to speak—if not a realm of freedom, then at least a capacity to imagine a realm of freedom, a world of warmth, a world of happiness. Like Heinrich Hoffmann’s mammoth, who upon exhumation from a glacier brings vanilla ice cream from the Ice Age (as famously recounted in Yesterday Girl, fig. 4.1), they come bearing gifts for the present. That they can wrest such warmth from the midst of such cold, that they can extract a sense of possibility from the midst of overwhelming objective negativity, suggests that the epigraph for this book, Rick Roderick’s maxim supposedly borrowed from C. Wright Mills— “Once a possibility, always a necessity!”—works equally well in reverse: once a necessity, always a possibility. This requires, perhaps, some explanation. In retrospect, each of the filmmakers in this study makes the following suggestion, in one way or another, in direct or indirect fashion: namely, that at the same time that history will throw up blockages to the realization of its potentials, that it will not provide what people can demand, it will also always provide the

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possibility of the solution to its problems. This is, in the end, a fundamentally materialist, even Marxist standpoint, already clearly articulated in the Communist Manifesto. There Marx and Engels describe not only how the bourgeois epoch carries out the most horrific of depredations and how it manifests the pinnacle of the class struggle and brute exploitation, but they also argue that it produces the historical conditions necessary for the alleviation of all the want and suffering the epoch produces, and that it creates as well the agent capable of performing the deed necessary to eliminate such want, the proletariat. If this conventional agent of social revolution no longer appears as the hero of this sort of story for Godard, Tahimik, or Kluge (recall that Godard once said that cinema had to become difficult after the proletariat died), they do hold to this combined belief, to paraphrase Kluge, that the means for resolving the insufficiency of the present lie at hand (vorhanden), perhaps not ready-at-hand, but nonetheless available, if only we might find them. For Godard, this hopeful fact is nicely captured by his personal quirk that he finds titles for his films before he discovers their content, as if the title were a sort of incantatory sign that called forth the subsequent work from the murky substrate of the present. For Tahimik, as we have seen, the cosmos, as much a sign of the idiosyncratic and aleatory processes of nature as a name for the inexplicable and inescapable magic that accompanies collective human activity, is always ready to step in and provide the solution to seemingly intractable woes: how to finish that film, how to survive that typhoon, where to get the next few cups of gas. And for Kluge, perhaps the ultimate figure of history’s capacity to repair itself is that inheritance of the unexpected, the guardian angel bequeathed to us as a guide through the global storms of the present. Thus every moment of necessity seems to include the possibility of its surpassing. Every image that seems complete always opens up onto another; montage is not only our “fine care” (beau souci) as Godard called it, but also our solace. Every bleak obligation will always start to decay, for the natural history of the present has it that the pavement will crack and new green shoots of life will push through; the accumulated ash of a Mount Pinatubo will yield to the jungle, whose vines and flowers will once again restore color to the landscape. And so, perhaps, in the end, the utopia of film is a mere reminder that we should be like Anita G., seismographs or probes on the lookout, our ears pricked up and our antennae on alert for the way out of an impasse that seems total. The impasse of the present, as each of these filmmakers

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shows us, is only apparently an impasse. To find the way out, we need to be like these filmmakers’ odd assemblage of characters, moling around like Tahimik beneath the great Baguio City earthquake’s rubble, looking for something to cobble together; or stumbling like Lemmy Caution through the strip-mined landscapes of old East Germany; or digging away like Gabi Teichert with her shovel to discover a future that will be worth teaching. And we should recall, as Kluge notes apropos of the cold, that though characteristics important for our survival came out of the Ice Age, that “over the long haul, a coldness of heart becomes unbearable.” So at the very least, the utopia of film is the reminder that we should seek out the warmth of the cinema, where we might see something unexpected, something that just might make us smile the smile that dismisses the universe.

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Notes

Introduction: The Idea of Cinema 1. Alexander Kluge, “Die Utopie Film (1964),” in In Gefahr und grösster Not bring der Mittelweg den Tod: Texte zu Kino, Film, Politik, ed. Christian Schulte, 53. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, 43–45. See also chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume for a discussion of Adorno’s aphorism. 3. Fredric Jameson makes the point that a utopian interpretive theory must expand its purview beyond the individual texts of cultural history: “The task of such a theory would then be to detect and to reveal—behind such written traces of the political unconscious as the narrative texts of high or mass culture, but also behind those other symptoms or traces which are opinion, ideology, and even philosophical systems—the outlines of some deeper and vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given collectivity at a certain historical conjuncture anxiously interrogate their fate, and explore it with hope or dread.” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 282. 4. On the reception of The Battleship Potemkin, see Richard Taylor, The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion. For the significance of The Battleship Potemkin to the avant-garde of the period, see Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, esp. 184–95. 5. Two other excellent readings of this sequence should be mentioned here. Nora Alter provides a thorough and extremely useful account, not only providing a detailed enumeration of the content of many obscure images but also compellingly situating the film within the development of Marker’s oeuvre in Chris Marker, 54–57. Catherine Lupton contextualizes the film within French political developments in the 1970s in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 138–47. 6. Marker’s own English title, A Grin Without a Cat, is not a direct translation of the original French. A literal rendering of the French title would be something like “there’s a hint of red in the air,” along the lines of “there’s a hint of fall in the air.” 7. Marker, quoted in David Sterrit, “A Grin Without a Cat—Web Exclusive,” Cineaste 34.4 (2009); see www.cineaste.com/articles/ema-grin-without-a-catem.

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8. I argue this at some length in “Far from the Sixties: Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat” (paper presentation, Istanbul, August 12, 2010). Nora Alter also points out Marker’s use of Guevara as a “foil” for Fidel Castro in A Grin Without a Cat in Chris Marker, 71. 9. On the “tractorization” of art, see Richard Taylor, “Introduction,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 1: Writings, 1922–34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor, 8. Eisenstein makes the comparison between cinema and the tractor in his essay “The Two Skulls of Alexander the Great” in the same collection of writings. 10. Alain Badiou, “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed?” www.lacan.com (2009); see www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=323. 11. Badiou develops this argument in The Communist Hypothesis, esp. in ch. 4, “The Idea of Communism,” 229–60. 12. Sergei Eisenstein, “Constanta (Whither ‘The Battleship Potemkin’),” in Selected Works 1:67. 13. Žižek uses this idea frequently in his recent work. For a useful explanation of the term, see In Defense of Lost Causes, 139–41. 14. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 209. 15. Chris Marker, “Sixties,” Critical Quarterly 50.3 (October 2008): 29. 16. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, 197 and passim. 17. Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods 1:44–64. I discuss the contentious notion of the Third World in chapter 2. 18. The concept is developed in D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. 19. Alexander Kluge, “On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge,” by Stuart Liebman, October 46 (Autumn 1988): 58. 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 16. 21. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (March–April 1984): 104. The phrase “in the air,” incidentally, echoes the French title of Marker’s film, which aptly hints at the degree to which the proximity of social revolution was a significant determinant of Marker’s own film practice. 22. Ibid., 105. 23. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson provide a detailed account of the pressures on classical Hollywood style and the classical mode of production in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. 24. On the importance of commodity culture in the sixties, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. 25. Recent scholarship on the “essay film,” for example, takes cinema’s ambitions toward thinking very seriously. An excellent example of such scholarship is Timothy Corrigan’s “The Essay Film as a Cinema of Ideas,” in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, as well as his The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, where he argues that essay films, in particular, “describe and provoke an activity of public thought” (55), a formulation with particular affinities to my arguments about Kluge and his insistence on the essential “publicness” of reason in chapter 3. 26. Godard, for example, calls cinema a “form that thinks” in Histoire(s) du cinéma. 27. Klaus Theweleit, in his talk on the occasion of Godard’s receipt of the Theodor Adorno Prize has spoken of the affinities between Godard’s and Adorno’s thought. One Plus One: Rede für

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28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

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Jean-Luc Godard zur Verleihung des Theodor W. Adorno Preises an J.-L. Godard, esp. 29–32, 41–42. For an extended discussion of Adorno’s concept of the Bilderverbot, see Gertrud Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” Screen 34.3 (Autumn 1993): 211–22. Brecht’s most significant development of the idea is found in his notes to The Three Penny Opera, published as “The Literarization of the Theatre” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett, 43–47. I must thank one of the anonymous readers of my manuscript for pointing out this structure to me, of which I must admit I had not been consciously aware. Though it admittedly leaves unchallenged the practice of single-author studies, which still abound in the field of intellectual history. The film has had multiple screenings not only in the Philippines but also in Japan (where it premiered in multiple forms at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival) and South Korea, where Tahimik’s following is perhaps its strongest. See chapter 1, this volume.

1. What Has Come to Pass for Cinema: From Early to Late Godard 1. Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1:76. 2. On the “four” deaths of cinema, see Michael Witt, “The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard,” Screen 40.3 (Autumn 1999): 331–46. 3. An exception to this would be Fredric Jameson’s chapter on Passion, “High-Tech Collectives in Late Godard,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 158–85. 4. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard,” by Gideon Bachman, in David Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, 138. 5. Godard, “The Carrots Are Cooked,” 138. 6. Jean-Luc Godard, “Jean-Luc Godard,” interview with Gavin Smith, in Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, 184. In fact, the final lines are a quote of the final sentence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les mots. 7. Jean-Luc Godard, “Godard Makes (Hi)stories,” interview by Serge Daney, in Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy, eds., Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, 160. 8. Nora Alter cites death, and consequently mourning, as the “dominant theme” in JLG/JLG and provides a reading of the film as a form of mourning. Her essay has compelling affinities with the reading I present here, in which I present the utopian aspect of passing. See Nora Alter, “Mourning, Sound, and Vision: Jean-Luc Godard’s JLG/JLG,” Camera Obscura 44 (15.2) (2000): 89. 9. See note 6, above. 10. As Godard says in JLG/JLG, “I am at home in language and I cannot remain quiet.” 11. Godard, “Jean-Luc Godard,” 186. 12. Ibid., 185. 13. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, 2. 14. Godard, Histoire(s) 1:71. 15. Godard, Histoire(s) 1:75–76. 16. Godard, Histoire(s) 1:71.

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17. Fredric Jameson would say this is a vision of culture as a “dominant.” See Jameson, Postmodernism, esp. 1–54. 18. A standard joke amongst (former) East Germans that the Trabi was available in several colors including that color unique to East Germany, “dark white,” is illustrative of its ability to condense a number of different significations. 19. See the discussion of Kluge’s “redemptive” mode in my “History and Obstinacy: Negt and Kluge’s Redemption of Labor,” New German Critique 68 (Spring–Summer 1996): 137–63, and chapter 3, this volume. 20. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 89–90. 21. For information in English on Godard’s attacks on Steven Spielberg, see Richard Brody, “An Exile in Paradise: How Jean-Luc Godard Disappeared from the Headlines and Into the Movies,” The New Yorker, November 20, 2000, 62. 22. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, 96. 23. Alter begins her essay on JLG/JLG with a discussion of the shot with the crow call and builds from it a reading of the whole film, whose “project” it “epitomizes.” In addition to its “symptomatic layering,” the shot conveys the “pervasive funereal quality” to be found in the image and sound tracks. She also sees in this shot something to which I allude here: a coming together of two absences, captured in the “indexicality of a path that leads elsewhere and a sound that comes from somewhere else.” Alter, “Mourning, Sound, and Vision,” 76. 24. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde, 20. 25. James Williams explores Godard’s reluctance to abandon the parameters of national cinemas, especially in the name of some larger European culture in his “European Cultures and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma Chapter 3A, La monnaie de l’absolu,” in Michael Temple and James S. Williams, eds., The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, 131–33. 26. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 20. 27. Kluge will claim almost the opposite for cinema—that cinema can indeed help “rejuvenate” an older form of life. See chapter 3, this volume. 28. For a more extended reading of the problematic of the representation of history in Germany Year 90, as well as for a more global reading of the film that resonates with my arguments here, see Nora Alter, “Theses on Godard’s Allemagne 90 Neuf Zéro,” iris 29 (Spring 2000): 117–32. 29. Raymond Bellour has identified this recurrent use of quotation as one of the four main “modalities” by which Godard’s films “link text and speech to image.” His interest is primarily in how the “fragmented continuity” of the abundant quotations “strikes bodies”—of the actors—“with the force of their detachment.” Bellour, “(Not) Just an Other Filmmaker,” in Bellour and Bandy, eds., Jean-Luc Godard, 220. 30. Jean-Luc Godard, “Ideas, Not Plots, Inspire Jean-Luc Godard,” interview by David Sterritt, in Sterritt, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, 176. 31. Jean-Luc Godard, Allemagne neuf zéro: Phrases (sorties d’un film), 30. 32. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, 281 (translation modified). Citations of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics refer to the page numbers of the 1973 Continuum edition. However, in almost every case I rely on the far superior, yet unpublished, translation by Dennis Redmond (publicly available at www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html), though

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33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

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I modify these as well. I keep the page references to the Continuum edition for the sake of convenience. For a compelling argument about how Godard’s films (specifically Pierrot le fou [1965] ) teach us to live, see Richard Dienst, “The Imaginary Element: Life + Cinema,” in David Wills, ed., Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le fou,” 23–42. It is also tempting to see Godard’s own partnership with Anne-Marie Miéville as a biographical instantiation of this. The two had tried living together, but subsequently maintained separate dwellings. This process may be fully completed in the near future; local authorities want to replace the Glienicke Brücke with a higher bridge so that heavier barge traffic can travel beneath it. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320 (translation modified). Reviewers and critics share my confusion on this point, some thinking that the children are running for office, others thinking it is the father or mother. And the current (2012) “Greek crisis” suggests that even the crude unity of a common currency might be under serious threat. As Nora Alter puts it, in Germany Year 90 the bible signifies the “return of the mythifying Christian master narrative” and marks the “triumph of the ‘opium for the masses’ [that] confirms the renaming of Karl Marx Strasse as Martin Luther Strasse” depicted earlier in the film. Alter, “Theses,” 130. Amy Taubin, “Wiping the Slate Clean,” Film Comment (September–October 2010): 45. Godard recounts this in “Le droit d’auteur? Un auteur n’a que des devoirs,” interview by Jean-Marc Lalanne, Les inrockuptibles, May 18, 2010; see http://blogs.lesinrocks.com/ cannes2010/2010/05/18/le-droit-dauteur-un-auteur-na-que-des-devoirs-jean-luc-godard/ (accessed July 27, 2011). Cited from Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme: Dialogues avec visages auteurs, 27. This is not a exactly a script of the film, but another of the texts or “phrases” Godard has published to accompany the majority of his recent films. Such a substitution is utterly consistent with Godard’s own method. Michael Temple has pointed out Godard’s proclivity to replace key terms in various texts in order to reinscribe them for different use. Temple’s main example is the substitution of the word “cinema” for “Rembrandt” in Godard’s lengthy citation of Élie Faure’s History of Art in part 4B of Histoire(s) du cinéma. See Temple, “Big Rhythm and the Power of Metamorphosis: Some Models and Precursors for Histoire(s) du cinéma,” in Temple and Williams, eds., The Cinema Alone, 79–80. Similarly, as we will see, in the closing sequence of Film Socialisme Godard performs a complex set of substitutions between a poem by Valéry and a text by Denis de Rougemont. Godard comments on this in an interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit. See Jean-Luc Godard, “Jean-Luc Godard à Daniel Cohn-Bendit: ‘Qu’est-ce qui t’intéresse dans mon film?’ ” Télérama 3148 (May 18, 2010); see www.telerama.fr/cinema/jean-luc-godard-a-daniel-cohn-benditqu-est-ce-qui-t-interesse-dans-mon-film,55846.php (accessed July 23, 2011). Theordor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 148. Though she is identified as “Frieda” in the script available from the film’s UK DVD distributor, New Wave Films. Available at www.newwavefilms.co.uk/assets/465/Film_Socialisme_ English_subtitles_plus_dialogue.pdf (accessed July 23, 2011). No bibliographic information available.

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46. I borrow here from David Carr’s English translation of Husserl to aid in the translation of the French in Film Socialisme. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, 353. The French already changes the German, substituting as it does the reflexive “s’edifier” for the German substantive “Fortbildung,” which nicely retains the sense of “education” in the original. The root, “bilden,” means to both create an image as well as to develop or educate, as familiar from the term Bildungsroman. 47. Godard, Film Socialisme, 29. 48. Godard recounts this tale in several interviews. See, for example, Godard, “Le droit d’auteur?” See also “Entretien avec Godard,” video interview by Edwy Plenel, Ludovic Lamant, and Sylvain Bourmeau, Mediapart (April 27, 2010); see www.dailymotion.com/video/xd8tiy_jlg-110-entretien-avec-godard-medi_news (accessed July 27, 2011). 49. Godard, “Le droit d’auteur?” The otherwise excellent translation of this interview available online somewhat comically translates this as “it lent the word some dignity,” which is quite a different thing than taking away its innocence or silliness. 50. I say “joked” because the statement occurs in a fictional interview with Godard included in the press kit for Film Socialisme. The interview, conducted by “Renaud Deflins” for “Sud Rail Magazine,” is an elaborate ruse-cum-homage to the radical SUD Rail union and the workers at the Renault automobile factory in Flins, France (Usine Renault Flins), a site of major strikes in 1968. More than one critic has accepted the veracity of the interview, including Taubin. It should be noted that more recently Godard has made it clear he is fact producing the film. See his interview with Laure Adler on the show Hors-champs on French Culture (www.franceculture.fr/emission-hors-champs-jean-luc-godard-l-opacite-de-lexistence-15-2011-09-12.html). 51. James Williams, “The Signs Among Us: Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma,” Screen 40.3 (Autumn 1999): 312–13. 52. One should add, recalling a statement by Godard from long ago, that the image also loses its innocence because it cannot escape the touch of money: “The cinema is all money but the money figures twice: first you spend all your time running to get the money to make the film but then in the film the money comes back again, in the image.” The image cannot escape the presence of money. Quoted in Colin MacCabe with Laura Mulvey and Mick Eaton, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, 27. 53. Godard, “Le droit d’auteur?” 54. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15. 55. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 174. 56. This is the tacit assumption, for example, of Todd McCarthy’s uniformly derisive review of the film, “Band of Insiders,” indiewire.com (May 18, 2010); see http://blogs.indiewire.com/toddmccarthy/archives/band_of_insiders/# (accessed July 27, 2011). 57. They include Godard, Fabrice Arragno, Jean-Paul Battagia, and Paul Grivas. See Andréa Picard’s excellent, and sympathetic, review that rehearses some of the points I summarize here, “Film Socialisme” (film review), Cinema Scope 43 (2010); see http://cinema-scope.com/ wordpress/web-archive-2/issue-43/spotlight-film-socialisme-jean-luc-godard-switzerlandfrance/ (accessed July 1, 2011). 58. Godard, Film Socialisme, n.p. 59. Godard, “Le droit d’auteur?”

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60. I have been unable to identify the music. 61. Marker’s association with owls is extensive, ranging from their frequent appearance in his films, most notably in Sans Soleil, where owls are acknowledged as one of the narrator’s favorites, to several films that include owls in their title: Owls at Noon, The Owl’s Legacy, and others. 62. I will return to this idea of a “material thought” in chapter 3. 63. The meaning of “sentiment drapé” is difficult to discern. It could mean veiled, or perhaps, as translated here and in the Navajo titles, “draped” in the sense of draped in an ostentatious and adorning robe or fabric. 64. Even though the French title does not mention a grin, the line—“a grin without a cat”— appears in the film in the voice-over.

2. Kidlat Tahimik’s “Third World Projector” 1. Abé Mark Nornes, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Film, 228. 2. There is some confusion about the title of the film. It was put together over the course of a decade and screened repeatedly at festivals and local venues in the Philippines, and as it grew in length its title changed over time. The initial installment of the “final” version, which I have used, opens with the title card that reads: “Third World Projector Presents,” followed by another which reads “A KID’S RAINBOW ALBUM (1981–1988),” in English. This is then followed by another title card, an image of a rainbow that magically paints itself and is then fitted with the text that reads “Why Is Yellow Always Middle of Rainbow?” in Tagalog. The next title card shows images of a photo album in which the titles of the first three sections of the film are listed in English, as in a table of contents in a book: “I Am Frivolous Green,” “I Am Furious Yellow,” and “I Am Curious Pink (1986–1989).” Authorship is attributed to Kidlat Tahimik and his son Kidlat Gottlieb Kalayaan, who in his professional life now goes by the name Kidlat de Guia. The film in its final version, completed in 1991, concludes with a title card showing the film’s title as “We Are Glorious Rainbow (1981–1991)” followed by an image of another photo album with the text “A Child’s Rainbow Album.” The album is then closed to reveal the rainbow from the opening of the film, which asks, “Why Is Yellow Always the Middle of Rainbow?” Tahimik refers to the film by this title in several places, including, most prominently, in an interview with Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. See Kidlat Tahimik, “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? An Interview with Kidlat Tahimik,” by Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill, Cantrills Film Notes 73–74 (May 1994): 44–63. In my correspondence with Kidlat Tahimik and with Kidlat de Guia, as well as on the DVD menu of the film they provided, the film has always been referred to as I Am Furious Yellow, the title that I will use here. Some confusion might arise as well because the title of the film as a whole is taken from the title of one of the film’s subsections. 3. A further confusion arises because Tahimik and his son share first names. When discussing I Am Furious Yellow, I will generally refer to the son as Kidlat or the young Kidlat and the father as Tahimik. An additional confusion arises since Tahimik plays the fictional yet eponymous role of “Kidlat” in Perfumed Nightmare. I will generally refer to that character as “Kidlat” in quotation marks if the context does not make his identity clear. 4. Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born Later,” in Bertolt Brecht: Poems, 1913–1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, 318–20.

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5. A full list of the sections, in the order they appear in the film: untitled opening section; “I Am Frivolous Green (1981–83)”; “I Am Furious Yellow (1983–86)”; “I Am Curious Pink (1986–89)”; “We Are Colonial Red White and Blue”; “We Are Dis-Harmonious Disney-Color”; “We Are Disastrous Gray (1989–1991)”; “We Are Powerless Black”; “Indio-genous Brown”; “Epilogue.” While inspired by the colors of a child's rainbow, the titles also allude to Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967) and I Am Curious (Blue) (Jag är nyfiken— en film i blått, 1968). 6. Kidlat Tahimik, “Cups-of-Gas Filmmaking vs. Full-Tank-cum-Credit-Card Fillmaking,” Discourse 11, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1989): 81. 7. Ibid., 81. 8. Adorno’s famous line, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” is found in Minima Moralia, 39. For a reading of this line in the context of Alexander Kluge’s work, see chapter 3, this volume. 9. Tahimik, “Cups-of-Gas,” 81. 10. Ibid., 85. 11. I discuss the temporality of dominant cinema in a comparison of Raoul Peck’s two films about Patrice Lumumba, the essay film Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet (Lumumba: la mort du prophèt, 1992), and the highly conventional biopic Lumumba (2000), in “The Black Holes of History: Raoul Peck’s Two Lumumbas,” in Framework 50.1–2 (Spring–Fall 2009): 82–94. 12. I should comment on the term Third World in relation to the idea of Third Cinema, as some commentators have categorized Tahimik’s work as belonging to this “movement.” I refrain from using the term here for two reasons. First, Tahimik himself valorizes the notion of the Third World, and never, to my knowledge, refers to his work as a form of Third Cinema. Clearly, this would not prevent me from discussing his work as a form of Third Cinema. My point, rather, is that for Tahimik the notion Third World embodies an ethical-political imperative—that has formally prescriptive consequences in his work—grounded in the particular material circumstances of those regions or societies he thinks of as belonging to the Third World. In a sense, the term Third World supersedes the need for the supplementary term Third Cinema. Secondly, the term Third Cinema has become so vague in its meanings that its usefulness has declined. In its original usage, as elaborated in Solanas and Getino’s famous essay, “Towards a Third Cinema,” the term functioned within the set of very useful, to my mind at least, distinctions between First, Second, and Third Cinemas. Jonathan Buchsbaum has commented on the transformations in the term’s meaning and points out the degree to which it has evolved and expanded from Solanas and Getino’s original usage, citing Teshome Gabriel’s remark in his influential Third Cinema in the Third World that “the concept and proposition of ‘Third Cinema’ used to refer to a special kind of Latin American film. Of late its use encompasses all films with social and political purpose.” See Jonathan Buchsbaum, “A Closer Look at Third Cinema,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21.2 (2001): 154. By that definition, Tahimik’s films are clearly a form of Third Cinema, but it is not clear what one gains from the designation. That said, it is apparent, as I show here, that Tahimik rejects much if not all of what Solanas and Getino originally designated as First Cinema; it is not apparent, though, that Tahimik has escaped the “fortress” within which they famously argued, following Godard, that much Second Cinema found itself trapped; nor is it clear that Tahimik has created a cinema of the sort of militancy that Solanas and Getino originally promulgated in their essay and in their film, Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia y la liberación, 1970). See Getino and Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema,” 52.

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13. On the eternal present of the postmodern, see my discussion of Alexander Kluge in chapter 3. 14. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 204–205. Marx passage cited from Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach. 15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 2n1, 374, and passim. 16. Brief summaries of the history of the term “Third World,” as well as a description of its difficulties and defenses of the notion, can be found in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 25–27, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 333–34. Hardt and Negri’s defense of the term is analogous to my reading of Tahimik’s own usage: “In other words, Third World . . . homogenize[s] real differences to highlight the unifying processes of capitalist development, but also and more important, [it] name[s] the potential unity of an international opposition, the potential confluence of anti-capitalist countries and forces” (334). Shohat and Stam’s take is not dissimilar: “We will retain the expression ‘Third World,’ therefore, to signal both the dumb inertia of neocolonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with the caveat that the term obscures fundamental issues of race, class, gender, and culture” (27). Tahimik, by comparison, by identifying the Third World in the heart of the First asserts a commonality of experience, and by extension points toward the possible political alliance across disconnected, spatially discontinuous zones of the Third World. 17. Tahimik remarks upon this in “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?,” 44. 18. For a critique of recycling programs and their contradictory environmental political economy, see James O’Connor, “Socialist Ecology: What It Means, Why No Other Kind Will Do: An Interview with James O’Connor,” by Alexander Cockburn, Z Magazine 2.2 (1989): 15–30. O’Connor points out the fundamental contradiction in market-based recycling: the profit from recycling concerns reenters the accumulation/valorization cycle of capitalism, contributing to its expansion and hence greater consumption of the finite resources of the planet. O’Connor’s “ecological Marxism” is elaborated more fully in Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. 19. Shantha Bloemen’s T-Shirt Travels (2001) documents a comparatively benign form of this sort of waste dumping, in the form of castoff T-shirts, in Zambia. 20. One could say that Tahimik pursues an “environmentalism” without “nature” which comes to terms with the mistaken ontological grounding of environmental politics in the presumed existence of “nature.” Timothy Morton grapples with this problematic in his critique of “ecomimesis” in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. 21. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 391. 22. This is a point where Tahimik and Alexander Kluge converge: see chapter 3 for my discussion of Kluge’s own portrayal of the “landscape of waste,” but one that operates wholly from within a First World horizon. I must also point here to Robert Stam’s provocative reading of “garbage” films and videos in Brazilian cinema, which has deep resonances with my argument here. I can only concur with Stam when he writes that “the garbage dump becomes a critical vantage point from which to view society as a whole.” Stam, “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity,” in Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Rethinking Third Cinema, 45. My point here though is somewhat different: it is not so easy to separate “the dump” from “the world.” 23. Here I follow Fredric Jameson in his conception of base and superstructure. For Jameson the terminological pairing “is not really a model of anything, but rather a starting point and a problem, an imperative to make connections.” See Jameson, Postmodernism, 409.

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24. As Jameson designates it. I use the term as Jameson originally intended it: on the one hand as a reference to Friedrich von Schiller’s original notion of “naïve” (as opposed to sentimental) art, and on the other hand as a description of a consciously assumed enunciative position on the part of the “Kidlat” character in Perfumed Nightmare. Critics of Jameson’s usage misunderstand this latter point especially, and assume that Jameson projects an emphatic naiveté (i.e., ignorance) onto actual Third World subjects. If anything, Jameson’s point is the opposite: “Kidlat” knows far more about the First World and the Third World than any First World subject ever could. “Kidlat” is constructed as a fictional naïf and assumes a narratological function as such a figure; he is not a documentary figure. For a critique of Jameson along these lines, see E. San Juan, Jr., “Cinema of the ‘Naïve’ Subaltern in Search of an Audience,” in Roland B. Tolentino, ed., Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures, 264–76. 25. A fellow traveler of sorts in this politics would be Sembene Ousmane, whose Guelwaar (1993) features the explicit rejection of dependency-inducing foreign aid when a truckload of grain, sent as food aid, is dumped onto the ground. 26. This basic gesture in Tahimik—the move from the micro-level analytic to the macro-level— finds an echo in the early Marx’s theory of alienation. Does Marx not do exactly the same thing, that is find the source of alienation on the grandest level—that of human beings from their “species being” and from each other—at the most micro level, already formed in nuce at the level of the alienation of the worker from his or her product and the process of production? 27. This thematic is central to Alexander Kluge’s work, as well, as we shall see. Kluge articulates this problematic in terms of historically determined “labor capacities”—particular individual and social skills that pass into obsolescence alongside the forward movement of so-called progress. Progress, in Kluge, much like in Tahimik, is thus figured as the progressive deskilling and dis-abling of human beings. 28. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 191. I will return to this point in due course. 29. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, 762. 30. Ibid., 773. 31. Ibid., 772. 32. Marx, Early Writings, 423. 33. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 229. 34. Ibid., 231. 35. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 190. 36. By which I do not mean to suggest that his interest in the Igorot, or other groups, is merely instrumental; his current work aims to assist various local hill tribes in the Philippines in documenting and preserving their culture. 37. Spivak refers to the politics of cultural hybridization in the Third World as one of “translation”; Tahimik, I would suggest, advocates a more resistive politics, a “politics of mis-pronunciation”: the proper stance toward “aid” and “development politics,” NGO munificence and IMF demands for structural adjustment, is not to translate them into local idiom (for do we really need a Philippine capitalism, a Vietnamese capitalism?) but instead to mis-pronounce them “properly,” so to speak, and not translate them into indigenous or local equivalents, but to re-render them so that they speak their truth content in their own language. “Benevolent assimilation” becomes not its Filipino equivalent, but rather the English term for its actuality: benevolent assassination.

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38. It seems, though, that work on the film has essentially halted. The negative and rough cut of the film have been damaged, apparently, by mold, the “cosmic” effect of too many typhoon seasons (Kidlat Tahimik, personal communication with the author). 39. Tahimik, “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?,” 55. 40. Ibid., 55. 41. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 146. 42. Tahimik, “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?,” 50. 43. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization, 63. 44. Tahimik, “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?,” 49. 45. The phrase is borrowed from Jameson who relies on Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests for an account of the history of such beneficent influence of commerce going back to the Renaissance. See Jameson, “Notes on Globalization,” 68. 46. Tahimik discusses his personal fear of volcanoes in “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?” 47. This is another moment where an actual historical fact becomes metaphorical. The majority of the more than 800 people who died as a consequence of the eruption died in their homes or other structures when the roofs collapsed under the weight of the deceptively heavy ash. See http://expo.edu.ph/pinatubo/index.html for information on the eruption and its aftermath. 48. In a fascinating reading of Benjamin’s “artwork” essay, Susan Buck-Morss also points to the anesthetic function of culture, specifically German fascist culture, though for her it is precisely the “displacement of the place of pain” that contributes to the formation of a particular form of society—a fascist one—able to take a collective-narcissistic pleasure in its creation as a visual spectacle, via such films as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935), even though it is simultaneously being prepared for “unquestioning sacrifice and ultimately, destruction, murder, and death.” Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 39. Clearly, Tahimik points out the degree to which U.S. mass culture allows Filipinos to similarly take enjoyment in their own cultural (self-)destruction, but, as we will see, he also points to the degree to which the experience of suffering underlies collective self-identification. 49. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 201–202. 50. Ibid., 202. 51. As I argue in chapter 3, this dual functioning of the spectator’s mind, its simultaneously “realistic” and “abstract” encounter with the image on the screen, lies at the heart of Alexander Kluge’s theory of spectatorship. 52. Though Katrin de Guia was in fact pregnant and did indeed bear a child, but not in the film. 53. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203; translation modified. 54. I use the term “authenticity” guardedly, fully aware of the objections it might raise. But I do believe that this is a point where a notion of the authentic breaks forth in Tahimik. 55. As such it stands in stark contrast to similar rites of passage for Kidlat in I Am Furious Yellow, all of which are superficially ritualistic and celebratory: his graduation from middle school, for example, possesses none of the immediacy and pathos of the circumcision ritual. 56. I must mention in this context a documentary film that gives a good, or rather sobering, sense of just what sort of nightmare an existence without pain would be. Melody Gilbert’s A Life Without Pain (2005) explores the lives of children who suffer from CIPA, the congenital insen-

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

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sitivity to pain with anhidrosis, which leaves them incapable of feeling pain. The consequences are dire, leading not as one might think to a sense of security in the world, but to the constant risk of injury. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 230. Ibid., 230; translation modified. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 63. Ibid., 49. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 102. To cite the entirely different national context of the Congo, which I have discussed at length elsewhere, this is essentially what is at stake in Raoul Peck’s two different accounts (in Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet and Lumumba) of Patrice Lumumba’s inaugural speech as President of the Congo, when Lumumba, despite all advice to the contrary, openly recounted the sufferings of the Congolese population at the hands of the Belgians with the Belgian King Badouin present at the ceremony. As Peck shows, the impact of this speech came as much from the forceful acknowledgment of the pain and terror suffered by the Congolese, as it did from the direct affront to the Belgian king with an accusation that demanded acknowledgment of the infliction of past suffering. See Pavsek, “The Black Holes of History.” Tahimik, “Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?,” 48. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 193. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, 76, 91. Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, trans. John Willett, 28. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 192. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 191. This sum is historically inaccurate. The settlement was actually for $20 million. Slavoj Žižek, “Repeating Lenin” (2001); see www.lacan.com/replenin.htm. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 17. Ibid., 18. As a current example of such a misguided attempt in the United States, I point to the recurrent far-right desire to resurrect “family values” in historical conditions that are, to put it mildly, hostile to such values. That this attempt involves massive repression, in the psychoanalytic sense, is only too well demonstrated by the string of revelations of infidelity amongst right-wing politicians in the United States over the past two decades. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 20. This is just one instance of a seldom remarked-upon feature of Perfumed Nightmare, the impossible chronology of the film and its characters who achieve life spans of nearly Old Testament proportions. Kaya would have to be over 80 years old to tell this tale realistically; similarly, Kidlat, in order that he might be his father’s son, would have to be near 80 as well. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, 300. To put it another way: if we repeat Lenin, what is the fate of the antagonisms within Leninism itself when he is repeated? Or: what is the fate of the social antagonisms not already addressed by a liberatory movement? Thus, what of all the people the Bolsheviks did not try to liberate? Does this remain unaddressed in a contemporary repetition? Is the utopia that repetition establishes to be founded on the old antagonisms?

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79. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 15. 80. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 213. Internal quote from Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett, 202. 81. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (June 1986): 28. 82. This situation is perfectly illustrated by the contemporary worship of the notion of economic growth, a term which is, in most popular representations and usages, an unquestioned goal in itself. In the wake of the so-called “Great Recession” of 2008, this situation has become only more entrenched. Any policy proposal in the United States or Canada that “threatens growth” is immediately dismissed out of hand. Every “progressive policy,” be it for environmental improvement or for social services, has to be assessed in terms of its impact on growth, and liberals find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to frame any policy proposal for social amelioration as a way to improve growth. 83. E. San Juan, Jr. points out this reference in “Cinema of the ‘Naïve’ Subaltern,” 269. Roland B. Tolentino argues as well for a much more emphatic set of references to the Marcos dictatorship than Jameson generally concedes in his chapter on Tahimik. See Roland B. Tolentino, “Jameson and Kidlat Tahimik,” Philippine Studies 44.1 (1996): 113–25. 84. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 228. 85. Personal communication with the author.

3. The Actuality of Cinema: Alexander Kluge 1. This remark is taken from a televised debate entitled Reformzirkus, which originally aired on the German television station WDR in 1970. It is included as an extra on volume 4 of the DVD collection, Alexander Kluge, Sämtliche Kinofilme (Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 2007). 2. Kluge identifies himself as “belonging to the school of thought of so-called Critical Theory,” most recently in Alexander Kluge, “Alexander Kluge: Die Granaten des Kriegs führten zur Collage-Technik,” interview by Daniel Binswanger, Das Magazin 8 (2010): 49. On Kluge’s continuation of Adorno’s thought, see my “History and Obstinacy,” 137–63, and further comments later in the chapter. 3. For an overview of Kluge’s television production and business, see Peter Lutze, “Alexander Kluge’s Cultural Window in Private Television,” New German Critique 80 (Spring–Summer 2000): 171–90, and Lutze, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist. 4. I discuss the notion of primitive accumulation in greater depth in “History and Obstinacy.” 5. In his lectures in the philosophy department at Duke University in the late 1980s, Roderick frequently attributed this saying to the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, but I have been unable to locate it in any of Mills’s writings. 6. Kluge has a fondness, very much like Brecht’s, for folk wisdom, but one that is dialectical: he does not consider the articulation of complex philosophical ideas in a more comprehensible vernacular to constitute a simplification of those ideas. See, for example, his discussion with Oskar Negt in the television broadcast Selbstdenken about Wilhelm Liebknecht’s desire to rewrite Marx’s Capital in a simpler language more accessible to the workers, a version which paradoxically resulted in a more complex, more difficult to comprehend book. The interview can be found on Alexander Kluge, Seen sind für Fische Inseln: Fernsehartbeiten 1987–2008, disk 13.

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7. See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, esp. 2–9. 8. It is from this perspective that we should understand Kluge’s citation of Brecht’s famous story about Herr Keuner and love in Yesterday Girl. In the film, Anita’s lover, Herr Pichota, reads her the story: “ ‘What do you do,’ Mr. K. was asked, ‘if you love someone?’ ‘I make a sketch of the person and make sure that the one comes to resemble the other.’ ‘Which? The sketch?’ ‘No,’ said Mr. K., ‘the person.’ ” To which Anita responds: “But that’s stupid!” A standard reading of the story understands it as an allegory of the narcissism of love, as an almost proto-Lacanian notion that a lover imposes an ideal upon his or her love object, eradicating its particularity. But another reading could as well be true, one that is more emphatically Klugean: because Herr K. loves someone, he wishes that that person would be different. Love, then, is not the mere acceptance of someone “as they are,” with all their faults and annoying particularities, but instead as they could be. Anita, as a figure trapped in the present (discussed later in the chapter) is utterly incapable of grasping the anticipatory logic of the story. 9. Habermas makes this remark in an interview in the documentary film Alle Gefühle glauben an einen glücklichen Ausgang (All Feelings Believe in a Happy Ending, 2002) by Angelika Wittlich, available on Kluge, Seen sind für Fische Inseln, disk 13. One can understand this somewhat odd formulation along the lines of Jameson’s slogan of “anti-anti-Utopianism,” itself a reworking of Sartre’s old slogan of so-called anti-anti-Communism: just as Sartre’s slogan helped him “find his way between a flawed communism and an even more unacceptable anticommunism” (Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, xvi), so too does Kluge’s “anti-defeatism” refuse a naively optimistic utopianism as well as its even more insufficient opposite, defeatism (or the acceptance of the given and its apparently inevitable future). 10. Alexander Kluge, Neue Geschichten: Hefte 1–18: Unheimlichkeit der Zeit, 9. 11. As can be learned from the film script (but not the film itself) the interviewer’s name is “Frau Pichota”; one can assume she is Anita G. from Yesterday Girl, who has clearly gone on to marry her lover from that film, Ministerialrat Pichota. “Herr Kammersänger” is given the name “B.” in the script; “Kammersänger” is an honorific bestowed upon distinguished singers. See Alexander Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle, 77. 12. As in the title of Kluge's collection of stories Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, trans. Christopher Pavsek. 13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203. See note 32 of chapter 1. 14. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, 22. 15. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 60. 16. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 17. On Kluge’s continuation of Adorno’s critique of identity and his “politics of the non-identical,” see Pavsek, “History and Obstinacy.” 18. Kluge’s tireless activity on the part of cinema (and television) culture in the Federal Republic is well documented. Peter Lutze gives a good overview of Kluge’s film activism as well as of his activity in television through the mid-1990s in Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist. Matthias Uecker gives an extensive consideration of Kluge’s television activity until 2000 in Anti-Fernsehen? Alexander Kluges Fernsehproduktionen. 19. For an excellent and extended discussion of Kluge’s use of and attitude toward early film, see Miriam B. Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema,” October 46 (1988): 179–98. Hansen points out the pitfalls of idealizing the degree to which early film embodied an alternative public sphere to the bourgeois public sphere.

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20. Kluge writes and speaks about Vertov in a number of places in his work. For his most recent discussion at this writing, see his interview with Oskar Negt, “Der ‘Mehrwert’ und seine Bilder” on Seen sind für Fische Inseln, disk 13. 21. Kluge, “On New German Cinema,” 59. 22. On Kluge’s placement of cinema within the “classical public sphere,” see Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon,” 184. See also Alexander Kluge, Günter Gaus, Ferdinand Sieger, and Klaus von Bismarck, Industrialisierung des Bewusstseins: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den “neuen” Medien, which Hansen cites. 23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, 45. The German original for “intuition” in Kant is “Anschauung.” Intuition is a poor rendering of the term, but has a long tradition in Kant translation. It does not, however, register the visual connotations of the German term. 24. Ibid., 45–46 (translation modified). 25. Ibid., 46 (translation modified). 26. Kluge, “Die Utopie Film” (1964), 53. 27. Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, and Edgar Reitz, “Word and Film,” October 46 (Autumn 1988): 88. 28. One can see in this basic distinction the justification for Kluge’s rejection of observational documentary and direct cinema as well as his rejection of “abstract” film. “Pure” documentary would provide blind intuition; abstract film provides empty concepts. 29. Kluge, Reinke, and Reitz, “Word and Film,” 88. 30. The connection between Kant’s notion of the imagination and Kluge’s notion of “Phantasie” can be read out of his earliest essays, though nowhere in his writing does he make the connection absolutely explicit. In his recent video work—in particular the collection Seen sind für Fische Inseln—the connection becomes readily apparent. See my discussion of his “Was heisst Selbstdenken?” later in this chapter. 31. Given its status as a cognate, I will simply render “Phantasie” with its German original instead of an English translation. This will have the added merit of distinguishing the concept from Kant’s notion of imagination, as well as more common psychoanalytic uses of the term fantasy. 32. For example, in Public Sphere and Experience, published in 1972, as well as in the book that was published as an eponymous supplement to his 1973 film Part-Time Work of a Female Slave (Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin). See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff; and Alexander Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Zur realistischen Methode, esp. 241–50. 33. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 33. 34. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 35 (translation modified). By positing a “mode of production” or “way of working” that is “proper” to Phantasie, Negt and Kluge approach a metaphysics of the imagination. They suggest that a utopian social order would permit the proper functioning of the human capacity for Phantasie. In this they approach replicating the “humanist error” of the “early” Marx which posited a metaphysical, and foundational, human essence that consisted of living labor. This essence preexists social relations and is acted upon and distorted by those social relations. This is an unacknowledged presupposition that Kluge never quite escapes or completely thinks through in the course of his work. It stands in con-

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35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

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trast to Adorno’s claims regarding human essence in Minima Moralia, discussed in chapter 2 in the context of Adorno’s critique of the organic composition of man: “there is no . . . no ontic interior on which social mechanisms merely act externally” (229). Rudolf Eisler, Kant-Lexikon: Nachschlagewerk zu Kants sämtlichen Schriften, Briefen und handschriftlichem Nachlass, 105. Miriam Hansen provides an excellent account of the concept of experience, in particular detailing its significance within Walter Benjamin’s work, in “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ ” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179–224. Kluge, Reinke, and Reitz, “Word and Film,” 88. On the “cinema screen as prosthesis of perception,” see Susan Buck-Morss, “The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception,” in C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, 45–62. On Marx’s notion that labor must “realize” itself, and its specific relationship to Hegel’s dialectic, see C. J. Arthur, Dialectics of Labour: Marx and His Relation to Hegel. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 38. What does this mean in practical terms, that the labor of the imagination can be rendered “abstract”? As an example, I would point to the current trend in universities in North America and Europe to assess their teaching in terms of “learning outcomes,” which, in the end, are almost always quantitative expressions of learning’s value. So dominant has this mode of thinking become, that it is almost impossible to question the merit of assessing education in these terms: “learning outcomes” has become the lingua franca of university administration, spoken by administrators, faculty, funding bodies, and students alike. The capacity to imagine a qualitative “outcome” has disappeared. The once rich and expansive acts of teaching and learning—and the filmmakers in this book give a sense of their possibilities—have been rendered abstract: quantifiable, fungible, expressible only through the “needle’s eye” of learning outcomes. Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” New German Critique 24–25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 220 (translation modified). In this respect Slavoj Žižek’s concept of fantasy, central to his theory of ideology, can be productively compared to Kluge’s. As Matthew Sharpe has pointed out, though generally understood as a primarily psychoanalytic notion, Žižek’s notion of fantasy is deeply indebted to Kant’s notion of the transcendental imagination: “In the terms of Kant, Žižek’s claim is that ideological representations politically ‘colonise’ this activity of the transcendental imagination in subjects. They provide it with ready-made sublime images . . . and elevated, but profoundly empty, ‘master signifiers’. . . . Through these (in psychoanalytic terms) fantasmatic positings, political subjects can be both captivated, and in this way brought to misrecognise, their own responsibility in maintaining commitment to hegemonic ways of understanding the world.” Matthew Sharpe, “Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal (Politicising the Transcendental Turn),” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2.2 (2008); see http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ ijzs/article/view/135/211. Sometimes Kluge dates it back 300,000 years; the precise carbon-dating of the phenomenon is irrelevant, I would argue. Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon,” 184.

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46. Alexander Kluge, Cinema Stories, no page number. 47. Alexander Kluge, “Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jan Dawson,” by Jan Dawson, Film Comment (November–December 1974): 54. 48. See, for example, Miriam Hansen, “Introduction to Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film,’ ” New German Critique 24–25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 186–98, and Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 42.2 (Summer 2001): 193–201. 49. Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 208. 50. Marx, Early Writings, 423. See my discussion in chapter 2 of the relationship between technology and human nature in Adorno and Tahimik. 51. Ibid., 209. 52. Kluge, “On New German Cinema,” 58. 53. It is from this perspective that we should understand Andrew Bowie’s apt claim that redemption in Kluge has less to do with theology than with pawnshops and soda bottles. Andrew Bowie, “Geschichte und Eigensinn,” Telos 66 (1985–86): 183–90. 54. Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon,” 184. 55. Peter Lutze is thus absolutely correct to subtitle his book on Kluge The Last Modernist, not only because of Kluge’s sustained commitment to the aesthetic forms of modernist cinema and literature as well as to the project of cinéma engagée, but also because of his stubborn insistence of the necessity of reason, his fidelity (to use the language of Alain Badiou) to the event called “The Enlightenment.” 56. Immanuel Kant, “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?” in Allen W. Wood, ed., Religion and Rational Theology, 18. 57. As for example in the subtitle to their collected works, Der Unterschätzte Mensch: Gemeinsame Philosophie in zwei Bänden. 58. The interview is to be found on Kluge, Seen sind für Fische Inseln, disk 13. 59. Kluge, Cinema Stories, no page number (emphasis added). 60. Kluge, “Die Utopie Film” (1964), 53. 61. Max Pensky, “Editor’s Introduction: Adorno’s Actuality,” in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, 1. 62. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121. 63. On the status of this film as an “essay,” see Lutze, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist, 157–58. 64. The English title of the film upon release was The Blind Director, which is taken from the sequence in the film of that same title. The forthcoming U.S. release of the DVD from Facets uses both titles: The Blind Director: The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time. I will use the more literal title. 65. Kluge distinguishes between his “films for the cinema” (Kinofilme) and his other filmic and video work. The collection “Alexander Kluge: Collected Films for the Cinema” (Alexander Kluge: Sämtliche Kinofilme) concludes with News and Stories (Vermischte Nachrichten, 1986). He refers to his subsequent work as “works for television,” though these include films primarily available through DVD release. 66. On the importance of this film in the history of the Young German Film, as well as for a compelling interpretation of it, see Miriam B. Hansen “Space of History, Language of Time: Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966),” in Eric Rentschler, ed., German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, 193–216. I will continue to cite the title in its original German.

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67. The published script bears only a family resemblance, at best, to the final film. See Peter Lutze’s note on the relationship between the “script” and the final version of the film. Lutze, Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist, 234n4. 68. Alexander Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit: Abendfüllender Spielfilm, 35mm, Farbe mit s/w-Teilen, Format: 1:1,37: Drehbuch, 107. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 12. 72. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15. 73. Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” 194. 74. Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach, 70–71. 75. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter, 49. 76. André Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, 145. 77. As in the title of the 1974 version of Kluge’s Stalingrad novel, Schlachtbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglücks (Description of a Slaughter: The Organized Buildup of a Disaster). 78. On Adorno’s concept of the “ancient wound” of history, see chapter 2, this volume. 79. Kluge (incorrectly) attributes the term to Freud in Alexander Kluge, Früchte des Vertrauens (booklet), 4. 80. Ibid. 81. Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 503–504. 82. Fredric Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge,” October 46 (Autumn 1988): 163. 83. Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 109. 84. Alexander Kluge, “Der Angriff der 13. Fee,” interview by Michael Angele, Ingo Arend, Jakob Augstein; and Philip Grassmann, der Freitag, December 12, 2009; see www.freitag.de/ kultur/0952-zukunft-netz-kluge-interview. 85. Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart, 10. 86. Marx, Early Writings, 244. 87. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 281–99. 88. Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart, 10–11. 89. For example, in News from Ideological Antiquity (Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike, 2008), Kluge argues: “The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousness.” Quoted in Fredric Jameson, “Marx and Montage,” New Left Review 58 (July–August 2009): 110. This echoes almost identical sentiments expressed in Geschichte und Eigensinn. 90. In Geschichte und Eigensinn, Negt and Kluge approvingly cite, in a provocative juxtaposition, Habermas and Nietzsche on the dispelling of illusion: “Habermas: ‘The process of enlightenment, which the sciences make possible, is critical, but the critical dissolution of dogmas does not liberate, it makes people indifferent: it is not emancipatory, but rather nihilistic.’ Similarly, Nietzsche: ‘We know that the destruction of an illusion does not yet produce the truth, but only another piece of ignorance, an expansion of our “empty space,” an increase in our “wasteland” ’ ” (388). 91. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 43. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 44.

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94. One should keep this basic point in mind to understand Kluge’s general refusal to assess the effectivity of his works in terms of audience numbers, ratings, and other calculable effects. 95. By this view, the development of capitalism, which has brought us to this ever-expanding present, has fully functionalized all culture; or, to say virtually the same thing in other terms, it has successfully collapsed the distinction between base and superstructure. One could say that this is Kluge’s shorthand theory of postmodernism, one very similar to Jameson’s classic account, in which the dedifferentiation of base and superstructure, characterized as the simultaneous deep enculturation of the economy and the complete commodification of culture, constitutes the “cultural logic” of contemporary capitalism. In Geschichte und Eigensinn, Negt and Kluge, while maintaining the notion of base and superstructure, nonetheless critique the strict separation of the two spheres. They insist that every determination of economic value is always supplemented by a non- or extra-economic determination that exceeds the reduction of value to a pure economic moment. The consequences of this are quite significant and it puts Negt and Kluge into an interesting debate with Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers. I explore these consequences and these debates in my “History and Obstinacy.” Suffice it at the moment to point to just one consequence: an anti-capitalist politics can never be solely economic; it will always have an extra-economic, or properly political component. This component is, of course, in Kluge, understood to be cultural, and it is the opening from which Kluge justifies an engagement in cultural politics. 96. Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 216. For an excellent introduction to Kluge’s theory of realism, see Rainer Stollman, Alexander Kluge zur Einführung, (Hamburg: Junius, 1998), 14–42. 97. Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 215. 98. Ibid. 99. For an excellent summary and extended discussion of Negt and Kluge’s theory of the public sphere, see Miriam Hansen, “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later,” Public Culture 5.2 (Winter 1993): 179–212. 100. In a passage in Geschichte und Eigensinn that demands extensive study, which cannot be done here, Negt and Kluge elaborate on no fewer than six levels or axes of existence on which such de-realized subjective capacities are forced to live. Beginning with Bertolt Brecht’s notion of the “functional,” they describe the levels of the horizontal, the vertical, the irrational, the imaginary, and most enticingly, the revolutionary. See Geschichte und Eigensinn, 511–15. 101. Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 144. 102. Kluge, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, 215–16. 103. David Bordwell outlines this distinction succinctly in “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, 17–34. 104. This is, for example, a central problematic in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York (2008). 105. Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart, 107. 106. Kluge, “Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jan Dawson,” 54. 107. Kluge’s thought anticipates some elements of contemporary phenomenological film theory, especially with its emphasis on “embodied” perception and knowledge. But two clear, and significant, distinctions need to be drawn. First, Kluge’s work embraces transcendentalism, unlike, for example, the work of Laura Marks, who argues that, “An understanding of sense experience as embodied resists transcendentalism, for it links perception and the perceived

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108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118.

119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

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material world.” Laura Marks, “Thinking Multisensory Culture,” Paragraph 31.2 (July 2008): 128. Kluge attempts to think the transcendental basis of sensuous experience. Second, and relatedly, Kluge refuses a tendency in some theory (which Marks also calls into question) to treat embodied knowledge as a reservoir of immediacy. For Kluge, it is obvious that “immediate experience” is deeply ideological, a denial of the inherent gap that constitutes all cognition. Geschichte und Eigensinn provides a history of the differentiation of the individual labor capacities within the individual human being. See, above all, part one, “The Historical Organization of the Labor Capacities,” Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 15–357. Marx, Early Writings, 251. For example in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Maßverhältnisse des Politischen: 15 Vorschläge zum Unterscheidungsvermögen, 57. Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller, vol. 18, p. 263. “If any aspect of happiness is frustrated, then it is none whatsoever.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202 (translation modified). Ibid., 202 (translation modified). I am tempted to say here, perhaps somewhat unfairly: we cannot flee to the “haptic” in film theory as a site of renewed immediacy and thus as a site for a renewed transcendental grounding for film theory. The moment of touch, no matter how durable, immediate, or apparently a-transcendental the sensations that it produces may be, is inevitably transformed into something other than itself. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203 (translation modified). Ibid. (translation modified). Omer Bartov has provided the most trenchant critique of Kluge’s “neglect” of “those elements [of history] that might threaten his preferred representation of that past.” Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, 140. For an examination of Kluge’s recurrent focus on the air war in the context of the broader interest in the subject in Germany in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, see Andreas Huyssen, “After the Wall: The Failure of the German Intellectuals,” New German Critique 52 (Winter 1991): 109–143. On the concept of primitive accumulation and alienated labor in Geschichte und Eigensinn, see Pavsek, “History and Obstinacy.” Alexander Kluge, “Alexander Kluge,” interview by Enno Patalas and Frieda Grafe, Filmkritik (September 1966): 488. See the Conclusion for a discussion of this comment. For example in Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 798. “If I were a little bird, and had two wings, I’d fly to you. But since I can’t, but since I can’t, I’ll stay here alone . . . ”. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, 732. Though it should be noted that Anita is Jewish, her specific experiences during the Nazi period are not explicitly addressed in the film. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” in Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, 260. See also later in this chapter for a discussion of this passage from Adorno.

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126. A phrase I borrow from Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15. 127. Ibid., 157. 128. For a compelling discussion of the concept of “the memory of nature in the subject,” see Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, 41–44, 244–47. 129. Theodor W. Adorno, “Reading Balzac,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 125 (translation modified). 130. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 157 (translation modified). 131. It should be noted that Kluge seldom, if ever, portrays such rest as leisure, which is a form of rest that is itself a determination of capital. Few if any hobbyists, for example, appear in his films, as in some of Godard’s television work; no one is ever on vacation, as in Film Socialisme. People are either working or resting. 132. Alexander Kluge, “Die Funktion des Zerrwinkels in zertümmender Absicht. Ein Gespräch zwischen Alexander Kluge und Gertrud Koch,” interview by Gertrud Koch, in Kritische Theorie und Kultur, ed. Rainer Erd et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 115–16. 133. As in “Das Nichtverfilmte kritisiert das Verfilmte” (which translates literally as “the unfilmed criticizes the filmed”), the title of the second section of Kluge, In Gefahr und grösster Not bring der Mittelweg den Tod. 134. Richard Dienst, “Breaking Down: Godard’s Histories,” in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds., New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 127–28. Dienst’s felicitous phrase is dialectical: not only does it point toward that which has yet to be seen or has yet to be determined (as in the expression, “that remains to be seen”), but it also gestures toward the remainder or leftover of what is seen on screen. In this sense it refers to what remains to be seen of the world after an image has been made of it, after it has been reified into the form of an image: it is what exceeds reduction into an image. 135. Later in the film, the “blind director,” played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, refers to himself as an “image destroyer.” 136. Kluge, “Die Funktion des Zerrwinkels,” 116. 137. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 359–60 (translation modified). 138. Ibid., 359. 139. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” 260. 140. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 360. 141. Ibid. (translation modified). 142. G. W. F. Hegel, System of Science: First Part, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (forthcoming), 25. 143. See chapter 2 for my reading of Tahimik’s attempt to “redeem” this landscape of waste. 144. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 20. See chapter 1 for a discussion of Godard’s own reference to this passage in Hegel. 145. In Film Socialisme (2010), Flo, the daughter in the Martin family, makes a statement along similar lines, speaking not in terms of historically constituted need, but rather in terms of the historically constituted capacity for expression: “Well, mother, we are entering an age of the digital, when, for various reasons, humanity will be confronted with problems that will not permit the luxury of their being expressed.” 146. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123. 147. Pavsek, “History and Obstinacy.”

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148. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Das Schema der Massenkultur,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 3:331. 149. Kluge cites this passage approvingly in Reformzirkus (see note 1, above). 150. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11 (translation modified). 151. The name was given its German spelling, however: Kairos. 152. Eric Rentschler, “Remembering not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluge’s Brutality in Stone,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 37. 153. My translation of this title differs slightly from Eric Rentschler’s in his essay on Brutality in Stone. He translates “zeugen” as a noun (“testament”) rather than as a verb (to “testify” or “give witness”). The active sense of the verb ascribes a certain agency or subjectivity to these materials, “which are living.” See Rentschler, “Remembering not to Forget,” 24. 154. Kluge, “On New German Cinema,” 57. 155. On Benjamin’s montage theory, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, esp. ch. 3. 156. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 169. 157. Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 61. 158. Perhaps one element of the perverse genius of the New Media is their ability to then take the inevitable illness induced by total mobilization and recursively make it part of its own purview. Where, but on the Internet, on the myriad self-help medical websites and discussion forums, do we seek information about our post-contemporary illnesses, imagined and real? 159. Kluge, Neue Geschichten, 387. 160. On the labor of mourning in Kluge’s films, in particular The Patriot, see Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, 105–135; for a less optimistic take on the capacity of Kluge’s films to enact the labor of mourning, see Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, 154–55. 161. Anson Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 11–12. The internal quote is from Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 13. 162. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 138. 163. Ibid. 164. Admittedly, this point might be moot if Kluge’s prognostications about a universalized present, in which no attachments to an actual historical past can be sustained, are correct. 165. Kluge’s willingness to explore the fascinations of fascism is much like his willingness to explore the dangerous territory of the “national question.” The strength of his analysis of the German “nation” and “Heimat” is that it is not simply dismissive; it does not explore it as simply a remnant of an outdated or regressive ideology, but rather attempts to unveil its attractions in order to better reconstruct a left-wing political and cultural project. In this regard I think critics who have accused the Left in Germany of having ignored—or simply rejected—the idea of “the nation” in a 30-year act of denial should at least figure Kluge into their analyses, in particular Brutality in Stone, The Patriot, and the entirety of his theoretical work with Negt. For such a critique, see Huyssen, “After the Wall.” 166. Kluge is not alone in his attempt to return to a modernist moment in the postwar period. For a compelling discussion of the general impulse to “reconstruct” the modern after 1945, see Klaus Scherpe, Die rekonstruierte Moderne: Studien zur deutschen Literatur nach 1945.

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167. For a discussion of Kluge’s attitude toward Eisenstein, see Stuart Liebman, “Why Kluge?” October 46 (Autumn 1988): 20–21. 168. Rentschler, “Remembering not to Forget,” 32. 169. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 63. 170. For a further elaboration of the role of mimesis in Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of fascism, see Koch, “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” 211–22. 171. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 184–85, quoted in Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 63. 172. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185. 173. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, 90. 174. In “Mimesis and Bilderverbot,” Koch cites Benjamin’s notion of “unsensuous likeness” (219) and suggests that Kluge’s filmmaking finds a way, through montage, to adhere to Adorno and Benjamin’s notion of the Bilderverbot (221). 175. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 20. 176. Adorno and Horkheimer, “Das Schema der Massenkultur,” 331. 177. Kluge, Neue Geschichten, 33–126, but esp. 55–62. 178. Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 787–89. 179. On the importance of this story, both within Kluge’s oeuvre and in his own biography, and for an interpretation that has significantly influenced my reading, see Andrew Bowie, “New Histories: Aspects of the Prose of Alexander Kluge,” Journal of European Studies 12.47: 180–208. 180. Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn, 788. 181. Ibid., 788. 182. Bernstein made this remark in a course on Hegel at the New School in New York City. Recordings of his lectures from the course can found at www.bernsteintapes.com/hegellist. html. The remark is made in the first lecture. 183. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50. 184. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, (London: Verso, 2010), 226. 185. Hansen, “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres,” 200–201. 186. Or, in the case of a recent proposal at my university to create a new program in cinema studies, we felt compelled to tout its contribution to the “creative economy,” that is the economy based on the production and sale of artistic “goods” and “services”; of course, the proposal needed to provide a “job market” evaluation as well. 187. Alexander Kluge, “Die Utopie Film,” (1983), in Kluge, In Gefahr und grösster Not, 111–12. 188. This does not amount to the assertion, however, that cinema is a language. 189. Kluge, “Der Angriff der 13. Fee.” 190. Kluge, “Die Utopie Film,” (1964), 53. 191. Kluge, “Der Angriff der 13. Fee.” 192. I thank one of my anonymous readers for this formulation.

Epilogue 1. There is, as yet, no official English translation of this work’s title, which presents real obstacles to any attempt to render it in English. Roughly, one could translate it as “A brave person can knock the Cold off his horse.” The title refers to the Third Rider of the Apocalypse, who, in

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

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Kluge’s interpretation of Revelation, symbolizes “the Cold.” “If the four riders appear together, then the Last Judgment is upon us. If they appear individually, according to tradition, a peasant can pull them from their horse.” Wer sich traut, reißt die Kälte vom Pferd, 80. Quoted in Kluge, Wer sich traut, 4. Interestingly, Kluge has begun using this language to refer to his relationship to past artists and thinkers, in particular the European modernists, including Eisenstein and Adorno, as well as to whole intellectual traditions, above all that of Critical Theory. See “Undercurrents of Capital: An Interview with Alexander Kluge,” by Gertrud Koch, The Germanic Review 85.4 (2010): 360–61. Kluge, “Alexander Kluge,” interview by Enno Patalas and Frieda Grafe, Filmkritik (September 1966): 488. Kluge, Wer sich traut, 5. This scene from Yesterday Girl is included as a chapter of Wer sich Traut. Kluge, Wer sich traut, 5.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to photographs 1960s. See Sixties, decade of 1970s. See Seventies, decade of Adorno, Theodore W., 10, 29, 49, 60–61, 65, 83, 138, 156, 171, 177; Bilderverbot, concept of, 16, 17, 23, 222, 265n174; on the composition of capital, 97–98; on culture, 173, 188, 211–12; dialectics of, 197–98, 202, 207; on enlightenment, 167–68, 235; on experience, 162, 174; on fascism, 219, 223–24; on history, 52, 143, 201, 207, 228; on human essence, 97–98, 226, 257n34; on illusion, 3, 186–87, 188, 192; influence on Kluge, 1, 150, 157–58, 169, 209, 237, 244n27, 266n3; on nature, 201–202, 207; on pain and suffering, 113–16, 196–98, 200; on the past, 171, 177–78, 193; on philosophy, 150, 157, 171, 212, 235–36; on self-preservation, 66–67; on technology, 97–99; utopianism of, 2, 16, 49, 178, 212, 239–40 alienation, 21, 67; Kluge on, 21, 161, 163, 180–83, 185, 226, 234; Marx’s theory of, 95, 139, 180–81, 183, 252n26; in Tahimik, 82–83, 94, 139 allegory: in Brecht, 125; in Godard, 43, 49, 70; in Kluge, 113, 156, 182, 195; in Tahimik, 90, 93, 99, 112–13, 120–22, 125–29, 132

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Alphaville (Godard), 19, 30, 35, 46–47, 54, 55–56, 57–58; JLG/JLG’s relationship to, 29–30, 32–34 Alter, Nora, 243n5, 245n8, 246n8, 246n23, 247n38 Althusser, Louis, on ideology, 8, 195–96 Anderson, Perry: on modernism, 12–13, 14 anesthesia, experience of, 110, 114–17. See also pain and suffering Aquino, Benigno, assassination of, 80 Aquino Corazon, 4, 14, 21, 80, 99–100, 102–103, 127. See also People Power movement (Philippines) art, 6, 17, 34, 65; cinema as, 165, 192; Godard on, 30–31, 41–43 Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, The (Kluge), 22, 23, 172–78, 180, 181–85, 191, 193, 198, 204–208, 205, 209, 210, 213–14, 259n64, 263n135 Auschwitz, 66, 198, 200, 225 auteurism, 18–19, 31 Badiou, Alain: appearance in Film Socialisme, 59–63, 71; on communism, 151–52; event, concept of, 7–11, 18; fidelity, concept of, 8, 235, 259n55 Baguio City earthquake (Philippines, 1990), 145–46, 148

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Balzac, Honoré de, 202 Bartas, Sharunas, Corridor, 76 Bartov, Omer, 262n117 Battleship Potemkin, The (Eisenstein), 4–11, 23, 99, 126; failure as theme of, 6, 8, 9–11; Odessa Steps scene, 5, 6, 8, 71–72, 73, 217; in A Grin Without a Cat (Marker), 4–11, 71–75; in Film Socialisme (Godard), 71–77 Bazin, André, 176–77, 194 Beck, Ulrich, 176 Bellour, Raymond, 246n29 benevolent assimilation/assassination, 101, 103, 106, 110, 117, 127, 128, 252n37 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 22, 98, 162, 199–201, 215; on art, 12, 253n48; on barbarism and culture, 2, 186, 193; Bilderverbot, concept of,16–17, 23, 222, 265n174; on history, 130, 142, 166, 193, 207, 235 Berio, Luciano, music composed by, 4, 5 Berlin Wall, fall of, 19, 34, 47. See also Germany, reunification of Bernstein, J. M., 227 Bilderverbot, 16–17, 23, 222, 224, 245n28, 265n174 Blank, Les, Burden of Dreams, 145 Blind Director: Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, The (Kluge). See Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, The (Kluge) Bloch, Ernst, 1–2, 151, 209, 219–20 Bloeman, Shantha, T-Shirt Travels, 251n19 body, the, 111, 117–20, 159, 196–98, 200–201, 207 Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 158 Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, 5, 6–7, 8, 72, 128, 254n78 Bordwell, David, 190 Borges, Jorge Luis, 192 Bowie, Andrew, 259n53 Brazil, garbage films, 251n22 Breathless, Hollywood version of, 18–20, 24. See also Godard, Jean-Luc (films and writings) Brecht, Bertolt, 85, 144, 157, 196, 230, 255n6, 256n8, 261n100; didacticism of, 17, 86, 125, 152; on estrangement, 40–41; literarization of the theater, 16–17; Tahimik’s resemblance to, 120, 123; “To Those Born Later,” 79

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Brutality in Stone (Kluge and Schamoni), 23, 214–25, 216, 217, 264n153, 264n165 Buchsbaum, Jonathan, 250n12 Buck-Morss, Susan, 253n48 Buñuel, Luis, 223 capitalism, 11, 34, 55, 57–60, 182, 199, 212, 213, 228, 232–33, 252n16; accumulation/ valorization cycle, 251n18, 261n95; composition of, 94–99, 105–106, 123, 138–39, 141, 257n34; dynamism of, 175–76, 208–209; global, 22, 112, 149, 152, 176; Godard on, 19–20, 47, 57–58, 70; Kluge on, 23, 163, 175, 178–80, 187, 263n131; labor-power and, 163, 218–19; logic of, 188, 211, 230; Marx on, 77, 128–29, 187, 232; Tahimik on, 20, 89, 98; temporality of, 22–23, 181, 182, 208, 213–14, 237–38; Third World, 94, 96 Carr, David, 248n46 Catholicism, 20, 133–34. See also turumba festival change: constancy and, 66, 69–70; historical, 141–42. See also transformation Chaplin, Charlie, 176–77 cinema: early, 158, 162, 191; failure in, 11, 150–51, 171–72, 225–26; as form of thought, 15–16, 17–18, 62; literarization of, 16–17, 160; in the spectator’s mind, 165–66, 167, 170, 226; Nazi, 220–23, 253n48; New Media’s effects on, 230–36; political, 9, 11, 20, 163–64; principle of, 21–23, 151–52, 165, 232; Third, 12, 83–84, 250n12; Third World, 12, 83–84, 250n12; as thought, 15–16, 17–18, 62. See also event, concept of; utopia of film cinéma engagée, 12, 14–15 cities, 181–85, 186 classicism, 13–15 cognition: cinematic, 159–61; Kluge on, 186–87, 191, 192, 195–98, 218–19, 226, 261n107; Tahimik on, 113–114, 116. See also mind, the Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 77, 238 cold, in Kluge’s films, 237, 238, 239–40, 242, 265n1

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INDEX

Cold War, 47, 47, 54–55; West in, 45, 50–52, 57–58, 59 colonialism: history of, 106, 117, 133, 143; neocolonialism, 250n12, 251n16; resistance to, 20, 127. See also imperialism communism, 7–8, 51, 54–55, 59; Badiou’s idea of, 11, 151, 152; failure of, 10, 19, 74, 75; Marx’s definition of, 169; opposition to, 256n9. See also socialism Comte, August, 139–40 concepts, 160, 196; and intuitions, 159–64, 257n23 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 254n62 consciousness: historical, 142, 260n89; Kluge on, 135, 161, 166–67, 195, 215, 220, 227; Tahimik on, 119, 136. See also cognition; mind, the; unconscious, the copyright. See property, private Corrigan, Timothy, 244n25 culture, 2, 44–45, 71, 151, 216; American, 20, 48–49, 68, 102–108, 110, 116, 238; cinematic, 33–37; commodity, 33–34, 103, 110, 113, 117, 144, 224, 261n95; consumption, 105, 114; functionalization of, 188, 193, 210–11, 261n95; indigenous, 84, 102, 112; industry, 33–34, 173, 224; Kluge on, 105, 164, 167; mass, 16, 163, 171, 178, 211–12, 253n48; politics of, 29, 157, 252n37, 261n95; in Tahimik’s films, 101–106, 148; Third World, 21, 87, 111 cups-of-gas filmmaking (Tahimik), 81–86, 87, 101, 148, 241 Curnier, Jean-Paul, 62–63, 70 death. See Godard, Jean-Luc (themes), death and love death-resurrection dialectic, 26, 31, 42 Deleuze, Gilles, 217 dereification, 40, 206. See also reification development. See overdevelopment; progress, Tahimik’s critique of Dienst, Richard, 204, 263n134 domination, 211, 223–24; development as form of, 96, 139–40; First World’s, 94,

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101; resistance to, 223–24; Tahimik on, 82, 115, 120, 130; of U.S. over Philippines, 80, 103–108, 126–27. See also imperialism Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, 158 dynamism: of capitalism, 175–76, 208–209; Tahimik’s principle of, 137–38, 153, 175 dystopia, 22, 59–60, 173, 182, 187, 212, 218–19. See also utopia East Germany, 19–20, 34–36, 49–50, 54–55, 59. See also Germany Eastern Bloc countries, 35–36, 55 economy: creative, 265n186; culture and, 103–104, 105, 261n95; in Tahimik’s films, 126–27. See also capitalism; Great Recession of 2008; Greece, financial crisis in Edison, Thomas A., Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 191 Eisenstein, Sergei, 3–4; failure in films of, 19, 22–23; Kluge influenced by, 266n3; montages in films of, 15, 16, 221; October, 71–72, 99; Strike, 163–64. See also Battleship Potemkin, The (Eisenstein) Eisler, Rudolf, 161 Elsaesser, Thomas, 175 emancipation. See freedom; human beings, emancipation of Engels, Friedrich, Communist Manifesto, 241 enlightenment, 259n55; dialectic of, 167–68, 187, 201–202, 217; Kant on, 168–69, 235; Kluge on, 158–159, 167, 169, 235, 259n55 environmentalism, 35–36, 89–90, 251n20. See also recycling Erikson, Erik, 179 Eternity of Yesterday (Kluge and Schamoni). See Brutality in Stone (Kluge and Schamoni) ethics: Tahimik’s, 87; Third World, 90, 91, 99 Europe: American occupation of, 48–49; culture of, 34, 102; identity of, 57; unification of, 19, 44, 45, 49–50. See also Germany; Greece, financial crisis in event, concept of, 7–11, 16, 18 exchange value, 163, 178, 179, 210–11, 212, 228. See also capitalism

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experience, Kluge’s use of term, 161–62, 189–90, 199–201, 231, 261n107 failure: in The Battleship Potemkin, 6, 8, 9–10, 11; in Godard’s films, 19, 38, 56–57, 59–60; history of, 130, 131, 132, 210; in Kluge’s films, 22–23, 150–51, 152–53, 171–72, 175; in Tahimik’s films, 20, 21, 79–80, 143, 148 fascism, 55, 214, 216–25, 230, 253n48, 264n165 Faure, Élie, History of Art, 247n42 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 95, 97, 134, 150, 166 fidelity, 11, 235, 238; Badiou’s concept of, 8, 12, 259n55 film. See cinema; utopia of film; Young German Film; and individual films Film Socialisme (Godard), 20, 44, 57–77, 61, 72, 77, 248n46, 263n131, 263n145; Badiou’s appearance in, 59–60, 62, 63; constancy and change in, 66, 69–70; ending, 238, 247n42; Godard’s fictional interview for, 248n50; A Grin Without a Cat (Marker) compared to, 4, 73, 74, 75; resurrection and renewal in, 25, 45–46; subjectivity in, 66–69; title’s origin, 62–63 filmmaking methods: cups-of-gas, 81–86, 87, 101, 191, 241; Eisenstein’s, 6; full-tank-cumcredit card (FTC), 82, 83, 84 First Cinema, 250n12 First World, 14, 21, 85, 96, 111, 113, 139; Third World’s teaching of, 86–87, 89–91, 93–99, 117, 251n16; waste landscapes in films of, 204–208, 209, 251n22 Flourens, Pierre, on chloroform, 115 Ford, John, 78 Frankfurt School, 1, 11, 156, 162, 186 freedom, 83–84, 97. See also human beings, emancipation of French Revolution, 7 Freund, Karl, 52 future, the: cinematic, 52, 171, 208–209, 225, 236, 239, 242; Kluge on, 173, 178, 180, 225–30, 233, 239; Tahimik on, 23, 114, 142–43, 149

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Gabriel, Teshome, on Third Cinema, 250n12 geometry, 59–62, 63, 65, 68, 71 Germany: East, 19–20, 34–35, 35–36, 49–50, 54–55, 59–60; fall of Berlin Wall, 19, 34, 47; Kluge on, 172, 238–39, 264n165; reunification of, 49–50, 54–55, 224; West, 57–58, 59–60; Young German Film, 157–58, 172, 214, 215 Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Godard), 34–37, 37, 40, 43–56, 51, 53, 56, 78; Berlin in, 19, 58, 72; bibles in, 33, 54, 56, 57–58, 247n38; ending, 57–58; Glienicke Brücke in, 50, 247n34; identity in, 62; individual in, 66; nature in, 41–42, 43; socialism’s passing, 19, 25; sound track, 44–45; utopianism in, 20, 46–47, 48–49, 51–52 Getino, Octavio, 12; “Towards a Third Cinema,” 250n12 Gilbert, Melody, A Life Without Pain, 253n56 Glienicke Brücke, 50, 247n34 Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 24–77, 78, 130, 150, 153, 157, 162, 172, 194, 204, 208, 209, 225, 238, 239, 241, 250n12; cinéma engagée in work of, 12; early period, 14, 24; images in films of, 37–43, 194, 246n29, 248n52; language use, 28–29, 30–31, 43–50, 63–64, 245n10; late period, 24–25, 34, 38–39, 42–43, 44, 52, 59, 62; making cinema into thought, 15–16, 17–18; materialism of, 29, 65; modernism/ postmodernism of, 13, 24, 47; montage use, 18–19, 39, 44–45, 47–50, 63, 73, 130; on socialism, 69, 70–71, 77; subjectivity of, 18–19, 28, 29–31, 43, 66–69; work in television, 263n131 Godard, Jean-Luc (films and writings), 18–20; Breathless, 14, 42, 43, 44, 67; Contempt, 43, 68; Détective, 42, 43; Far from Vietnam, 73; Histoire(s) du cinéma, 25, 39, 64, 71, 74, 75–76; Masculine Feminine, 14; Notre Musique, 62; Nouvelle Vague, 76; Oh, Woe Is Me, 39–41; Passion, 25, 42, 48; In Praise of Love, 25; texts accompanying films, 247n41, 247n42; Tout va bien, 68; Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 14, 28. See also Film Socialisme (Godard); Germany

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Year 90 Nine Zero (Godard); JLG/JLG: Selfportrait in December (Godard) Godard, Jean-Luc (themes): bible, 33, 54, 56, 57–58, 247n38; death and love, 25–33, 67, 245n8; failure, 19, 38, 56–57, 59; legend, concept of, 29–32, 33, 34, 55–56, 62, 172; nature, 41–43, 50–51; universality, 30–31, 33; waste landscapes, 205 Godard, Jean-Luc (utopianism of), 2, 18–19, 20, 28, 43–44, 55, 209, 239–40; in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 47–49, 51–52 Gould, Stephen Jay, 221 Grafe, Frieda, 239 Great Recession of 2008, 178, 227, 254n78 Greece, financial crisis in, 71, 247n37 Grin Without a Cat, A (Marker), 4–11, 58–59; Che Guevara in, 6, 244n8; failure in, 10–11, 59, 238; Film Socialisme compared, 71–75; origin of title, 243n6, 244n21, 249n64 Guia, Katrin de (Tahimik’s wife), 78, 90, 253n52 Guia, Kidlat de (Tahimik’s son), 21, 78–79, 112–13, 249n2, 249n3 Gunning, Tom, 13 Habermas, Jürgen, 154, 171, 260n90 Hall, Stuart, 138 Hansen, Miriam B., 166, 230–31, 256n19 Hardt, Michael, on Third World, 251n16 Hay, John, 100–101, 106. See also Treaty of Paris (1898) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 89, 185, 188; actuality theory of, 151, 189, 190, 191, 210; in Godard’s works, 25, 28; on history, 45–47, 208; Kluge’s debt to, 21, 113; philosophy of, 45–48, 209, 225–26, 227–28 Heidegger, Martin, 67, 124, 136; anticipatory choice, concept of, 129–30, 132; in Godard’s works, 28, 36–37; Umwelt, concept of, 87, 90, 96 Herzog, Werner, 145 history: Benjamin on, 130, 142, 166, 193, 207–208, 235; Kluge on, 181, 208, 210, 235, 241, 262n117; philosophy of, 116, 130. See also past, the

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Hoffmann, Heinrich, 240 Hollywood: classic, 13–14, 15, 16, 172; culture of, 105; dominance of, 40, 76, 82; filmmaking methods in, 82–85; Kluge’s feelings toward, 157–58; realism in, 190–91 Horkheimer, Max, 60–61, 226; on culture, 171, 173, 211; on enlightenment, 167–68; on fascism, 223–24; on pain and suffering, 115–16 Höss, Rudolf, diaries of, 214, 215, 216 human beings: Adorno on, 98, 226, 257n34; creativity of, 18–19, 21; domination of, 115–16; emancipation of, 2, 6, 7–8, 11, 59, 97; intelligence of, 233–35; labor by, 94–96; reification of, 212, 213; transformation of, 96, 97, 98. See also individual, the; subjectivity Huppert, Isabelle, 39 Husserl, Edmund: on constancy and change, 66, 69–70; geometry essay, 59–63, 65, 71, 248n46 I Am Furious Yellow (Tahimik), 20, 21, 79, 86–93, 88, 92, 104, 108, 109, 118, 147, 253n55; as autobiography, 78, 79, 148; birthday celebration scene, 117–20; cultural violence in, 102–103, 105–108, 109, 110; culture in, 34; didacticism in, 89, 120, 121, 123, 129; Eisenstein’s influence on, 4; epilogue, 145–46; history in, 131; indigenous peoples in, 90, 100, 133; list of segments, 250n5; Magellan’s Slave (or Memories of Overdevelopment), 101–102, 131, 133, 145, 253n38; origin of title, 249n2; pain and suffering in, 199; politics in, 80, 86–87, 117, 119, 127, 128; popularity of, 245n32; reification, concept of, 126; religious practice in, 134, 136; time, concept of, 84–85; transformation in, 144–45; as travel film, 81 identity, 62, 157, 188, 193, 253n48; Adorno’s critique of, 187, 211–12. See also nonidentity Igorot (Philippines), 87, 90, 99–100, 102, 112, 133, 142, 252n36

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illusion: Adorno’s critique of, 3, 186–87, 188, 192; eradication of, 192, 202, 260n90; Kluge’s critique of, 185–88, 191, 193 images, 160, 263n134; Eisenstein’s use of, 5–10; Godard’s use of, 19, 26, 37–43; Kluge’s use of, 182–83, 199, 202–204, 218, 220, 223–25; sound’s relationship to, 164–65, 246n29; Tahimik’s use of, 89, 91, 95, 105–106, 110, 119, 121, 132–34; thought and, 16, 67, 170 imagination, 211, 257n34, 258n41; Kant on, 160–61, 162, 163, 164–65, 257n30, 257n31, 258n43 imperialism: American, 79, 100, 117, 128; cultural, 101, 102; in Perfumed Nightmare, 126–27, 144; resistance to, 48–49, 128; temporal, 172–73. See also colonialism; domination individual, the, 11, 89; in Godard’s films, 18–19, 66–69; substance of, 208, 209–10; transformation in, 96, 97. See also human beings; subjectivity individual-collective dialectic, 18–19, 30–31, 49–50, 69, 208 industries, 105–6, 187; culture, 34, 173, 224; mass consumption, 14, 15. See also production Internet, 232, 264n158. See also New Media intuition, and concepts: 159–64, 257n23 Jameson, Fredric, 12, 230, 252n24; on Adorno, 156–57; on art naïf, 252n24; on base and superstructure, 251n23, 261n95; on Brecht, 125; on culture, 105, 186, 246n17; on the future, 142–43; on Passion (Godard), 245n3; on history, 116, 142–43; on Kluge, 156–57, 182–83; on modernism, 11–12, 13; on Sartre, Jean-Paul, 256n9; on self-preservation, 66–67; on utopia, 152, 243n3, 256n9. See also Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik) JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (Godard), 18, 25–34, 27, 31, 39–44, 59, 204, 245n8; calling crows shot, 43, 246n23; identity in, 62, 66–67; images in, 39–40; individual in, 18, 66; language in, 245n10; nature in, 41–43; utopianism in, 20

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Kant, Immanuel, 16, 158–63; on enlightenment, 168–69, 235; on imagination, 160, 163, 164–65, 257n30, 257n31, 257n43; thing-initself, 64; on transcendentalism, 158, 160, 257n43 Kierkegaard, Søren, 128 Klee, Paul, angel of history, 235 Kluge, Alexander, 3, 150–236; and actuality of cinema, 150–71, 211, 229; Adorno’s influence on, 1, 16, 18, 150, 157, 158, 209, 237, 244n27, 266n3; allegory in, 113, 156, 182, 195; Althusser compared to, 195; on base and superstructure, 261n95; cinéma engagée in work of, 12, 259n55; on cognition, 194–95, 218–19; collaboration with Negt, 168–19, 175, 264n165; and Critical Theory school of thought, 255n2, 266n3; on culture, 105, 164, 167; dialectics of, 196, 197, 201, 227; Eisenstein’s influence, 3, 266n3; folk wisdom and, 255n6; on history, 181, 208, 210, 235, 241, 262n117; on illusion, 185–88, 192, 260n90; images’ use, 106, 206, 253n51; Jameson on, 156–57, 182–83; making cinema into thought, 15–18; Marxism of, 22–23, 163; as materialist, 154–56, 198; montage use, 181–82, 183, 215, 216–17, 221, 225, 265n174; on National Socialism, 218–19; on New Media, 163, 172–73, 204, 208–14, 219, 230–36; philosophy of, 228–29; politics of, 167, 169, 208, 211; rejection of audience ratings, 261n94; on socialism, 70; subjectivity of, 187, 192, 200, 201, 259n65, 261n100; television and video work, 22, 23, 168–69, 172, 257n30, 259n65. See also utopia of film, Kluge on Kluge, Alexander (films and writings), 21–23; Arbeitsvermögen, 37; The Artists in the Big-Top: Perplexed, 153, 201, 222; Case Histories, 174; Cinema Stories, 165; In Danger and Great Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death, 181–82; “Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945,” 227; The Fruits of Trust, 23, 178–80, 227, 234; Geschichte und Eigensinn, 23, 151, 174, 181; Learning Processes with a Deadly

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Outcome, 201; News from Ideological Antiquity, 178; Part-Time Work of a Female Slave, 189–90; The Patriot, 194–95, 203, 227, 229–30, 264n165; The Power of Feelings, 154–56, 155, 182, 183, 194, 229, 256n11; Public Sphere and Experience, 169, 180, 189; Seen sind für Fische Inseln, 257n30; “The Sharpest Ideology,” 189–93, 206; “Utopie Film, Die” (1964), 1, 160, 170, 173, 204, 233; “The Utopia of Film” (1983), 231–32; Wer sich traut, reißt die Kälte vom Pferd, 237–39; “Word and Film,” 160; Zeitort, 230. See also Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, The (Kluge); Brutality in Stone (Kluge and Schamoni); Yesterday Girl (Kluge) Kluge, Alexander (themes): alienation, 21, 161, 163, 180–81, 183; antagonistic theory of realism, 188–93; anti-defeatism, 154–56, 157, 229–30, 256n9; capitalism, 23, 163, 175, 178–80, 187, 263n131; collectivism, 36–37, 135–36, 170, 183, 221; consciousness, 135, 161, 166–67, 195, 215, 220, 227; enlightenment, 167, 168, 169, 235, 259n55; experience, 161–62, 189–90, 200, 201, 231, 261n107; failure, 22–23, 150–51, 152–53, 171–72, 175; the future, 173, 178, 180, 225–30, 233, 239; imagination, 257n34; labor, 36–37, 175, 181, 201, 252n27, 262n108; love, 137, 154, 208–209, 256n8; meteorological metaphors, 200, 234–35, 237, 238, 239–40, 242; modernism/postmodernism, 12, 13, 85, 234–35, 259n55, 261n95, 264n166; nature, 235, 238, 239; the past, 3, 172–73, 193–204, 214–15, 228–29, 233, 263n117; the present, 61; primitive accumulation, 151–52, 198; progress, 142, 161, 181, 210, 252n27; reason, 169–70, 244n25; redemption, 157, 167, 214–15, 221, 259n53; social revolution, 14, 17, 229, 241; spectatorship theory, 253n51; time, 21–22, 85; truth, 158–59; war, 198–99; waste landscapes, 204–8, 251n22 Kluge, Alexander (utopianism of), 1–2, 167–68, 195, 202, 206, 239, 240; cinematic, 23, 38–39, 152–53, 162, 164, 170, 204, 209, 229; cities and, 182–83, 184

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Kluge, Alexandra, 153, 237 Kulturfilm. See cinema, Nazi labor: abstract, 54–56; dead, 207, 209; de-alienation of, 21, 83; human, 94–95, 96, 189, 212, 257n34, 262n108; Kluge on, 37, 181, 252n27, 262n108; in Tahimik’s films, 90, 98, 116 labor-power, 95, 163, 179, 218–19. See also production language, 102, 232; in Godard’s work, 28–29, 30–31, 43–50, 63–64 Left, the, 9, 128, 220, 225; politics of, 11, 157 legend. See Godard, Jean-Luc (themes) Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 234 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 255n6 love: Godard on, 25–34, 67, 245n8; Kluge on, 137, 154, 208–209, 256n8; Tahimik on, 137, 153 Lukács, Georg, 18, 112, 156–57 Lumumba, Patrice, 254n62 Lutze, Peter, 259n55 Marcos, Ferdinand, 4, 21, 80, 99–100, 126, 127 Marker, Chris, 238, 243n5, 244n21; A Grin Without a Cat, 4–8, 10–11; owls in films of, 73, 249n61 Marks, Laura, 261n107 Marx, Karl, 212, 220, 228; on alienation, 95, 139, 180–81, 183, 252n26; on capitalism, 94–98, 105–106, 128–29, 175–76, 178–80, 187, 232; on collectivism, 134–35; on communism, 169; Communist Manifesto, 85, 175, 180, 187, Das Kapital, 255n6; early writings, 183, 193; on human essence, 89, 219; letter to Arnold Ruge, 10, 22, 166–67, 170; on materialism, 105–106, 166–67, 241; on production, 212, 226, 233, 257n34; on religion, 161, 166–67, 185–86, 188; on theory, 195–96 Marxism, 77, 90, 150; Godard’s, 69; Kluge’s, 22–23, 163; media theory, 163; primitive accumulation, 151–52, 198 materialism, 3; Godard’s, 29, 65; Kluge’s, 154–56, 198; Marxist, 166–67, 241 media, 44, 163. See also cinema; New Media; television

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Mendiola Massacre (Philippines, 1987), 107 metaphysics, 207–208, 257n34 Miéville, Anne-Marie, 247n33 Mills, C. Wright, 240 mimesis, 7, 73, 120, 213, 222–25 mind, the: body-mind dualism, 159; cinema in the, 40–41, 158, 160–61, 165–66, 167, 170, 226; postmodern conception of, 234–35. See also cognition; consciousness; reason Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, Inability to Mourn, 219 modernism: Godard’s, 13, 24, 47; Kluge’s, 259n55, 264n166; late, 11–13, 14; Tahimik’s, 12, 13. See also postmodernism montage, 160, 241; associative, 163–64; Eisenstein’s use of, 15, 16, 221; Godard’s use of, 18–19, 39, 44, 47–50, 63, 73, 130; Kluge’s use of, 181–82, 183, 215, 216–17, 221, 225, 265n174; utopia of, 162–63 Morris, William, 17, 195 Mount Pinatubo, eruption of (1991), 108–109, 199, 253n47 Murnau, F. W.: The Last Laugh, 34, 52, 54, 72; Nosferatu, 46 myths. See allegories National Socialism, 49, 54–55, 214–25; cinema of, 220–21, 222–23, 253n48. See also Auschwitz; Brutality in Stone (Kluge and Schamoni) nativism, 80, 100, 102, 148 nature: Adorno on, 201–202, 207; domination of, 115–16; in Godard’s films, 41–43, 50–51; in Kluge’s films, 238, 239; second, 234–35, 238, 239; in Tahimik’s films, 80, 89–90, 136, 251n20 Navajo tribe (U.S.), 86, 87, 112 Nazism. See National Socialism Negri, Antonio, on Third World, 251n16 Negt, Oskar, 163, 195, 196, 230, 261n95; Geschichte und Eigensinn, 23, 151, 174; on history, 181, 210; on imagination, 191, 257n34, 260n90; Kluge’s collaboration with, 168–69, 175, 264n165; on labor, 175, 201, 227, 262n108; on levels of existence, 261n100; on

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National Socialism, 218–19; Public Sphere and Experience, 169, 189, 219; utopianism of, 182; on war, 198–99 New Media, 15, 82, 264n165; Kluge on, 163, 172–73, 204, 208–14, 219, 230–36; Negt on, 230. See also television Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47, 260n90 non-identity, 45, 49, 171, 211, 212. See also identity nostalgia: reified, 230; in Tahimik’s films, 118–19, 128, 129–31, 136. See also past, the objectivity, 37–39, 49; Godard’s, 29, 43 objects, 19, 59; words for, 63–64, 65–66 O’Connor, James, 251n18 Odessa Steps scene, The Battleship Potemkin, 5, 6, 8, 71–72, 73, 217 oppression. See domination Ousmane, Sembene, 252n25 overdevelopment, Tahimik’s concept of, 95, 101–102, 133, 138–39 pain and suffering, 108, 110, 113–16, 253n48, 253n56, 254n62 past, the: Adorno on, 138, 171, 177–78, 193; Kluge on, 172–73, 193–204, 214–15, 228–29, 233, 262n117; suffering in, 114, 116–17; Tahimik on, 120, 126–32, 136, 138, 142–43, 146, 149. See also history pastiche: Godard’s, 24, 47; Jameson on, 12 Patalas, Enno, 239 Paul, Saint, quotations from, 46, 52 Peck, Raoul, 254n62 Pensky, Max, 171 People Power movement (Philippines), 14, 21, 80, 99–107 Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik): Bavarian girl in, 78, 118, 229; bridge as metaphor in, 90, 131, 140, 148, 149; childbirth scene, 111, 112–13, 114; chronology of, 254n76; circumcision scene, 109–17, 118, 132, 253n55; culture in, 102, 104, 133; ending, 79, 119–20; Jameson on, 85, 89, 94, 113, 117, 121, 125–27; jeepnies in, 90, 110, 119, 131, 133, 146; Kidlat character, 252n24; laborers in, 95, 149;

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learning from past, 128, 131; progress in, 98, 139–41, 143–44; religious practice in, 134, 136; revolution in, 80, 100, 148; Tahimik’s appearance in, 249n3; Third World in, 20, 86, 252n24; white carabao in, 109–17, 111, 132, 141 Phantasie, Kluge’s use of the term, 160–65, 167, 219, 257n30, 260n31, 260n34 Philippines: acquisition by U.S., 101, 103, 127, 131–32; Baguio City earthquake (1990), 145–46, 148; cultural dominance by U.S., 80, 103–108, 126–27; loss of traditions in, 112; Mendiola Massacre, 107; Mount Pinatubo, eruption of (1991), 108–109, 199, 253n47; People Power movement, 14, 21, 99–107 philosophy, 16, 169; Adorno’s, 150, 157, 171, 212, 235–36; cinema as, 15–16, 45–47, 61, 150–51; Hegel’s, 45–48, 209, 225–26, 227–28; of history, 116, 130; Kluge’s, 228–29. See also Marxism Picard, Andréa, 73 politics: auteur, 18, 29, 34; cinematic, 6, 11, 20; cultural, 103–104, 105, 157, 169, 261n95; far-right, 254n74; of foreign aid, 93, 252n25, 252n37; Kluge’s, 167, 169, 208, 211; labor, 83; Leftist, 11, 157; Marx on, 166–67; of nativism, 80; of selfdetermination, 84; Third World, 86–87, 91, 93–94, 136–38, 252n37. See also People Power movement (Philippines); Tahimik, Kidlat, politics of postmodernism, 12, 36, 142, 230; Godard’s, 24, 47; Kluge’s, 85, 168, 234–35, 261n95. See also modernism power. See labor-power; People Power movement (Philippines) present, the, 116–17, 190, 214, 235, 261n95; Kluge’s concept of, 38–39, 61, 142, 171–88, 229–30, 241, 264n164. See also Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, The (Kluge) primitive accumulation, 151–52 production: Marx on, 212, 226, 233, 257n34; people power in, 3, 96; of Phantasie, 257n34; public sphere of, 181–85; social,

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151, 182; in Tahimik’s films, 146–48. See also industries progress, 7–8, 187, 217; Adorno’s critique of, 226; Kluge’s critique of, 142, 161, 181, 210, 252n27; Tahimik’s critique of, 85–86, 94, 96, 98, 105, 116, 137, 138–44 proletariat, 74, 189, 227, 241, 256n19. See also bourgeois property, private, 65–67, 69 protest, 188–93, 211. See also revolution(s) Proust, Marcel, 153 public sphere: bourgeois vs. proletarian, 189, 227, 256n19; cinema in, 158, 169, 170, 172; industrial-commercial, 230–31; Kluge on, 181–85, 204, 230–32, 233, 256n19 Rabinbach, Anson, 220 Ranke, Leopold von, on history, 193 realism, 111, 164, 188–94, 206 reason, 33, 168, 188, 259n55; Kant on, 158–59; publicness of, 169–70, 244n25; triumph of, 3, 201–202; utopian dimension of, 167–68 recycling, 47, 251n18; in Tahimik’s films, 20, 89, 226 redemption, in Kluge’s films, 157, 167, 214–15, 221, 259n53 reification, 94, 115–16, 230; in art, 42–43, 62; of the body, 117–20; of human beings, 212, 213; in Tahimik’s films, 20, 114, 126–27, 132, 139. See also dereification religion: in Godard’s films, 33, 54, 56, 57–58, 265n1; Marx on, 161, 166–67, 185–86, 188; in Tahimik’s films, 133–34, 136–37 Renoir, Jean, Rules of the Game, 46 Rentschler, Eric, 214, 215, 222, 264n153 repetition, 9, 128–30, 212, 244n13 repression. See domination resistance, 10, 20, 55–56; to imperialism, 48–49, 126–27, 128. See also protest; revolution resurrection. See death-resurrection dialectic Reverdy, Pierre, “L’image,” 39 revolution(s), 130, 187; contemporary, 5, 6, 8, 14, 74, 75; European, 260n89; Kluge on, 14, 17, 229, 241; in Russia, 5–9, 28, 72, 254n78; social, 13, 14–15, 16, 125, 235,

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244n21; in Tahimik’s films, 13, 14, 80, 100, 148 Riefenstahl, Leni: early films of, 220–21; Triumph of the Will, 222, 223, 253n48 rituals. See Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik), circumcision scene; turumba festival Roderick, Rick, 152, 240 Rodowick, D. N., political modernism concept, 12 Rossellini, Roberto, 45; Rome, Open City, 55 Rougemont, Denis de, Penser avec les mains, 74, 75–76, 247n42 Ruge, Arnold. See Marx, Karl, letter to Arnold Ruge Russell, Catherine, 133 Russian Revolution of 1905, 5–9, 72. See also Battleship Potemkin, The (Eisenstein); Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 Ruttman, Walter, Berlin, Symphony of the City, 182 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 28, 256n9 Schamoni, Peter. See Brutality in Stone (Kluge and Schamoni) Schiller, Friedrich von, on naïve art, 252n24 Second Cinema, 12, 250n12 self-determination, in Tahimik’s films, 20, 82–83, 84, 93–94 sensuousness-understanding opposition, 159, 160–62, 164, 195, 196 sentiment drapé, 74, 249n63 Seventies, decade of, revolution during, 5, 6, 74 Sharpe, Matthew, 258n43 Shohat, Ella, on Third World, 251n16 Sixties, decade of, revolution during, 5, 6, 8, 14, 74, 75 Smith, Gavin, 31 socialism, 49, 51, 58–60, 77; failure of, 19, 36–37; Godard on, 70–71, 77; origins of, 60–61, 71; return to, 60–61. See also communism Solanas, Fernando, 12; “Towards a Third Cinema,” 250n12 sound: in Godard’s films, 43–45; images’ relationship to, 164–65, 246n29

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Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West, 55 Spivak, Gayatri, 86, 102, 252n37; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 90 Staël, Madame Germaine de, 47 Stam, Robert, 251n16, 251n22 Stendhal, 111 subjectivity: Adorno on, 49, 98; Godard on, 18–19, 28, 29–31, 43, 66–69; Kluge on, 187, 192, 200, 201, 261n100; in labor, 95–99. See also individual, the Tahimik, Kidlat, 78–149; advertisements and billboards in films of, 17; cinema and emancipation, 11; on culture, 20, 178, 238, 253n48; cups-of-gas filmmaking, 81–86, 87, 101, 148, 241; Eisenstein’s influence on, 4; making cinema into thought, 16, 17–18; modernism of, 12, 13; politics of, 80, 93–95, 99–107, 112–15, 117, 119, 126–32, 136–38; on socialism, 70; on technology, 96, 98–99 Tahimik, Kidlat (films by), 20–21. See also I Am Furious Yellow (Tahimik); Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik); Turumba (Tahimik) Tahimik, Kidlat (themes): alienation, 82; authenticity, 253n54; capitalism, 20, 89, 98; collectivism, 114, 133–36, 148; consciousness, 119, 136; the cosmos, 3, 21, 81, 84, 99, 113, 160, 238, 241; didacticism, 17, 86–87, 89–91, 93–99, 117, 120–25, 129; environmentalism, 89–90, 251n20; failure, 20, 21, 79–80, 143, 148; the future, 23, 114, 142–43, 149; handicrafts, 3, 90, 105–106, 114, 238; labor, 90, 98, 116; love, 137, 153; nature, 80, 89–90, 136, 251n20; nostalgia, 3, 118–19, 124, 128, 129–31, 136; pain and suffering, 113–16, 199; past, learning from, 120, 126–32, 136, 138, 142–43, 146, 193; people power, concept of, 91, 96, 99, 121, 136–37, 160; recycling, 20, 89, 226; reification, 114, 126–27, 132, 139; revolution, 14, 80, 100, 131, 148; tradition, 117–20, 133–34, 149; transformation, 96, 97, 98, 144–45, 146, 149; waste, 87, 89, 141, 142, 145, 205, 206, 251n22. See also Igorot (Philippines); progress,

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INDEX

Tahimik’s critique of; Third World, in Tahimik’s films Tahimik, Kidlat (utopianism of), 2, 20, 83, 95, 113, 123, 130–31, 239–40; historical perspective, 132–41, 208; redemption and, 147–48, 149 Tarantino, Quentin, 24 Taubin, Amy, 58 Taussig, Michael, 223 technology: Adorno on, 97–99; cinematic, 13, 14; in Tahimik’s films, 96, 98–99, 122–24 television, 14, 151; dominance of, 15, 40; Godard’s work in, 24, 263n131; Kluge’s work in, 22, 23, 168–69, 172, 257n30, 259n65. See also New Media Temple, Michael, 247n42 temporality. See time Terminator, The, 56 Theweleit, Klaus, 244n27 Third Cinema, 12, 83–84; use of term, 250n12 Third World: capitalism in, 94, 96; concept of time in, 84–85; culture of, 21, 87, 111; politics in, 86–87, 91, 93–94, 136–38, 252n37; during Sixties, 14; in Tahimik’s films, 20, 21, 86–87, 99, 112, 141–42, 149, 250n12, 251n16, 251n20; teaching First World, 86–87, 89–91, 93–99, 117, 251n16; use of term, 251n16 thought, 74, 157, 169, 170, 196; cinema as, 15–16, 17–18, 62 time: in Kluge’s films, 21–22, 181, 182, 208, 213– 14, 237–38; Third World concept of, 84–85. See also future, the; past, the; present, the Trabi (German automobile), 35, 38, 246n18 tradition, in Tahimik, 117–20, 133–34, 149 transcendentalism, 115, 138, 196, 261n107, 262n114; Kant’s, 158, 161, 258n43 transformation: Adorno on, 197–98; in Kluge’s films, 11, 163; in Tahimik’s films, 78, 96, 97, 98, 144–45, 146, 149. See also change translation, 44–45, 47, 60, 62, 252n37 Treaty of Paris (1898), 100–101, 103, 127, 131–32 Truffaut, François, 29

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285

trust, Kluge’s concept of, 178–80, 182, 212, 234 truth, Kluge’s concept of, 158–59 Turumba (Tahimik), 20, 85, 93, 96, 98, 100, 122, 124, 135; artists and craftsmen in, 105–106, 149; didacticism in, 112, 121–24, 129; ending, 79–80, 119–20; labor portrayed in, 95, 116; papier-mâché dolls in, 90, 110, 122, 137–38, 146, 148; religious practice in, 133–34, 136, 138 turumba festival, 100, 112, 114, 120, 124, 133–34 unconscious, the, 168, 186, 243n3. See also consciousness understanding. See sensuousnessunderstanding opposition United States: acquisition of Philippines, 101, 103, 127, 131–32; dominance over Philippines, 80, 103–108, 126–27; family values movement in, 254n74; occupation of Europe, 48–49; in Tahimik’s films, 78, 86–87, 112; Third World in, 87. See also culture, American universality: Godard’s, 30, 30–31, 33; Kluge’s, 208 utopia, 67, 70, 183, 193, 206, 257n34; Adorno on, 2, 16, 49, 178, 212, 239–40; allegories of, 43–44, 49; Bloch on, 1–2; in fascism, 216–20, 222–23; Marx on, 183, 193. See also dystopia; Godard, Jean-Luc (utopianism of); Kluge, Alexander, utopianism of; Tahimik, Kidlat, utopianism of utopia of film, 1–3, 6, 18, 22, 41, 83, 150–54, 158, 160, 170, 241–42; Kluge on, 28, 38–39, 162, 164, 229, 239, 240; origins of, 2, 60 Valéry, Paul, “Psaume sur une voix,” 74, 75–76, 76–77, 247n42 values: alien, 84, 100, 102, 103, 105, 116; Western, 20, 21 Varda, Agnès, 238 Vertov, Dziga, 158; Man with a Movie Camera, 147, 182, 183 violence, cultural, 102–103, 105–108, 109, 110, 113 Vogl, Joseph, 180, 181

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286

I N D EX

war, 34, 198–200. See also Cold War waste, 87, 89, 141, 142, 145, 204–208, 209, 251n22. See also Kluge, Alexander (themes); Tahimik, Kidlat (themes) weather, in Kluge’s films, 200, 234–35, 237, 238, 239–40, 242 West, the, 35–36, 54–55; in Cold War, 45, 50–52, 57–59 West Germany, 57–59 Williams, James, 64, 246n25 Yegiazarov, Gavriil, Hot Snow, 73

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Yellow movement. See People Power movement (Philippines) Yesterday Girl (Kluge), 23, 176–78, 198, 200, 200, 240; the body in, 199–201; cold as metaphor in, 237, 240; love in, 256n8, 256n11; the past in, 172, 181 Young German Film, 157–58, 172, 214, 215 Žižek, Slavoj, 32, 136, 258n43; on culture, 133, 186; on objectivity, 38–39; on the past, 128, 131, 228; on repetition, 9, 129–30, 244n13; on Riefenstahl’s films, 220–21 Zukunftskunde. See future, the

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(continued from page ii) Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder Michele Pierson Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form Lucy Fischer Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture Thomas Doherty Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Andrew Britton Silent Film Sound Rick Altman Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Elisabeth Bronfen Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American Peter Decherney Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film Adam Lowenstein China on Screen: Cinema and Nation Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map Rosalind Galt George Gallup in Hollywood Susan Ohmer Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media Steve J. Wurtzler The Impossible David Lynch Todd McGowan Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility Rey Chow Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Richard Allen Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary Jonathan Kahana Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity Francesco Casetti Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View Alison Griffiths

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