David Blair is a multimedia artist whose 1991 project Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees may have been the first narrative film broadcast over the internet. This experience led to the transformation of Wax into a hypertext film and began Blair’s interest in the possibility of a new form of digital filmmaking, facilitated by the internet and innovations in software. Wax features William Burroughs and a labyrinthine plot that moves from spirit photography and Mesopotamian bees to the first Iraq war and a weapons guidance system designer who transforms into a weapon after having a television installed inside his head.

I spoke to David about about his experience of broadcasting the first narrative film over the internet, coming to grips with rapid new media development in the 90s and the now forgotten genre of ‘hypertext film’.

—Matthew O’Shannessy

SCREEN MACHINE: Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees wasn’t originally made for the internet – how did it come about that you had the opportunity to stream it over the internet?

DAVID BLAIR: I’d made the movie and finished it and had a page in the second issue of Wired Magazine. And these guys I know came over to me and asked me if I wanted to put the movie on the internet, and I thought that was a pretty good idea. They were going to build this parallel internet called the ‘M-Bone’ or the Multimedia Backbone. So it was something built into all these routers at certain kinds of universities and certain kinds of companies, and it was a multi-peer video protocol. You could do an M-cast and you could see who was on and people could talk back and sort of annotate as they were watching. It was sort of a video conferencing but also a broadcasting application.

SM: Who were the guys that approached you to put it on the internet?

DB: It was Vincent… ah, I’d have to get back to you. They were like technical cowboys that were loosely attached to a Manhattan server company. We had a premiere in the refrigerated room of the server company. Basically you had to use a Silicon Graphics workstation and we looked on the workstation and we saw that there were maybe 300 possible nodes, maybe 120 nodes that connected. David Farber, a guy from UPenn who became an early internet person, put it out to his list, which was basically the elite. And that’s how Markoff, the guy from the [New York] Times, wound up going over to Sun and watching it, and that’s how it got publicised as being the first movie online. Which it was. I mean it was the first entertainment movie online, I’m sure people had been sending images of squid or whatever…

SM: But it was the first narrative film…

DB: Yeah or the first self-conscious use of it for anything but scientific purposes, probably. I have no idea! Because I didn’t have a workstation I wasn’t on that network. And of course anybody could record it at the other end. It was basically 10 frames a second, 320 by 240 maybe 4-bit black and white and choppy audio. For me it was really wonderful because it was this really bizarre situation of reinvention and rearcheologising instantly, because here was this technical artefact that immediately disappeared, that was all part of the movie that was all in the context of what they call media archaeology now. And here it was instant lost media archaeology.

SM: What kind of response did you get to that initial screening – how many people would have seen that?

DB: Maybe about 100-150. The main reaction was that it was in the newspaper – the business section of the New York Times. It was a media event.

SM: And did it assist the company with their research, in terms of developing internet video?

DB: Oh, I think the company was really pissed off because Markoff forgot to put their name in! I was the main actor! And it was mainly because it fit the early 90s convergence spiel and there was a lot of talk about VOD, and that was back when that guy John Malone was saying that cable was going to take over the world and there weren’t going to be telephone companies – all that very early pre-bubble internet talk. And that’s the way Markoff spoke about it, because he’s an industry writer.

SM: Can you tell me a little bit more about watching it in a freezer, in the company…

DB: It was kinda cold, and there was a VHS machine which seemed kinda odd, and we recorded the output on another VHS machine and we watched it on an SGI monitor which was always very exciting back in those days. You know, computers for ordinary people weren’t that common back in the early 90s. It was basically just a drink and, you know, play the video on a TV screen.

I’d been talking to a friend of mine, Arnold Dreyblatt, about hypertext and I didn’t know an awful lot about it. And he had been starting to work on a couple hypertext projects. He was working on projects with one specific academic and he explained to me what it was. It was another form of electronic text, and electronic text had become very important for me. And looking at the software, it seemed to be a hint of a proper direction to head in.

Now getting back to what that M-bone thing looked like to me – I thought this must be equivalent to the hypertext. Now while I knew it wasn’t hypertext – it was an image system and a broadcast system – but it was multi-node I guess you would say. My interest had already been opened up in that and it wasn’t very long after that that I ended up in Brown University in Rhode Island and there was a lot of hypertext activity up there in ‘93. Robert Coover the American metafictionist had got really interested in writing on a computer and they had a strong computer science department up there. They were interested in it as a research topic and they had a space they called ‘Hypertext Hotel’. This is before hypertext became associated with the links in HTML. I met the software people and I met the literary people and I jumped into it.

SM: You were saying before that you saw hypertext as way to create a film that was kind of unfinished or that you could just keep adding to?

DB: Yeah. And then I was also going to make the new movie like that too.

SM: And did you find that an easier way to work or that it opened up different ways of working with video?

DB: It turned out to be more difficult but it was a strategy to get past difficulties, you know it added all kinds of other difficulties but you ended up having to leave behind sequence and building and to a certain extent you left behind the suspension of disbelief effect where people forget that they’re watching a movie. It was supposed to become a lot more like a reading experience. But it became something different of course. It became what it is. It’s difficult to do narrative in short bursts and build them into a longer string. For me anyway.

SM: And how do you consider it now – is it more like a website or an art project or a video, or a film…? Or has it become something else do you think?

DB: Well it’s two different things now. The movie was basically a video art movie. It’s just that it had a ‘rhythm track’ around it, it had a narrative track to it. And the website is more like an electronic book. In a newer and an older sense but it’s an art project. It’s not a populist project. It’s difficult. It requires a certain amount of detachment to watch. Though it was really built for people to remake; not to ‘remix’.

SM: To look at the bits and pieces…

DB: To look at the bits and pieces and see the immanence of meaning in it. And see the immanence of the resemblance. I sort of discovered that machines really do work to cut things up, but you really have to be aware of the matrix that you’re going to attach it to. And if you’re involved in that then you see all the resemblances. And most people aren’t particularly involved in the film. They’re not really quite ready to come back and remember in the context of the hypermedia site. But that’s just what it is. In a way it’s sort of a memory structure.

SM: Things have changed since the nineties and with the advent of things like Youtube, the idea of a hypertext film has become unfashionable. Do you think there’s still unexplored territory for artists and filmmakers, or do you think internet video as a medium has hardened into a set of conventions?

DB: There was such a burst of tools back then and burst of ambition and I sort of expected that all the tools that were there would develop in the ways that I wanted. They never quite did. There are a few subtitle programs, a couple of academic programs – subtitle programs don’t work. You know the major editing systems have no way to go back and forth between them and so a real hypertext tool, a video writing system is the one thing that was at the core of this project that didn’t quite technically develop.

SM: What do you mean writing with video?

DB: The very first problem was that you couldn’t write and have your text next to the video and when you cut a shot or you cut a sequence you couldn’t lift the paragraph or a link to the paragraph when you moved it away. And it could be as simple as shot annotation or tagging, but it really isn’t.

SM: So when you talk about resemblances – because you’re using found footage – are you talking about resemblances between bits of footage or images, or even text?

DB: Yeah. All those resemblances. Anything I happen to think appropriate at the moment. And sometimes I need to say, ‘This is that’. You know – this picture is this building here and this building here looks like that building there. I mean it’s pretty straightforward but it just kept not sticking. Or if it did stick, I would get stuck inside a technical process that was irreversible and that would also break after a while.

So recently I’ve gone back to printing everything out and putting it in notebooks. And that works as a memory structure, not as an editing structure but as a memory structure because I find that a lot of computer tools have the appearance of being a memory structure but they don’t work as memory for me anyway. After 20 or 30 years it’s good to get away from the screen. Because the screen is also a kind of forgetting device by itself. When you have terrabytes of data the image of forgetting is the screen.

SM: Memory is one of the themes of the film. The US military developed the internet…

DB: Well folks in the eighties were really aware of the relationship between media technology and war – the internet was yet another one of those things. Inside Wax there was this whole business with radar and television that were the same thing in the thirties and television was developed in order to create a manufacturing base for high frequency electronic components that would be used in radar and also to disguise radar research. There were television wars in the 30s which were basically pre-WWII radar wars – sort of technical flow, technical dominance. Remember the eighties were pretty charged. When Reagan came in it was the end of the world. Everything that was there with Bush was there with Reagan, the ties to the Apocalyptic Christians and Iraq and Iran. In the 70s there was The Late, Great Planet Earth. That sold millions of copies. Kids gave it to me in high school. The final battles were going to be fought in the Holy Land and in Mesopotamia as well.

I got tied into it in the Wax Project through Peter Fend who with Ingo Günther was doing Satellite art projects, a little thing they did called OECD and Peter gave me pictures of excavations and moat defences in Southern Iraq, in Basra, that Peter was hyperbolically calling robot excavated electrified trench defences [laughs] against the final onslaught of the Iranians. And that’s how I ended up putting the end of my movie in Basra.

SM: No one would talk about making a hypertext film anymore, but then we interact with Youtube everyday. Your film is different again from what Youtube is, or you’re working in a different way…

DB: You click a link, you maybe don’t bother to save your links very often but you do it all the time and your memory structure usually remains in your head and you don’t really explicitly need to create something. Back then we explicitly had to create something like that because it didn’t exist and now it’s all around and I think everybody uses it one way or another. It’s just there. And in terms of motion picture entertainment, perhaps it’s not a popular form except that it is the most popular form at the same time.

SM: Are there any projects that you’re interested in that have taken those ideas and gone a little bit further?

DB: In the last couple of years I’ve lived more on the flow of ideas. I’ve been more stuck in trying to solve my own problems. A painter told me off the cuff a long time ago, ‘Some painters they just stay in their studios trying to solve all their problems’. And I’ve been in that position for the last couple of years.

The first clue is in the title: Cowboys and Aliens. It doesn’t only signify two film genres (the western and sci-fi) sitting side by side in one loopy genre mashup. The title is ala reference to that classic Self/Other opposition of ‘Cowboys and Indians’, with Aliens replacing Indians as the external threat. The title may be contrasted with another recent blockbuster I saw recently, Rise of the Planet of the Apes: I much prefer the latter’s title because it evokes an Other while more or less avoiding the certitude of the former’s X&Y structure. ROTPOTA is less interested in setting up the standard ‘us and them’ type attitude, reinforced by the ambiguity of that verb: ‘rise’. We are not sure yet whether we are talking about a threatening ‘rise’ (as in the rise of youth related violence) or a liberatory ‘rise’ (as in the rise of the proleteriat). Let me point out here that of these two blockbuster Hollywood movies, it was C&A that arrived in cinemas with the edge in cultural credibility. This was by way of being (at least in theory) an eccentric concept and relatively original work directed by a (sort of) auteur. ROTPOTA, on the other hand, could not help but be seen as a cynical attempt to reboot a familiar franchise. (Studio executives probably thought that audiences had forgotten the same attempt made ten years ago by Tim Burton.) But as it turns out, it was the cynical reboot that ended up the more interesting film politically speaking.

So why replace Indians with Aliens? To find the reason for this switch-around we can rely on comments from director Jon Favreau who noted in an interview that “it was Reagan who said during the Cold War that the only way the Russians and the Americans are going to get along is if aliens invade. A common enemy brings these people together”. In Reagan’s own words:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

While it’s kind of cool that Favreau sees C&A as more than an ironic postmodern exercise and has gone to the effort to invest his film with some deeper meaning, touching on political allegory (though let’s be honest – this is no Animal Farm), let’s also admit that Reagan’s original sentiment was pretty daft. His fantasy of a united humanity is appealing enough, but what Reagan presents as a fanciful solution to social conflict is in reality an actual strategy commonly employed. Humanity has united against an alien force countless times throughout history. It just that these aliens tended to be human. But the form is basically the same: the external conflict supplants the internal conflict. (Case in point: The War on Terror really has, in a sense, united America against a common enemy. But the proliferating homeland security regime in the U.S. produced by ‘united America’ is commonly used to crush political dissent from America’s own citizens. The very noble idea of ‘recognising our common bond’ has a much more sinister role in silencing citizens with legitimate bones to pick with how the country is run.

It’s through this lens that we should be really critical of C&A in its depiction of Cowboy-Indian relations. In the film, a group of cowboys are captured by a tribe of Apaches who resent the white folk for all the injustices done to their people. The two groups are wary of each other but when they realise they have a common enemy in the alien invaders, they overcome their differences and fight together. The movie stresses here the bonds of brotherhood that are formed between the white settlers and the indigenous people, basking in a glow of politically correct multiculturalism. But the antagonism between the two groups, as we know very well, has not been resolved, only postponed. What can only follow after the film’s merry ending is the savage decimation of the Apaches and their culture after having shaken hands with their real aggressors who are not the aliens but the white men taking their land.

Things play out differently in ROTPOTA. In the film, James Franco plays Will Rodman, a scientist working at a capitalist research facility. He has been experimenting with apes in order to find a cure for Alzeimer’s disease but often comes into conflict with Steven Jacobs, his boss: Jacobs shuts Rodman’s project down when it is perceived as commercially unviable (resulting in the termination of the test apes) and when military uses for the drug become apparent he casually take control over the project from Rodman. The apes exposed to the drug become intelligent enough to strategise an escape plan and when they succeed, humanity comes under threat from the genetically enhanced animals and the city’s police forces gather to destroy the angry simians in a grand climactic conflict on the Golden Gate Bridge. The big difference here is that the presence of a threatening Other doesn’t bring humanity together. Rather, the external conflict (the apes) clarifies the internal conflict (corporate exploitation). Rodman thus quits his job and fights to protect the apes from being slaughtered by the policeman and Jacobs. The false conflict (between humanity and its Other) is superceded by the real conflict (between the exploited and the exploiters), which cuts across nationalities and even species. We can imagine an alternate ending to C&A in which Daniel Craig’s Jake Lonergan enters the alien spaceship in the desert and discovers to his surprise that alien society also contains its own oppressed class. The film would end with the alien proleteriat revolting against their masters and cooperating with the Apaches to throw the white men off their land.

II. MASHUPS AND ASSIMILATION

It is perhaps a bit inaccurate to describe C&A as a genre ‘mashup’. The mashup, as a device, is defined by the synthesis of disparate and eclectic sources. But the incongruity of the sources is emphasised even as they are successfully synthesised. Think of something like Dangermouse’s The Grey Album (a mashup of The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s The Black Album) or Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (a mashup of, amongst many other things, westerns and kung fu films). The response to a successful mashup is, It’s so crazy, but it works! The opposite of this is ‘assimilation’, where different sources may be synthesised but with a result of seamlessness – What was an incongruous source no longer seems incongruous after its integration. C&A is not a genre mashup then, but genre assimilation. With its rote visual style and MOR thundering music score, the movie resembles less a western or a science fiction film (or an admixture of the two) than it does a standard contemporary Hollywood action blockbuster that just happens to have cowboys and aliens in it. Rather than offering us the distinct pleasures of westerns and sci-fi films, the film assimilates them into a boring factory-produced package, well-made but banal.

The problem starts when assimilation is not just a strategy but something that encompasses the whole ideological framwork of the film. This is why the script requires the cattle owners and the Apaches and the outlaws to all grin and get along: they need to become assimilated into the notion of ‘humanity’. Why is the politics of assimilation so problematic? Because, although superficially it is a politics of inclusiveness (humanity can be found in anyone), assimilation conceals as its dirty truth a desire for exclusion. Hence, one often hears the racist argument that they welcome immigrants to their country, bit those who insist on retaining their foreign culture have to go (and the antagonism extends to even non-immigrants who don’t follow the dominant culture). Difference cannot be seen or acknowledged within the politics of assimilation except as the necessary threat to be exterminated. Which is why the aliens are so curiously underdeveloped in Cowboys and Aliens. We know they are on Earth to mine for gold and irrationally terrorise the local population of humans but that’s it. We never hear them say a word or see any kind of thought or emotion register on their faces. If we did, and we started to see their perspective, this would undermine the film’s project of celebrating humanity’s wonderful ability to come together. It’s in this sense that the movie is emblematic of liberal hypocrisy: a multicultural fantasy that nevertheless maintains racism’s logic of inside and outside.

III. THE ALIEN GAZE

ROTPOTA has come under predictable critical attack for its digital visual effects. The review by F.F. Croce in the Notebook called out the effects for being ‘too weightless to fill the screen’ and ‘lacking the tangible pantomime of the earlier Apes installments’. Now I would agree with Croce that there is something unsatisfying about watching the digital apes that populate the film. The question is, should this fact lead us to make some normative statement about digital effects or is there something about our dissatisfaction that deserves interrogating?

As I see it, the dissatisfaction in watching the digital spectacles of ROTPOTA cannot be put down to inferior rendering. The marriage of performance capture and state of the art digital effects make the apes that populate the movie utterly convincing. I think the real culprit is the camera — its too-fluid movement through space often betrays the illusion that what we are watching is not really there. My guess is that this speaks to some anthropomorphic bias: Our ability to feel viscerally satisfied by a shot rests in our feeling that there is potentially some guy holding the camera that is capturing the images. Classic Spielberg spectacles still excite today for this reason: each shot is grounded in the limitations of the human body. In Jurassic Park, the scene where we see the brachiosaurs for the first time still excites, even though digital effects are much more advanced now, because the shot is positioned from our human level looking up at the dinosaurs. Think also of the handheld camcorder aesthetic that has become so successful in popular cinema with films such as Children of Men and The Bourne Supremacy. Recently, however, we are seeing a new aesthetic, made possible by new technology: the aesthetic of the virtual camera. The virtual camera gives us as a digital point of view, spinning around objects, darting in and out of spaces with complete disregard to physical limitations. I’m talking here of films such as Fincher’s Panic Room or any entry of the Spider-Man franchise. The virtual camera makes impossible movements (in Panic Room, for example, the camera goes through the handle of a kettle) and this is what is most exciting about it. But this impossible perspective has a simultaneous and conversely alienating effect. We know its images can’t have been actualised by a man operating a camera in the real world. It is by definition an inhuman perspective and we can sense this innately.

In an emotional section of ROTPOTA, the main ape, Caeser, is taken by his owners to the forest where he experiences for the first time the joy of climbing in a large environment. In one long fluid take, we follow Caeser as he bounds up from branch to branch, leaps from tree to tree and marvels at the sight from the forest’s canopy. All the work gone into making the ape and the forest as convincing as possible is undermined by the virtual camera which keeps us at a distance from the image. We know innately that this shot is only possible because much of what we are seeing only exists inside a computer. But surely the opposite effect is intended by the filmmakers. The shot is designed to bring us closer, directly into the headspace of Caeser, not dissimilar to how the camera follows behind the blonde-haired boy wandering the highschool corridors in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant or Mickey Rourke’s weathered body in The Wrestler. There is something a little quixotic about this shot in ROTPOTA, for it’s an attempt to make us identify with a point of view that is by definition going to alienate us on some level. Nevertheless, it’s this very idea of undertaking the impossible task of identifying with the Other that makes it an interesting film. ROTPOTA’s failure is much more productive than C&A’s success in deploying classical action filmmaking clichés because it invests in that crucial thing that the latter, despite its title, curiously lacks: an alien perspective.

New movies opening this week:

TABLOID is Errol Morris’ latest documentary, utilising his method of direct-to-camera interviews, he explores the bizarre story of a former beauty queen who pursued her Mormon lover to Britain leading to the famous “sex in chains” story that dominated tabloid newspapers.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (3D) is Werner Herzog’s documentary about the Chauvet Cave which features the earliest known cave paintings. Somewhere in the film there are mutant albino alligators.

Special events:

WORLD CINEMA NOW is a conference organised by Monash University including key note speakers such as Nicole Brenez, Meaghan Morris and filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux . In addition to dozens of lectures, ACMI will be holding three public screening-lectures as part of the program including Elena Gorfinkel on American sexploitation films, Vinzenz Hediger on trailers as art and Nicole Brenez with Philippe Grandrieux on the political avant garde. Full program available at worldcinemanow.com.au. Details for ACMI events available here. Conference running September 27-29.

Special seasons:

The Melbourne Cinematheque presents TROPICAL MALADIES: THE CINEMA OF LUCRECIA MARTEL, a retrospective of the Argentinian filmmaker who has directed only three features. This week concludes with the 2008 THE HEADLESS WOMAN about someone who runs over something with her car and becomes dislocated from reality as she tries to piece the events together. The film will be followed by THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET from director Pedro Almodovar who produced Martel’s film.

FIRE IN BABYLON is a documentary about the West Indian cricket team in the 1970s and 80s and their journey to becoming one of the greatest sporting teams in history. At ACMI until October 5.

The Astor presents a complete retrospective of the films of Terrence Malick. This week’s film is the 2005 THE NEW WORLD about the historical figures Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. At the Astor, September 26.

Old films:

LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET is Frederick Wiseman’s 2010 documentary exploring the institutional organism that is the ballet. At ACMI, September 24, 25 & 26.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking science fiction film, screens at the Astor, September 24.

Other new films opening this week:

ABDUCTION is about a teenage boy (Taylor Lautner) who is a star on the school’s wrestling team but struggles with feelings that he is ‘different’ and a ’stranger in his own life’.

MONTE CARLO is about a group of American teenage girls who travel to Paris and live the high life after one of them is mistaken for royalty. Starring Selena Gomez and Blair from Gossip Girl.

SPY KIDS 4 (3D) is a kids film with a scratch and sniff card à la John Waters’ Odorama.

THE LION KING (3D) is THE LION KING but in 3D.

"The New World" at the Astor

Special seasons:

FIRE IN BABYLON is a documentary about the West Indian cricket team in the 1970s and 80s and their journey to becoming one of the greatest sporting teams in history. At ACMI, September 15-October 5.

The Melbourne Cinematheque presents ‘Tropical Maladies: The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel’, a retrospective of the Argentinian filmmaker who has directed only three features. This week’s films are THE HOLY GIRL (2004) about an adolescent girl who undergoes a sexual awakening and a simultaneous Catholic awakening, focusing her attention on her mother’s lecherous boyfriend; and LA CIÉNAGA (2001) about two families who retreat to a shabby country home during the summer  and the repressed family mysteries and tensions that become exposed.

The Astor presents a complete retrospective of the films of Terrence Malick. This week’s film is the war film THE THIN RED LINE (1998). At the Astor on Mondays, September 12-26 (except for THE TREE OF LIFE which screens on Saturday, October 1).

Old films:

CineCult303 presents DREADNAUGHT, a 1981 action film from martial arts legend Yuen Woo-ping (director of Drunken Master and fight choreographer for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). At Bar 303 in Northcote, September 20.

A double bill of classic seventies sci-fi with LOGAN’S RUN about a future in which people are only allowed to live to the age of 30 (a concept that Andrew Niccol is adapting in his upcoming Justin Timberlake-starring In Time) and SOYLENT GREEN about a detective investigating a murder in an overcrowded dystopic Manhattan. At the Astor, September 18.

BIUTIFUL, the latest film from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel, Amores Perros), screens at the Astor, September 21.

New films opening this week:

GOD BLESS OZZY OSBOURNE is a documentary about the lead singer of Black Sabbath.

THE EYE OF THE STORM is some horrible film about white Australian aristocrats learning family values.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN is yet another self-conscious exploitation film, a genre which seems to be Quentin Tarantino’s main legacy. This one is based on a fake trailer that won some competition.

"Logan's Run" at the Astor

New films opening this week:

13 ASSASSINS is Takashi Miike’s colourfully violent samurai film about a band of assassins sent to kill the murderous Shinzaemon who threatens to plunge the country into violent darkness. The extended fight scene that closes the film is particularly amazing.

SUBMARINE is a remake of Harold and Maude or maybe of Rushmore. In any case, it’s a coming of age story about a precocious teenager with whimsical affectations who falls in love with an enigmatic girl. Could be fun or could be terrible.

Special seasons:

The Astor presents a complete retrospective of the films of Terrence Malick. This week’s films are BADLANDS (1973) starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on the run; and DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) about another young couple toiling in the fields of a wealthy but sickly man. At the Astor on Mondays, September 12-26 (except for THE TREE OF LIFE which screens on Saturday, October 1).

RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO is an adaptation of the comedic play by Andrea Dunbar about two teenaged schoolgirls who have a fling with a married man. Andrea Dunbar was the subject of the recent film THE ARBOR that recently screened as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. At ACMI, September 8-11.

Festivals:

The KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL runs over four days. Highlights include THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, Korea’s highest-grossing film last year, starring Won Bin (Mother) as an ex-special agent who returns to action to protect a young girl; and THE SHOW MUST GO ON, a crime film meets family comedy drama starring Song Kang-ho notable for his roles in Memories of Murder and The Host. He also starred in Park Chan-wook’s JOINT SECURITY AREA which is also screening at the festival. On Sunday, the presence of Korean Cinema in Australia will be the topic of a public discussion between film critic Adrian Martin, Madman brand manager Christian Were and MIFF programmer Al Cossar at ACMI. The festival runs from September 10-13.

Old films:

The Melbourne Cinematheque presents two films by Luis Bunuel — VIRIDIANA (1961) about a young woman invited to her lecherous uncle’s house just prior to taking her vows; and NAZARIN (1959) about a Roman Catholic priest’s misadventures with a prostitute and the woman living below his hotel room. At ACMI, September 14.

Gus Van Sant’s DRUGSTORE COWBOY screens at ACMI, September 9.

Billy Wilder’s courtroom drama WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957) starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton screens with 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), Sidney Lumet’s drama set inside a jury room.

Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch in "Drugstore Cowboy" at ACMI

In an interview with David Walsh a few months ago for the World Socialist Website, Joseph McBride, film historian and author of a recent biography of Steven Spielberg, remarked scathingly:

A great deal of the academic writing in the 1970s on film was just appalling. The field was taken over by people … it’s difficult to characterize them in one sentence … but, for example, I remember reading one book on film theory that after thirty pages hadn’t mentioned a single film yet. I stopped reading the book. In the introduction of another book on film theory the author said, more or less, “I don’t have time to go to movies anymore because I’m spending all my time writing about them.” Film studies became a field populated by people who were not particularly interested in films, they were interested in something else, a fact that was not especially healthy for film studies.

The statement intended by our publication of this series of papers on unseen films is, quite simply: Bring back those great, unhealthy days! In these five essays we explore the notion of the unseen film, and how questions of not seeing, seeing nothing (as in Dorian Stuber’s essay), writing without seeing (as in the essays by myself, Daniel Fairfax and Goda Trakumaite) or the unseen films that seen films produce (as in the essay by Josefina Garcia Pullés) allow us to pose new questions both of the cinema and of its others, the latter encapsulated in McBride’s scorned “something else”: the others of cinema, the thoughts it provokes, creates, distorts or obfuscates, whose pursuit may finally be of greater value than ’seeing’. - Conall Cash

On Not Seeing Films: Experience and Ideas in Criticism Conall Cash

Watching The Clock Daniel Fairfax

Seeing Nothing: Lanzmann, Godard and Sontag’s Fantasies of Voluntarism Dorian Stuber

From The East Goda Trakumaite

Looking For Creators Josefina Garcia Pullés

I’ll begin by considering a remarkable essay by the French critic Serge Daney, from 1992, called “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” which raises this question of writing and not seeing quite starkly.

Among the many films I’ve never seen there is [Gillo Pontecorvo’s] Kapo. Am I the only one who has never seen this film but has never forgotten it? I haven’t seen Kapo and yet at the same time I have seen it. I’ve seen it because someone showed it to me — with words… I know it only through a short text: the review written by Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma… entitled On Abjection.

Rivette didn’t recount the film’s narrative in his article. Instead he was content to describe one shot in a single sentence. The sentence, engraved in my memory, read: “Just look at the shot in Kapo where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbed wire: the man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final frame – deserves only the most profound contempt.” Therefore a simple camera movement could be the one movement not to make. The movement one must — obviously — be abject to make. As soon as I read those lines I knew the author was absolutely right.

Over the years, “the tracking shot in Kapo” would become my portable dogma, the axiom that wasn’t up for discussion, the breaking point of any debate. I would definitely have nothing to do or share with anyone who didn’t immediately feel the abjection of “the tracking shot in Kapo.”

It’s a rich and evocative passage, but what I want to bring out from it is just how it figures the binary of experience and idea, and the role it offers to criticism in traversing this binary. It’s striking and I think significant that Daney’s “breaking point of debate,” this firm line separating what is acceptable in cinema from what is not, should be established around a film that the critic has not seen. Firstly, in doing this Daney makes a case for the primacy and vitality of criticism, its capacity to show films “with words,” as he puts it. This means something very different from the reduction of a film to its narrative content or its overall ‘meaning’ or attitude. What is contemptible in Kapo is not what the film ‘says’ about the Holocaust (which might be derived from a description of the film’s narrative which, Daney points out, Rivette does not give), but the workings of this single tracking shot, and the politics and ethics of this image – which can, Daney suggests, be precisely conveyed through words, without the reader witnessing or experiencing the image itself. There is certainly a sense here in which Daney praises criticism (Rivette’s criticism) for its ability to evoke an image with precision, to allow the reader to see and know the image, as if as a spectator.

Yet in another sense, Daney’s insistence on the ‘correctness’ of Rivette’s response to Kapo is linked not to the evocation of the image, but to its outright refusal. He avoids seeing Kapo so as to maintain fidelity to Rivette’s words – implicit in this refusal to watch Pontecorvo’s film, I think, is an apprehension over the power of the cinematic image to ‘subjectivise’ and to immerse the spectator. To see the film would be to risk losing the objectivity and certitude of Rivette’s words, to risk seeing something Rivette has not shown him, to risk the corruption of the conviction or idea as it crumbles amidst the all-encompassing presence of experience. Written language is on the side of ideas and the fixing of meaning, images on the side of experience, undecidability, the dispersal of meanings; a familiar enough dichotomy, though one we have perhaps learnt to be suspicious of. What Daney calls his “conviction” about what is and is not politically and ethically acceptable in cinema is necessarily founded upon an image he refuses to see (even as he says that Rivette “shows” it to him), because of this logic that to see is to assent. The strength of the conviction, of the idea, depends upon this refusal.

Daney continues:

It was possible to be upset with Pontecorvo for inconsiderately abolishing a distance he should have “kept.” The tracking shot was immoral for the simple reason that it was putting [me] in a place where [I] did not belong, because he ‘deported’ me from my real situation as a spectator made witness, forcing me to be part of the picture. What was the meaning of [Jean-Luc] Godard’s formula, ‘The tracking shot is a moral affair,’ if not that one should never put oneself where one isn’t?

The shot described by Rivette eradicates the distance between the spectator and the other, this dead woman, victim of the concentration camps, tracking in on her body, positioning it artfully within the frame; it is a pornographic image, offered up to the spectator for possession, blotting out the distance, blotting out the acknowledgement of my inability to know the other’s suffering. Despite Daney’s own eradication of distance in this paragraph – eradicating the distance between himself and Pontecorvo by effacing the middle-man, Rivette, now referring to himself as the film’s spectator rather than Rivette’s reader – he still in a sense needs this distance, needs to factor this distance (the fact that he has not seen Kapo) into his narrative: this is an image that, in being seen, does violence, and so one must refuse to see it. Rivette’s text allows Daney to both ‘know’ and refuse the image: in short, to know it without experiencing it.

I want to spend some more time thinking about this word, experience, and how it’s presented to us in art criticism. Experience is often taken to be that which precedes interpretation, abstraction, analysis, and the production of meanings or ‘readings’ of an artwork: it is the individual’s primary, immediate encounter with the object. I want now to spend some time considering Susan Sontag’s well known 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” which I think provides a clear example of this conception of experience in art. Before beginning I should note that, as with Daney, I’m taking Sontag here at her most polemical – it’s true that her own critical practice in the years following this early essay does not always adhere to the strict binary logic that, as I’ll be suggesting, is operating here. Still, this essay offers a useful contrast to the texts of Daney and of others I’ll discuss later, in regard to how she positions these key terms.

Sontag posits her central dichotomy between experience and interpretation, or experience and meaning, at the level of temporality, from the beginning of the essay.

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

The temporal distinction between experience as primary and primal, and interpretation (which she here calls “theory”) as secondary, reductive, deadening, is further enforced through Sontag’s language. Postulating what the earliest experience of art “must have been,” Sontag acknowledges that this original experience cannot be known, only hinted at, even as she tells us what it was. Experience, she suggests, is not reducible to historical knowledge, not dateable – thus she can only intuit what it “must have been”. The first theory of art, however, is historically locatable (with the Greeks), and in shifting from experience to idea Sontag shifts from the conditional to the simple past tense (“must have been” to “proposed”), reinforcing the notion that theory and interpretation belong to recorded knowledge, while experience exists outside this record, preceding it. Experience, in this formulation, is precisely pre-historical, and with each experience of art we find ourselves (temporarily) called back to that “incantatory,” pre-historic state, before those meddling Greeks came and spoiled everything with their dreaded theory.

In elaborating her notion of interpretation, Sontag further entrenches this binary, returning continually to the figure of experience:

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” …Away with all duplicates of [the world], until we again experience more immediately what we have. …Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. …We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. …The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us.

We can note that in this passage Sontag introduces a spatial dimension to the binary that structures her argument, in addition to the temporal one, with the (oddly Platonic) separation of “the world” which is experienced and “a shadow world of meanings.” But the temporal logic of her thought is still of central importance here, in the introduction of the idea that, thanks to interpretation and “meaning,” experience itself has been degraded, corrupted. History reaches back into pre-history and distorts it, so that our experiences are always already tainted by interpretation. Sontag now posits a third temporal point, which is the imagined future to which criticism will hopefully lead us, and which will be a recovery of that real, pre-interpretative experience of art (“We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”). Again, and despite her identifying the origin of all art criticism’s woes with the Greeks, Sontag appears rather more Platonic than she apparently intends: does this striving for learning and truth through recollection not follow the logic of anamnesis?

We find then that this notion of contamination or dilution that I saw at work in Daney is present in Sontag, only in inverted form. Whereas in Daney, it is experience that contaminates the idea, in Sontag it is meaning, interpretation and the realm of ideas that contaminate experience. Both also rely on the understanding of experience as immersive and in that sense pre-historic (it precedes the moment at which I can tell a story about it), and it is for this reason I think that Sontag turns so heavily to cinema (that art form so often understood to be the most utterly immersive) in the section of her essay that discusses particular artworks directly. Sontag emphasises cinema as the art that is most in need of a refusal of interpretation: “Ideally, it is possible to elude [interpretation] by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be just what it is. …It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now.” The immersive qualities of the cinema experience that Daney remains suspicious of are here celebrated precisely for their capacity to ward off interpretation.

Sontag continues with this idea, writing of a famous sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence that “those who reach for a Freudian interpretation are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.” It is our inability to see and “respond” to “what is there on the screen” that leads us to interpret, and so try to rid ourselves of the dirty shame of not being able to properly experience, which is the fate of modern man. The link established in Daney’s text between (ethico-political) conviction, the idea, and the refusal of experience is again present in Sontag, where the polemical argument is instead that any writing about art that attempts to remove us from this womblike space of experience, through the positing of meanings or ideas rather than revealing what she later calls “the sensuous surface of art,” is a flight from authenticity.

Now, I want to turn briefly to a third, recent case which raises some of these same questions for film criticism. Earlier this year Slavoj Žižek wrote an essay critical of James Cameron’s Avatar, also, as it happens, published in Cahiers du Cinéma. Žižek’s ideological critique attacks the film’s use of racist, colonialist motifs underpinning its ostensible, politically correct message. More interesting than the article itself is an interview Žižek did with Cahiers for the following issue, during which he announced that he had in fact not seen Avatar. “Sometimes,” he remarked, “I read something about a film, I watch some clips from it, and an idea comes to me. And I’m worried that seeing the film will interfere with this idea. So, as a good Hegelian, between the idea and the reality, I choose the idea.”

Now, anyone who doesn’t like Žižek’s work will no doubt see this admission as evidence of his laziness and illegitimacy as a film critic: Žižek is indeed often taken to task for what critics see as his lack of attention to matters of form, his reduction of films to a description of their storylines which he then runs through a pre-established Lacanian and/or Hegelian-Marxist theoretical mill, producing results that tell us nothing about the art of cinema in its dynamic complexity. His decision to write about films without having fully seen them, relying on descriptions and perhaps a few clips, can from this perspective be seen as simply an extension of his generally inattentive critical approach. It is perhaps more useful though to take seriously Žižek’s suggestion that the idea must sometimes be maintained at the expense of the reality (or, we might say, the experience), and to use his position as a useful foil to Sontag’s valorisation of form and the real of experience as the truth of art.

To conclude I want to say a couple of things about how this relates to questions of modernism and our all-too familiar understanding of them. Fredric Jameson, in a wonderful book called Brecht and Method, offers these thoughts regarding the relationship between modernism and ideas in literature:

We may well pause to remember T.S. Eliot’s revealing remarks, at the very dawn of the modern movement, on the relationship between ‘ideas’ and literary texts. They are remarks which conjure up an atmosphere of philosophical pragmatism hostile to system… but also of a general Imagism in literature, which marked the feeling of modern writers generally that the idea in the text was a kind of foreign body; that such ‘literary’ ideas demanded special precautions, and at the outside limit, in the extremist cases, demanded to be tracked down and eliminated altogether (‘say it, not in ideas but in things’). This literary-ideological attitude is perhaps most memorably formulated in Eliot’s grand celebration of Henry James: ‘he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it’.

With the reading of Brecht that he goes on to develop, Jameson makes the case for a rehabilitation of the place of ideas in modernism, against the polemics of an Eliot (or a Sontag). What I take to be one of the primary virtues of this perverse critical tradition that I’ve sketched a little in this paper is its suspicion of the empty formalism championed by such thinking, which, in refusing the idea as that which exists outside and comes after the artwork (and the ‘immediate’ experience of it), imagines itself to be reaching closer to the real of the work in its pre-ideational, pure form. As I have suggested though, texts like Daney’s “Tracking Shot in Kapo” and Zizek’s writings on cinema work by inverting rather than revoking this logic, maintaining fidelity to the idea through a refusal or displacement of experience; their continued reliance upon this dichotomy between the two points perhaps to the limitations of such a critical approach. The next step may be to attempt something akin to what Jameson does with Brecht, and first of all by strongly critiquing this whole notion of a pre-history of pure experience that we find in Sontag amongst others, working instead to consider the experiential grounding of ideas, and perhaps even the ideational qualities of experience, its inseparability from language and meaning. Taking such an approach to the cinema will of course open up further questions in addition to those Jameson poses for literature and the theatre: given the centrality of the figures of experience and the spectator to so much of the discourse around cinema, an attempt to think about the interpenetration of experience and ideas in film spectatorship and criticism would seem especially pertinent.

WORKS CITED

Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” in Postcards From The Cinema, trans. Paul Grant. Berg, 2007.

Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998.

Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Dell, 1967.

Slavoj Žižek, “Un éxércice d’idéologie politiquement correct,” in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 654, March 2010.

Slavoj Žižek, “Éléments d’autocritique: Entretien avec Slavoj Žižek,” in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 655, April 2010.

Having carved out a couple of days free of in-semester duties at Yale, and with a number of engagements further enticing me, I had decided to embark on one of my regular (though not as regular as I would sometimes like) weekend trips down to Manhattan. Riding the Metro-North train from New Haven’s Union station – a 90-minute commute to Grand Central – I idly leafed through the pages of the copy of the New York Times I had picked up at the station’s newsstand, while the Connecticut countryside cascaded past me. Perusing the arts pages, I came across an article by Roberta Smith on a video work which had just commenced screening at the Paula Cooper gallery in Chelsea.[i] Smith was positively gushing over Christian Marclay’s The Clock, and – although I could hardly be said to be an ardent disciple of her art criticism – by the end of her review Smith had convinced me it was worthwhile to squeeze a trip to the West 21^st Street gallery into my schedule, in order to see this intriguing work for myself.

The premise of Marclay’s piece is simple, and carries on from earlier works of his such as Telephones and Video Quartet. The video consists of an intense montage of found-footage, culled from the history of cinema and television, and lasting 24 hours. For the vast majority of the duration of the work (there are some exceptions here and there, but they are by and large linking shots giving the work a semblance of semantic continuity), which can be played on-loop for days, weeks or months on end, timepieces of various kinds are visible on-screen, the shots of which have been arranged so as to give the precise time that the spectator experiences in the “real world”. So, when it is 10:24am for the public, the on-screen timepiece will unfailingly show the time to be 10:24am.

What could have proven to be a tedious or overly academic exercise, which video art aficionados would attend more out of a sense of duty than excitement, is given a captivating quality not only by the mesmerising nature of the footage, and the uncanny experience of literally watching time, but also by the mini-narratives Marclay spins from editing together sequences from disparate films (in the manner of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma), as well as the montage-echoes permeating the film. By all reports, The Clock is a unique, fundamentally unprecedented perceptual experience.

I say “by all reports”, because, alas!, I have not actually watched the piece first-hand. You see, I had managed to fit a timeslot to make it over to Chelsea between having lunch with an old friend in the East Village and watching a Fritz Lang American-period double-bill at the Film Forum on Houston Street, but, upon taking leave of my friend, the heavens opened with such ferocity that, sopping wet, I had to take refuge in the cosy surrounds of St Mark’s bookstore. At this point, the idea of trundling uptown through the tempestuous downpour to speculatively take in half an hour or so of a video installation which I – obviously out of the loop in these matters – had only heard about through reading a Roberta Smith-review on the train down to the city, only to then come back downtown for the Fritz Lang double, had become distinctly unpalatable, and I contented myself with whiling away the remaining time rifling through the bookshop’s contemporary theory section, before heading over to Houston Street.

Not long afterwards, I came to regret my lack of hardiness. Giving a guest seminar precisely on the intersections between the cinema and the gallery world, Thomas Elsaesser (forgive me the namedrop!) related his own thoughts on viewing The Clock, and rarely have I witnessed an academic, let alone one of Elsaesser’s stature, be so effusive in their response to an artwork. For Elsaesser, watching the piece, which he did on several occasions during his stay in Manhattan, was an epiphanic experience, during which, in his own words, he felt an intense sensation of being more alive. What more can we ask for from moving images? Hearing this, I would gladly have made the trip back to New York the next day for the express purpose of even a momentary viewing of Marclay’s work, but, sadly, by this time its run in the Paula Cooper gallery had come to an end.

So why write about something that I have not had the opportunity to appreciate for myself, given that there are already so many ill-informed articles about works by people who have seen them? A couple of reasons.

Firstly, because my experience represents a distinct counter-tendency to the prevailing discourse on the unprecedented accessibility of audiovisual material in the modern world. Marclay’s The Clock will not be sold on DVD, nor will it be available for download, or as an iPhone app. I won’t be able to watch it in the comfort of my living room, or in the palm of my hand while waiting for a bus. This is not just due to the quixotically anti-Benjaminian practices prevalent in the gallery world, where the infinite reproducibility of video works is denied, and they are instead, for the most part, released in extremely limited editions intended for exclusive (and concomitantly expensive) purchase by institutions or wealthy patrons. For once, there is a genuine logistical foundation to this modus operandi. The Clock simply makes no sense in a format, such as DVD or VOD, where the viewer has control over its temporal flux. Giving the spectator the ability to stop, play, pause, rewind or skip chapters would entirely rob Marclay’s work of the force it exerts on those who submit themselves to its spell, which comes precisely from the fact that the time shown on-screen flows at exactly the rhythm as that experienced off-screen, and, furthermore, that it does so beyond the control of the spectator.[ii] Indeed, seeing the work in its entirety is basically impossible, at least in a single sitting: Smith managed to last 4½ hours, while Marclay himself (probably the only person to have a complete knowledge of the work) admits that the most enduring spectator sat through 8 hours, or a mere third of its duration.

Given that few institutions will be willing to give themselves over to this perceptual experiment, and that the prevailing modes of exhibition in the contemporary art world prevent a wide proliferation of the work, it is fated to make a solitary, sporadic tour around a clutch of galleries or museums located in the epicentres of Western culture. And so it is that I may never, in my life, actually see The Clock. Already, since its New York run end, it has returned to London (where the work made its debut), for a stint in the Hayward gallery in April. In June, it made its way to Venice for the Biennale, garnering a Golden Lion for best artwork. Where it goes to from there is anyone’s guess, but unless it happens to turn up in a city where I am concurrently residing, or – more unlikely, I have to admit – I resolve to travel specifically in order to take in a viewing of the piece, I will not be privy to its delights.

The point here is that it is all too common to say that films (or video works) are more easily accessible than ever, when, in fact, for whatever logistical or artificial reasons, the opposite is often the case. This not only applies to installation work, or time-based pieces such as Marclay’s. Surely one of the big trends in film-viewing habits in the last decade has been the explosion of film festival tourism: people travelling to different cities, countries, or even continents, in order to take in, in quick succession, a range of films they would be unable to see in their hometown.

Or, at least, unable to see in a cinema. This, perhaps, is the real transformation: we can watch, at any time we wish, a digitised version of a work at home on our flat-screen television, or sitting on a train using our smartphone – that is, in private viewing conditions. But if we want to watch it in the public sphere, together with an audience, and even, rare as this may become, projected on celluloid, we are going to have to travel further than we ever have before. If I content myself with the visually wretched pirated Internet download of a video dupe of L’Amour fou, I can watch it when and wherever I want, but if I hope to see an actual print of the film I will have to wait for years, or possibly decades, for it to screen near where I live, or cross the seas for a Rivette retrospective programme playing in a distant city.

On a different note, my experience of not watching The Clock has also inspired in me the urge to write about one other – distinctly more unheralded – aspect of moving image spectatorship. I cannot count the number of times that, seated in a cinema, my mind has drifted from the film unspooling in front of me, my thoughts finally resting on a desire to know what the time is. Most of the time this will involve – for me, who doesn’t own a watch – a furtive glance at my mobile phone, as I attempt to unobtrusively illuminate its screen away from the glances of neighbouring patrons, hyper-aware of the annoyance I could be provoking. But, occasionally, if I am in a more sluggish or torpid disposition, preventing me from making the effort to dig my phone from out of my pocket, and a timepiece happens to appear in the film playing before my eyes, I will momentarily try to read the time on-screen in a hope to answer my query, only to immediately realise the futility – indeed, folly – of such an endeavour.

This experience was hammered home to me not long after my missed date with Marclay, when, in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, I lost my phone, and thus, for several excruciating days, had no reliable way of telling the time. Anyone who has been to the festival will appreciate that knowing the time is an absolute necessity at Cannes, as one attempts to juggle a daily schedule filled with innumerable film screenings, press conferences and other engagements. While, outside the cinema, I was able to have recourse to public clocks or snatched glances at the watches of passers-by, inside I had no means of divining the time – particularly crucial if I had to leave a screening early to join the queue for another one (a lamentably frequent aspect of attending Cannes). And so, again and again, in the state of agitation this condition would plunge me into, I succumbed to looking at on-screen clocks as a method for telling the time, seemingly unable to allow the inevitable pointlessness of the practice to deter me from repeating the gesture.

Am I the only one to be afflicted with this peculiar propensity? It seems not. Éric Rohmer, at least, has written about the experience. Discussing Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia in the May 1955 issue of Cahiers, he makes the confession that “as I watched the film thoughts went off in directions far from those of the plot itself, like someone who goes into the cinema to kill time between appointments and, with his mind more on his own concerns than those of the film, is surprised to discover himself trying to read the time on a watch that one of the actors on the screen is wearing.” Ah, I have indeed found a kindred spirit! Rohmer, for once writing under his real name (Maurice Schérer), attributes this mindset to the particularly elasticised rhythm Rossellini gave the film, adding “I was plunged into all kinds of absurd trains of thought by things like the pattern of George Sanders’ tweed jacket, how old he must be, how much he’s aged since Rebecca or All About Eve, Ingrid Bergman’s hairstyle, not to speak of the shape of the skulls in the catacombs or new archaeological methods – for which a more sustained tempo in the plot wouldn’t have allowed time.” But, Rohmer concludes, these bouts of distractions are precisely the effect that Rossellini intended: “I noticed that even while my imagination seemed to wander, time and time again it forced me back relentlessly to the very subject of the film. In this film in which everything appears incidental, everything, even the craziest mental digressions, is essentially a part of the film.”[iii]

And so, by Rohmer’s way of thinking, I am not entirely unjustified in this lengthy excursus, when I am ostensibly supposed to be writing about The Clock; this whole piece, indeed, has taken the form of a distracted film-viewing, where we begin with the subject matter at hand, but end up, through a process of mental association, preoccupied by an entirely different theme. And it is the best films which incite us to do this, much as the greatest novels will so frequently lead us to continue reading their words while our mind is captivated by other, tenuously related thoughts they have inspired, only to reach the end of the page and realise we have taken nothing in of the preceding passages.

But the remarkable aspect of scrutinising a clock on screen, in an attempt to figure out the actual time, is that this form of mental oscillation between the world of the artwork and the “real world” occurs within a fraction of a second. Indeed, though I am no expert in neuropsychology, I would hazard to say that the process is instantaneous: no sooner do I seek the time on-screen than I realise my error. Thus, somehow, momentarily, I fully reside in two distinct worlds. With my guard let down, the barriers that normally separate me from the world of the film become permeable. It is as if, albeit only for an instant, I inhabit the film – not because I am so absorbed in the events it portrays, but precisely because I am in a distracted state of detachment from its diegesis.

These moments of suspension between two, mutually exclusive realities, fleeting as they are, represent, to my mind, the most wondrous aspect of watching film. Perhaps it is this, then, which provides the power of Marclay’s The Clock. By persistently showing us an on-screen time which is the same as the time we experience, even though the footage is culled from a panoply of pre-existing films which patently did not seek to abide by the same rule, Marclay refuses to jolt us out of our momentary ontological lapse, and, instead, our vacillation between worlds is prolonged, deepened, intensified. The result, as Elsaesser can attest, but as I will have to bide my time before being able to verify, is no more nor less than to make us feel more alive.

[ii] It’s true that imaginative ways of giving this work a mass proliferation are conceivable: The Clock could be shown on television (with an entire channel dedicated to showing it for weeks on end), or it could even be purchased as a video screen, for use in the house as an actual clock.

[iii] See: Maurice Schérer, “La terre du Miracle”. In: Cahiers du cinéma #46, May 1955.

About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing.

—Claude Lanzmann

o how marvelous

to be able to watch what one can’t see

—Jean-Luc Godard

Less than ten years separate the births of Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and Susan Sontag (b. 1933), three of the twentieth century’s most significant theorists of the image.  Each was a child or adolescent during the war who avoided, by accident of circumstance and birth, its worst depredations; each would be profoundly affected by images—real and imagined—of the Holocaust.  Each describes that experience by using the term “nothing”—not, however, as we might expect, to designate absence but rather to indicate presence.  For these thinkers, in other words, something comes from nothing; that something, I argue, is a notion of individual agency that we might have supposed destroyed forever by the very events that prompted the images to which these thinkers respond.

I begin by considering a debate between Godard and Lanzmann over the value of something that is straightforwardly nothing, in that it does not exist:  hypothetical footage of the so-called “Final Solution” in operation. The imagined film would show what happened in the gas chambers in the Nazi extermination camps.  In a version of the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterises the debate, one critic has named this hypothetical footage la pellicule maudite (the damned film/footage) [Delfour qtd. in Saxton 53].[1] Godard is convinced that this footage exists:

I have no proof of what I’m saying, but I think that if I got to work on it with a good investigative journalist, within twenty years I would find images of the gas chambers. We would see the deportees arriving and we would see in what state they left. (qtd. in Brody 585)

Godard’s stake in this search is higher than the quixotic, even bemusing image of Godard as muckraking journalist or private investigator suggests. The discovery of such footage—and, one presumes, its manipulation in the technique of montage that characterizes Godard’s work—would redress nothing less than what he calls the failure of cinema.  Explaining to an interviewer that the New Wave was anything but a revolutionary beginning, Godard describes his idiosyncratic history of cinema:

[I]n fact [by the time of the New Wave] it was already too late.  It was all over.  The culmination was the moment when we didn’t film the concentration camps.  At that instant, cinema completely neglected its duty.  Six million people, mainly Jews, were killed or gassed, and cinema was not there… In not filming the concentration camps, cinema completely gave up. (qtd. in Saxton 48)

Godard replaces the pronoun “we” with the noun “cinema,” as if he wishes to elide the question of agency and responsibility.  Who constitutes this “we” anyway? The Nazis?  The Allies who liberated the camps?[2] Humanity as a whole?  I submit that it is in Godard’s interest to avoid such questions, so that he can reserve personal pronouns, like the heroic “I” of the previous passage, hunting down footage we didn’t even know we had lost, for the task of rehabilitating a surprisingly naïve understanding of human agency and intentionality. Godard’s personification of cinema as a failed agent thus displaces responsibility away from anyone in particular or everyone in general, and preserves the notion of human agency as not only possible but also efficacious.

Richard Brody’s excellent biography of Godard shows that the filmmaker had long been preoccupied by, even obsessed with, the relation of cinema to the events of the Holocaust.  But the event that prompted Godard’s thoughts about the hypothetical gas chamber footage was the release and critical success of Claude Lanzmann’s nine and a half hour documentary Shoah (1985). Godard particularly took exception to Lanzmann’s decision to avoid historical footage of any kind and to use historical documentation sparingly.  (One of very few exceptions of the latter is a memorandum, read by Lanzmann, which describes the limitations of the gas vans that were used as a precursor to the gas chambers (the exhaust was sent into the back of the truck, asphyxiating its human cargo).  Significantly, Lanzmann immediately connects this document to the present:  the trucks were manufactured by a company named Saurer, a company that, as we learn when the camera closes in on the mud flaps of a truck in modern-day Germany, remains in business.) Kent Jones is right to suggest, in a recent reappraisal of the film, that there is something amazing in the perpetual amazement expressed by the film’s viewers about Lanzmann’s decision (62). For Godard, at least, that amazement is expressed as hostility, beginning with his claim that the film “showed nothing at all” (qtd in Saxton 46).[3]

Godard’s use of “nothing” is echoed but countered by Lanzmann’s assertion that, after a year spent reading historical and theoretical sources about the Holocaust—sources of the same order as Godard’s imagined historical footage—in preparation for shooting his film, he “understood nothing,” an absence that he could only counter by setting Shoah entirely in the present (Chevrie 38).   What Godard might consider the most important something—archival material, photographic and cinematic images of the events of the “final solution”—is nothing to Lanzmann: “I call these ‘images without imagination.’ They are just images that have no power” (40).  But Lanzmann, who is like Godard and indeed everyone who inveighs on this topic in that he seems compelled to make extravagant statements, does not simply disagree with Godard’s desire for archival material, the ne plus ultra of which would be the hypothetical gas chamber footage.  Rather, he accepts the terms of Godard’s fantasy—only, of course, to repudiate it entirely:

If I had found an existing film—a secret film because it was strictly prohibited—made by an SS man showing how 3,000 Jews, men, women and children, died together, asphyxiated in the gas chamber of Crematorium II at Auschwitz; if I had found that, not only would I not have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I am not capable of saying why. It goes without saying. (qtd. in Saxton 128 n6)

Godard took this response as a prohibition.  He linked it to the famously misunderstood statement of Theodor Adorno’s that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz:

There’s no point to issuing prohibitions like Lanzmann or Adorno, who exaggerate, because then we find ourselves caught up in endless discussions over formulas such as, “It’s unfilmable”—one must not prevent people from filming, one must not burn books, or else one can no longer criticize them. (qtd. in Brody 585)

Others have levelled similar accusations at Lanzmann, including Ron Rosenbaum, whose intemperate response to the latter’s theories of whether the Holocaust can be understood stem, in large measure, from an event that took place at Yale University in the 1990s.  The survivor and analyst Louis Micheels invited Lanzmann to respond to a documentary about the Nazi doctor Eduard Wirths, who had helped Micheels and others to survive the notorious extermination camp “selections”.  Once Lanzmann saw the film, in the days before the event, he refused to be present at the screening or to discuss it; he would only discuss his refusal.  In the text of that evening’s proceedings some attendees criticise Lanzmann for his highhanded refusal to engage with the film or, indeed, even to show it.  One person calls that refusal “an ideological stance which is a repetition of exactly what it is that you’re attempting to help us understand” (214).  This is not the only time Lanzmann’s attitude has been compared to the Nazis’.  Lanzmann has repeatedly explained his refusal to understand the Holocaust (he has called such understanding “an obscenity”) by referring to a story told by Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz (1958).  Like all the deportees, Levi found himself plagued by thirst on his arrival at Auschwitz.  He reaches for an icicle hanging from one of the barracks; an SS guard immediately snatches it away. To Levi’s (astonished and, in the circumstances, astonishing) question: Why? the guard replies:  Hier ist kein warum (Here there is no why).  Rosenbaum and Micheels observe that it is peculiar for Lanzmann to predicate his response to the Holocaust on the claims of the perpetrators (Rosenbaum 265-6, Micheels qtd. in Lanzmann Obscenity 219 n. 8). Some critics, like the historian Dominick LaCapra, have considered Lanzmann’s responses in philosophical terms, describing his method as a Bilderverbot, an instance of a ban on images, as presented in the Second Commandment.

Yet any attempt to oppose Godard and Lanzmann, despite the apparent opposition of the stands they take on the matter of the gas chamber footage, will ultimately founder.  It is not merely that, as Saxton argues, the two are united by their opposition to conventional modes of filmmaking, exemplified by their shared whipping boy, Steven Spielberg.  There are genuine differences between them. But those differences are not the ones they first seem to be.  Looking more closely, we see a chiastic rather than an oppositional relation between Lanzmann and Godard.

Lanzmann refuses the idea of the archive in favour of testimony.  He uses no historical footage, refers almost to no primary documents, stages no historical reconstructions (except in the idiosyncratic form of memory, as I note below).  Instead he presents us with testimony—we listen as three groups of people, Nazi perpetrators, Polish gentile bystanders, and Jewish survivors, tell us, in response to Lanzmann’s often insistent questions, their stories.  Following the principle laid down in Holocaust historiography by Raul Hilberg (who is interviewed in the film), Lanzmann values minutiae.  He does not ask: why did the Holocaust happen?  He asks instead:  what colour were the Saurer vans? Shoah, he says, is a film “from the ground up, a topographical film, a geographical film” (Chevrie 39).  Especially given that many of these interviews are conducted through a translator—and the process of translation is not edited out; we see it in action—Lanzmann’s film is organised around mediation. He values the indirect over the direct.  But this valuation, although never stated as such, is only strategic, temporary.  It is ultimately subordinated to an even stronger belief in its opposite—the idea of direct access to the past, specifically to the events of the Holocaust.  In making a film in which every shot takes place in the present, Lanzmann affirms the continuity of the Holocaust in contemporary life.  (Not least in scenes in which Polish peasants, obstreperously posed in front of a church, assert to Lanzmann that there were never problems with the Jews, yet their language, so redolent of anti-Semitism, replicates the logic of the Holocaust.) Primarily the past continues to live on in the present through memory, which, for Lanzmann, is most valuable when it returns the witness to past experiences, flooding him (Lanzmann’s interviewees are almost invariably male) in an abreaction that dissolves the distinction between past and present.  Thus Lanzmann’s preference for moments in which what he calls a “neutral and flat” discourse about the past gives way to something much more overwhelming, and the witness, like a psychoanalytic patient, finds himself reliving past experience.   Such moments sometimes happen serendipitously, such as when the engineer who drove trainloads of Jews to Treblinka, asked by Lanzmann to once again drive a similar locomotive, spontaneously reproduces the throat-slitting gesture (hand slashed across the windpipe) he made at the time, apparently to warn the Jews of their impending fate.  (“Compared to this image,” says Lanzmann, “archival photographs become unbearable.” (Chevrie 43).) But sometimes they must be staged, as in the much-discussed example of the testimony of Abraham Bomba.  Bomba, a barber in life before and after his internment, was ordered to cut the hair of women prisoners before their gassing.  Lanzmann questions him in a barbershop in Tel Aviv that he had rented for the day; he asked the newly retired Bomba to cut a volunteer’s hair.  As Lanzmann puts it:

And from this moment on, truth became incarnate, and as he relived the scene, his knowledge became carnal. It is a film about the incarnation of truth. That’s a cinematic scene. (Chevrie 41)

Lanzmann’s dizzying rhetoric is at once of immediacy and mediation:  the incarnation of the past, through repeated relived corporeal gestures, is a cinematic scene.  Mere telling is not enough; witnesses had to act out their story; they had to become their past (and thus still-present) self.  LaCapra uses Freudian terminology to describe Lanzmann’s method:  the latter seeks out moments in which witnesses “act out” their experience, but it is unclear whether he allows them to “work through” those abreactions.  Either way, the paradox I am emphasising is that Lanzmann repudiates the past only to affirm it.  He denigrates one notion of history only to arrive at another (in his eyes, more valuable, all-encompassing). As Lanzmann puts it, “the film is the abolition of all distance between past and present; I relive this history in the present” (Chevrie 45).  Through indirect access we arrive at direct access; or, to change the metaphor, we blind ourselves in order to see.  This metaphor comes from Lanzmann himself, who repeatedly describes his filmmaking in terms of blindness:

Not to understand was my ironclad rule during all the years Shoah was in the making… Keeping my guard up, wearing these blinkers, and this blindness itself, were the vital condition of creation.  Blindness should be understood here as seeing in its purest form, the only way not to avert the gaze to a reality that is literally blinding:  blindness as clear-sightedness itself. (Hier 51)

Godard, by contrast, values the archive rather than testimony. Thus he wants direct footage of the camps, not indirect witnessing from years later.  Perhaps surprisingly, given his constant awareness of film as an opaque medium of representation, Godard cannot conceive of any filming that isn’t direct.  Even the possibility of a fictional film about the Holocaust, although not for him the abhorrent impossibility it is for Lanzmann, runs aground on a breathtaking refusal of the very idea of fictionality.  In an interview given in 1980 at Cannes, Godard explained:

I’d like to make a film on the concentration camps.  But one must have the means.  How to find twenty thousand extras who weigh thirty kilos? What’s more, one would have to really beat them. But what assistant would be willing to beat up a skeletal extra? (qtd. in Brody 510)

This is polemical, surely.  But if one thinks, for example, of the physical beauty, despite makeup and other effects, and health of the actors in a fictional cinematic reconstruction like Schindler’s List (1993) one gets a sense of what Godard is critiquing.  (We might take Godard’s statement as an oblique contribution to the debate begun by Jacques Rivette about the tracking shot of Emmanuel Riva’s death in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1959), which Conall Cash has written about elsewhere in this issue.) Thus I think we should take Godard at his word here, which would be to concede that film cannot countenance fictiveness, which would be to believe that it offers direct access to the real. But it does so not simply through a naïve, positivistic notion of reference or evidentiariness.  (Though, to be sure, at the bottom of Godard’s claim must lie something like Barthes’s claim about photography in Camera Lucida—that in this art there is an actual trace of the historical referent.)  Godard is famous for saying that there is no such thing as a just image; there is just an image.  But in fact his philosophy makes the contrary claim—that images are by definition connected to justice.  Recall his pronouncement:  the failure of cinema is that it did not film the camps.  As Brody explains, this absence or oversight can only be a failure if film has extraordinary powers.  Godard assumes “the medium’s overwhelming popularity would have compelled a worldwide public outcry against the Holocaust, had it only been shown in movies. He took for granted the power of images… to inspire viewers’ confidence, compel their belief, and arouse their outrage” (Brody 512). In the first episode of Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-98), Godard speaks similarly of the cinema’s “humble/and formidable power/of transfiguration” (39). For Godard, this failure is a function of cinema’s preference for its spectacular rather than its documentary tradition.

But just like Lanzmann, who valued indirect testimony as a means of achieving direct access to the past, Godard complicates his argument by reversing the value of his terms.  The direct access to the past that cinema (at least in its Godardian incarnation) promises is predicated on indirection—on the manipulation of images, on the transformation of their meaning by their juxtaposition through montage.  Indeed, for all his dislike of Shoah, Godard has availed himself of the film, taking the footage of the train driver at Treblinka and manipulating it in slow motion in one of the episodes of Histoire(s) du Cinema; the latter is the text he created in some ways as a response to Shoah, composed as it is by nothing but “archival” footage (be it historical, found, or excerpted from other films). For Godard, then, the value of the immediate is only apparent through its translation via mediation.

Saxton is right when she says that these disagreements, however strongly worded, don’t appear overwhelming in the face of most cinematic representations of the Holocaust.  Godard and Lanzmann have both, for example, spoken out against Schindler’s List.  (Born in 1946, Spielberg is of a different generation than Godard, Lanzmann, and Sontag.) Its most discussed scene is the one in which a trainload of the Schindlerjuden, having mistakenly been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau rather than to a work camp in Czechoslovakia, are shaved, stripped, and herded into a bath and disinfection room that is ominously bolted behind them.  We watch, first from outside the room, through a porthole in the door, and then from inside, as the terrified women wait for what they assume will be their death by gas.  When the showerheads release water, the scene becomes a redemptive one in which their cries of terror are washed away in cries of joy.  The scene is followed by one in which the women, dressed again, are marched past a separate line of people who are being led down into a building that a crane shot, gliding up to show the smoke and ash coming from the building’s chimney, metonymically tells us is the real gas chamber in which the overwhelming majority of prisoners perished.

This is a dubious scene, to be sure, like much of the film one of exquisite kitsch, which plays shamelessly on our feelings.  (Although there is something interestingly sadistic about aligning us, however momentarily, with the Nazi gaze, as we look through the porthole.  It is unclear how self-conscious the film is at that moment, so it is difficult to know what we are to make of the intimated connection between viewer and perpetrator.) But is it so different from the content of Godard’s desired and Lanzmann’s dreaded film?  Recall Godard’s initial description of the hypothetical film:  “We would see the deportees arriving and we would see in what state they left.”  Spielberg’s tracking shot elides the material horror of the process (the deliberately stage-y mise-en-scene—the scene was shot on a stage set constructed immediately outside the gates of Birkenau, where Speilberg was refused permission to film—as well as the trembling violin of the nondiegetic score lessen the horror of the scene), but, in the end, his scene offers a similar dialectic of seen and unseen to Godard’s imaginings.  For even Godard, in his description of the ultimate footage (of the Holocaust, of the twentieth century, even of cinema itself), elides its central “action”—the moment of dying that comes between arrival and departure.  Even the (fantasized, imagined, hypothetical) presence of this ultimate footage, then, is haunted by absence.

We may well have to agree with Lanzmann when he says, “About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing” (Chevrie 40, emphasis in original).   But “nothing” fails to appear as such.  It is always a spur to something.  For Lanzmann and Godard, what matters is the framing of that nothingness.  (The same is true for Spielberg, even if the others resent his decision as exploitative.  It seems, in the end, to be a question of what kind of exploitation one cares for:  the manipulation of Godard’s montage; the staging of Lanzmann’s abreactions; or the false consolations of Spielberg’s emphases, which make the story of the Holocaust a story of survival and regeneration.)

The debate between Godard and Lanzmann is ultimately most interesting not as a contest between competing imperatives as to how the Holocaust should be represented, but as an expression of a powerful fantasy.  Instead of asking: What should we do with hypothetical footage of the gas chamber?, I would rather us ask:  What is at stake in even imagining that such footage exists?  What dreams and desires are enabled by this fantasized object?  La pellicule maudite is a sublime object—it is imagined to have an overwhelming force that threatens to shatter the viewer (it cannot be comprehended; it makes a mockery of our pretensions to rationality; it destroys understanding) but that, crucially, ultimately does not do so, such that the viewer can overcome its assault through a renewed assertion of individual willpower.   The fantasised footage makes viewers into survivors.  Implicit in that survival is a judgement on those who perished. Let me refine this statement by adding to our discussion of Godard and Lanzmann a claim made by Susan Sontag, a critic (as well as a filmmaker) who praised both of these figures and for whom the Holocaust was also a defining event, all the more so for happening at such remove from her personal circumstances.

Sontag seldom inserted personal anecdote into her essays. (You can read Illness as Metaphor, for example, and never know that she had cancer.) But she did at least once, in her essay “In Plato’s Cave.”  The subject that prompts this autobiographical turn is the visual representation of the Holocaust:

One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation:  a negative epiphany.  For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945.  Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously.  Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. (19-20, my emphasis)

The passage is structured around a deviation. It begins in Sontag’s typical mode:  abstract, generalising, even universalising, as suggested by that knowing pronoun “one.”  Note that this generalised tendency extends, initially, to the very subject of her investigation:  the photographic representation of “ultimate horror,” which, despite the superlative adjective, doesn’t have a particular or necessary referent.  Only in the next sentence, in which Sontag describes her own iteration of this “prototypically modern” experience, does she refer to the Holocaust.  The heightened rhetorical mode of the passage only increases in the following sentences.  Sontag uses the language of trauma to describe the photographs’ effect:  she is taken by surprise, unable (initially) to process what she sees; in short, wounded. Indeed, the metaphorical wounding of being cut comes to seem literal in the face of the second metaphor of division—as if she were literally cut by the photographs that then metaphorically cut her life in two.  Yet the extremity of the situation experienced by Sontag (there is life before these photographs and life after) incites, in the move from innocence to experience, something like a “fortunate fall.”  Note that, although nothing Sontag has seen (or, presumably, will see) has the power of these photographs, the nothingness they threaten her with is eventually overcome by understanding:  “it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.”  This assertion of capable individual agency is heightened by Sontag’s repeated use of the first person in the passage, even in moments that do not necessarily call for it, such as the “to me” in the beginning part of the final sentence.

Sontag’s assertion of her ability to traverse the horror of the nothing—a version of the “radical will” she had written about in an earlier book—is echoed in a statement made by Lanzmann about his strategy in making Shoah:

I knew that the subject of my film would be death itself, death and not survival, a radical contradiction because it attested, in a way, to the impossibility of the enterprise I was throwing myself into, since the dead couldn’t speak for the dead. But it was also an illumination of such power that, once this decision became clear to me, I knew immediately that I’d see it through to the end, that nothing could make me abandon it. My film would take up the ultimate challenge: to replace the nonexistent images of death in the gas chambers. (qtd. in Tzvee, my emphasis)

This declaration takes the same form of reversal that I have delineated above:  one form of knowing (“I knew immediately that I’d see it through to the end”; I take this to be a version of the carnal knowledge Lanzmann sought to instantiate in his interviewees) trumps another (that of theory, of the “obscenity” of conventional understanding).  Even more explicitly than for Sontag, nothingness in the form of nonexistent images can be traversed, by a reversal of the use of the term “nothing.”  Now nothing can stop Lanzmann—this use of “nothing” is a kind of grammatical dummy or placeholder, which is triumphantly replaced by the first person; by the individual actions and abilities of Claude Lanzmann.

Godard too partakes of similar rhetoric; he asserts his agency in his claim that the gas chamber footage can be found:  “I think that if I got to work on it with a good investigative journalist, within twenty years I would find images of the gas chambers.”  He admits he has no proof, he too works against some kind of nothingness, but he remains undaunted.  Even if he needs the help of another, it is still “I,” Jean-Luc Godard, who will find the images.

These indicators of agency, the insistent assertions of the first person, serve the desire to counter the lack of agency experienced by the victims of the Holocaust.  Similarly, much post-Holocaust education for Jewish children in America has taken the form of assertion of individual will.  What would you have done?, Jewish children are asked in religious school classes as they simulate scenarios in which they imagine what prized possessions (including home, family, food, etc) they would give up in their attempt to escape.[4] The intention of such exercises might be to honour the lost, but the effect is to assert the present-day individual, who can imagine herself able to avoid the fate of those others.  The desire to put oneself in the shoes of the other—as, for example, visitors to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C. are asked to do, when upon arriving they receive a card with the name and personal information of one of the Holocaust’s victim, whose “progress” they check in on at various moments in their pilgrimage through the museum—is less an exercise in identification than, necessarily, in superiority.

The real import of the gas chamber footage debate, or indeed of any discussion of images or other representations of the Holocaust, is the support it gives to a fantasy of extreme voluntarism, that is, a belief in the power of individual agency.[5] In his late work The Drowned and the Saved (1987), Primo Levi lamented what he called the intolerable exceptionalism of the survivor, who in an essential way does not know the truth of the camps (a truth “known” only to those who did not survive, who he names “the drowned”) and owes his survival to forces beyond his control.  As he puts it:  “we survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it” (83).

In the end, then, perhaps Spielberg is the most honest of our image-makers, in that his film explicitly plays to the fantasy of individual agency, as noted in the very terms Schindlerjuden and Schindler’s List—the Jews who belong to Schindler, the list that Schindler makes.  It is Schindler who makes a difference, who heroically contests what Alain Resnais in Night and Fog called the Nazi machine.  When I say most honest I mean least dishonest.  Spielberg offers a false view of the Holocaust, but he does not claim to be avoiding that falsity.  He never claims to value the nothing that Godard, Lanzmann, and even Sontag transmute into the something of the self.  With Spielberg, what you see is what you get.  With the others, what you don’t see, unless you look closely, is the triumph of an I that claims not to see.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor.  “Cultural Criticism and Society.”  Prisms. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen.  Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997. 17-34.

Barthes, Roland.  Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard.  New York: Hill & Wang, 1982.

Brody, Richard.  Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.  New York: Metropolitan-Holt, 2008.

Chevrie, Marc and Herve le Roux.  “Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah.”  Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2007.  37-50.

Duras, Marguerite.  Hiroshima mon Amour.   Trans. Richard Seaver.  New York: Grove, 1994.

Godard, Jean-Luc.  Complete Text. Trans. John Howe.  Histoire(s) du Cinema. 4 vols. ECM, 1989. CD.

Hite, Molly.  The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative.  Ithaca:  Cornell UP, 1989.

Jones, Kent.  “Present Tense.”  Film Comment Jan./Feb. 2011: 62-7.

Lacapra, Dominick.  “Lanzmann’s Shoah:  “Here there is No Why.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2007. 191-229.

Lanzmann, Claude. “Hier ist kein Warum.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Ed. Stuart Liebman.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2007. 51-2.

—. “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.”  Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.  200-20.

Levi, Primo.  The Drowned and the Saved.  Trans. Raymond Rosenthal.  1988. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Night and Fog [Nuit et Brouillard].  Dir. Alain Resnais.  1955.  Criterion, 2003. DVD.

Rosenbaum, Ron.  Explaining Hitler:  The Search for the Origins of his Evil.  New York: Random, 1998.

Saxton, Libby.  Haunted Images:  Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust.  London: Wallflower, 2008.

Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perfs. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes.  1993.  Universal, 2004. DVD.

Shoah.  Dir. Claude Lanzmann.  1985.  New Yorker, 2003. DVD

Sontag, Susan.  “In Plato’s Cave.”  On Photography.  1977.  New York: Picador-Farrar, n.d. 1-24.

Tzvee. “Is Claude Lanzmann Jewish?”  Tzvee’s Talmudic Blog. 10 Dec. 2010.  Web.  20 July 2011.

The Sonderkommando were teams of prisoners, mostly Jewish, forced to operate the machinery of the gas chambers and crematoria.  Some of these men committed suicide; most were murdered by the Nazis; a small number survived.  Lanzmann is fascinated by these survivors, presumably because he considers them, as the operators of the gas chambers, to be closest to the centre of the Holocaust.  Accordingly, their testimony is privileged in Shoah beyond that of other survivors, such as those who survived the camps in other ways or who spent the war years in hiding.

[2] American soldiers did, in fact, film and photograph what they found when they liberated Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.  These shocking images—I will have more to say below about Susan Sontag’s response to them—have been used in documentaries about the Holocaust without clear acknowledgement of what they show.  That is, they are often used as a stand in for the depredations of the camps.  Like many others, Godard uses the term “concentration camp” loosely. Concentration camps were forced labor camps in which, for example, prisoners quarried stone or performed other sorts of physically demanding labor.  Although terrifying and destructive of human dignity and life, they were not extermination camps of the sort developed, beginning in 1941, for mass murder, in particular the mass murder of the Jews.

[3] Godard made a similar comment in a televised debate with Marguerite Duras about Shoah:  “”Lanzmann didn’t show anything—he showed the Germans” (qtd in Brody 511).  Duras was furious, perhaps because Godard seems to criticize the sentiment expressed in the opening of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), for which Duras wrote the screenplay (its first line reads: “You saw nothing at Hiroshima.  Nothing.” (15)).

[4] I owe this knowledge to personal conversations with Marianne Tettlebaum, June 2011.

[5] I take the term “voluntarism” from Molly Hite’s discussion the theory of intentionality that governs both our assumptions about narrative, be they fictional or actual (25).

Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (From the East) opens with a dark blue nighttime shot of a street lamp and some power-lines, an empty road underneath them. The title appears in the centre of the screen in bold white letters, some kind of simple and elegant font. This is followed, a few still minutes later, by a shot of another street, this one in daylight, framed by a window with a green or yellow curtain slowly flapping in the wind. Through the window I can see a street sign, a light green and white bus, some cars passing by. The curtain keeps flapping, calmly. The walls around the window are wallpapered, again in yellow and green, maybe some red, tones. And from here it continues, for another two and a half hours, in a similar manner – languidly moving between solidly framed stable views of, or, as the title stresses, from, Russia.

People appear in D’Est only in passing, as merely another part of some larger choreography of objects, never singled out as characters or actors or as otherwise being in any way distinct from the other things that appear on screen. Since I don’t see any of them for long enough to begin to feel any sense of identification, the entity I feel most closely aligned with in D’Est is instead the camera – I can imagine sitting still, just as this camera sits still, in front of the window, silently observing. Just as my presence by that window would most likely not determine what happens on the other side, in this observational documentary taken to an extreme, the presence of the camera does not appear to in any way determine what happens in front of it. This is the case because we (the camera and I) do not demand, or even wish, that something happen in front of us. We do not wait for an incident, a moment, an audible exchange, or anything else to reveal some truth or relay some insight into life in Russia. Instead we just watch, patiently accepting and enjoying our role as visitors.

Because of this easy identification with the camera, my experience of watching D’Est, at least within the microcosm of every several-minutes-long still shot, is very likely similar to the experience I would have if I were sitting in front of a Russian window with a flapping green or yellow curtain.  My presence is factored into each scene in a way it rarely is in other films. Because they are not in any way influenced by us seeing them, the series of moments the camera and I unobtrusively observe do not come together to form any sort of narrative. Instead of telling me something about the country that the film is ostensibly about, D’Est instead shows me, or maybe more precisely lets me see, what Russia might look like if I made the trip myself. The grammatical formulation of the film’s title then seems to become important – the views offered in D’Est are not of Russia, they do not tell us of or about the country. Instead they are relics brought back from a trip, impressions gathered by an outsider who does not purport to interpret, understand, assume, or know, only to observe.

I learned about this film one afternoon at work, while scouring YouTube for clips for a presentation I was preparing on “non-traditional” documentary techniques. I watched a short clip that someone had uploaded – a couple of minutes from the start of the film. I then read something brief, I no longer remember where. And that is the only encounter I have ever had with D’Est – I’ve never seen more than a couple of minutes of it and I would have been nervous to type the names of both the film and the filmmaker without double-checking on them. All that I remember of what I read, and I make no claim to remembering correctly, is that it is a very long film composed of a series of still shots taken in Russia. And all that I remember of what I saw is described in the paragraphs above.

My hazy recollections of the film are undoubtedly mingled with similarly hazy imaginings of what Russia looks like, probably based in part on – again hazy – recollections of images from my childhood in then-Soviet-occupied Lithuania. My interpretation of D’Est, as it is offered in the paragraphs above, is thus a result of some mingling between the circumstances or context in which I discovered the film (while thinking about “non-traditional” documentary) and partly imagined/partly remembered images that I associate with the region of the world that the film is from, if not about.

In writing about a film I have seen, I can assume that my reader and I can at least potentially share the experience of seeing the same film. In a piece like this one however, my position in front of the unseen film is entirely unique because it is determined by the particular circumstances of my mis-encounter with it, as well as by factors that cause me to imagine and remember that encounter as I do – there is no tangible object at the centre of the writing that I can share with a reader. Instead of allowing this reader to further reflect on a film she has seen, or to decide whether or not to see the film in question, a piece of writing like this one asks her to imagine with me what the film could or might be. While all criticism is in one way or another a creative act, writing on unseen films that have for one reason or another stuck with us as we continue to not see them can be a way of generating ideas for films that do not yet exist.

The exercise of organising my imagined memories, free associations and assumptions in writing has turned them into productive agents that have inspired me to try my own hand at making the kind of film I think D’Est might be. But aside from being simply an idea-generating exercise, the practice of writing on unseen films creates a potentially productive kind of discomfort. Certainly there is something that at least feels inappropriate about writing on what one hasn’t seen – if one is not writing about a real film but instead some combination of specific circumstances, memories, and imaginings, one is writing about nothing other than oneself! Yet isn’t the case that any insights drawn after seeing a film are in an important sense the result of all the circumstances, memories, and imaginings that have led up to the critic’s encounter with and experience of it? Removing the supposedly shareable experience at the centre of a piece of writing brings to the forefront the particular, the somehow inappropriately personal circumstances that typically hide behind that shareable experience despite their inescapably determining what one has to say about anything at all.

I’ve put in a request for a copy of D’Est from a library across town and I’m looking forward to matching the actual film up against my imagined version. Whether or not I can really identify with Akerman’s camera however, the same circumstances that cause me to imagine that film as I do (my visual recollections of growing up in a Soviet country, my interest in documentary, etc.) will undoubtedly determine how I perceive, understand, interpret, and maybe write about what I do in fact see.