Videology 2

1 2 VIDEOLOGY 2 LOUIS ARMAND 3 PRAGUE 2017 Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com Copyright © Louis Armand, 2017 Published 2017 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. 4 The research & publication of this book have been supported from the ‘Program rozvoje vědních oblastí na Univerzitě Karlově,’ no. 9: ‘Literature & Art in Intercultural Relationships,’ subproject: ‘Transformations of Cultural Histories of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods, Canons.’ Cataloguing in Publication Data VIDEOLOGY 2, by Louis Armand. —1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-709-8 1. Visual Culture. 2. Cultural Theory. 3. Film Studies. I. Armand, Louis. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Cover, typeset & design © lazarus Cover images: stills from Jean-Luc Godard’s One-Plus-One (1968), Pierrot le fou (1965), Le Mépris (1963), Liliana Cavan’s The Night Porter (1974) & Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970). VIDEOLOGY 2 5 for John Gamble who saw it all 6 Amos Poe, The Foreigner (1978) VIDEOLOGY 2 Revolt for Sale IN LIEU OF A STATEMENT OF PURPOSE 9 Concerto for the Universal Algorithm PAIK | MOORMAN | YOUNGBLOOD | FLUSSER 14 Leap into the Void PARALLAX | DESIRE | REALISM 27 Betrayals of the Avantgarde KAREL TEIGE’S CINÉ-POETICS & BEYOND 42 The Ideology of the End of Ideology PONTECORVO | GODARD | FASSBINDER 64 7 Conforming to Type FILM AS SUBVERSION 80 Emancipatory Disillusionment 8 AGITATION | TRANSGRESSION | CRITIQUE 110 Der Amerikanische Freund PETIT | WENDERS | JARMUSCH 144 Lumpenproletariat WRITING ATTACK | ANTISYSTEM | SUBLITERATURE 182 Le Saboteur AESTHETIC TERRORISM | CORPORATE PORN 200 Postludes CINEMA AT THE END OF THE WORLD 218 Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris (1963) REVOLT FOR SALE IN LIEU OF A STATEMENT OF PURPOSE This is an enquiry about the future of the cinema. It appears… that a television aesthetic has replaced a cinematic aesthetic for large parts of the audience all over the world. Well, you have to know who invented television & what the context was. Its arrival coincided with the talkies, at a time when governments were half-consciously thinking of harnessing the incredible power that was released by the silent film, which, unlike painting, achieved instant popularity. Rembrandt’s paintings & Mozart’s music were supported by kings & princes. But it was a mass public that very quickly came to support the cinema. The silent movie was something to behold: first you look, then you speak. The sound film might have been invented right away, but that didn’t happen. Instead, it took thirty years. The age of reason. Whoever has power has right on his side, you might say. First came the technical birth of 9 television. When the film people weren’t interested in it, it had to be rescued by the post office, people working in communications. So today, television is like a little post office. It’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s so small & you have to be very close to the picture. In the cinema, on the other hand, the picture is large & intimidating, & you watch it from some way away. Today, it seems people would rather look at a small picture close up than a large one from a distance. Television emerged very quickly because it was born in the USA. It was born at the very same time as the advertising that financed it. So it was the highly articulate advertising world, saying things in a single phrase or image, like Eisenstein, as good as Eisenstein, as good as Potemkin. So they made ads like Potemkin, only Potemkin is ninety minutes long. Is cinema dying out as a language, will it soon be a defunct art form? It really doesn’t matter. It’s bound to happen some time. I shall die, but will my art die? I remember telling Henri Langlois that he should throw away his collection of films & go off somewhere, otherwise he would die. So one should just go off somewhere. It’s much the better way. Films are created when there’s no one looking. They are the Invisible. What you can’t see is the Incredible - & it’s the task of the cinema to show you that. – Jean-Luc Godard, Chambre 666 (Wim Wenders, 1982) 10 The fatalism of a certain end. And then to reach for this: the abolition of the image for the sake of a future cinema, for example. The auto-critique of avantgardism initiated from within the avantgarde as an act of resistance, sabotage, renewal, revolution, against the otherwise irresistible forces of cooption, expropriation, normalisation, commodification, etc. (those “pseudo” avantgardes of the global consortium of Museums of Contemporary Art). To become invisible thereby to “reveal” (the possibility of) the Incredible – or, détourning a bit of expired ’68 agitprop, to unexpect the expected. What, in fact, is the meaning of discontinuity if not a history of disappearances? The famous “break with the past” is precisely that which avoids being seen: the punctualist, eruptive anti-image, that unpresentable “thing” that – from Malevich to Debord – is “turned” into a domestic pet by the institution of art criticism, like a child’s pet invisible rock. By diligently watering it, it doesn’t become the proverbial “elephant in the room,” it simply remains what it is, the “history of an illusion”: the Incredible was never in the room to begin with. Is the avantgarde, in cinema as in general, “doomed” to this ambivalent status between the invisible & the illusion of the invisible? A kind of ab nihilo catastrophe practice (of “pure” subversion)? The art that dare not show its face, lest it become (by unforgiving necessity) other than “what it is”? Perhaps we mean to speak, in fact, of an unconscious of that ideally millennial illusion of an absolute, continuous present – the accomplished time of the commodity in which all thought today appears suspended. Engorged already with itself to the point that, any moment now, a thousand years from now, this all-encompassing farce will erupt into nova: the spectacle to end all spectacles. And like Ulysses bound to his mast, you’ll want to see it. You’ll want to call out your name to it, so that it’ll know who has done this to it (in your dreams). And thus will you be cursed, to be that nonheroic travesty of the Homeric “secret agent” spilling over the sides at closing time in a Cypriot harbourside dive, with nothing waiting in the dark but the usual phalanx of hustlers, con artists, pickpockets & murders who on principle refuse to believe anything about you except the size of your roll. These sunset years aren’t a revolution: standing witness to the “slow abolition of the future.” Who was selling shares in that idea? Building monuments to the “final solution” of the Enlightenment problem. Modernity was an anachronism before its time, debunked by “cynical irony.” Today the sanctified pseudoavantgarde has NO FUTURE on its side, they are the patriotic shock-troops, the “heroic martyrs,” of culture’s manifest destiny. But it really doesn’t matter. Evolution has everything under control. There never was any vital paradox of an existence (real/imaginary) that, on the one hand, both invited & succumbed to a parasitic accelerationism while, on the other, periodically (& with ever shorter cyclic frequency) tending towards the monolithic, each technologically-assisted new wave ceding to institutional gigantism at the same time as its means are absorbed into the expanded cultural medium – 11 12 to which the culture industry consequently related in the manner of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus, etc. Unhappy with modernism’s appeal to “abstraction” & “autonomy” a messianic/suicidal “avantgarde” set about re-collapsing “art into life” & got their wish. From Méliès to Vertov & Eisenstein, to McLuhan, to Vostell & Nam June Paik, to Debord, Godard, Wenders, to here, to now: cinema as the history of this pseudo-struggle, of counterlogics, of seduction & entropy, of illusory disillusionment, of aestheticopolitical economy & the economics of political aestheticism, of the reality principle versus the pleasure principle, of decoherence in the social fabric & the fabrication of societal coherence, of holy terror & anaemic pieties, of whatever you want it to be & whatever you don’t want it to be. The whole prospective history, in other words, of a radical ambivalence let loose upon every vested interest known to the species while just as readily drawing a paycheque from the same: everything, they figure, has its price, even if it’s just for the principle of it. Does cinema therefore have a “task”? The betterment of humankind? The salvation of lost souls damned to endless arse-numbing reels of Hollywood dross & “fake news”? Somewhere there’s a belief that cinema (literature, culture, blahblahblah), whatever it is, & for whomever it is, has serious things to say: that it itself is important for what this pseudohistorical creature called humanity has been & is yet to become. It is, to a certain way of thinking, the evolutionary medium of the species. This is not unknown, & even less disbelieved, by those forces arrayed for the purpose of its total commodification, for reasons that are quite simple: the aim of the commodification of cinema, & of abstract image technologies generally, being coterminous with the final aim of commodifying humanity as such. Or put another way, like some diabolical old-school Frankenstein, the final aim of commodifying existence. If cinema (literature, culture) itself can be thus viewed, as a kind of techno-evolutionary immanence, what would be the meaning of a “cinema” (“literature,” “culture”) that nevertheless seeks to venture the utmost in withdrawing from this portentous faith in the image as a form of destining? And is the destiny of such an “counter-cinema” (etc.) simply to stand in a perturbed mirror relationship to its other? (Hollywood being merely the most obvious.) Which is to say, the fatalism of the commodity, of the commodity as mode & horizon of contemporary existence extended indefinitely (no future)? (Is this not the necessary demand placed upon the avantgarde’s saviour complex – this acquiescence in, if not precipitation of, the failure of the liberal humanist project, IN ORDER to bring into view a “new future” – exposed for what it is: an alibi against the future of liberal humanism? viz Baudrillard, “In the final analysis, the system of consumption is based on a code of signs... & differences, & not on need & pleasures...”) That such grandiose, totalitarian gestures might yet succumb to the most self-deprecating ironies invites (its absurdity, even – this inevitably disappointed faith one is meant to have in the infallibility of the universal dream machine – ought to incite it) acts of violent insurrection all by itself. A violence & an insurrection not in its image, of course, but in that mass of indeterminates: the verbal graffiti of over-formularised kitsch, the camp of avid conformity & masturbatory individualism, the running joke of mass “niche appeal” in which a misrecognised subversion tests the medium to its limits like the parody of a parody from which there’s no escape & in which the “spectacle,” by virtue of what it is, is always making a spectacle of itself. Prague, January 2017 13 CONCERTO FOR THE UNIVERSAL ALGORITHM PAIK | MOORMAN | YOUNGBLOOD | FLUSSER 14 Delivering his verdict in the case against cellist Charlotte Moorman for “indecent exposure” on 13 May 1967, Judge Milton Shalleck, in finding Moorman guilty, suggested that – in contrast to the defendant’s starkly unbecoming behaviour – her otherwise more respected contemporary, Spanish cellist & renowned interpreter of Bach, Pablo Casals, would never “have become as great if he had performed naked from the waist down.”1 Reporting on the case, Russell Baker in the Chicago Tribune noted that the court had thereby given credence to the theory that the artist must dress in the costume of his trade – an implicit gendering of both “serious music” & the figure of the “artist” characteristic of 1 Russell Baker, “Naked Cellist Shivers Theory of Clothing,” Chicago Tribune (May 14, 1967): 8. the times. Moorman’s crime, for which she was dubbed on the front pages of the nation’s tabloid press “The Topless Cellist,” was to have performed the second movement of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique, on 9 February 1969 at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Maker’s Cinemateque in New York, naked from the waist up. The performance was interrupted by police who arrested Moorman on stage. The police had been present at the Cinemateque owing to a screening there of Jack Smith’s film, Flaming Creatures, which had resulted in an obscenity case against Mekas, Kenneth Jacobs & Florence Karpf in 1964, & had taken a continuing interest in the Cinemateque’s programming ever since. The case against Moorman was therefore timely, & by provoking an intensification in the anti-censorship lobby, eventuated in the liberalisation of New York state laws against partial or full nudity in performing art & elsewhere, while bearing out the argument presented by Paik in the programme notes for Opera Sextronique, in which he wrote: “The purge of sex under the excuse of being ‘serious’ exactly undermines the so-called ‘seriousness’ of music as a classical art, ranking with literature & painting.” Almost ten years after the case of Naked Lunch, the continued censorship of the performing arts was not only retrograde but infantilising, yet it nevertheless ensured the relevance of an avant-garde which, post-liberalisation, would resort to increasingly technological rather than social means of “justifying” itself. Moorman herself was classically trained, having studied at the Juilliard School & was a member of the American Symphony Orchestra. Her entrée to contemporary experimental music came with her graduation performance of John Cage’s 26 Minutes, 1499 Seconds for a String Player, & until her death (somewhat “ironically” from breast cancer) in 1991 she was a central figure in the New York & international avant-garde. Throughout, & in the face of frequent public ridicule, she maintained a scrupulous “seriousness” in her performances, lending critical weight to Paik’s argument as well as a certain “dignity” to art practices often viewed as buffoonery. Edgar Varèse referred to her, indeed, as the “Jeanne d’Arc of New Music.” In 1963, Moorman had already founded the Annual Avant- 15 16 Garde Festival of New York, initially as a forum for the experimental music scene linked to Fluxus, but with the broader aim of “making the art of the present important in its time.”2 It was through the festival that Moorman first encountered Paik, when – with Allan Kaprow, she proposed restaging Karlheinz Stockhausen & Mary Bauermeister’s Originale in 1964. Stockhausen & Bauermeister agreed on condition of Paik’s involvement – for whom the role of the “Action Composer” had been written for the original 1961 performances in Cologne. Thus began a long-term association between Moorman & Paik which had a significant impact on the evolution of experimental performance for the next two-&-a-half decades. Two of Paik & Moorman’s better known collaborations are TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) & TV Cello (1971), both of which – like Sextronique – explicitly drew attention to the spectacular nature of musical performance, both vis-à-vis the fetishisation of the body of the performer & in the pervasive televisual mediatising of the genre itself for popular consumption. They also ironised, somewhat, the ostensibly closed circuit of experimental music as subversive art free to appropriate elements from, but not access, the mass media economy. As subversive art, they continued in the vein of Duchamp & Cage to sabotage the formal purism at the core of the Greenbergian dogma & the hierarchical relationship of performance to score or text. In his “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television” (1964), Paik had written: “Indeterminism & variability are underdeveloped parameters in the optical arts, though they have been the central problem in music for the last two decades. Conversely, the parameter of sex has been underdeveloped in music as opposed to literature & the visual arts.”3 With TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) & TV Cello (1971), Paik & Moorman not only erased the distinction between performative interpretation & creation, but through the intervention of video feedback transformed the 2 Quoted in the documentary Topless Cellist, dir. Nam June Paik (1991). Nam June Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television,” reprinted in Videa ’n’ Videology 1959-1973 (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974) 6. 3 understanding of where or how performance is situated, including how terms like “music,” “image,” “body,” “technology,” etc. are situated, even in the already fluid context of the avant-garde. Paik’s own synthesis of music & electronic “image” was first shown to the public in March 1963 at the Wuppertal “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television” (two months before Wolf Vostell’s “Television Décollage” in New York) – the exhibition comprising four prepared pianos, mechanical sound objects, several record & tape installations, twelve modified TV sets (their live broadcast images distorted by magnets) and the head of a freshly slaughtered ox, & was duly described as a “total event.” While some historians identify the Wuppertal show as the birth of “video art,” like Vostell’s work of the same period these were strictly TV installations: Paik’s incorporation of video-recording technology began later in 1963, with his co-development of the Abe-Paik video synthesiser (with engineer Shuya Abe), & in his subsequent collaborations with Moorman. TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Paik adapted the language of cybernetics to focus on the “human use of technology,” echoing Norbert Wiener’s “human use of human machines.” The piece involved Moorman (topless) wearing two miniaturized (three-inch) video monitors mounted in plexiglass cubes on a translucent harness, which displayed a live video feed of her performance: the picture on each monitor was then distorted by oscillations produced by signals transmitted from a pickup on Moorman’s cello. This interactive looping produced a new kind of volatile “synaesthetic image,” integrating the “orchestrative body” into a cybernetic verbi-voco-visual apparatus (to borrow an expression from Joyce), in which instrumentality & subjectivity, sound & image, body & spectacle, become ambiguous, ambivalent, intermedial. As Paik had written in 1965, in an article entitled “We are in Open Circuits,” cybernated art was coterminous with cybernated life. The implications of the new video art were stark (if not yet fully clear): if cybernetics, “the science of pure relations,” pointed to an expanded field of generalised synaesthesia (the translatability & abstraction of the senses), so too video pointed to an expanded field of genre, in which all elements 17 18 (image, sound, body, etc.) were translatable, so to speak, as pure relations emerging out of a constant process of feedback. The logical consequence of this would be New Media & the radical abstraction of digital code. Already, however, Paik envisaged “video” as a dynamic spectrum on which any point could potentially be remodulated by way of any other. In his 1971 collaboration with Moorman, TV Cello, Paik moved from the repurposing of discrete elements in the performance (body, classical instrument, cathode tube), to a more interventional approach, drawing on the idea of the video synthesiser. Moorman’s customary cello was replaced with a stack of three TV screens fitted inside a plexiglass frame, surmounted by a plexiglass neck, with a regular bridge & tailpiece attached at the bottom, & lowtensioned wires strung between with pickups attached. By bowing, fingering & slapping the wires – as part of a composition called “Concerto for TV Cello & Videotapes” – Moorman was able to manipulate the images appearing on the TV stack, as well as those appearing on tiny monitors attached to a pair of “TV Glasses” which she wore during the performance. The metamorphosis of the classical cello into a stack of TVs (later a bomb, a body, a block of ice, syringes) pointed on the one hand to the developing trend of Conceptualism & the arbitrariness & “dematerialisation” of the socalled work of art, but more importantly it pointed to a new logic of the sound-image, of the performative “event,” & of technology, which would go on to inform the approach of such artists as Stelarc, Andre Borges & Francesca Fini. 2. In a landmark survey of the state of video experimentation, published in 1970 under the title Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood refers to Paik & Moorman on a number of occasions – though to Paik primarily – in the context of the electronic transformation of graphic images & the advent of “synaesthetic video.” Paik is presented as one of the original orchestrators of the avant-garde’s counter-attack against the global hegemony of TV. He is described as a “cultural terrorist,” & John Cage is quoted as saying “Paik’s work, performances, & daily doings never cease by turn to amaze, delight, shock, & sometimes terrify me.” “In recent years,” Youngblood noted, Paik has abandoned his mixed-media environmental Happenings to concentrate exclusively on television as an aesthetic & communicative instrument. Independently, in collaboration with scientists, & in a special research & development program with the State University of New York, he has explored nearly every facet of the medium, paving the way for a new generation of video artists. His work has followed four simultaneous directions: synaesthetic videotapes; videotronic distortions of the received signal; closed-circuit teledynamic environments; & sculptural pieces, usually of a satirical nature.4 Focusing on Paik’s technical experimentation, Youngblood goes on to suggest that, “By altering the circuitry of his receivers with resistors, interceptors, oscillators, grids, etc., Paik creates ‘prepared televisions’ that are equivalent 4 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970) 302. 19 20 in concept to David Tudor’s prepared pianos.”5 This is more than mere analogy, as it points to the broader “synaesthetic” character of Paik’s experimentations in which, as he says, “activities, desires, phenomena, that one cannot explain” are explored through what we might call instrumental metamorphosis – an “epistemology” that is trans-medial. Where TV transmits information to a passive receiver in an unacknowledged, ideological encoded way, Paik’s “synaesthetic video” is an experimental as well as experiential medium for producing new forms of “aesthetic” knowledge. Only half-joking, he has said that “My experimental colour television has instructional resource value. Kindergarten & elementary school children should be exposed to electronic situations as early as possible. My experimental TV demonstrates various basic facts of physics & electronics empirically, such as amplitude modulation, radar, scanning, cathode rays, shadow mask tubes, oscillography, the ohm principle, overtone, magnetic character, etc. And it’s a very pleasant way to learn these things.”6 But Paik’s expanded conception of TV as synaesthetic video goes far beyond its array of technical potentialities: like Youngblood’s “expanded cinema” it is concerned foremost with the question of consciousness. There is in Paik’s media-performance work of the late sixties & early seventies something prophetic of the “New Media” art that appeared in the late eighties & nineties, with the development of hypermedia & the invention of the World Wide Web. In 1974, Paik, in tune with the thinking of Marshall McLuhan & Buckminster Fuller, began speaking of video’s potential as a prelude to a global telecommunications network or “electronic superhighway” & some critics have mistakenly credited him with coining the term “information superhighway” which became fashionable in the 1990s. In any case, the synaesthetic video performances of Paik & other cybernetic artists, in conjunction with the advent of “multiple projection environments” & “holographic cinema” at around the same time, provided the antecedents for those immersive environments associated from the 1980s 5 6 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 303. Qtd in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 305-6. with virtual reality. Youngblood duly notes, “In real-time multiple-projection, cinema becomes a performing art: the phenomenon of image-projection itself becomes the ‘subject’ of the performance & in a very real sense the medium is the message.”7 The prospect of synthesising all of these potentials into a “New Medium” still represents something of a holy grail, but at the time, perhaps with Kubrick’s 2001 stimulating his imagination, Youngblood was sufficiently enthused by the prospect of such a synaesthetic medium to announce that “It is certain that holographic cinema & television will be common by the year 2000.”8 The important point here, however, isn’t about the attainable state of communications technologies & the future status of cinema, television, or video, whether analogue or digital, but about the implications of synaesthesia – from the “representation” of sound as image, for example, to the generalisation of “sense(s)” as code within a universal semiosphere: incorporating everything from soundwaves to DNA to qubits. As Youngblood stresses in his preface to Expanded Cinema, “When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialise in a single discipline & hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationship in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema & television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind.”9 This expanded view of synaesthetic technologies as constitutive of a consciousness is a regular theme of critical discussion around cybernetics & media & has a long genealogy, but which since Turing, & continuing up to the present debates around the latest -isms, from posthumanism 7 8 9 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 387. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 399. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 41. 21 to accelerationism, have incorporated into the question of consciousness the question of general intelligence. That is to say, of an intelligence that transcends the socalled human condition – just as we speak of technology as transcending what may be deemed as “human utility.” All of this may be considered a direct consequence of that process of radical abstraction called the Industrial Revolution, with which the question of the “autonomy of the work of art” is also bound up. And rather than signalling a collapse into a narrow “aestheticism,” this autonomy – as we see in Paik’s & Youngblood’s formulations – implicates itself in the broader picture of what has been called autopoiesis: autonomous, self-modifying, self-perpetuating, & ultimately discursive entities. Which is to say, feedback systems that perform, in a manner of speaking, their own ontology. We might call them artificial intelligences. What, after all, is the implication of an “intermedia network of cinema & television” which functions as “the nervous system of mankind”? What is, as Vilém Flusser says, “the prospect of a future society that synthesizes electronic images”?10 In which, in other words, our social (but not only “social”) being is this synthesis. 22 3. Published in Germany in 1985, Flusser’s essay Into the Universe of Technical Images theorises the evolution of electronic media towards an image-utopia. Flusser’s “future society,” like Paik’s “electronic superhighway” & Youngblood’s “expanded cinema,” is not, he states at the outset, “a future floating in the far distance. We are already on its cusp. Many aspects of this fabulous new social & life structure are already visible in our environment & in us. We live in a utopia that is appearing, pushing its way up into our surroundings & into our pores. What is happening around us & in us is fantastic, & all previous utopias, whether they were positive or negative, pale in comparison to it.”11 As with the relationship of video to TV in Paik’s work, which is fundamentally antagonistic, Flusser’s “future 10 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images [Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (1985)], intro. Mark Poster, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011) 3 – emphasis added. 11 Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 3. society” will have evolved through the contest of “two divergent trends”: “One moves toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers & image administrators, the other toward a dialogic, telematic society of image producers & image collectors. From our standpoint, both these social structures are fantastic, even though the first presents a somewhat negative, the second a positive, utopia.”12 This dialectics of emergent utopias is a product, precisely, of abstraction – &, through abstraction, of a certain formal “equivalence” which permits the constant metamorphosis of the one into the other, the totalitarian into the telematic (& vice-versa), just as in Paik we see the translation of instrumental or egotic identity into an interchangeable, distributed system of feedback. The reason for this is not a failure of political consciousness, for example, but rather the radical ambivalence of consciousness as such, informed by the radical ambivalence of what is called an “image.” If the consciousness of Flusser’s future society is produced by or as the synthesis of electronic images, which are in & of themselves synaesthetic, then it presents itself to us not as any thing but rather as an “image,” so to speak, of the techne of possibility. Possibility, that is to say, of – or as – generalised synaesthesia. This “technical image” is not, 12 Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 4. 23 24 of course, an image in any straightforward sense: not any kind of “visual representation.” Just as Paik’s “Concerto for TV Cello & Videotapes” is not a picture of something, even of itself. What we call auditory or visual here are not discrete facts but data transmissions, algorithmic, evanescent ultimately as the signal from a quasar. Likewise for Flusser, what he calls “technical images” are “not surfaces but mosaics assembled from particles. They are therefore not prehistoric, two-dimensional structures but rather posthistorical, without dimension.”13 Technical images, Flusser argues, are in fact “completely new media… They ‘mean’ in a completely different way from traditional images. In short, they actually constitute a cultural revolution.”14 13 14 Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 5. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 7. As with Paik’s synaesthetic video & Youngblood’s expanded cinema, Flusser’s “technical image” is “technical” insofar as it articulates an innate technicity in its broadest ramification. Unlike Paik, however, Flusser doesn’t seek to “humanise” the technological. Needless to say, humanity is already technological, but Flusser’s conception proceeds from the point of abstraction & agency at which Paik’s work (replete with its “purposive” chance operations) leaves off, & this leads Flusser to a more radical hypothesis. “Apparatuses,” he writes, “are intractable; they should not be anthropomorphized, however convincingly they may simulate human thought functions. They have no trouble with particles. They want neither to grasp nor to represent nor to understand them. To an apparatus, particles are no more than a field of possible ways in which to function.” Consequently, Flusser argues, “The production of technical images occurs in a field of possibilities: in & of themselves, the particles are nothing but possibilities from which something accidentally [arbitrarily] emerges. ‘Possibility’ is, in other words, the stuff of the universe & the consciousness that is emerging.”15 Like the subversive character of Paik & Moorman’s collaborative performances, however, this technical-imageapparatus has a paradoxical core – & not simply because it is irreducible to an image of some thing, or a sound, or an experience. It is rather because, in its – let’s say – “posthumanism,” it is no longer (simply) required to mirror human consciousness, but – in a radical materialist sense, like a Universal Turing Machine – to “comprehend” it. The algorithms of which its “mechanism” is comprised therefore tend not only towards the probable, but the improbable. Specifically, for Flusser, “probable” & “improbable” here refer to “concepts from informatics, in which information can be defined as an improbable situation: the more improbable, the more informative. The second law of thermodynamics suggests that the emerging particle universe tends toward an increasingly probable situation, toward disinformation, that is, to a steadily more even distribution of particles, until form is finally lost altogether.” 15 Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 16. 25 26 Like McLuhan’s “medium is the message,” the “technical image” produces information in apparent defiance of the law of entropy, & it does so intrinsically, we might almost say ontologically, since – just as with the indeterminacy of Paik’s video feedback matrix – the “technical image” is really the instantiation of a generalised metamorphosis. Which is to say, of a generalised ambivalence (in which probability & improbability are inversely equivalent; just as negentropy is entropy between interacting systems.) All of which leads Flusser to advance what he calls a “fantastic hypothesis”: an hypothesis which casts back to Paik’s “electronic superhighway” inflated into a kind of Laplacean phantasmagoria – a universal (im)probability machine or “artificial intelligence.”16 This hypothesis is, in fact, what Flusser’s “technical image” ideally tends towards: a Fluxus-like hologram of “all the improbable situations that have already appeared, are about to appear, or are yet to appear,” including itself. The difficulty, Flusser suggests, for the construction of such an artificial intelligence, “is not the literally astronomical quantity of possibilities that surround such situations as spiral nebula, living cells, or human brains; rather the difficulty lies in the necessity for the computer to contain not only the big bang program itself but also all the errors in this program. In other words, it would have to be much larger than the universe itself, an example of the abyss into which the new calculating & computing consciousness is about to fall.”17 It would be, in other words, the ultimate feedback mechanism. Music of the spheres stuff. But also, paradoxically, a fragment of itself, a metonym, a hologram, from which the organised chaos of the world can always be “reverse engineered” & ritualised. A concerto for the universal algorithm. *Presented as a lecture at the International Musicology Colloquium Brno, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, 11 October 2016. 16 17 Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 17 – emphasis added. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 17-18. LEAP INTO THE VOID PARALLAX | DESIRE | REALISM On October 19, 1960, two years before his death at the age of 34, Yves Klein, controversialist & leading figure of the proto-Pop avant-garde, the Nouveaux Réalistes,1 jumped from the roof-ledge of the house at 3, rue Gentil-Bernard, in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Klein’s flight from the ledge, out over a quiet tree-lined street down which a cyclist (who might also have been Klein) rode apparantly unaware towards a T-junction beyond which a commuter train passed, was captured on film by two other members of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Harry Shunk & János Kender. The resulting photograph (in fact one of several showing Klein in mid air from different angles) has since become one 1 Including also Christo, Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely. 27 28 of the best-known images of the post-War avant-garde. Entitled “Saut dans la vide” (“Leap into the Void”), it was published by Klein on November 27, in a faked 4-page insert of the weekly Dimanche newspaper. Anticipating Yuri Gargarin’s pioneering space-flight, the photograph was accompanied by the caption: “The painter of space hurls himself into the void!” (“Le peintre de l’espace se jette dans la vide”). By a seeming coincidence, Klein’s “Leap” (& the birth of Nouveau réalisme) came precisely mid-way between the publication of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s manifesto-like collection of essays, Pour un nouveau roman (1963), & Émile Henriot’s coinage of the term “nouveau roman” to describe the literary experiments of Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon & others in 1957. But Klein’s “Leap” is more than simply coincidental with the emergence of this latest assault upon the conventions of literary realism. As a work of photomontage, Klein’s “leap” immediately called forth an apparently irresolvable contradiction between performance & veracity, a contradiction which – as with the nouveau roman – is shown to lie at the very core of any art of verisimilitude. Which is to say, the appearance of being true or the semblance of actuality. For, as was widely suspected at the time, Klein’s “Leap” was a confabulation of two separate images: one recording the cyclist riding away from the camera down rue Gentil-Bernard, but with no Klein; the other, with no cyclist, recording Klein midair above a group of men holding a tarpaulin stretched between them. The manipulation of these two images in the darkroom “produced” the performative event called “Saut dans la vide.” The ambiguous status of Klein’s “leap” is in many ways emblematic of the combined project of the nouveaux romanciers, but most specifically of the concerns central to the work of Robbe-Grillet, in his novels, his films, & in the hybrid ciné-romans (recalling the “bioscopic” books of the 1920s Prague & Moscow avant-gardes) – of which there are four: L’Année dernière á Marienbad (1960); L’Imortelle (1963); Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974); &, C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle (2002). Throughout, Robbe-Grillet’s work has been notable for its attachment to a forensics of objective language, verging upon a “photographic realism” in which a camera eye, or caméra-stylo (to take Astruc’s term), usurps the place conventionally reserved for a subjective “point-of-view.” In his introduction to the 2008 reissue of the 1960 Calder edition of Jalousie, entitled “The Geometry of the Present” & coincident with RobbeGrillet’s death, Tom McCarthy focused on this as indeed the central tenet of Robbe-Grillet’s art, identifying two key areas in which Anglo-American critics had misunderstood the nouveau roman’s attitude to realism: firstly, in their failure to understand that literary “realism” is itself a construct as laden with artifice as any other; & secondly, in missing the glaring fact that Robbe-Grillet’s novels are actually ultra-realist, shot through at every level with the sheer quiddity of the environments to which they attend so faithfully.2 During a discussion with John Calder at the 2002 Prague Writers’ Festival, Robbe-Grillet underlined this point by stressing the linguistic “transparency” of his approach – as if, so to speak, language is attributed in his writing a certain equivalence to the function of a camera lens – in distinction to the “opacity” of language in the work of Joyce, for example, or of the Surrealists, who remained the prevailing models of experimentalism in the 1950s. Robbe-Grillet’s insistence upon a certain veracity of language (grammatical, syntactical) might in this way be regarded as continuing in the vein of Beckett’s late filmic minimalism – in which language assumes an almost exclusively indexical function, resembling sets of instructions, directions, descriptions, discrete materialities attached to an objective “reality” in the world – while at the same time expropriating the conventional “realism” of Sartrean prose & its ironic fascination with basemateriality (ironic, because Existentialism’s apparent “turn towards the object” – Roquintin’s pebble on the beach, which seems to “look back” at us from its very inertia, 2 Tom McCarthy, “The Geometry of the Present,” introduction to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008) 1. 29 30 its inanimacy, its lugubrious primordiality – was merely a pretence for a reaffirmation of the ego; Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, like Beckett, was concerned rather with the ego’s automatism, vested in the mechanics of perception, memory (repetition) & of objectification, in the manner, for example, of the reel-to-reel recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape). As McCarthy notes, “What we see happening in [RobbeGrillet’s novels], again & again, is space & matter inscribing themselves on consciousness, whose task, reciprocally, is to accommodate space & matter. As Robbe-Grillet was himself fond of declaring: ‘No art without world.’”3 Or, more correctly, “space & matter” inscribing themselves as consciousness. Of course, this status of the world is also a status of writing – of, in fact, a cinematography – & if the lesson of Robbe-Grillet’s approach amounts to anything, it is that neither facticity nor indeterminacy are external to, or merely consequences of, the discourse in which they are produced. If Robbe-Grillet’s writing were a structuralist experiment, its disarming “transparency” might serve to point towards other characteristics of discourse than metaphor, or “subjective language,” as the roots of socalled ambiguity in the observable universe. But where Robbe-Grillet’s approach differs less subtly from that of conventional realist prose, is in its seemingly fragmentary or rather circuitous character: its constant cutting between different angles of observation, different time-frames, different spatial arrangements – a mode of construction frequently likened to the work of a hyperactive camera; an obsessive-compulsive surveillance system glitched by feedback, cyclic redundancy, machine paranoia. Unlike Beckett, for whom narrative tends towards entropy, the outcome for Robbe-Grillet is a textual equivalent of cubism – of the specifically analytical cubism of c.1910, with the principle distinction that where Braque & Picasso favoured still-lifes, Robbe-Grillet’s cubism belies a kinetic restlessness, a motivic incompletion. This fragmentary, circuitous character of the nouveau roman has often been mistaken for a fetishistic &/or 3 McCarthy, “The Geometry of the Present,” 1. Glissements progressifs du désir (1974) gratuitous catalogue of description – what Louis Aragon called the Surrealist vice: “the immoderate & passionate use of the drug which is the ‘image.’” Whatever the enigmatic quality of such images, is reduced, according to Marcel Raymond, through formulaic use & sheer excess to the otherwise trivial characteristic that “they defy common sense.”4 The work perhaps most susceptible to this charge is Robbe-Grillet’s 1974 film (& ciné-roman), Glissements progressifs du désir. Beginning with the opening credit sequence – a radically mannered, dislocated montage, in a style at the intersection of Buñuel & Godard – the film proceeds on a kind of recursive loop, of softcore cinematic voyeurism played out in an array of hieratic “fetish” tableaux (involving every cliché of the genre: rope bondage, torture dungeons, a prison-convent with sadistic nuns & lascivious father-confessors, a deranged magistrate, vampirism, somnambulism, lesbianism, young girls in blissful servility, uniformed, naked, & the de rigueur accoutrements: steel bedframes, mannequins, medieval stairwells, a cemetery, braziers, gardening implements, gallons of red paint, etc). The sheer artifice & excess of these images gives way to an unsettlingly self-parody, heightened by the 4 Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, trans. G.M. (London: Methuen, 1970 [1933]) 260. 31 32 anti-naturalism of much of the acting (particularly of the “detective,” played by Jean-Louis Trintignant – echoing his earlier role in Trans-Europe Express (1966)), which distinguishes Robbe-Grillet’s work from the schlock horror/ porn of Jess Franco, for example, or even of the allegorical sado-masochism of L’Image (the 1956 novel by Jean de Berg – pseudonym of Catherine Robbe-Grillet – & filmed by Radley Metzinger the same year as Glissements), & which belies the “kinkmaster” epithets frequently tossed at Robbe-Grillet by American critics. And if this self-parodic element is at times reminiscent of Godard circa Pierrot le fou, there is also something to be said about the very different styles of Godard’s & Robbe-Grillet’s highly textual approach to cinema. The published “Synopsis” of Glissements begins by establishing the setting as a “juvenile prison run by the church” in which an adolescent girl has been incarcerated for the murder of her friend “Nora”; a crime she denies having committed. “Nora,” we are told, has been discovered dead, tied to her bed with a pair of scissors protruding from her right breast.5 The accused, whose name is subsequently given as “Alice” (an obvious allusion to Lewis Carroll), undergoes a series of “interrogations,” by the police, the prosecutor, her attorney, a nun, a priest, a magistrate, whose collective “incredulity” in the face of her denial of guilt slips increasingly into graphic insinuations of perversity: questions lead, criminological hypotheses thinly mask scenarios of guilty pleasure on the part of the interrogators. “Alice” becomes, in a sense, both a screen & a mirror, a reflective image, presented successively as a schoolgirl (virgin), a whore, an enfant terrible, a seductress, a pervert, a murderer & a witch. The “narrative mode” accordingly veers between registers: investigative, interrogative, confessional, etc. At a certain point, it becomes “clear” that “Alice” is, in effect, a figure: the locus of a series of narratives of illicit desire, the “desires of others.” The artificial blood in the film, of which there is an abundance, is thus described in the 5 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Paris: Minuit, 1974) 17. “Synopsis” as “blood from the crime, menstrual blood, the blood of defloration,” making blatant the associative matrix in which the entire genre & its symbolic conventions are rooted: the archetypically “feminine” object-of-desire & the guilty pleasure afforded by her prosecution, or rather persecution, by successive figures of institutional authority for the violence they themselves desire to commit. This hyper-aestheticised spectacle of power, however, always verges upon the puerile & absurd: the sombre ritual of the law, the choreographed agonies & ecstasies, the tedious interminable cataloguing of paraphernalia, a whole bureaucracy of supposed deviances, is both as vacuous & ominous as an audience in evening dress at a Dada poetry recital. To reinforce this point, Robbe-Grillet includes, towards the end of the film, an explicit homage Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” (“Anthropométrie de l’Époque bleue”) from 1960, in which the artist employed nude female models as “living paintbrushes,” with the models pressing their paint-smeared bodies against a wall-sized canvas to produce residual shapes in monochrome “Yves Klein Blue” resemblant of palaeolithic “Venus” figures. These painting sessions were staged as elaborate V.I.P. events, featuring a string ensemble performing Klein’s “Monotone Symphony” (a single note played 33 34 for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence”). There is more than mere coincidence between Klein’s elaborately ironic stagings & Robbe-Grillet’s own play of “Anthropometries” (at one point “Alice,” naked & covered in red paint having just produced a series of “anthropometries” on the walls of her prison cell, addresses a rhetorical question to the nun who acts as her warden: “You don’t like modern art?”). Robbe-Grillet’s parodic sabotage of the austerity of the juridical process is somewhat akin to both Kafka’s Trial & the “Nighttown” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. Increasingly, to satisfy her accuser’s desire for graphic confessions of guilt, “Alice,” with a mix of exasperation & a child’s over-willingness to oblige, recalls or invents scenes of correspondingly explicit yet faintly silly pornography, all tainted by artifice & deflated pathos: a mannequin tied to a steel bedframe half-buried on a beach; a “dungeon” full of ominous gardening implements; a submissive blonde doppelganger – curiously reminiscent of “Anne” in Metziger’s screen version of L’Image – who “passively” incites the abject passions of her victimisers (only ever consummated by proxy, by way of implements, objectifications, & at the hands of others). It is as if the excess of images, of this pornography of endlessly enlarged scenarios, were in fact a parody of genre as such, of what Derrida referred to as the “Law of Genre”: the perverse relationship between ritual subjection & the constraint or disciplining of narrative that produces interminable cliché (indeed, early press clippings described the film as “des rétrogradations progressives du sens”; “parodie, dérision, humour, inventaire d’un inconscient collectif”6). Deviance, here, rests in the subtle détournements “Alice” affects in this play of transgression & deferred gratification whose object & enunciator she is required to be. “Alice” is altogether too knowing for the ritual to sustain itself – instead, the “Pleasure” of the film’s title seems rather to extend from a certain complicity 6 John J. Michalczyk, “Robbe-Grillet, Michelet, & Barthes: From La Sorcière to Glissements progressifs du plaisir,” The French Review LI.2 (December l977) : 233-244. See also, Michalczyk, “Neo-surrealist Elements in Robbe-Grillet’s Glissements progressifs du plaisir,” The French Review LVI.1 (October 1982): 87-92 . between object & narration: a complicity, so to speak, of cinema itself, of writing, of what Godard insistently refers back to the figure of the cinematograph. Which is to say, of an apparatus of signification which is also an apparatus of desire: this is perhaps the key to the importance of the term “glissement” in Robbe-Grillet’s title. In one of his better-known discussions of Freud’s Traumdeutung, in which the cinematographic nature of dreams is analysed at length, Lacan advances the notion of glissage to account for the phenomenon of subjective decentring & difference that occurs within the function of the I as both enunciation & the enunciated; narration & object. Entitled “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” & presented as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1957, Lacan’s text combines ideas earlier developed in his talk on the “Mirror Stage” (1949) & later formalised in “The Dialectic of Desire & the Subversion of the Subject” (1960): namely, the recession of the object in its imaginary function masking an “unconscious agency” – here, the economy of the dream “image,” additionally characterised by a movement of condensation & displacement; disidentification & alienation. This recession corresponds to what Freud terms Entstellung & which Lacan translates as “glissage.” Entstellung, as Lacan notes, is usually taken to mean “distortion” or “transposition,” & is for Freud “the general precondition for the functioning of the dream,” but is also what Lacan designates, in a semiological gesture following Saussure, as “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” – this “sliding” being the constant activity of the signified in discourse, an activity which remains, however, wholly “unconscious.” It represents, in fact, the action of the unconscious as such. The movement of glissage, as reflected in the “displacements” of the signifier – the constant, as it were, “slippage” from one to another – is further characterised by two other terms associated with the Freudian Dreamwork, which I’ve already alluded to: Verdichtung, or “condensation” (the structure, as Lacan says, of the apparent “superposition” of signifiers, of one onto another) which performs the function of metaphor; &, Verschiebung, or “displacement” (a “veering off” of signification, as Lacan says, through a series of detours or 35 36 détournements) which performs the function of metonymy. This completes Lacan’s synthesis of Saussure & Jakobson in re-figuring the “agency of the letter” in the Freudean unconscious by way of this deceptively simple algorithm, S/s (signifier over signified) – which Lacan identifies as effectively “defining the topography of the unconscious.”7 To some extent we can read almost the entirety of RobbeGrillet’s body of work as an allegory of this Entstellung, or glissage – in other words, the drama of the letter (of the “cinematograph”) with regard to unconscious agency. Every narrative of voyeurism, detection, confession reduces to this: the forensics of an “objective enigma” that can neither be represented nor situated, in short known, because it “itself” is the paradoxical agency of any epistemology, of any system of representation, of taxonomy, of verification, of judgement & therefore of gratification – while at the same time entraining this desire (for gratification) in its regulated pursuit of an ideal object by way of a repetition compulsion, glissant on the surface of the socalled real, of the signified that stands always “beyond” (which is to say, “beyond the pleasure principle”) in the zone of prohibition. The counterpart of this glissage is thus the “jouissance” of transgression that Lacan refers to as the “pain principle,” or the aggression of the deathdrive: it is, we might say, a sur-plaisir, a surplus or excess that carries overtones of sacrifice but also of an acte gratuit. As in many ways with Trans-Europe Express, the paradox here is that this excess never in fact amounts to a transgression, but the contrary: the ritualised drama of Glissements – of violence, humiliation, judgement & punishment – likewise represent a merely phantasmatic inversion of the conventionalised narrative of desire: the illusion, in other words, that jouissance can be obtainable only where it is forbidden. But as Freud points out, this is merely the prohibition of something which is already impossible. And the “experience” of this prohibition is thus already the merely ritual, symbolic or rather fetishistic experience of metaphor. Similarly, the “illusionistic” 7 Jacques Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 511, 513. Trans-Europe Express (1966) character of this pseudo-transgression mirrors – rather than cuts across – the glissements of metonymy, to which the promise of jouissance remains a tropic counterpart (the offer of pain experienced as pleasure). All of which, it is necessary to add, is already an image of the text itself, of its uniquely discursive (cinematographic) economy: like “Alice,” who is its metonymic avatar, Glissements stages – in its very technique – its own decentring; it is that enunciation & the enunciated, narration & object. This may be further illustrated by a scene towards the very end of the film – a prolonged scene referred to in the script as “The Interrogation” – during which “Alice” speaks to the camera in a kind of catechistic play of wordassociation as a series of objects (pieces of “evidence”), all of which have obsessively appeared throughout the film up to that point, are exhibited before her, one by one. Her “testimony,” however, appears not addressed to the objects in question but instead to the narrative tropology 37 in which they are, as it were, produced: “Structure!” she says, in response to a blue sandal; “Permutation!” she says, in response to the blade of a shovel; an empty bottle elicits “Dissociation!”8 These dislocations, between word & image, between account & scenario, facticity & desire, motive & apparent crime (as we see), themselves constitute a particular objecthood in Robbe-Grillet’s schema & point towards what Žižek – addressing the objecthood of agency in Lacan & Freud – construes as “the parallax view.” On a trivial level, we can easily apply the notion of parallax – as “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight” – to the multiplication of “points-of-view” & differing camera angles in Robbe-Grillet’s films, novels & ciné-romans. But Žižek invites us to go further. “The observed difference,” Žižek notes, 38 is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would put it, subject & object are inherently “mediated,” so that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological shift in the object itself. Or – to put it in Lacanese – the subject’s gaze is always already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than the object itself,” the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.9 The “rectitude” of Robbe-Grillet’s prose, congruent with the formalism of his cinematography, thus exposes an equivalent error as that attributed to the “subjectivity of language” by a linguistic empiricism vested in the forensic detailing or description of “observable fact.” In Pour un nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet explicitly vests this “objective reality” not in the “image” of a programmatic realism, but in the “reality effect” of language itself – echoing, to some extent, André Bazin’s position on the “ontology of the 8 Robbe-Grillet, Glissements progressifs du plaisir, 207-9. 9 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2006) 17. photographic image,” to the effect that a novel “expresses nothing but itself.” As Lacan says, “Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I, I am also in the picture.”10 To this effect, Robbe-Grillet’s prose exposes the essentially ideological underpinning of the “language of reason” while equally disavowing any form of subjectivism, so that what we refer to as “objects” are in reality projections of the system “parallax effect” of any socalled “objective narration.” For Robbe-Grillet, then, the objectivity of the text isn’t merely a stance towards objects (Breton’s famous 1935 lecture, for example, on the “Surrealist Situation of the Object”): the nouveau roman “isn’t a theory,” he insists, but rather “an exploration”; it doesn’t speculate, but rather constitutes its reality through the objectivity of its “gaze.” It’s this “objectivity” that Roland Barthes fixed upon in his 1957 review of Jalousie, specifying the reduction of metaphor in Robbe-Grillet’s text as a “turn towards the object.” By “turn,” here, we should understand tropism, this “objective” movement of parallax which turns, so to speak, around the locus of the “object” which, in Žižek, constitutes the narrative of perception as such: in other words; it produces that constitutive difference in which perception is vested yet which remains imperceptible – 10 Qtd in Žižek, The Parallax View, 17. 39 40 other than by way of these traces to which Robbe-Grillet so closely attends, these blind spots, these perturbations in the image, in the text, that fascinate without ever being able to be pinned down (not the conventionalised “object-of-desire” but its perversion in the form of a catachresis: parallax, montage, irony). We may thus speak of both an incommensurability & simultaneous recursion between the configured object (shoe, broken bottle, scissors, mannequin, etc.) & the object of configuration (the glissage of the text): the locus of this “turn” being that void inscribed in the object & which, in turn, describes it. Which again bring to mind certain intersections the preoccupations of the nouveau roman & Klein’s similar preoccupations with body, object, image & his various stagings of the void – his 1959-1962 series, “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” in particular (in which Klein satirically offered art collectors different types of empty space for sale). Like the “Anthropometries” & “Saut dans la vide,” “Zones” finds a direct parallel in Robbe-Grillet’s projection of a spatial materiality rendered “narratologically full” by the seemingly paradoxical means of being “emptied” of “subjective content.” This effect is amplified by Robbe-Grillet’s deceptively transparent language, in which every subjectivity is automatically objectified & submitted, so to speak, to a supervening forensic “pointof-view,” a visual factography that maintains at all times an utmost fidelity to what is being described, or rather, to the narrative of description itself, but which nevertheless remains a species of performance art. As in the Marquis de Sade, the “pornographic” character of Robbe-Grillet’s work stems from pure narrativity: the constructing of scenarios, their constant elision & superposition; the mock naivety of a language masking the obscene knowingness of its significations. In this way, Robbe-Grillet “turns the weapon of metonymy,” as Lacan says, “against the nostalgia that it serves,” & “metaphor” against the logic of neutral affirmation & verification it serves. Throughout Glissements, the enigmatically objective status of the narrative (the fetish of description, etc., in which “subjectivity” is, in a manner of speaking, bound), is also the status of the film (text) itself. And as with Klein’s “Leap,” this objective register isn’t equivalent to anything discoverable, as Žižek says, in the object – rather the contrary: it “represents” the impossibility of an object other than that of writing, of the image, which is to say of the inscription in the “gaze” of that constitutive blind-spot – the back of the proverbial “eye,” the parallax in which the “void” is produced & which is in the socalled object of perception “more than the object itself.”11 And it is here, in this objective “void,” in the superposition & veering-off of two “looks,” that Lacan situates the very locus of desire (of the compulsion to see more), & sets in train that succession of images that pass across it as upon a cinema screen, only at the end to be interrupted once more by the camera which, fixing its gaze upon us, appears to say, Alors, tout est à recommencer. *Presented as a lecture at the Department of French Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, 14 June 2016. 41 11 Hence “it is a question,” as Lacan says, “of re-centring the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that which, at first site, it presents itself as speaking.” Or, as elsewhere, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” 516. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Coming to One’s Own,” trans. J. Hulbert, Psychoanalysis & the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 138. “A ‘domain’ opens up in which the ‘inscription’ of a subject in his text is also the necessary condition for the pertinence & performance of a text, for its ‘worth’ beyond what is called empirical subjectivity.” BETRAYALS OF THE AVANTGARDE KAREL TEIGE’S CINÉ-POETICS & BEYOND 42 “To make literature with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream.” – Richard Huelsenbeck “Modernity today isn’t in the hands of the poets, but of the cops.” – Louis Aragon Avantgardism has always been vested in ideological struggle, though in retrospect this struggle is frequently aestheticised or abstracted into a type of avantgarde metaphysics, in which “the new” circulates as a transcendental signifier of pure possibility detached from the real political character of its revolutionary rhetoric, its historical dimension circumscribed by isms: Cubism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. Each of these isms, drinking at the well of an ancient antago- nism, enacts a kind of Gnostic ritual in which the destiny of the world (no less) is bound up with an act of aesthetic completion, whether by enlightenment or by apocalypse. This is the revolutionary task the avantgarde has always, in one form or another, imagined for itself. Whether or not “modernism” & “avantgardism” can be regarded as in any respect synonymous during the first half of the twentieth century, or merely coincidental upon a drawn-out transitional moment in the technological & politico-economic evolution of the European idea, is perhaps a moot point, since in any case they come to represent complementary facets of the same historical “problem.” Given the imperative of crisis in both, within a context of violent transition1 across much of Europe – from Imperialism to Totalitarianism, with various detours into libertarianism, social democracy & market capitalism – even this simple binary, which has become the foundation of endless arthistorical truisms, is fraught with contradiction. In his 1974 study, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger famously but unpersuasively sought to contrast “modernism” with the “avantgarde” on the tenuous basis that modernism “is defined in terms of its consistent & continuous adherence to the concept of aesthetic autonomy” while the aim of the avantgarde has been to reintegrate art into life through a critique of institutional ideology (especially that concerning “art” itself).2 1 A transition sometimes mediated by nationalism, less frequently by the experiment in democracy that in a very few countries of the West had already acquired a tradition – a tradition which happened to provide the liberal environment in which an otherwise antagonistic avantgarde could productively evolve with minimal threat of state suppression. 2 Cf. Michael Chapman, “Fusion & the Avant-Garde,” Fusion (www.fusion-journal.com/issue/001-fusion/fusion-&-the-avantgarde/): “Bürger developed a sociological argument that the practices of the historical avantgarde had emerged as a fusion of art & life, merging practices into a hybrid assault on autonomy that can be characterized as distinctly avantgarde. Refuting previous positions, Bürger argued that the avantgarde wasn’t concerned with merely dismantling the classifications of art, but the institution of art in its entirety. This was dramatically opposed to Clement Greenberg’s hegemonic theory of art practice, where the segregated medium was the sole attribute through which the avantgarde could advance. It was in opposition to this diffusion of art practice that Bürger’s theory framed a radicalized lens through which the avantgarde could be reconceptualised: combating the segregation of medium with a deliberate fusing of the structures of art & their political & social histories.” 43 44 Contrarily, it’s easy to argue that the abstractive (autonomous) movement of modernity (as distinct from what Poggioli called the “sociological-aesthetic myth of l’art-pourl’artisme)3 is precisely what provides the critical possibility of an avantgarde as such, while – as Bürger concedes – in the final analysis a “reduction” of art & life eliminates the possibility of a critical position. Bürger concedes that “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticise it.”4 As others, like Guy Debord, have noted, “the suppression & realisation of art are inseparable aspects of the same overcoming of art.” And it is for this reason that a “socially-transformative” project of “reintegrating art into life” is visible even in the seemingly paradoxical, spasmodic anti-art of the various Dadaisms & their stabilisation within the discourses of Cubo-futurism & Constructivism. The same reasons that gave rise to such seemingly unlikely artefacts as Raoul Hausmann & Richard Huelsenbeck’s “radical communist” manifesto What Is Dadaism & What Does It Want in Germany? (1919) in which the artist demanded the “introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanisation of every field of activity” & the establishment “of a Dadaist advisory council for the remodelling of life in every city of over 50,000 inhabitants” – as well as “the “immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual centre.” The same reasons, too, manifest in the ideological discrepancies between two of the most frequently cited instances of the avantgarde’s “last” convulsive flowering in Europe: Mai ’68 in Paris & the Prague Spring (Pražské jaro). Discrepancies that belie deeper antagonisms within the socalled avantgarde project, inherited from the interwar era & transposed into a fractured image of experimental “liberalism” in the late 1960s, whose revenance-effect was still visible in Fukuyama’s timely proclamation of the End of History in 1989. What in the interwar era remained fluid & 3 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1968) 20. 4 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 50. contested, becomes a set of doctrinal positions from which revisionist critiques like Bürger’s have biased the avantgarde idea & which have, within the mainstream of Western postwar intellectual discourse – with its initial impetus in the work of Sartre & other self-proclaimed “existentialists” – obscured the ideological crisis at the heart of it. The embarrassing & sometimes shameful adherence of key Western intellectuals to the tenets of Stalinism & Maoism, even after the facts were well known (Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s grotesque apologies for the Moscow show trials; Sollers’s laughable subscription to the Chinese “cultural revolution”) taints twentieth century “modernism” & “avantgardism” no less than Pound’s & Marinetti’s befuddled adoration of Mussolini, or Heidegger’s unrepentant Hitlerism. The fact that a certain post-war prestige attached itself to the Soviet Union in light of its dubious opposition to the Nazis, has of course tended to slant the way in which history has been projected in this respect, just as the cultural & economic prestige of the United States served as an ideological foil in Western Europe (no less than in the USSR) for the discourse of revolt against the apparently one-sided hegemony of market capitalism.5 Mai ’68 & the Prague Spring illustrate the dilemma frequently concealed here, based in what were in fact (despite a shared pre-history of Nazi occupation) diametrically opposite social movements: one, symbiotic with an economic “renaissance,” appealing both to modernism’s apparent revulsion by consumerist (i.e. American) kitsch as well as the revolutionary discourse of a “political avantgarde,” & drawing upon the heroic image of war-time (partisan) resistance movements; the other emerging from a populace whose cultural & political independence had been twice traded away by the West & whose non-partisan resistance movements had been systematically decimated, such that their dissident movements had evolved directly within the framework of an oppressive state socialism, characterised by a recent history of isolation, economic crisis, widespread purges & Soviet clientelism. 5 See, for example, L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 & 1986, ed. Christian Höller (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2012). 45 46 Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 didn’t, in this respect, produce the major sea-change in Western intellectual circles it might have. And if the Budapest uprising & the Prague Spring did marginally more to realign attitudes, this likely as not took the form of a handydandy flirtation with Maoism & the various brands of anticolonialism fashionable on the boulevards in the ’60s & ’70s – of the kind satirised by Godard & Fassbinder & only marginally linked to actual political struggle in Algeria, Palestine & elsewhere. It would be wrong, however, to regard these as merely forms of “boutique” avantgardism sponsored (covertly or otherwise) by the competing powers to produce a cultural of political distraction, for their consequences were nevertheless significant & continue to enmesh debate in a “postmodernist” miasma that is both “capitalism’s masterstroke” (Fukuyama) & the triumph of institutional “leftist” revisionism (as for example the project of October magazine). While a disproportionate number of the victims of Stalinism – particularly those affiliated with the interwar avantgardes – had to wait until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in order to be, as they say, “rehabilitated,” many socialist dissidents from those same groups in the Warsaw Pact countries remain in undeserved obscurity still, haunting the margins of a discourse whose major leftist elaborators in the West were actively complicit in their suppression. This is the dirty history of “the avantgarde,” which – in its ideologically homogenised Franco-Germano-centric view of itself (ventriloquised by American proxies like Rosalind Kraus & Hal Foster) – have too often privileged the representatives of Sovietised “modernism” while effectively collaborating in the silencing of its internal critics (doing the work of the NKVD & KGB). Situated as the major interchange on the Paris-Moscow axis, the situation of the interwar Prague avantgarde was (& remains) paradigmatic in this regard.6 Capital of the only advanced industrial state east of Germany – with a Western-orientated liberal democracy & a flourishing avant6 See especially Derek Sayer’s excellent Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Toyen, Bohuslav Brouk, Jacqueline Breton, André Breton, Vítězslav Nezval, Jindřich Štyrský (seated), Vincenc Makovsý, Paul Eluard, Karel Teige (Prague, 1935) garde with close ties to the Cubists, the Constructivists, the Berlin Dadaists, the Bauhaus & the Surrealists – Prague was the proverbial beacon-on-the-hill of the new “European idea” emerging from the defeat of the German Reich & the collapse of the Habsburg empire. The scope of the Prague avantgarde ranged from the “first Dada novel,” Melchior Vischer’s Sekunde dirch Hirn (Second Through Brain) (1920), & the Dada manifestations of John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann7 in tandem with Adolf Hoffmeister, Jiří Voskovec & Jan Werich at the Liberated Theatre (Osvobozené divadlo ) – from which Poetism, Devětsil, & Prague Surrealism successively emerged – to the irrealism of Kafka, the “science fiction” of Karel Čapek, the ex7 See František Šmejkal, “Kurt Schwitters a Praha,” Umění 34.2 (1986): 184-191. 47 48 perimental poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva & the structuralism of Roman Jakobson & René Wellek, among many others. Central to much of Prague’s interwar avantgarde scene, much as Guillaume Apollinaire was to that of pre-war Paris, was Karel Teige – writer, polemicist, artist, theorist – who formed close connections with Man Ray, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, André Breton & Le Corbusier, all of whom visited Prague on his invitation. And if Prague’s status as an internationalist avantgarde capital of interwar Europe has since become obscured under the influence of world-historical events & the city’s secondary position (after Berlin) on the Cold War fault-line (figuratively at least) between East & West, in that perennial non-place of “Mitteleuropa,” then this diminution, suppression & at times erasure is nowhere more paradigmatic than in the case of Teige himself, in whom the ideological forces of “History” found a most convenient scapegoat. For in Teige we see how truly inimical to the self-proclaimed guardians of the “avantgarde” the internationalism & syncretism of a certain modernity still remain & just how superficial the work of intellectual reparation, so to speak, has been since then & in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as the West begins again to doubt its global triumph. For while to “Western” eyes Prague has served at key times as a symbol (however ambivalent & indeed accusatory) of totalitarian oppression & as a beacon of resistance & of the “free spirit” – Hitler’s annexation in 1939, the Prague Spring in 1968, the Velvet Revolution in 1989 – the substance behind this symbolism & the modernist/avantgardist tradition underpinning its cultural labour has largely been ignored. And despite the West’s apparent fascination with the city, on each occasion of its oppression by the Nazis & then the Soviets, it was the Western Powers who left it to fend for itself – just as, despite Western intellectuals’ extravagant love affair with Kafka, the legacy of Prague’s other major modernist innovators, Teige foremost, after forty years of communist suppression & Western ignorance & neglect, has continued to be left to fend for itself.8 8 There are notable exceptions to this tendency, as Derek Sayer among Like many involved in the avantgardes of the 1920s & ’30s, Teige believed that the problems of art proceed from a social dimension. While never a member of the Communist Party his theories linking Constructivism & Poetism led him to a broadly “socialist” understanding of the revolutionary task of art – driven by a catholic conception of futurity expressed, in 1924, in the idea of an “Americanised Europe on its way to becoming one chaotic & cinematic metropolis” in whom “the accompanying social change” would produce “an harmonious international city,” of which Prague was emblematic.9 It was Teige’s misfortune, unlike his Western counterparts, to find himself after WW2 living not in an internationalist utopia but in a communist-dominated state veering towards dictatorship, whose socialism bore no relation to Teige’s (as some critics nowadays say with all the sneering satisfaction of hindsight) naïve socialism. For Teige, art was never in the service of the revolution, it was the revolution – his vision of an ars una encompassed all aspects of social life alongside all modes of production, in contrast to the Socialist Realist dogma in which art served purely as an aesthetic representation of ideology. The political orientation of the pre-War avantgarde & Teige’s later victimisation by the communist authorities in post-War Czechoslovakia, cannot be separated either from the mode in which his ideas were formulated or the manner of their later suppression. Arguably, Teige’s importance to the pre-War avantgarde scene in Europe has been almost entirely negated as a consequence of ideological normalisation during the Cold War era & the invention, basically, of a “secret avantgarde” whose existence in the Yalta Conference states remained (& in many cases still remains) that of a shadow to the institutional avantgardism of the liberal left within the cultural conglomerate represented by the Marshall Plan. While Teige’s standing in pre-War Czechoslovakia had been commensurable with that of Le Corbusier & Breton in France, during the immediate post-War period following others has pointed out, but they remain – like André Breton’s lifelong fidelity to Prague & Teige – isolated incidences. 9 Karel Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film & Cinematography,” trans. Zdeněk Polívka, Prague Poetics, ed. David Vichnar (Prague: LPB, 2017). 49 50 the communist putsch (& as a consequence of his earlier criticism of the Moscow show trials – for which Vítězslav Nezval, Louis Aragon & Maurice Merleau-Ponty were all avid apologists) Teige was declared persona non grata. His reputation was almost completely overshadowed by that of his one-time friend & collaborator Nezval, who disowned him (to the disgust of mutual friends like André Breton) – but while elsewhere Stalinist sympathisers like Louis Aragon have since attracted a degree of criticism, Nezval, a no less rabid Stalinist & unbridled egotist in addition, still remains the default representative of Czech avantgardism, even in the most recent cultural histories. In addition to being obliged to recant his anti-Stalinist views & to issue a stern public auto-critique, Teige (at the same time as Nezval was receiving official sanction) was systematically harassed, denied access to all but informal modes of publication, & denied the opportunity to emigrate. Teige’s official humiliation continued even after his death in 1951, when his apartment was confiscated & his papers & library were destroyed by the communist authorities. As if to reinforce all this, & on the flimsy pretext of having been written in a minor European language, Teige’s work was subsequently allowed to fall into an obscurity in the West equal to the obscurity into which it was cast in Czechoslovakia, affected – & this is a conclusion difficult to avoid – with at least the partial collusion of the “liberal left” in assuagement of their Soviet minders (& this despite the ongoing art-historical vogue Surrealism & Constructivism have experienced since roughly that time).10 To be exact, 10 Teige’s work was first translated into English to any real extent in 1999, while the first important secondary literature on Teige only appeared in the mid-2000s. In comparison, the semiotician Jan Mukařovský, Teige’s contemporary & one of the founders of Prague Structuralism, prospered after the War, during which time he became one of the chief architects of the communist purges & was appointed Rector of Charles University. With the Anglo-American hunger for Structuralism in the ’70s, Mukařovský even had an impact in English in some quarters of academia comparable (arguably) to that of Roman Jakobson (who, along with René Wellek, had escaped Prague before the war). The point here is not to exaggerate the comparative reception of these thinkers, but to highlight a disparity between the ongoing reception of the likes of Mukařovský in the West (particularly in light of the reassessments directed at Heidegger, who for a time enjoyed a similar position under Hitler, though did not exercise it to the same ends, & even comparably minor collaborationist figures like Paul de Man). Teige’s work first appeared in English translation only in 1999, while the first important secondary literature on Teige didn’t appear until the mid-2000s. In comparison, the semiotician Jan Mukařovský, Teige’s contemporary & one of the founders of Prague Structuralism, prospered after the War – during which time he became one of the architects of the communist purges & was appointed Rector of Charles University. With the Anglo-American hunger for Structuralism in the ’70s, Mukařovský even had an impact in English in some quarters of academia comparable (arguably) to that of Roman Jakobson (who, along with René Wellek, had escaped Prague before the war). The point here is not to exaggerate the comparative reception of these thinkers, but to highlight a disparity between the ongoing reception in the West of the likes of Mukařovský (particularly in light of the reassessments directed at Heidegger, who for a time enjoyed a similar position under Hitler as Mukařovský did under the Czechoslovak dictator Klement Gottwald, though did not exercise it to the same ends) & someone like Teige. And while it is characteristic of this period, in which dissident figures on both sides of the Marxist-Capitalist divide were overshadowed by those overtly complicit with the ideological status quo – which is to say, the phoney “revolutionary struggle” the Cold War masqueraded itself as11 – such an alibi is not readily available today, where in its place we often simply confront a project of consolidation within Western intellectual discourse that (still) projects itself eastward as the definitive cultural narrative, by way of its Guggenheim franchises, its virtual monopoly on “impact assessed” scholarly publications, its saturation of digital archives, & so on. By a perhaps not un-ironic twist, the necessary disillusionment produced by this hegemonic powerplay (in addition to all else, & accompanied by an ongoing “postmodernist” angst about the failure of the “neoavantgarde”), gives a renewed impetus to precisely the kind of legacy Teige’s work bequeaths. Monolithically 11 For just as Teige is erased from cultural history in communist Czechoslovakia, so we have the erasing of Wilhelm Reich in democratic USA. 51 John Heartfield (left), at the AIZ magazine office, Prague (1936) & his “Farewell to Prague!” (1938) 52 overshadowed on both sides, it represents something like an apotheosis of everything the experimental avantgardes of the nineteenth & early twentieth-centuries set out to accomplish, for it illuminates the real object of the critique: that, like a secret army, in order to become what it is, the avantgarde must not be – & it must accomplish this in full view of the world. Is it merely a circumstance of history, then, that Teige – like Trotsky, though under rather differing circumstances – acquires a certain “validation,” having fallen by the wayside of Power? Or is the form of this “fall” already a denunciation, of that false “transformation of consciousness” the institutional avantgarde represents by becoming, in effect, an Ideological State Apparatus, as Althusser says? Yet the duplicities of this expropriative movement are such that the romance of avantgardism, particularly in the former West, & among intellectuals who ought to know better, is allowed to dissemble the fact that any wholesale “transformation of consciousness” must necessarily betray a political impetus – & that, moreover, no “avantgarde” could pursue such a programme without relinquishing its experimental basis.12 Teige argues precisely this point in his “Poetist Manifesto,” published in 1924, in which a programmatic constructivism 12 There are no scheduled discoveries, & the “new,” which is not a synonym for “progress,” being always contingent & in-excess of itself, cannot be reduced to a paradigm of ideological operations. is confronted with an irreducible poiēsis, an idea that will remain – if not always formulated as such – the basis of Teige’s thinking even during his socialist period. “Each calculation,” he writes, “rationalises irrationality merely by several decimal points. The calculus of each machine has its π.”13 This π is the critical-generative element, the poetic spur, which is both so-to-speak “objective” (it is the only truth in art) & “without object” (it has no model, whether interior or exterior). When art or language or even politics is stripped of “ideology,” it is this that remains, & it is this that “ideology” is ultimately unable to abolish: the element that exposes its inauthenticity, as it were. It is the locus of a “disillusionment” in every sense. In the manifesto, Teige called for a generalised poetics as the foundation of everyday life, expressed in the synergetic intermeshing of all aspects of modernity, from the technological to the psychological, the political & the semiotic. This syncretism reaches beyond its immediate historical formulation towards the post-War preoccupation with cybernetics, hypermedia & interactivity. Unlike the technocratic utopianism of Marinetti, Poetism, for Teige, was to be the actual crowning achievement of a communitarian future concerned not with the artefacts of modernity but rather its self-transformative potential. “Poetism,” Teige wrote, “knows that one of the greatest values embraced by mankind is human individuality harnessed to the discipline of the collective fellowship of man.”14 Just as Heidegger envisage poetic dwelling, so Teige envisaged a communitarian dynamic. As a revolution towards potential, “Poetism,” Teige insisted, was “not an -ism.” Nor was Poetism “art” in any pre-existing sense. “Poetism is,” he argued, “above all, a way of life.” It was Teige’s objective to “revise all values,” “to liquidate existing art categories,”15 to produce an “art that ceases to be art.”16 The “Poetist Manifesto” was not about “poetry” 13 Karel Teige, “Poetist Manifesto,” trans. Alexandra Büchler, Karel Teige 1900-1951: L’Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde, eds. Eric Dluhosch & Rostislav Švácha (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) 67. 14 Teige, “Poetist Manifesto,” 70-71. 15 Teige, “Poetist Manifesto,” 70. 16 Karel Teige, “Obrazy a předobrazy” [Figures & Prefigurations] (1921), 53 54 in the sense of a literary genre, but about a generalized poiēsis. It is necessary to read Teige’s major theoretical statements in tandem to appreciate the original character of his thinking here. The emergent concept of a life-poetics takes shape in several very different contexts: the first is the “Poetist Manisfesto” of 1924, then “The Minimum Dwelling & the Collective House” – an essay primarily concerned with the problem of social housing, published in 1931 – & “The Inner Model,” a response to Surrealism, from 1945. Teige’s starting point may be described as a “projective dialectics,” an attempt to understand the true character of experimentalism & the role of the avantgarde as a critical-generative force. In this, Teige lays the practical foundation of his project, distinguishing his “poetics” from an avantgardism that constitutes its own “problem” – that is to say, from the vicious circle of “ideology.” Teige conceived of this dialectic as “projective” in that it is drawn into the world, or as Heidegger says, thrown. The basis of its critique are not a system of pre-existing values, but the convulsive encounter between emergent forms. In this way Teige’s “Poetism” approaches aspects of de Saussure’s semiology, in which “meaning” or “significance” arises on a basis of interactions characterised as “differences without terms.” As in montage, “sense” doesn’t devolve upon discrete semiotic elements on the basis of pre-existent “meanings” or “resemblances” – rather, like Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” their constellation, so to speak, makes sense of them. As Benjamin says, It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images cited in Miroslav Petříček, “Karel Teige: Art Theory between Phenomenology & Structuralism,” Karel Teige 1900-1951, 326. (that is, not archaic); & the place where one encounters them is language.17 It’s no accident that Teige saw an immediate expression of this idea in the logic of collage. Like Debord some decades later, Teige recognised that the significant element of collage was its capacity for détournement. Not only does the encounter between previously unrelated elements produce “sense,” but this “sense” has the potential to affect a critique. A critique not of some “content” or other, but of the very logic (the ideology in fact) of sense vested in objects: which is to say, in a mimēsis. Collage, montage, architectonics & psychic automatism all provided Teige with opportunities to develop a non-objective poetics which at the same time emphasised its radical materiality. In 1925, Teige turned his focus on the work of Man Ray. Teige considered Ray’s photograms (“rayographs”) as opening a path towards precisely such a materialist “poetics” of the object, in which the implied technicity of montage & the “seamless potential” of collage might be given “formal” expression – what Teige called “optical poetry.”18 This was not supposed to be a metaphor but rather a revolution, a reinvention of “seeing” that would also & at the same time entail a reinvention of “poetics.” Art in all its previous formulations was declared to be abolished, or if not abolished, transformed beyond recognition: the future it represented could only be grasped if the revolutionary character of this transformation itself was grasped. As Paul Éluard was to write, “it is possible to transform anything into anything else, anything whatsoever.”19 The photogram provided a blueprint. During the next ten years, these ideas of “combining the incompatible”20 percolated through his theoretical 17 Walter Benjamin, “Awakening,” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 462; n2a, 3. 18 Karel Teige, “K estetice filmu” [“Towards an aesthetics of Film”], Pásmo 1.7-8 (1925): 2. 19 Qtd in Vojtěch Lahoda, “Teige’s Violations: The Collages of Karel Teige, the Visual Concepts of the Avant-Garde & René Magritte,” Karel Teige: Surrealist Collages 1935-1951 (Prague: Edice Detail, 1994) 8. 20 Lahoda, “Teige’s Violations,” 7. 55 Karel Teige, collage no.55a (1938) 56 writings before emerging, in 1935, as the basis of Teige’s major art practice. Additionally informed by Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1925), & by the “Dadaist collages” of Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Max Ernst, & the “visual imagination” of John Heartfield (resident in Prague from 1933-38 in exile from the Nazis),21 Teige’s later “Surrealist” photomontages & collages – some of which appeared, alongside that of Jindřich Štyrský, in Erotická revue & Edice 69 – aimed at an overarching “pictorial synthesis of contradicting elements.” As Karel Srp has noted, the mutual relation of the motifs used became the most important question of photomontage; while in pictorial poems the choice of motifs was subordinated to a single unified tone, in surrealist collage it was the role of contrast & discrepancy which came to the fore.22 21 See Teige’s notes on “Koláž, fotomontáž” in the Literary Archive of the Museum of National Literature, Prague: 2266-2277, no. 134/62. 22 Karel Srp, “Collage as Simultaneity & Contradiction: The Pictorial Conceptions, Quotations & Paraphrases of Karel Teige,” Karel Teige: Surrealist Collages 1935-1951 (Prague: Edice Detail, 1994) 23. The majority of Teige’s 374 collage works, however, weren’t published until after his death in the samizdat journal Zvěrokruh & remained unknown outside communist Czechoslovakia until they were “discovered” by German art critics in the 1960s. In retrospect, we can see the collages as an integral part of the overall architectonic design of Teige’s syncretic modernism, whose “social” dimension was never separate from the question of articulation, whether in the aesthetic forms of collage, cinema, architecture or “poetry,” or in the ideological foundation of the future ideal “harmonious international city.” What Teige was attempting was an entirely new theoretical structure for a new poetic environment; in the process he sought to reinvent the very idea of the avantgarde. His “projective dialectics” had evolved through a shift away from the idea of “form” & “model” towards “process” & onwards, to the polyvalences of “figuration” & “prefiguration.” His next step brought him into direct conflict with Le Corbusier on the question of communal architecture. Teige’s interest in architecture was two-fold: on the one hand, stemming from a concern with the economic roots of urban housing shortages, he viewed architecture as a realisation of social possibility & consequently as a mode of socialism; on the other, stemming from a concern with structure, he viewed it as an expression of poiēsis, of a social dynamic in flux. For Teige, social reality must first & foremost be experimental. Teige’s approach to the question of the “minimal dwelling” anticipated Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxionism, in that the minimal should maximalise potential. This was not simply an economic argument. For Teige, a dwelling that could meet an essential existential minimum must, by definition, also be collective. Unlike Le Corbusier’s machines for living, with which this idea is superficially similar, Teige rejected any notion of a “hermetically sealed structure” (as in Le Corbusier’s “Unité d’habitation”) or any reduction to classical principles of proportion & scale (Le Corbusier’s application of the “golden section” as the modular standardisation of the individual body). Teige, who lectured on this subject at the Bauhaus in the 1930s, envisaged a collectivity that wasn’t merely an abstract assemblage 57 58 of units (“unity” in “separation,” as Debord says), but a dynamic system. This is the social dimension of Teige’s thinking, however naively it might’ve been accommodated to the imperatives of state socialism – for the dwelling must itself be the socius. While the language of Teige’s essay on the minimum dwelling is often programmatic, its key points are derived – as in his approach to the rayographs – from the materiality of the problem. The minimum is effectively a semiotic minimum on which the collective discourse that dwelling entails can be founded23; it is the defining possibility of social interaction. The architectural minimum becomes an architectonic minimum, the interstice defining a general economy of articulation. The final development of Teige’s syncretic modernism came about in his discussion of photography in the “Inner Model,” his last major theoretical statement, in which he attributes the operations of a generalised poiēsis to an autonomous structural agency (for example, the “technical, photochemical process that,” in the production of a photographic image, “is essentially automatic”). From Breton, Teige borrows the metaphor of “psychic automatism,” but ultimately the “psychic” character of this automatism is independent of purely human agency. Teige returns to the Freudian understanding of a psychic apparatus, whose structures are differential, & whose operations are guided by a radical ambivalence. He defines what he calls the “inner model” not as a mimetic substitute, but as a “psychograph” produced “by those forces of the psychic apparatus that act on it before it becomes what it is.”24 The “inner model” is, in effect, the non-objective core of Teige’s poetics – & it represents the moment at which his thinking deconstructs the ideological basis of its “socialism.” Teige’s photo-poetics or typophotography – exemplified in practice in his 1923 “Pictorial Poem” collaborations wit Jindřich Štyrský & his better-known 1926 collaboration with Nezval, Alphabet – overlaps with both Berlin Dada 23 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1975). 24 Karel Teige, “The Inner Model,” Karel Teige 1900-1951, 342. (Hannah Höch’s Meine Haussprüche, for example, from 1922) & the photo-poetry of Russian avantgardists like Mayakovsky & Rodchenko’s About This (1923) & Mayakovsky & Rozhkov’s To the Workers of Kursk (19247), developing from the “bioscopic” approach first mooted by El Lissitzky. As Aleksandar Bošković notes, In the 1920s, inclusion of mass-produced & machine-made images—photography, photomontage—together with the application of a filmic vision as a fundamental part of literary fiction, was a much more radical statement about modernity than it may appear to us today. In this context, the 1920s photopoetry emerged as a new genre that aspired to appropriate the products of technological culture in creating poetry more alert to the mass sensibility of a rapidly changing mechanical age. As a new hybrid form that combines poetic text & photographic images, photopoetry was ripe for poetic experimentation & production of optical provocations.25 In certain essential respects, this “bioscopic” incorporation of a general poetics within the sphere of the socalled technical image epitomises Teige’s emerging cinematographic, techno-poetic vision. As Bošković argues, the bioscopic book was conceptualised “as an alternative cinematic apparatus,” capable of transforming a mere object into a concrete “technology” due to its operational body: its continuous page sequence & the dialectical interaction of the poetic text & photomontages featured on its pages. The specificity of the bioscopic book’s operational body is defined by the montage… as overt juxtapositions & accumulation, repetition, seriality, or sequence… the reader/viewer both takes part in the topography of the bioscopic book & becomes a part of its conceptual material circuit. The reader/viewer participates in the re-creation of the cinematic ‘projection’ by setting the alternating current of the bioscopic book in motion.26 25 Aleksandar Bošković, Photopoetry & the Bioscopic Book: Russian & Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s, doctoral dissertation (Slavic Languages & Literatures) (University of Michigan, 2013) x-xi. 26 Bošković, Photopoetry & the Bioscopic Book, xi. 59 60 This “concrete technology” thus presents itself as an apparatus for “the formulation & re-production of montage thinking as a new cognitive model by which we interact with the outside world”27 in which, as Teige says, the “silver screen of our dreams displays electrogenic poems” engulfed in a new global “sensibility” anticipating the syncretic thought of Buckminster Fuller & Marshall McLuhan, & its Situationist critique. Indeed, Teige’s photopoetics is never conceived separately from a form of “expanded” future cinema of which, already in 1924, he writes “the rapid succession of facts, ideas & observations” – at a “velocity… similar to Einstein’s theorems” – “brings about a simultaneity of perception” – an “overwhelming visual orchestra… of form & matter in motion… a cineplastic poem that abides & unfolds in time… a space-time poem that, as Whitman says, ‘Needs not words, nor music, nor rhyme’” & which – like Benjamin’s dialectical image – would be not only “an accurate description of our age” but encompass “the most radical psychological contrasts with such acuteness that it borders on paradox.”28 What is important here is that this paradox no longer represents a problem in need of resolution or accommodation, rather it exposes a certain impetus to “abstraction” that is fundamental to what Teige perceived as the true technological condition of humanity. And it is here that Teige’s conception of “montage” is most radical in its departure from Bürger’s reductionism – as a generative semantic conceit that cuts across not only spatio-temporal but also social dimensions, transforming perception itself.29 To the extent that all modernity is an “accelerationism,” Teige’s vectoral ciné-poetics vests abstraction in a new (potentially fundamental) reality to which the eye-mind is given access under the tutelage of unprecedented velocities. “A landscape,” he writes, “which we traverse at the speed 27 Bošković, Photopoetry & the Bioscopic Book, xi. Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film & Cinematography,” n.pag. 29 Teige himself sums this up in a brief parable of sorts: “Guillaume Apollinaire, who so ingeniously anticipated many of the future developments, tells a story about a painter who stands ‘at the very edge of life, in the realm of art,’ only to discover that he has in fact entered ‘at the very edge of art, into the realm of life.’” 28 Karel Teige, collages no.196 (1941) & no.48 (1938) of a hundred kilometres by train or car is devoid in our eyes of its descriptive & statistical dimensions; our senses are impregnated with a vision of totality & synthesis.”30 Drawing on the Simultaneist impulses in Apollinaire’s Alcools, Teige’s synaesthetic “vision” comes to inform a generalised poetics as the basis not merely of an aesthetic standpoint but, like Fuller, of a “total” world view – in which avowed socially-transformative aims are not in contest with the abstractive autonomism of modernity at large, but fully in synthesis with them. It is in the “paradox” of the moving image that Teige identifies the aspirations of Poetism as most fully expressed, “that there is but one art in many guises” speaking “in all the languages & dialects of human imagination.” As an analogue to his integrated/ dynamic conception of the social & aesthetic dimensions of life, cinema represented for Teige that acme of creative life which for Gropius & Le Corbusier was represented by architecture: a weightless, perpetually mobile, virtual architecture of poetic vision & thought. A revolutionary idea for its time. In practice, Teige’s involvement with filmmaking was 30 Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film & Cinematography,” n.pag. 61 more or less limited to the genre of Poetist screenplay – explored in tandem with Voskovec, Nezval, E.F. Burian, Vladislav Vančura et al. as “a synthesis of picture & poem, set in motion by film” – whose most successful interpreter was arguably Aleksandr Hackenschmied, considered to be the founder of Czech avantgarde cinema with his 1930 film Aimless Walk (Bezůčelná procházka), but who became better known in his American incarnation as Alexander Hammid, co-author with Maya Deren of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Yet if the evolution of “expanded cinema” in Teige’s total conception as a medium still belongs to the future, its “reality” is already vested in the world – it is, in a sense, the immanence of the world itself given temporal expression: Cinema revealed to us a brand new artform, one perfectly attuned to the character, needs & essentials of our time. We recognized the cinema as a cradle of all new art. Its live radio-concerto is where the sundry voices of all the world’s cities & the keen magic of melancholic songs converge. Where the most singular images & foreign lights burn as ephemeral stars shrouded in steam train mist. The possibilities of cinema are endless, its resources rich & limitless. Its genuinely modern poetry is all-encompassing, precise, terse & synthetic.31 62 Almost a century on, & like some return of the repressed Teige’s theoretical investigations appear to us today strangely cognisant, in their most radical formulations, of a line of development in “Western consciousness” from cinema to cybernetics, to that eminent domain of posthumanism in which contemporary thought still dreams of itself as the midwife of an artificial intelligence it has always been nostalgic for. What had been consigned to the dustbin of history only to become one of those poltergeists that find ways of upsetting the proverbial applecart, Teige’s syncretic modernism confronts us in equal measure with an unnerving prescience & the naivety of the “heroic spirit, intoxicating exoticisms & beautiful optimism”: which is to say, with the disillusionment of the “new” in 31 Teige, “The Aesthetics of Film & Cinematography,” n.pag. Karel Teige, collage no.50 (1938) its momentarily recognisable form. Poetism claimed to be more than merely “a silent accompaniment” in the world of social interactions, but is its revenance the symptom or a secret “cause” of a poetics of radical ambivalence that continues to test the adequacy of modernism’s theoretical prostheses, or the barely glimpsed prelude to a cinemawithout-end? *Presented as a lecture at the Société Moderniste & Institut du Monde Anglophone, Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, April 2014. 63 THE IDEOLOGY OF THE END OF IDEOLOGY PONTECORVO | GODARD | FASSBINDER 64 In 1968, at the height of a renewed political engagement in all areas of social life, Jean-Luc Godard stated: “There are two types of militant films, those we call ‘blackboard films’ & those known as Internationale films. The latter are the equivalent of chanting L’internationale during a demonstration, while the others prove certain theories that allow one to apply to reality what has been seen on screen” (La Gai savoir). This dichotomy harks back to a debate about cinema that emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution, & whose two central protagonists were Eisenstein (on the side of narrative) & Vertov (on the side of the medium itself); both made radical contributions to film form, in particular the use of montage (in the case of Eisenstein) & superposition (in the case of Vertov). Additionally, Vertov’s kino pravda (cinéma vérité) approach to filming had particular ramifications for the “depiction” of everyday life, as opposed to conventional “realism” in which the imposition of narrative continuity etc. is exposed as constituting an ideological “normalisation.” In a reductive sense, the debate between Eisenstein & Vertov could be boiled down to a commitment to either form or to revolutionary content. When Lenin announced cinema to be “the most important art form,” the doctrine of Socialist Realism soon transfigured it into a propagandistic medium, dogmatic in tone & didactic in intent. Formalism, which would henceforth be the domain of the avantgarde, was ostensibly suppressed as bourgeois decadence &, consequently, it is arguable that “militant” formalism thereafter serves a double critique: both of the social, subjective condition, & historical conditions,1 but also of the ideological condition of cinema itself. It is for this reason that even in the most overtly “political” films by directors like Godard & Guy Debord there is a marked ambivalence towards a doctrinaire “socialist realism.” The dilemma that arises here has partly to do with the question of the status of cinema itself. In Lenin’s view, cinema was a tool, an instrument at the service of the revolution, just as it was for Goebbels & countless other architects of both soft & hard totalitarianism: among which we need to include the major Western “democracies.” The identification of cinema at the service of the revolution with a “popular” cinema, gives rise to a number of dilemmas. While “popular” may easily be opposed to “avant-garde,” in the sense that the latter is often difficult & inaccessible to easy understanding (hence “elitist”), the separation of “popular” in the revolutionary sense from “popular” in the commercial sense is not so clear. As the Portuguese filmmaker Glauber Rocha once wrote: “Revolutionary art must be magic, capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand to live in this absurd reality.”2 Such an emancipatory potential, however, is fraught 1 Menno ter Braak, “Cinema Militans,” The Cinema Militans Lectures 1989-1991 (Utrecht: Dutch Film Days Foundation, 1992) 10. 2 Glauber Rocha, “Aesthetic of Hunger / Aesthetic of Dream,” trans. Randal Johnson & Burnes Hollyman, Diagonal Thoughts (12 October 2012): www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1708 65 66 with disillusionment, since precisely the same acts of “seduction” can be, & have been on an industrial scale, employed in the business precisely of social normalisation & economic enslavement: from Rocha’s “absurd reality” to Baudrillard’s “desert of the real.” This is one reason why, in his more recent films, Godard has made controversial comparisons between the Hollywood “dream factory” & the concentration camps, & between Hollywood & the Nazi Occupation – suggesting that the former represents a type of “holocaust”: the destruction of cinema, as such, & its supplanting with what Debord calls spectacle. But not only the destruction of cinema, along with its critical potential, but also what Jean Baudrillard goes so far as to call the murder of the real. Godard explicitly relates the systematic global domination of Hollywood to the Soviet mass propaganda machine, Mosfilm, whose purpose – far from expressing or performing a critique of “real conditions of existence” – was to keep the “spectator” at bay in a state of passive contemplation (as Brecht says, “hanging up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”), separated from life itself. For Debord, this “spectacularism” represented the highest form of social & individual alienation For both Godard & Debord, the “popularism” of Hollywood is a product of no less than a systematic colonisation of the collective unconscious. In a sense, the entire project of Debord’s criticism of the “society of the spectacle” stems from the recognition that first cinema, then television, were the major instruments of the postwar Marshall Plan, whose avowed intention was the infrastructural rebuilding of a materially devastated Europe, but whose consequences were a (also) an infrastructural re-acculturation: & that culture was American culture. It’s perhaps for this reason that the militant cinema of this time in Western Europe (particularly France) shares certain characteristics with socalled “Third World” militancy (in Algeria, Palestine & elsewhere), in its focus both as anticolonialist & (in varying respects) anti-totalitarian. And as post-war America entered its own phase of social, economic & ideological normalisation, so too did it heighten existing tensions around civil rights, gender inequality, civil liberties, & so on, producing a generation of militants & filmmakers in reaction to America’s internal “colonisations” & to the totalitarianism operating behind its veneer of democracy. A reaction that largely began in the 1950s but only became visible after the assassination of JFK, America’s entry into the Vietnam War & Watergate. One of the ramifications of US post-war hegemony & the Cold War generally was a theoretical reorientation of the idea of “political” cinema. As Louis Althusser & the theorists associated with Tel Quel argued, all films must be considered “political” because they are always already overdetermined as expressions of prevailing ideologies. This also placed a certain responsibility upon “militant” cinema to be, above all, critical – its responsibility, in the eyes of Godard (who had – echoing or anticipating Guy Debord, depending on which version of the story you believe – declared “cinema” to be dead), was to intervene, interrupt, or otherwise sabotage the “imaginary” economy of the Hollywood film model. Godard’s chosen means (like Debord’s) was montage, most extensively deployed in his ’68 anti-film Cinétracts, & far from simply being an avant-garde frivolity, montage was thus regarded as a means of sabotage against nothing less than the dominant US “military entertainment complex” itself. As Godard, again paraphrasing Debord, argued: “The dominant class creates a world after its own image, but it also creates an image of its world, which it calls a ‘reflection of reality.’” These & other Godardian tropes are in some sense already recognisable from the numerous Situation tracts published throughout the ’50s & ’60s, but above all in Debord’s Société du spectacle, published in 1967 & which became hugely influential after the student protests of May 1968. Debord always contended (with a certain amount of selfirony lacking) that Godard’s entire approach to militant cinema had been plagiarised from the Situationism, & responded with his own anti-cinema, released in 1973 under the same title as his earlier book. Like Cinétracts, The Society of the Spectacle is largely trenchant didacticism verging on agitprop, which indeed tests the comfort of the “ordinary viewer” (were such a creature to actually exist). It is an unrelenting feedback of détourned consumerist/ military-entertainment complex porn, with all the prurience- 67 value of a textbook cut-up. In certain respects, Debord’s approach parallel’s that of Marshall McLuhan, also a great advocate of the radical montage approach, whose mantra “the medium is the message” finds an exact articulation here in Debord’s “anti-concept,” in which the “end of cinema” is also the possibility of the deconstruction of the “spectacle.” In the wake of Structuralism & the development by Christian Metz & others of a “semiology of cinema,” montage – with its radical breaks in narrative continuity – could be regarded not simply as a stylist device, but as a means of interrupting the very ideological relations of the signifying system, by breaking the apparent unity of the “image” & its socalled referent (the nominally “real”). In addition, montage could be regarded as critical by virtue of the way in which the resulting “interval” provided a space in which to deconstruct the implicit alienation-effect of the “spectacle” – which is to say, its operations of disempowerment upon the “spectator”: firstly by making these operations visible, & secondly by exposing their ideological character. For Debord, the critical potential of montage represented a mode of consciousness. “Militant cinema” would no longer be an art of perception, but a critical way of thinking. 68 1. Set during the period of the Algerian independence struggle from 1954-62 & shot on location, The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966), draws on the documentary style & techniques of Italian neo-realism in order to produce its effect of cinema vérité (it contains no “newsreel” footage; the entire thing was a dramatic reenactment shot largely with handheld cameras with mostly non-professional actors) – leading it to be considered as one of the most important filmic statements about postwar revolutionary militancy, & as a virtual training manual for urban guerrilla warfare. It arguably had a direct impact on two major revolutionary texts to appear after 1968: Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969) & Ulrike Meinhof, The Urban Guerrilla Concept (1971), both of which promoted all-out guerrilla war against “fascist” state apparatuses, specifically using means that had previously been regarded as “illegal” or as “terrorism,” but which since the Algerian War had widely characterised the actions of governments themselves (like that of France) against their own people. This itself was the focus of JeanLuc Godard’s heavily criticised 1960 film, Le Petit Soldat, which in part centred on the clandestine programme of assignations & bombings throughout Europe carried out between agents of the French military & Algerian insurgents (Godard’s film, also, was banned by the French authorities & not released until 1963, because of Godard’s graphic depiction of torture). The philosophical framework for the The Battle of Algiers was largely drawn from Frantz Fanon’s seminal text, The Wretched of the Earth, written while Fanon worked in an Algerian hospital between 1953 & 1956, & published in 1961: an analysis of the dehumanising effects of colonisation. The book’s title is drawn from the opening lines of “The Internationale” & was, in effect, a call to revolutionary action. Jean-Paul Sartre, who provided an introduction to the book (which appeared shortly before Fanon’s death) used the occasion to argue for the right of the colonised to employ violence against the coloniser in the cause of freedom. This would then be generalised into an advocacy of the right to violence against oppression generally & against the multitude of “neocolonialisms” that had emerged since the war & would eventually involve 69 into what, more recently, is referred to as “globalisation.” Much of The Battle of Algiers is, in fact, addressed to the question of asymmetrical struggle against a system of colonial oppression & not merely the legitimacy but in fact necessity of pursuing “unorthodox” or “illegal” means in order to “battle” the military superiority of the oppressor: hence the question of “terrorism” (& Fanon & Sartre’s advocacy of it as a legitimate tactic) is central to the film. “Legality,” wrote Meinhof in The Urban Guerrilla Concept, is the ideology of parliamentarianism, the social partnership, the plural society. Many of those attempting to challenge the system ignore the fact that telephones are being legally bugged. That the post’s being scrutinised. That neighbours are being legally questioned. That informers are being paid. And that all this State activity’s legal. The organisation of political work & activism – if you want to keep away from the eyes of State scrutiny – has to take place on an illegal level, as well as the legal one… We refuse to rely on some spontaneous anti-fascist mobilisation in the face of this kind of State terror… To be an urban guerrilla means to launch an offensive against imperialism. The Red Army Faction is striking the connection between the legal & illegal resistance. Between national & international resistance. Between national & international struggle… 70 When The Battle of Algiers opened in New York, in September 1967, it did so in the midst of Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam (the year Che Guevara famously called upon guerrilla insurgents around the world to “create many Vietnams”) & during the immediate aftermath of large-scale race riots in Newark & Detroit, & mass protests in Washington facing off against detachments from the National Guard. Members of the Black Panthers (founded by Huey Newton & Bobby Seale in 1966, inspired in part by the teachings of Malcolm X) were said to routinely attend screenings of the film (& later participated in the first PanAfrican Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1970). The film has also been cited as a direct influence on the programme of “domestic terrorism” carried out by the Weathermen during their October 1969 “Days of Rage.” Yet the film itself is remarkable for its moral detachment & refusal of agitprop: despite being financed & produced by the recently formed Algerian government, with a screenplay by FLN coordinator Saadi Youcef, it was not so much a “call to arms” of socalled Third World militancy, as a document of the conditions & circumstances out of which the resistance & liberation movement in Algeria grew, & the historical sense of necessity that informed their actions. Nevertheless The Battle of Algiers was banned in France until 1971, despite having won the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival (the French delegation at the festival staged a walkout during the screening). 2. Shot 3 months after the May ’68 Paris Student uprising with the working title One Plus One, but re-cut & re-released in the US as Sympathy for the Devil, Godard’s “film” (or “anti-film”) is constructed from 4 separate “narratives” or rather “arguments” (in the classical sense of a summary prologue): 1. The Rolling Stones, working in the studio to develop the song “Sympathy for the Devil” in extended 10-minute takes over a five-day period. (The final version of the song was left out not because Godard intended it (leaving the film “intentionally incomplete,” as Colin McCabe has solemnly deduced), but because a studio fire interrupted the sessions & Godard went home to Paris & never bothered coming back.) 2. A series of back-&-forth crabbing shots of a black militant group modelled on the Black Panthers reciting revolutionary texts as they pass assault rifles along a human chain while a group of white girls in white dresses are shot off screen & left lying on the ground, in a highly mannered tableau about racial/sociosexualisation of political militancy, etc. 3. Another allegorical sequence involving an interview team posing Yes/No questions to “Eve Democracy” (Anne Wiazemsky). 71 4. The fourth is set in a pornographic bookshop in which the proprietor reads aloud sections of Mein Kampf, while two Maoist hostages are ritually slapped by the shop’s customers, each of whom then give the Hitler salute. 72 These “arguments” reflect not only upon the contemporary political situation in 1968 & upon the commodification of all aspects of social life, even (or especially) of counterculture, transgression & “political activism,” but above all on the complicity of cinema itself in the fetish economy of the “Society of the Spectacle” (indeed, much of Godard’s work at this time can be considered a direct response to Debord – both his theoretical work & his own anti-cinema) – summed up by Erich Kuersten as a “counterculture… already lost in a narcissistic haze,” to which the Stones provide the soundtrack.3 Godard’s additional point being that the critic is as far from the artist as an historian is from the “man of action,” a theme transformed into the unremitting agitprop & racialist “porn” of the Black Power sequence & the action/crime/porn bookshop sequence, along with random scenes of Godardian street graffiti (“Cinémarxism”) counterpointing on the one hand the Eve Democracy “interview” &, on the other hand, the footage 3 Erich Kuersten, “Hell is a Postcard of Heaven: Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One),” Acidemic (http://www.acidemic.com/id98.html). of the “white” Stones playing “black” music, deploying a general narrative montage to point up the “devil’s contract” of a pop cultural revolutionary stance. Godard’s brand of anti-cinematic “action” works to counteract the political & sexual seduction of the subjectmatter’s activism. Revolution is now, but all we get are slogans, repetition, cliché. Pornography is now, but all there is in the end is saturation, desensitisation & endless consumption. Rock is the zeitgeist with an electric guitar, but the entire process of “creation” is ponderous, conflicted, political, strategic, verging on committee work & agitprop (agitpop). Democracy is the present & the future, but it looks like a bland if vaguely quaint pastoral vision of the 18th century, like the celeb “woman of the future” constantly featured in popular interview magazines from the ’60s (“Do you agree that the only way an intellectual revolutionary can be truly revolutionary is to stop being intellectual?” “Yes.” – one of several questions Godard lifted from a Norman Mailer interview in the January ’68 edition of Playboy Magazine). In his own way, Godard is showing us how the revolution is, so to speak, televised within: auto-packaged like so many reams of soap opera. But at the same time he presents us with a critical dilemma: is all of this Brechtian alienation effect at work in the “film” itself not already a cliché? By drawing attention to its own incredulity towards grand narratives while at the same time slanting towards allegory, isn’t One Plus One in certain respects a parody of the socialist revolutionary “autocritique” that began as an exercise in political self-consciousness but under Stalin had already been refined into an insidious form of political control through the neutralisation, precisely, of any possibility for critique? Which leads to the question: when Godard famously announces (like Debord) the end of cinema (at the end of his 1967 film Weekend), is he simply declaring the medium’s failure or enacting it? This question is complicated by the fact that One Plus One was a commissioned piece which Godard then appeared to go about sabotaging from the outset, working against the producers’ expectations of a “Godard” version of the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night, for example. The resulting 73 film, One Plus One, was re-cut by producer Iain Quarrier for its general release, under the title Sympathy for the Devil against Godard’s wishes. Appearing during a moment of transition, between Godard’s previous “revolutionary” work, like La Chinoise & Weekend, & the “collective,” “political” cinema he would attempt in collaboration with Jean Gorin under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group, One Plus One occupies an ambiguous position with regard to Godard’s evolving ideas about the “auteur” & the singular “authority” of the director: an ambiguity highlighted by Godard’s relation both to the work itself & the contractual conditions of its production, which pose the usual dilemma of French intellectuals in the post-war period of “bad faith” & “guilty conscience.” 74 3. The “urban guerrilla” concept & the spectacle of homegrown “terrorism,” cognisant with the radicalisation of a sympathetic bourgeoisie, is one that is revisited in a number of Godard’s film’s, from his ambivalent treatment of the Algerian War & the underground actions of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) & OAS (Organisation armée secrète) in Europe – Le Petit Soldat – to the scathingly satirical examination of the almost terminal decadence of the Fifth Republic in his 1967 films Weekend & La Chinoise, the latter anticipating the student militancy of the following year & posing the question of the violent overthrow of the state (in that film, Wiazemsky’s character conducts an “interview” with her Nanterre tutor, the philosopher Francis Jeanson, who had actively assisted Algerian National Liberation Front agents operating in France during the Algerian War – Wiazemsky’s character advocates the planting of bombs in order to force the closure of Parisian universities as a political act, something Jeanson opposes, distinguishing gratuitous political violence from popular resistance; later Wiazemsky’s character tries to assassinate a Soviet cultural attaché but farcically shoots the wrong person due to a room number being read upside down in a hotel register). Godard’s sardonic critique of revolutionary play-acting among the children of the bourgeoisie, who in the film spend much of their time in the spouting from Mao’s Little Red Book, finds a stylish iteration in one of Rainer Fassbinder’s lesser-known hothouse dramas of the 1970s, The Third Generation (1979), born out of the disillusionments of ’68, the failure of de-Nazification in Germany, & a new period of radicalism centred around the actions of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction (RAF) & the “German Autumn” of 1977. Fassbinder, a self-styled acolyte of Godard, was considered the major figure of the “New German Cinema” of the 1970s, though like Godard his work transcends any such association to a national cultural movement. With the release of his 1973 film, Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder’s re-interpretation of Godard et al. became increasingly influential internationally – notably with regard to the work of filmmakers like Derek Jarman, Miike Takashi & Quentin Tarantino (his last film, Querelle (1982), with Brad Davis, was filmed in English). Like Godard, with whom he achieved something of an equal standing during his last ten years, Fassbinder explored & exploded one cinematic genre after another, from film noir & spaghetti western to science fiction, domestic melodrama & gothic thriller. At the time of his death at age 37 he had completed 40 feature films & two TV series (including the 16-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz), as well as 24 stage-plays. He worked closely with an ensemble cast (drawn largely from the Anti-Theatre group) 75 76 & adopted a provocative & highly critical stance with regard to the political & moral life of post-War Western Germany (its “everyday fascism”), both in subject matter (terrorism, racism, sexuality, the police state) & by way of a Brechtian anti-naturalism in both cinematography & directing. But The Third Generation is anti-natural & satirical only up to a point, informed as it is by a doomed & somewhat Debordian sense of capture within the operations of the spectacle. The satire here is really addressed to the sort of Schopenhauerian romanticism that continued to infect left-wing political thought at that time: a romantic notion of revolution married to a romantic notion of the state (a romance perpetuated by the operations of the Debordian spectacle, in which a certain revolutionary thought remains enmeshed). Fassbinder’s work on The Third Generation was anticipated in his contribution to Alexander Kluge’s collaborate film project, with nine other directors, entitled Deutschland im Herbst (released 1978). The film was bookended by the state funeral for Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a Daimler-Benz executive & former SS officer shot by the RAF, & the desultory funeral service of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Esslin & Jan-Carl Raspe at Dornhalden cemetery, Stuttgart (which, after numerous injunctions elsewhere, had been facilitated by mayor of Dornhalden & son of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, who in one of those ironic twists of history had himself been accorded a state funeral by Hitler after having first been forced to commit suicide). The film, by turns documentary, melodramatic, introspective, paranoid, elegiac, charted the disappointment of a generation with return of the status quo after ’68; the continuity of Nazi influence in society; American consumerism & the failed “German economic miracle,” etc. – but also the uncritical acquiescence in turn to the cult of militant celebrity, revolutionary narcissism, & a cycle of irrational violence mirroring state authoritarianism (exemplified by the execution of hostages by RAF members during the botched Lufthansa hijacking at Mogadishu airport). Fassbinder’s own position is revealed as one of agitated ambivalence, the question seemingly most pressing, by the time he comes to make The Third Generation, is What is the critical/political/ militant function of cinema as cinema? And not simply as a paean to actions increasingly rendered absurd by their gratuitousness? Like Godard’s La Chinoise, Fassbinder’s reply doesn’t seek to resolve ambivalence, but to probe the radical character of everything ambivalence entails from the cartoonish perspective of the Sartrean “man of action.” In Fassbinder’s film, as in Godard’s, a group of disaffected bourgeoises who decide to form a militant leftist “cell” intended to conduct armed operations. Seeking a target they ultimately decide to kidnap one of their own bosses, an industrialist in the mould of Schleyer, P.J. Lurtz (Eddie Constantine), who runs a subsidiary of an American computing firm (echoes of IBM’s entanglements with the Third Reich). Unbeknownst to them, they in their own turn are being set up by State Security: the father & lover of two of the cell members is in fact a cop, while the cell’s coordinator is a stoolie & agent provocateur who’s sold them all out from the start. The joke – & Fassbinder makes it very clear that the whole thing, from the viewpoint of the cop & the industrialist, is indeed an enormous joke at the expense of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries – is that the kidnapping & ransom will be used as a highprofile justification for advancing the technocratic police state (there is even a minor essay on the new informationdriven approach to criminology). At the beginning of the film, computer sales in the security sector are down, corresponding to a post-’77 decline in militant/terrorist action – but a timely left-wing kidnapping… And so it goes. There’s a nation-wide manhunt, the noose tightens, etc. The film ends with the surviving members of the cell trying to shoot a ransom video: Lurtz speaks the usual prescripted lines at the camera with a strange enthusiasm, & as the last frame freezes he’s smiling. 4. It would be redundant to state that Fassbinder’s & Godard’s takes on the theme of “militancy” are unapologetically parodic, the question is rather what is it that is being parodied here, & how can parody itself constitute a militant/revolutionary stance? If the first responsibility of revolutionary consciousness is self- 77 78 criticism, then the answer to the first part of this question is the genre of “militant cinema” itself. Both are “anticinema” to the extent that they are against the pomposity of existentialist cinéma engagé – in The Third Generation the cell members use the Schopenhauerian pass-phrase “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” to identify themselves, while Fassbinder employs Godardian intertitles comprised of graffiti found in various men’s urinals, the locations of which are duly cited). It is in no way an Internationale film: the question of “cinema” here is not the depiction or advocacy of militant struggle or violence by or against the state, but the militant capacity of cinema itself to affect a criticism of ideology in all its dogmatic forms (including those of the socalled left). Nor is it simply the indictment of an ideologically bereft & self-contradictory “intellectual” class (the Meinhofs of the world, being the direct product of the Marshall Plan & West German post-industrialism), whose seeking after “social emancipation” is really nothing more than either a lifestyle choice or a product of their own boredom, where “militancy” is really a form of infantilism, of a “generation” immured in consumerism & an expired culture, unable to creatively or “authentically” assume responsibility for their own existence – sublimely portrayed by Fassbinder’s ironic infusion of ”romanticism” into the motivations of the group (Schopenhauer), coupled with rampant chauvinism & exploitation. Like Godard’s student “Maoists,” the actions of Fassbinder’s “Third Generation” (the post-war “disenfranchised”) are shown to be gratuitous rather than staked to anything like the revolutionary discipline at the core of The Battle of Algiers: their militancy is informed by the ennui of a theoretical (if yet untheorised) “social consciousness” – & yet, in this extended acte gratuit there’s something fundamentally as revealing as in the work of André Gide (Dans les Caves du Vatican (1914)), or André Breton’s revolution surréaliste (a shot fired randomly in the street (1929)). And here is the point: what ultimately concerns Fassbinder, in this & numerous of his other films, is the paradox at the heart of what “militant cinema” can mean if it isn’t itself simply a mirror to all those parodically flawed actions held up as the measure of “political engagement” (history accomplished as conscientious farce). And this paradox concerns the nature of cinematic engagement, of cinematic action, of cinema’s own radical ambivalence – & of the militant “potential” of this ambivalence – measured against the fetishism of any acte gratuit.4 We are confronted, in other words, by a militant impulse apparently sans ideology. In this, Fassbinder is perhaps at his most incisive, responding in a sense to Debord’s critical stance vis-à-vis The Society of the Spectacle: that the only authentically revolutionary act has nothing to do with avowed ideology, but with the radical unbridled arbitrariness born of its simulacra. *Published in 3:AM magazine (February 2017). 4 Where intention is reduced to farce, ambivalence is the only action that isn’t compromised. 79 CONFORMING TO TYPE FILM AS SUBVERSION 80 The term “experimental cinema” has been highly contested virtually from its inception. In the context of British & American filmmaking, there has been a strong tendency to link the term to the kind of formal work being produced in the wake of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger & others associated with Dada & Surrealism – which is to say, with avantgarde art. The relevant genealogy usually begins with Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) & includes work by Willard Maas, Marie Menken, James Broughton, Sidney Peterson, Joseph Vogel, Gregory Markopoulos, Stan Brackhage, & so on down through the 1950s. Subsequently, terms like Beat, Underground, Independent, No Wave, Cinema of Transgression & Exploding Cinema, evolve out of – & frequently in conflict with – what at a certain point became an experimental orthodoxy. The films of Andy Warhol are especially significant in this respect, as is Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) & Jack Smith’s 1963 Flaming Creatures, as well as the films of Hollywood fringedwellers on the B-slate like Ed Wood, Ted V. Mikels, Russ Meyer & Roger Corman, New York & Chicago genre mavericks like Frank Henenlotter & Herschell Gordon Lewis, & underground directors like the Kuchar brothers, John Waters, Richard Kern & Nick Zedd whose work was largely ignored or tacitly rejected by such upholders of the experimental tradition as Amos Vogel & Parker Tyler. We can add to this list British filmmakers like Bruce Lacey, Ken Russell & Robert Fuest, among others. And yet, in almost all of these cases, there’s an explicit appeal to an idea of experiment as subversion: of “existing values, institutions, mores & taboos” (as Vogel puts it1), as well as of the formalism & institutionalising of “experimentation” itself within the evolving corporate hegemony of the Culture Industry. In Tyler’s discussion of “Underground Film,” for example, we see the likes of Jonas Mekas & the New York Anthology Film Archive fighting both a rearguard action against accusations of laissez-faireism from the more formalist, craft-orientated Tyler, in addition to their own vanguard assault on the normalising forces of Hollywood & commercial TV, etc. Such internecine strife obscures the dynamic & contingent character of experimentation & reduces it to a set of dogmas, cliques, & so on. It is necessary, rather, to suspend all competing definitions & to examine the works themselves on their individual (de-) merits & within the (anti-) social bias of concepts & actions that may be deemed “subversive.” 1. Amos Vogel, a long-time admirer, once described John Cassavetes – whose filmography includes Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) & Gloria (1980) (all starring his wife Gena Rowlands), as well as the 1976 film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie & Love Streams (1984) – as 1 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: d.a.p. / C.T. Editions, 2005 [1974]) 9. 81 82 “the master of fictional ‘cinéma vérité’ who subversively reveals us to ourselves in others.”2 He was widely considered, with the release of his debut film, Shadows (1959), to be one of the pioneers of American Independent cinema. The film itself evolved out of a workshop with actors at the Variety Arts Theatre in Manhattan, focused on improvisation & in opposition to the dominant school of “method acting” purveyed by Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner & Lee Strasbourg (all variants of the Stanislavskian technique), with the cast also including Anthony Ray (son of Nicholas Ray). The film likewise evolved around a soundtrack by Charlie Parker, though in the form in which it was finally released most of the recorded music was provided by Mingus’s saxophonist Shafi Hadi). Consequently, on its release, Shadows was billed as an improvisational/jazz film, though in fact it was only the first cut of the film – initially released in 1958 – that was improvised; this version was then largely re-shot & re-edited according to a script & screened in its definitive version in 1959. In the interim Cassavetes received extensive support from the Mekas 2 Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 183. brothers & the film received the first Film Culture magazine “Independent Film Award.” Shadows was hailed by Tyler as “extraordinary,” & subsequently compared favourably to Smith’s Flaming Creatures & Warhol’s Chelsea Girls as an example of the synthesis of spontaneity (drawn from a cast of “inexperienced actors & nonprofessionals”) & the approximation of regular plot logic. The film, according to Tyler, “Aiming at an effect of cinema vérité… belongs to the avantgarde because of its success in avoiding commercial cliché & the positive case it displays in catching people so realistically in dialogue scene that one might suspect a hidden camera.”3 In recapping the film’s plot storyline to his readership, however, Tyler is more concerned with how the question of race dynamics avoid seeming to be a “sham” (to a presumably white audience) rather than considering Cassavetes melding of cinematic “verity” with a kind of social realism that is also social critique. There is a certain resonance here in the question of “passing for white” & passing for “regular plot logic,” & in the refusal of the characters to reject their black identity & the film’s attempt not to compromise its improvisational aesthetic (questions, we see, that are in no manner unambiguously resolved). While critical of the fact that Cassavetes himself pursued a career in Hollywood subsequently (though continuing to produce independent, or rather “underground” films in the interim), the major criticism Tyler reserves, particularly for Faces – released ten years after Shadows – was that Cassavetes’s “relentlessly explorative” method should have been pursued “less experimentally & more consciously, more with a dominant idea in view.”4 Reflecting on the “general inclusiveness” of Faces (by which he means the lack of discrimination in the editing) – a fault that had been levelled at the original version of Shadows – Tyler concludes by saying, “I think Cassavetes has a lingering documentarist fault, a desire to accept human nature in a dimension where it is too commonplace, 3 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995 [1969]) 201. 4 Tyler, Underground Film, 203. 83 too passive, & above all he should cultivate a more filmic sensibility.”5 It is, however, precisely Cassavetes’s rejection of filmic sensibility that, for his part, Mekas regarded as the director’s defining ethic. For Mekas, the original cut of Shadows – along with Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie’s 1959 short adaptation of Kerouac’s play “Beat Generation,” Pull My Daisy – “marked the end of the avantgarde experimental cinema tradition of the ’40s & ’50s (the symbolist-surrealist cinema of intellectual meanings),”6 & the beginning of a new movement corresponding to Mekas’s own December 1959 manifesto “A Call for a New Generation of Film Makers”; though in a subsequent Village Voice article from January 1960 he rejected Cassavetes’s re-edited version as “just another Hollywood film.” 84 2. Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) began, so the story goes, as a “commission” by Mekas for his Film-Makers’ Cinemateque. Warhol & Paul Morrisey then went about producing a series of twelve roughly thirty-minute shorts, comprised of relationship “vignettes” between various Warhol characters (like Nico, Mary Woronov, Brigid Polk, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, Marie Menken, Ingrid Superstar, et al.) filmed in a mix of fixed camera, violent zoom (or “jerkoff”) shots, jumpcuts, black-&-white & colour stock, & featuring sexual frankness, nudity, drug use, etc.,7 all initially centred around the Chelsea Hotel, which were later combined into a single threehour-long film. “All that summer,” Warhol later said, “we were shooting the short interior sequences that we later combined to make up Chelsea Girls, using all the people who were around. A lot of them were staying at the Hotel Chelsea, so we were spending a lot of time over there… I got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people’s lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms of the same hotel. We didn’t actually film all the sequences at the Chelsea; some were shot down where the Velvets were 5 Tyler, Underground Film, 203. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 19432000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 203. 7 David Curtis, Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution (New York: Dell, 1971) 179. 6 staying on West 3rd, & some were shot in other friends’ apartments, & some at the Factory – but the idea was that they were all characters that were around & could have been staying in the same hotel.”8 The completed movie opened at the Cinemateque on a makeshift duplex screen, with parallel scenes running simultaneously & a single soundtrack switching between them. The effect was compared by Parker Tyler to Able Gance’s use of a triptych screen for final act of Napoléon. “The film’s actions,” Tyler wrote, are “to all intents & purposes… simultaneous in time if separate in actual space. This spatial separateness & contiguity is expressed by the side-by-side reels being simultaneously run off. Although they are related in mood… there is no conscious ‘musical’ relation between the two units, any chiming between them being, presumably, accidental. But of course there do occur certain amusing coincidences that, while the two scenes are technically in competition with one another, give off mutual rhyme & reason…”9 8 Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ‘60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 180. 9 Tyler, Underground Film, 198. 85 86 Following its initial run, Chelsea Girls moved to the Cinema Rendezvous on West 57th street & then to the Regency on Broadway, unprecedented for an underground film & provoking a violent backlash from the mainstream press, whose columnists (like the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther) seemed determined to keep Underground Cinema underground (“It has come time to wag a warning finger at Andy Warhol & his underground friends,” Crowther wrote, “& tell them, politely but firmly, that they are pushing a reckless thing too far. It was alright as long as [they] stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42nd Street… But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th Street & taken over a theatre with carpets… it is a time for permissive adults to stop winking at their tooprecocious pranks.”)10 For his part, P. Adams Sitney lauded the fact that it was precisely this “terrifying childlike quality of Underground films [that] emerges proudly & with some effect in The Chelsea Girls,” adding that “neither the child nor the madman can be overlooked as valid dimensions of Underground aesthetics.”11 Coming two years after Mekas’s arrest for screening Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Cinemateque, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls represented a high-water mark in Underground Cinema’s challenge to the film & art establishment (in 1967, for example, Hollywood was bankrolling Midnight Cowboy with John Voight & Dustin Hoffman, which included in one scene its own “Warhol movie”). Soon after, Chelsea Girls was invited to Cannes, with Mekas hailing it in the September 29 issue of the Village Voice, somewhat hyperbolically, as “comparable only to Joyce”: “The lives that we see in this film are full of desperation, hardness & terror… It’s our Godless civilisation approaching zero point. It’s not homosexuality, it’s not lesbianism, it’s not heterosexuality: the terror & hardness we see in Chelsea Girls is the same terror & hardness that is burning Vietnam & it’s the essence & blood of our culture, of our ways of living: this is our Great Society.” In his study of American avantgarde cinema from 194310 11 Warhol & Hackett, POPism, 185. Sitney, Visionary Film, 199-200. 2000, P. Adams Sitney makes the claim that, more than Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka & other now canonical figures associated with the movement, it was Warhol who represented the major precursor of what he calls the “structural film,” of which Chelsea Girls is a kind of apotheosis.12 According to Sitney, Warhol’s genius drew from a parodic view of avantgarde film itself, beginning with work like Empire & Sleep (a six hour-long fixed-camera shot of a man sleeping). “Theorists such as Brakhage & Kubelka,” Sitney notes, “expounded the law that a film must not waste a frame & that a single filmmaker must control all the functions of the creation. Warhol made the profligacy of footage the central fact of all his early films, & he advertised his indifference to direction, photography & lighting. He simply turned the camera on & walked away.” Warhol’s “anti-romanticism: has been compared to Duchamp’s use of readymades & to his “Anaemic Cinema,” but where Duchamp employed found objects to upset the dogmas of avantgardism as well as the art establishment, Warhol appeared to go further by transforming himself into an object13 – a depersonalised, ironic “machine” conspicuously comprised solely of “surfaces.” 3. In many respects a precursor to the 1969 cult film, Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper & starring Peter Fonda & Jack Nicholson), The Trip (1967) is a psychedelic “drugsploitation” / “acid movie,” directed by major independent American film producer Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson & starring Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper, among others. Corman, known as the “Pope of Pop Cinema,” had been a trail blazer in low budget independent movie production in the US since the mid-50s, at times producing up to nine films a year. He is perhaps best known for his 8-part series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, made between 1959 & 1964 at American International Pictures (AIP), who also produced The Trip. Corman worked broadly within the framework of socalled “genre” cinema, from horror to gangster films, & made his first biker movie in 1966, The 12 13 Sitney, Visionary Film, 349. Sitney, Visionary Film, 350. 87 88 Wild Angels, starring Peter Fonda & Nancy Sinatra. The film established Fonda as the “John Wayne of biker flicks” & earned AIP $10 million on a $360,000 budget. It was while doing publicity on The Wild Angels that Fonda first conceived of what was to become Easy Rider & proposed Hopper as the director & co-writer. The project provided an opportunity to develop some of these ideas, as well as to give Hopper his first hands-on experience with direction (with one of the film’s acid sequences). Elements of The Trip resurfaced in Easy Rider in the New Orleans mardi gras scenes towards the end, & there are likewise parallels between the “journey” of the acid trip & the cross-continental USA road “trip” that provides the basic narrative of Easy Rider. But where Fonda & Hopper’s character in Easy Rider is a quasi-outlaw drug dealer cutting loose from the whole idea of “American society” at the end of the 60s, in The Trip Fonda plays a TV ad producer on the rebound from a break-up who gets his first introduction to LSD – brought to more popular American consciousness in 1964 by Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” & their series of road-trip psychedelic school bus, immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The “exploitative,” voyeuristic element of Corman’s film in certain respects marks the obverse of what Hopper & Fonda later project in Easy Rider as a generational insider’s view: with Corman, there’s still a predominant sense that, even in independent cinema, there is an assumed audience of primarily prurient interest: a grey zone in which independent films had long existed side-by-side with arthouse, grindhouse & porno. The story of Easy Rider – as marking the birth of a New Hollywood & (as with Nick Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause for the post-war generation) of an emerging 60s film audience uninterested in seeing themselves portrayed through the lens of a parasitic film industry. For all its belatedness (though it was still arguably the first of its kind), The Trip nevertheless disconcerted establishment critics, like Crowther, whose New York Times review spoke very obviously to an audience assumed to have no direct personal experience with LSD. Crowther himself treated the film as a type of advertisement for psychedelic experience &, writing from somewhere on-high (so to speak), dismissed the film for its incomprehensibility & lack of developmental structure. “Is this a psychedelic experience?” Crowther asked. “Is this what it’s like to take a trip? If it is, then it’s all a big put-on. Or is this simply making a show with adroitly staged fantasy episodes & good colour photography effect?” Crowther’s bemusement can be taken as summing up what was, in effect, an insuperable division between those who were “experienced” with LSD & those who tried to intuit what psychedelia was all about on the basis of “wavy lighting” & “weird music & sounds.” It was the ultimate generational distinction: you either got it, or you didn’t, & there was no point listening to anyone – like Crowther – who didn’t, because their lack of qualification in speaking on the subject was glaringly obvious. Arguably The Trip represented the first of a series of industry-fringe assaults (films like Easy Rider & Bonnie & Clyde) on ingrained attitudes around cultural permission that went on to cause a decade-long upheaval in American life, not as a fringe phenomenon, but at the core of the Culture Industry itself, producing a seismic shift in the operations of the Hollywood studio system. Notable also is that by the time of the film’s release, LSD, which had previously been legal in the US, was criminalised (6 October 1966). It is perhaps the element of “criminalisation” that 89 makes Corman’s film more “democratic” in its appeal than it might otherwise have been. The fact that criminality is placed front & centre in movies like Bonnie & Clyde & Easy Rider brought those films into direct communication with a generational experience in late ’60s / early ’70s USA that was one of increasing alienation from the State & its increasingly authoritarian responses to everything from the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, to gender & racial equality, & myriad other “non-conformist” tendencies at that time (including an attempted resurrection by the authorities of the “dope panic” movie genre). What we see, too, is that for the first time independent cinema spoke beyond the theoretical confines of the arthouse cinema to an actual process of generational & social change – more so, even, than avowedly militant & avantgarde cinema had been able to do. 90 4. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) was conceived as a parodic sequel to Mark Robson’s 1967 film, Valley of the Dolls, after Twentieth Century Fox rejected scripts proposed by Jacqueline Susann, author of the novel on which the original film was based. The title, Valley of the Dolls, referred to downers like dolophine (“dolls”) that became prevalent in the US after the War, & follows the careers of three ingénues who in one way or another “lose their souls” in LA. It was this aspect of the showbiz morality tale that Ebert & Meyer chose to exploit & satirise in their anti-sequel (for which Fox was successfully sued by Susann for damages to her reputation as an author). Though the film was issued an X-rating, the film nevertheless grossed more than ten times its budget in the US & contributed to Meyer’s cult status as a “sexploitation” director. Ebert & Meyer co-wrote several other films together (including Meyer’s last – & most explicit – work, Up! (1976) & Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979), as well as the unfinished Sex Pistols vehicle, Who Killed Bambi?). Ebert, however, is better known as the first film critic to win a Pulitzer & earn a star on the Hollywood “Walk of Fame.” By 1970, Meyer was already an established independent director with a reputation as “King of Nudies” & “Mayor of Rack City” whose filmography included titles like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) & Vixens! (1968). Like Corman, Meyer’s success stemmed from low-budget production of commercially viable “entertainment,” but with an added element of auteurism, signature-styled & all self-financed, directed, co-written, edited & distributed by Meyer himself. Typically, however, critics sought to distinguish the type of B-genre/exploitation films associated with Meyer from other forms of “independent,” “underground” & “avantgarde” cinema linked to the arthouse scene. Also like Corman (& later John Waters), Meyer’s fringe status has been cast as a product of economics rather than “authorial vision.” As Jonathan McCalmont complains, “Both directors arrived on the scene after the collapse of the studio system & TV’s wholesale annexation of cinema audiences. Corman & Meyer made money & brought in younger audiences by filling cinema screens with sex & violence & so have come to be hailed as pioneers but the directors of the American New Wave did much the same & yet produced art rather than the grubby, stupid & lacklustre nonsense that we have come to associate with Corman & Meyer.”14 14 Jonathan McCalmont, “Review of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970),” Film Juice: www.filmjuice.com/beyond-the-valley-of-the-dolls-review 91 92 Meyer’s attachment to the Valley of the Dolls sequel was in part a reaction by Fox Studios to the commercial impact of Easy Rider in the wake of a series of big Hollywood flops & the social upheavals of the late sixties, perceiving Meyer’s independent credentials as a prospective boon for the Studio. Meyer considered the result his “definitive work,” & in many respects – not least its major Studio backing – it represents a signal achievement of film industry & cultural criticism, as well as subversive exploitation of the culture industry itself & its normalising influence in society at large as cinematic valium & tabloid sensation. As such, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, with its convoluted celebrity soap-operatic plot & post-Manson Killings climax (Sharon Tate starred in the original), can be regarded as a highly ambiguous melodramatic satire on the pervasive social & economic logic of melodrama – not least because it poses as a sequel. It is, to paraphrase Marx, the tragedy of American social history repeated as moralistic farce. Ebert himself described the film, ten years after its release, as a “satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters & success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn’t know whether the move ‘knew’ it was comedy.” In hindsight, he wrote, “I can recognise that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. An independent X-rated filmmaker & an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio & given carte-blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio’s own hits. And Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was made at a time when the studio’s own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble none of the studio’s executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognisance) from the Front Office.” It seemed, Ebert noted, as if the movie “got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.”15 5. Brian De Palma & Robert De Niro first collaborated on a black & white student film, co-directed with Wilford Leach, 15 Roger Ebert, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/beyond-the-valley-of-the-dolls-1980 entitled The Wedding Party, shot in 1963 but not released until 1969. In the meantime, De Palma directed De Niro in his first major screen role, as “Jon Rubin” in Greetings (1968), a film about dodging the Vietnam War draft. It was also the first film to receive an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, while nevertheless going on to win De Palma a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Ebert described Greetings as “not, properly speaking, a feature film at all, but a string of episodes in the Laurel & Hardy tradition,” something it shares to some extent with Hi Mom! (1970; originally conceived as “Son of Greetings”), in which De Niro reprises his role as Rubin, by now a Vietnam vet who, returning to New York, sets out to be a porno-conceptualist filmmaker (“Peep Art”), veers into underground Black social theatre, & ends up as a “domestic terrorist” – a role that has been seen as a rehearsal for De Nero’s appearance as “Travis Bickle” in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Like Godard’s 1967 film, La Chinoise, Hi Mom! can be read as a biting satire on middleclass “social consciousness” & late ’60s “radicalism.” The film’s title comes from de Nero’s parting line, addressed to a live TV camera at the site of a NY apartment building that he’s just bombed: but in addressing the camera, De Niro is also addressing the film’s audience, who are as much a target of de Palma’s satire as the white middleclass Theatre of Revolt audience 93 94 in the film’s most controversial sequence: “Be Black, Baby” (in which the audience is subjected to the experience of “being black in America”), including being painted with shoe polish & beaten & robbed (& one female “audience member” raped) by black actors in white face, before De Niro’s character bursts in dressed as a New York cop & arrests the audience “for being black” & ending outside the “theatre” when the actors applaud the “audience” for their performance, & the “audience” break down into “rave reviews” of their recent “living theatre” experience. The whole thing, meanwhile, has been shot in guerrilla documentary style in B/W Super-8, to heighten the tension between cinematic irony & cinema vérité. Styling himself as the “American Godard,” De Palma’s early films represent an effort to establish a revolutionary cinema capable of expressing the revolutionary character of the period – both in terms of its subject matter & technique. His collage of radical jump-cuts, split-screen, interpolation of B/W sped-up footage, in addition to an overall narrative fluidity & interchangeable points-of-view, situate these films within the experimental fringe of the emerging “New Hollywood” – as well as situating the work in relation to contemporary theatre (such as the New York Performance Group) & art (in 1965, De Palma produced a documentary for Pathé on MoMA’s “The Responsive Eye” exhibition of Op Art). De Palma has said of his approach: “First of all, I am interested in the medium of film itself, & I am constantly standing outside & making people aware that they are watching a film. At the same time I am evolving it.” This critical-reflexive posture is thematically reflected in the film, in the relationship between film itself & its object (including a series of film-on-film quotations, the most obvious being Hitchcock’s Rear Window), between voyeurism & performance, between reality & simulation, between the alienating normality & normalised alienation, between sex & terror, etc. Themes that, in one way or another, play out across de Palma’s otherwise diverse filmography, from his first avantgarde, Brechtian experiments with genre, like 1967’s Murder à la Mode, to later Hollywood studio productions like Carrie (1976) & Scarface (1983). 6. Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971) was adapted from James Mills’s 1966 novel of the same name, about the heroin culture between Verdi Square & Sherman Square, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at 72nd & Broadway. It featured Al Pacino in his second screen appearance, & his performance in the role of “Bobby” (a small-time heroin dealer), which led directly to his being cast by Francis Ford Coppola in the first Godfather film (very much against the wishes of Paramount head of production Robert Evans). Like later New York films that paralleled the emergence of the socalled “New Hollywood” – like Billy Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), Barry Shear’s Across 110th Street (1972), Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1972) & Taxi Driver (1976) – Schatzberg employs a gritty urban realism & cinéma vérité camera style, along with a stark frankness in depicting Manhattan’s burgeoning heroin culture; an effect heightened by the decision not to include a musical soundtrack. In a column published on September 9, 2014, New Yorker film critic, Richard Brody, has referred to the composite effect of Schatzberg’s approach as “tremulous visual palette of briskly panned telephoto shots & macrophotographic intimacy that unfolds a city within a city & reveals a second world of experience that shows through New York’s abraded surfaces.” The film is utterly unlike the fringe psychedelia of Easy Rider & reflects the 95 96 big comedown from ‘60s Flower Power counter-culture during the Nixon era & the systematic expansion of heroin imports into the United States from Vietnam & Cambodia by a consortium of organised crime & the CIA. In this respect, The Panic in Needle Park is also a direct antecedent of the political “paranoia” films of the mid-seventies, like Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) & All the President’s Men (1976), & Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), as well as later reprisals of the same theme such as Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). Due to its realistic depiction of drug use, particularly by white addicts – like Bobby’s Midwest girlfriend “Helen,” played by Kitty Winn, who also procures an illegal abortion in the film – The Panic in Needle Park was issued an X-rating on its release & banned in the UK. Winn nevertheless went on to receive the Best Actress award for her role at the Cannes Film Festival. In part, the controversy surrounding The Panic in Needle Park stemmed from the studio’s attempt to market it as a lurid examination of underground drug culture, rather than as a generational “love story” – which was how scriptwriter Joan Didion preferred to characterise it. The film also touched on contemporary sensitivities about the breakdown in the American social fabric, most particularly through its depiction of the false sense of community built up around “Needle Park” as a microcosm for a false sense of American “community” founded on post-War consumerism, which is in certain respects exposed here as equivalent to heroin addiction: both are founded upon an illusory access to personal & collective fulfilment through consumption while masking the industrialised profit-making machinery that relentlessly exploits the consumer class. In this way, The Panic in Needle Park is also an essay on alienation & the ongoing erosion of social solidarity in the face of any threat posed to so-called individual liberties: just as libertarianism was hijacked in order to sabotage the welfare state, so too the junkies’ addiction is exploited to manufacture a culture of betrayal – played-out on the most intimate level between the film’s two protagonist’s, Bobby & Helen, whose relationship is exploited & debased by undercover narcs – in just the same way that secret police operate everywhere under totalitarian regimes, leveraging the most humiliating forms of self-interest. In this sense, the film’s major controversy has nothing to do with drug culture, but with the tacit collusion of the heroin “industry” & the Police State. 7. The Who released the concept double-album on which Ken Russell’s film Tommy is based in 1969 (having taken two years to complete), driven for the most part by songwriter Pete Townshend’s desire to break from what he perceived as the formularisation of rock music by the record industry & the creative restrictions represented by the standard radio airplay 3-minute single. The rock-operatic form offered Townshend broader scope for the creation of an extended, cohesive work—& in this the Who were pioneers, producing what Rolling Stone magazine called “the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania.”16 While it has been suggested that the basis of Tommy was Townshend’s personal experience of childhood sexual abuse, Russell’s enlarged screen interpretation (for which Townshend extensively re-wrote the original, with the addition of a substantial amount of new material, & which featured appearances by Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Jack 16 Rick Sanders & David Dalton, “Townshend on ‘Tommy’: Behind the Who’s Rock Opera,” Rolling Stone (July 12, 1969). 97 Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Robert Powell & Oliver Reed) has broader social implications, concerned as it is with an age of instant gratification & pseudo-enlightenment, the mass commodification of individual experience & the cynical pursuit of “authenticity” under the sign of the sacred dollar. As Townshend expressed it in an interview with Rolling Stone: 98 In general terms, man is regarded as living in an unreal world of illusory values that he’s imposed on himself. He’s feeling his way by evolution back to God – realisation & the illusion is broken away, bit by bit. You need the illusions until you reach very pure saintly states. When you lose all contact with your illusory state, you become totally dead – but totally aware. You’ve died for the last time. You don’t incarnate again; you don’t do anything again – you just blend. It’s the realisation of what we all intellectually know – universal consciousness – but it’s no good to know until you can actually realise it. There is a particular poignance to the casting of The Who’s frontman, Roger Daltrey, in the title role, as the “blind, deaf & dumb kid” transformed into a “pinball wizard” Messiah of a disaffected, disenfranchised generation hungry for belief – in the midst of a period of violent radicalisation in the UK, Europe & the US. With the original album’s release, Daltrey identified with the character “Tommy” to the point of “becoming him” on stage, representing a kind of spiritual breakthrough for the singer & for the band as a whole, while the film role brings with it the fact of Daltrey’s enormous stardom at the time, & the singer’s hugely ambiguous situation within the general cultural framework as a kind of messiah-destined-to-fail. The monumentality of this failure is conveyed, however, not through the role itself, or even through the music, but by Ken Russell’s masterful instinct for cinematic excess. Yet it is precisely the excessive character of Russell’s directing that exposes a certain “realism” at the core of his 1975 film “adaptation”: in part Tommy’s sophistication stems from the fact that the post60s world really was that parade of kitsch, of cynical selfparody, of capitalist nihilism & the all-pervasion “society of the spectacle.” As Daltrey, Townshend & Russell all knew, rock & roll wasn’t there to save anyone the way most people seemed to want to be saved: despite the film’s exuberance at times, there is an overwhelming pessimism about music’s ability to “break the mirror” of industrialised narcissism. It isn’t the catastrophic pessimism of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, with which both the album & the film of Tommy have often been compared: it’s rather a critical pessimism – in the sense that rock (& cinema too) must contend with its own self-seduction if it is to transform consciousness rather than simply transform décor. If the film’s anti-realism represents, in fact, a more incisive “realism” than the informercialised pap dished out as pop “social reality” in the seventies (& today), its rockvideo allegorisation of failed enlightenment is also its most effective critique of the idea of enlightenment as such, by way precisely of the mechanics of disillusionment. At no point in the film does Russell ask his audience to suspend disbelief. It is rather as if he is daring us to do the contrary: to believe in our disbelief & to do so in full self-awareness. Or as Townshend says about the “Pinball Wizard” episode (in the film, the role is played by Elton John in a pinball beanie, glitter sunglasses & enormous platform boots – which he reportedly kept as his fee): “Tommy’s games aren’t games. They’re like the first real thing he’s done 99 100 in his life.” It’s a difficult proposition at times to grasp, inducing something of a condition of denial in the viewer that may account for the fact that the film achieved huge box office success as entertainment. Like Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which satirised America’s addiction to melodrama while succeeding, precisely, as melodrama: Tommy turns disillusionment into spectacle, by way of a critique of exactly that, the “spectacle’s” ability (as Guy Debord says) to assimilate anything, even its critique. In this way, Russell’s film represents something like a dissertation on the postmodern condition: what Francis Fukuyama later famously called “capitalism’s masterstroke” of universalising Marx’s “false choice,” where “anything goes” because nothing that isn’t already part of the “spectacle” (Debord) is any longer possible. Which is to say, nothing “authentic” outside its representation as commodity: no “aura” (Walter Benjamin) after the “end of history” (Fukuyama). We are, so to speak, caught inside the mirror, in which even the act of “breaking the mirror” is already nothing but a reflected action that will only ever accomplish itself as an image. In this way, the film seems to pose a fairly trivial dilemma: are we to regard the entire second half of the film, after Tommy “breaks the mirror,” as a narrative of freedom, or as Tommy’s “real” nightmare – the nightmare that confirms his vegetative state – the nightmare inside the merely apparent nightmare that seemed to constitute his being up until then? Yet at the same time, the films poses a more difficult dilemma: about the status of cinema itself, about the logic of depiction, that is itself inescapable, even as the film’s excess seems to push that very logic to its limits. If there is an ambivalence within the film, perhaps it derives from this, from the always provisional & contingent character of any critique of spectacularism. 8. Amos Poe is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of New York punk & No Wave cinema, with films like The Blank Generation (1976; with Ivan Král, filmed at CBGB’s & featuring Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Talking Heads), The Foreigner (1978; featuring Eric Mitchell, with Anya Phillips & Debbie Harry) & Subway Riders (1981; featuring John Lurie, Robbie Coltrane, Susan Tyrrell). Writing about Subway Riders in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert observed: “this movie isn’t a narrative, it’s an environment. You do not analyse this movie. It doesn’t matter how the plot turns out… Subway Riders is a hymn to style. It is not an imitation of old Hollywood B pictures & dopers. It is a meditation on them. There are eight million stories in the city, & this is one of them.” Like Subway Riders, The Foreigner constitutes something of a style manifesto, constructed around a noir armature in which the conventions of the B-film are distributed like pieces of collage to produce camera opportunities for its characters (of which New York is itself the foremost) to perform themselves. Every cameo, like Debbie Harry’s appearance in an alley singing Kurt Weill’s “Bilbao Moon,” thus becomes a pillar in the film’s overall construct, just as the central role of “Max Menace” (“European secret agent,” Eric Mitchell) is really an amalgam of peripheries & an occasion for some of the film’s most striking moments of pure style, including the long take of Max running down Broadway to Battery Park. If Max represents a kind of moving target, it’s so that the frame itself can remain constantly in flux, becoming part of the tempo of the streets, both hectic yet paradoxically detached, cool, ironic 101 102 – what you might call an overstated minimum of gesture, a type of frenetic “mannerism” & pulsing entropy. In a way, The Foreigner is all about the emergence of a New York scene in the ’70s that refused assimilation into the preceding cultural/social code, including that of the institutional avantgarde. This “No Wave” included such underground filmmakers as Vivienne Dick, Eric Mitchell, James Nares, Becky Johnston, & Beth & Scott B. Its postpunk aesthetic developed partly out of the approach of people like Warhol, cross-referenced with the French New Wave & B-directors like Ed Wood, while both “parod[ying] & celebrat[ing] 1960s Underground cinema, film noir, European art cinema & trash exploitation movies.”17 It prioritised “style” over production values & identified with the “outsider” status of the “blank generation” that gave rise to bands like Richard Hell & the Voidoids, the Ramones, Television, Wayne County, etc. There’s a moment in The Foreigner when Max is in a hotel room watching TV & a programme about the Sex Pistols comes on air – caught by chance while Poe was filming – zeroing in on the punk mantra of “no future.” In a way, Poe’s film can be a partial exploration of this emerging “no futurism,” in which the dominant existential mode is one of pervasive, undirected menace. But it is the undirectedness of this menace that is most telling in its, so to say, “naïveté.” Poe’s “No Wave” aesthetic is really something like Situationism minus the critique: it verges on conceptual art, while rejecting the intellectual preciousness of Fluxus & other institutional avantgardisms, yet its apparent “nihilism” remains more modish than “punk,” while its eschewal of political critique signals a substantial difference between Poe & the “new wave” directors like Godard he sought to emulate. In part, this has to do also with a general disillusionment with ’60s social critique & socalled revolutionary cinema: “no wave’s” address to style is also an address to a certain rejection of the whole rationale of “critique,” equivalent to a rejection of a political process that, in any case, is rigged against it. 17 Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2007) 188. As if to say, in response to Debord, that “critique” is just as much a part of the “spectacle” as anything else, just as servile to the economy of alienation, etc. As Nick Zedd writes in his memoir Totem of the Depraved, “underground films do exist, & as we who have been suppressed by the indifference of the bastards in the clouds are well aware, there have always been alternatives to the bubble gum of the mind peddled by Hollywood & Europe for our consumption.”18 No Wave’s eschewal of the kind of explicit social critique regularly found from the mid-60s in the work of their New Wave precursors, & in particular Godard, is perhaps better seen as a defence against expropriation by the “liberal left” conscience industry (& other permitted forms of pseudo-dissent): the “menace” in Poe’s film is pervasive & directionless because it represents a general symptom of “spectacular” existence once it has become disconcerted by its own inauthenticity. Max’s paranoia, in a sense, mirrors the breakdown in the narcissistic general economy of the “spectacle.” Which is to say, Max experiences his own being as this breakdown, which is everywhere reflected but nowhere represented, so to speak (no one in the film knows who he is or why he’s there, his “purpose” for being in New York thus appears as what Emma Hacking in No Ripcord magazine calls an “existential search & destroy mission”19). His own existence (& thus the real purpose of this mission) is only confirmed by his assassination at the end of the film. 9. Querelle, the last film to be made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder before his death in 1982 & released posthumously several months afterwards, was largely (if not “faithfully”) based on Jean Genet’s anonymous 1947 18 Nick Zedd, Totem of the Depraved (Los Angeles: 2.13.61, 1996) 78. He adds: “At the New York Film Festival Downtown, all the boring & unclear films got the usual polite applause. Then they showed my film, Kiss Me Goodbye, & some people in the crowd began to produce hissing noises which pleased me, since to get any response other than polite applause from a group of art fags is a major accomplishment” (80); “As filmmakers, we of the Cinema of Transgression must never forget we’re at war with everything Hollywood & the established avant-garde stands for…” (84). 19 Emma Hacking, “The Foreigner,” No Ripcord (17 October 2010). 103 104 queer psychodrama, Querelle de Brest, & was sneeringly described by Vincent Canby in The New York Times as “humourless” & “witless,” a “detour that leads to a dead end,” a disappointing coda to the lifework of “the most important European filmmaker of his generation.” The film is characterised by a certain ambivalence toward Genet’s text – particularly what Fassbinder considered its fascistic elements & Genet’s penchant for poetic transcendentalism, which he countered by means of a Brechtian antirealism that breaks with much of Fassbinder’s familiar melodramatic style. In certain respects, the only other work of Fassbinder’s that Querrelle significantly resembles on a stylistic level is World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), a sci-fi film produced in 1973 for German television. Featuring Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau & long-time Fassbinder collaborator Günter Kaufmann (who Fassbinder cast in a total of 14 films), Querelle is also Fassbinder’s most explicit engagement with the subject of male homosexuality, further heightened by a highly stylised set design & theatrical, non-naturalistic staging & lighting, anticipating later work by British director Derek Jarman (in particular his 1986 film, Caravaggio). With Querelle Fassbinder produced a lurid, homoerotic noir that translated Genet’s original text into the realm of expressionist, almost psychotropic, hardboil. And as with all of Fassbinder’s work, Querelle challenges orthodoxies, but perhaps above all the orthodoxies of the self-proclaimed underground of the “New Wave” & the dogmatism of much contemporary counterculture, particularly the gay liberation movement. In many respects, Fassbinder’s work is all about betrayal, sabotage, the acte gratuit, & a general libertine philosophy that, by its very nature, runs contrary to the “rules of engagement” either of the film industry establishment or of the socalled avantgarde. In certain respects, Querelle itself is a “betrayal” of the increasing devotion Fassbinder’s work had attracted during the 1970s, with its deceptive naturalism & political engagement (however conditional, however much parsed with irony & scathing critique, however much disillusioned with the selfsame counterculture that made such a show of being approved by, & approving in turn, Fassbinder’s cinematic “vision”). Tauntingly prescient (though we will never know just how much), Querelle flaunts its transgressive character in every direction, especially (in light of the emergent AIDS crisis) in its outré depiction of male homosexuality in the wake of the failed radicalism of the ’70s & its mawkishly pornographic obsession with the era’s Bonnie-&-Clyde: Andreas Baader & Ulrike Meinhof. In doing so, Fassbinder finds more in common here with filmmaker’s like Hans Syberberg (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972)) & Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando (1981)) – among German directors – & Jarman, Ken Russell (Salomé’s Last Dance (1988)) & Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising (1964)) – among the British & Americans – whose at times violent embrace of kitsch & antisentimental melodrama put them very much at odds with the trend towards normalising the old “New Wave” as the film-art wing of the ’80s culture industry. 10. King Lear, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1987), invites comparisons to its historical antecedent that run wildly against the pieties of canonicity to which Shakespeare’s work has long succumbed. Yet for all its iconoclasm, Godard’s film is most radical in its “return” to those primordial impulses to which Shakespeare himself was 105 106 very much arguably responding. From Shakespeare’s play Godard derived the central tropes of power & incest, staged between a short opening prelude – featuring Norman Mailer (as himself, the “scriptwriter”) & his real-life daughter Kate Mailer (as herself, the “great writer’s” daughter), comprising two versions of the same scene of Mailer typing & reading back part of the supposed script for Godard’s film, before sitting down to breakfast on the balcony of his hotel room, where he is joined by his daughter who glances over the script & questions Mailer’s obsession with the mafia (“Don Gloustro? Don Learo?”), to which Mailer replies that the mafia is “the only way to do King Lear” (this being the sum total of a single morning’s shoot before both actor’s, in “a ceremony of star behaviour,” quit the set) – & two intersecting narratives centred around a Swiss lakeside hotel in Nyon (the Beau Rivage), being: 1. the story of mafia boss Don Learo (played by Burgess Meredith; who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era) & his daughter, Cordelia (played by emerging Hollywood star Molly Ringwald, whose name at the time, following her lead role in the 1986 comedy-drama Pretty in Pink, was – Godard argued – synonymous with the paying public’s idea of a “princess”); 2. the story of Shakespeare’s descendent, “William Shakespeare Jnr the Fifth” (played by Peter Sellars), seeking to rediscover his ancestor’s work in the aftermath of Chernobyl, in a post-apocalyptic world from which all cultural memory has disappeared. Godard himself makes an appearance as “Mr Pluggy,” along with Woody Allen, who plays the role of a film editor called “Mr Alien,” the two of whom rediscover the idea of “cinema.” Speaking for the guardians of official culture, Vincent Canby in his January 22, 1988 column in the New York Times described the film as a “Godardian practical joke” in which Shakespeare’s text is not subject to adaptation but is instead the excuse for an exercise in amateurishness, “sometimes spiteful & mean, sometimes very beautiful, sometimes teetering on the edge of coherence & brilliance… &, finally, as sad & embarrassing as the spectacle of a great dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh” (the irony of this portrait, not of Godard but of Lear, did not appear to dawn on Canby). With such (predictably) ill-tempered & ill-construed criticisms in view, Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing three months later in the April 8th edition of the Chicago Reader, described the film as Godard’s “latest monkey wrench aimed at the Cinematic Apparatus” (if not the cultural apparatus in general) – of which view the New York Times’s reaction was nothing if not a vindication. From King Lear’s first screening at Cannes, there was indeed the impression that Godard had exceeded himself in this film in seeking to offend the expectations & sensibilities of most critics who, expecting a more or less faithful Shakespeare adaptation, or at least some sort of canonical “Godard” clone, were bound to be dissatisfied. Add to this Godard’s insistence upon subverting the conventional filmic treatment of his subjects: Molly Ringwald, for example, is almost always underlit, or shot against backlighting that renders her facial features (the stuff of celebrity magazine covers) virtually invisible much of the time. The entire film, in fact, can be read as a demystification: of cinema, of the idolatry of Shakespeare & “memorial reconstruction,”20 & an insistence on a kind of return to or rediscovery of the Shakespearian text itself, in its cognizance of writing-asexperiment (which is to say, writing-as-experience), & not 20 Lianne Habinek, “A Question, an Answer, & a Death,” Open Letters Monthly (1 June, 2011): www.openlettersmonthly.com/ a-question-ananswer-&-a-death/ 107 108 as promulgations from Mt Sinai. Or, as Godard himself put it, channelling the spirit of Lear, “words are one thing, & reality is another thing, & between them there is nothing.” Like Joyce in Ulysses, Godard’s orientation towards Shakespeare is one of devotional iconoclasm – a combination of Oedipal patricide & re-embodiment, evoking that line early in Ulysses where Joyce writes vis-à-vis his protagonist Stephan Dedalus, “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather & that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” In essence, Godard is showing that in order to “read” Shakespeare it is necessary to rediscover the text in precisely such a recursive, contingent & disillusioned way (the “nothing” which confounds the incestuous tyrant Lear, & which in turn confounds the Keepers of Shakespeare). It’s precisely for this reason, too, that we can consider Godard’s film a kind of perversion, not only in its “deviation” from cinematic norms & the classic reading of Shakespeare, but in the Lacanian sense of perversion as père version: the Oedipal action of “translating [sublimating] the father.” The ultimate act of iconoclasm here is not the repudiation of the father, but the return to the empty symbolic kernel of the paternal authority – of the “nothing” in place of ideology, the contained vacuum at the heart of power. And this is nothing if not the core of the “original” Shakespearean text (which, after all, was already a compendium of preceding versions of the story of “King Lear”) – & if Shakespeare’s text can already be read as an allegory of text & of the authority of language, Godard’s film is thus also an allegory of allegory. What is perhaps most interesting in all of this is – if we accept Rosenbaum’s proposition that the film “puts us on the spot” in a way that “prevents us from redeeming ourselves” – is how Godard’s refusal to venerate, or to take the situation of the film “seriously” (in the manner of those expectations aroused by the “classics”) – in other word’s, his irreverence (or what critics have called his “silliness”) – not only subverts a conventional idolatry (of Shakespeare, of “cinema”), but also subverts the act of subversion: the mystifications of iconoclasm raised to the ideological spectacle of an avantgardism. This is perhaps the most upsetting feature of Godard’s King Lear: its refusal to accommodate the romance of subversion, any more than it accommodates the romance of cinema or the romance of the cult of the author. As Rosenbaum says, “whatever might turn into ‘a Shakespeare play,’ ‘a Mailer script,’ ‘a story,’ or even ‘a Godard film’ in the usual sense is purposefully subverted. The film aspires, like Cordelia, to be (& say) ‘no thing…’” Godard’s subversion of this literary “personality cult” parallels Shakespeare’s own often misrecognised deconstruction of “Tragedy” as the romanticism of power – & it is this that lies at the “heart” of Godard’s “rediscovery of Shakespeare.” Here we also find Godard at his most incisive with regard to Shakespeare’s text, in which the demystification of sovereignty always runs the risk of descending into a nostalgic romanticism for the personal tragedy of Lear, whose “end” is in fact infused with sinister connotations of incestuous desire & authoritarianism’s claim upon collective pathos. Godard shows us that the perversity of Shakespeare is in keeping his audience witless to precisely this fact of experiencing sympathy with a tyrant’s thwarted desire to exercise incestuous authority over his own daughter, & thus symbolically over their collective “subjectivity,” too. *First published in Sonder Magazine (13 December 2016). 109 EMANCIPATORY DISILLUSIONMENT AGITATION | TRANSGRESSION | CRITIQUE 110 In Paul Cronin’s 2004 documentary, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel & Cinema 16, Vogel – whose work between the founding of Cinema 16 in 1947 & the publication of Film as Subversive Art in 1974 is central to much of the discussion of American underground cinema – spoke optimistically of what he described as the “accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects & forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.” But the question remains as to whether the culture of permission underlying this bold new cinema hasn’t simply resulted in bankable eye candy, in place of the kind of transgressive social critique catalogued in Film as a Subversive Art, one that flew in the face of the moral majority, the quasi-police state & aggressive censorship regimes, at the risk not only of suppression but of gaol-time for its producers & exhibitors, & in some cases far worse. And while the major focus of Vogel’s work may be considered the status of “cinema” as subversive art, his approach ranged liberally from films considered as “weapons of subversion” – such as the revolutionary era of the Soviet avantgarde, the “terrible poetry of Nazi Cinema,” taboo-breaking “pornographic” gay & lesbian cinema, etc. – to cinema as the construction of a new “consciousness” at the hands of the international counterculture. He was also attentive to the perennial avantgardist dilemma: the necessity, in the face of new orthodoxies, of a “counter-subversion” (i.e. of the glibly “subversive” as a generic consumer brand), in defence of the view that only an uncompromisingly Nietzschean subversion can lay claim to being the proper criterion of art as such, of which he wrote: “In the last analysis, every work of art, to the extent that it is original & breaks with the past instead of repeating it, is subversive.”1 This twofronted revolt is always tenuous, poised between a history of existential struggle & appropriative lifestyle role-play, suppression & exploitation, such that its criteria, whenever reduced to the language of reasoned argument & “art appreciation” risks becoming little more than an artefact of pluralism. As Vogel, speaking in Cronin’s documentary, puts it: “The most interesting films are precisely those that show things that have never been seen before or show things in a completely new way. This is something that upsets many people or prevents them from appreciating what is being shown to them. I, on the other hand, prefer to be upset, & one of my main criteria, in fact, in looking at films & in writing about them is the unpredictability of what I am seeing.” 1. There are certain respects in which Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance – featuring Mick Jagger, James Fox & Anita Pallenberg – is both a product of 1968 (when it was shot) & prophetic of what came after 1970 (when it was released), both in its aesthetic & existential temper, & in its politics. Made three years before Mike Hodges’s hard-edge British neo-noir, Get Carter – which borrows liberally from Performance’s editing style, its juxtaposition of unadorned realism & often surreal mannerism, its brazenly stylish explicit sex & its ultraviolence – Cammell & Roeg’s film ushers in a whole period of brooding, sinister, post-Mansonesque cinema that often 1 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: d.a.p. / C.T. Editions, 2005 [1974]) 323. 111 112 fuses impulses discernible in the work of Roger Corman (with whom Roeg had collaborated on The Masque of the Red Death (1964)) & Joseph Losey (whose 1963 film, The Servant, James Fox had co-starred in) while maintaining a delicate balance between sardonic camp & pure menace (something not achieved, for example, in Brian De Palma’s 1974 The Phantom of the Paradise, which attempts a similar balance but too readily descends into farce, like a “serious parody” of Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)). Much of Performance’s editing – particularly the use of disjunctive, “mosaic-like montages” – draws on the approach of Jean-Luc Godard & François Truffaut (who Roeg assisted on Fahrenheit 451 (1966)), & form a blueprint for Roeg’s subsequent work on Walkabout (1971) & Insignificance (1985). It’s a notable coincidence, too, that during the production of Performance the Rolling Stones were shooting scenes with Godard himself, who was in London to document several studio sessions in which the band developed & recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” – footage that served as the basis for the film One-Plus-One – & at one point, as Godard’s camera moves around the studio, James Fox can be glimpsed anxiously trying to stay out of the frame. In Performance, Roeg’s use both of the camera & the editing console to deconstruct conventional narrative & instil a sense of existential menace dominate the film throughout: everything from the opening scene – a flying rocket in close-up, cutting to a black Rolls Royce driving down a motorway, cutting then to a montaged sexual encounter between Fox’s “Chas” & a nightclub worker – to one of the final scenes, when Chas shoots Jagger’s “Turner” in the head & the camera immediately plunges down the bullet hole, tunnelling through brain matter only to arrive at a photograph of Jorge Luis Borges (one of the film’s more obvious literary influences, alongside William Burroughs & Jean Genet). Along the way we’re given “Memo From Turner,” Chas’s mushroom-induced hallucination of Jagger transformed into the mob boss “Harry Flowers” in a rock video avant la lettre, while Chas’s former mob associates strip naked & dance along. It’s a sequence redolent of the “Mr Roque” episode in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: a sequence that encapsulates in thumbnail Performance’s broad synthesis of the East End London crime underworld (à la the Kray brothers) & the counter-cultural London underground, marked by homoerotic hypermasculinity on the one hand, androgyny on the other, cut across by violence, sex & psychedelia. So integral is montage to this aspect of the film’s texture & logic that the power of the individual “performances” is never allowed to grow distinct from the force of “character” of the film’s construction itself. Unlike conventional Warner Bros films, the camera is never disinterested, is never neutral; there is no pretence to the filmic medium being a transparent window through which “action” is communicated to an audience – an effect emphasised by the ruthless pursuit of hard-edge realism, interspersed with paranoiac, & at times unhinged camera angles, a disjunctive soundtrack & the periodic breaking of the fourth wall (as if the camera itself were an otherwise invisible interlocutor, a “character” in its own right, like the proverbial elephant in the room that finally gets to speak lines). While the film’s title has been interpreted with regard to everything from the role-play required of individual identity, mediated by social conventions of power, masculinity, & various other conformisms, to the role of the artist, the constitution of reality, & the society of the spectacle at large in which “words still have meanings” insofar as they can be 113 114 manipulated by those with authority over them (barristers, mobsters, rock stars, etc.), there is necessarily also the question of the camera’s performance, & the “action” of the film itself as, for example, performing a critique, or perhaps even a subversion of cinema itself, within the prevalent framework of an “entertainment industry.” That the film was initially conceived as something else entirely (“a light-hearted swinging ’60s romp” – something akin to the Beatles’s A Hard Days Night as a vehicle for stadium rock performer Mick Jagger, who was in process of recording tracks for Beggars Banquet, following 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request) also contributes to the sense of self-subversion & genre-bending at work here, in its metamorphosis into something far more complex, darker, unflinching, that follows all the way down the rabbit hole (so to speak): the kind of film it might’ve otherwise been can be glimpsed in The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus, shot over two days in December of ’68, though withheld from release until 1996. This self-subversion initially resulted in Performance being refused theatrical release by Warner execs, & numerous accounts exist of scenes being cut & re-edited, resulting in several different versions of the film finally making it into circulation (in a joint letter to Warner Bros, Cammell & Jagger wrote: “You seem to want to emasculate the most savage & most effective scenes in our movie. If Performance does not upset audiences, it’s nothing”). Its release in 1970 was as much due, however, to changes occurring in the studio system after the release of Easy Rider in 1969 & the emergence of the socalled New Hollywood, but its delay served to obscure the truly radical nature of Roeg’s cinematography – seemingly pre-empted by Dennis Hopper’s New Orleans “acid trip” footage in Easy Rider (which nevertheless remains less compelling than Roeg’s, & is too reminiscent of Corman’s stock phantasmagoria in The Trip – with its de rigueur backlot graveyard sets & LA gothic – to be anything more than decoration). 2. Promoted as a “fantasy thriller,” The Final Programme (1973: a.k.a. The Last Days of Man on Earth), is a loose adaptation of the first of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels, directed by the late Robert Fuest. In fact, it’s the only film adaptation to date of any of Moorcock’s work. Fuest is probably best known for The Avengers & The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971; with Vincent Price), & The Final Programme had – until its UK release on DVD by Network Distributing – been out-of-print in the Englishlanguage market for a decade, available only through online bazaars at prices around the £100 mark. The film itself is a retro sixties sci-fi parody, with Jenny Runacre (who also appeared in Jarman’s 1977 Jubilee) as “Miss Brunner” & Jon Finch, who’d just played the lead in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, as “Jerry Cornelius” (supposedly the role was offered to Mick Jagger first, who turned it down on the grounds the script was too weird). The blurb on the Studio Canal edition goes: “How to fabricate a new Messiah, harbinger of a new era? A gigantic computer, augmenting the brains of illustrious scientists, gives birth to a hermaphroditic monster capable of reproducing itself.” The brains concerned, of course, are suspended in vats, wired up to a giant mainframe designed by Cornelius’s dear old dad, lately defunct: in fact the film opens with the scene of Professor Cornelius’s funeral pyre in Lapland, attended by hoary Laplanders in animal furs. Dr Smiles (Graham Crowden), the late Prof’s right-handman officiates, before son Jerry makes an unscheduled entrance like some Notting Hill pop star before making an 115 116 equally peremptory exit in his private helicopter. The Prof’s former expert assistants resemble Dutch burghers cut from a Rembrandt group portrait, anticipating the sort of characters found in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982); we encounter them a little later on in the company of the mysterious Miss Brunner, plotting to retrieve a secret microfilm (containing the eponymous “final programme”) hidden by the late Prof on the family estate (a Cormanesque gothic pile on an island surrounded by a misty lake, replete with loyal butler (Harry Andrews), pathological brother (Derrick O’Conner), & Byronesque sister trapped in perpetual drug-induced sleep). The film’s doomsday scenario is duly sketched via a series of flashbacks to playboy Jerry’s private philosophy tutorials with “Professor Hira” (Hugh Griffith) on the Hindu belief in Kali Yuga or the “dark ages” of the world in its final days, soon to end (coincidentally, it need hardly be said, with the activation of the dead Prof’s “final programme”). Griffith’s “Professor Hira” is strongly reminiscent of Milo O’Shea’s “Duran Duran” in Barbarella (1968), & the whole cod-profundity imparted by his dialogues with Cornelius jnr similarly recalls the satirical musings of O’Shea’s “Leopold Bloom” in Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation of Ulysses. From the Kali Yuga we are promptly transported into a series of genre-mashes set against the backdrop of a vaguely drawn World War Three. We get a view of a post-apoc Trafalgar Square piled with car wrecks as Jerry makes his way to meet arms trader “Major Wrongway Lindbergh” (Sterling Hayden) to place an order on an F-4 Phantom jet fighter, before rendezvousing with international political assassin “Shades” (Ronald Lacey) in a giant inflatable pinball parlour to set up a deal on some napalm (for the purpose of incendiarising the family house). Eventually agreeing out of a mix of curiosity & boredom to assist in the recovery of his dead father’s microfilm, Jerry leads Miss Bruner, Dr Smiles & Co on a raid against his psychopathic brother, “Frank,” who has barricaded himself behind a battery of mind-altering defences. Frank escapes with the microfilm, & so Jerry & Miss Bruner fly after him in the F-4, tracking him down at a meeting with a fence for industrial secrets called “Baxter” (Patrick Magee, in all respects identical to his role as Anthony Burgess’s doppelgänger in Kubrick’s 1971 A Clockwork Orange). From here the film races to its dénouement in an abandoned Nazi submarine base somewhere back in Lapland, where reside the brains in fish tanks & a supercomputer parodically made to resemble a washing machine (“Does it spin dry?” Jerry asks). From the outset Chic Waterson’s camerawork is quite stunning & the entire opening sequence could easily have led to something tense & elegiac – Sibelius fused with a broad Nordic existentialist sweep – were it not for the fact that Fuest overlays it (after a few counts of windswept field-recording) with an upbeat “jazzy” (read, “satirical”) soundtrack (Moorcock reportedly wanted space-rock band Hawkwind for the job, to no avail). A great deal of tonguein-cheek art deco kitsch follows, from gothic to sci-fi, via nuclear apocalypse, mystic psychedelia, high camp, spy thriller, action flick, sexploitation, & übermensch fetishism – the film weaving ever-more cartoonish satires around the contemporary myth of the Organisation Man & the cult of informatics, while relentlessly parodying Hollywood’s infantile “superhero” anodyne in the face of mass political disillusionment, commodification of the counterculture & carpet bombing in Laos & Vietnam. “It’s the easiest way to run the world,” Jerry’s brother proclaims at one point, “with all the people asleep.” From this perspective, the film’s “narrative structure” can be read as a self-conscious collage of House of Hammer, Barbarella, Modesty Blaise (1966) & John Huston’s original Casino Royale (1967), ending with a full-on parody of the James Bond franchise with Finch & Runacre screwing under a giant solar-accumulator in the late Prof’s aptly situated lab in Lapland (the brains are bubbling away excitedly next door in their vats). With the aid of the eponymous “final programme,” Jerry & Miss Bruner conjoin in a blast of solar radiation & in the process evolve to a higher plane, in the form of a single, immortal, self-reproducing post-human organism that – Übermensch as it is – ends up resembling a hunchbacked, hermaphroditic primate. Emerging from the de rigueur spontaneously combusting lab, this hairy amalgam of the film’s protagonists winks at the camera, salutes, says “See ya round, sweetheart” & slouches out 117 into the great unknown, as the muzak pipes, a new age dawns, & the credits optimistically begin to scroll. 118 3. In her February 6, 1975, review of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba & Jack Pia’s SS Regalia for the New York Review of Books – entitled “Fascinating Fascism” – Susan Sontag wrote “If the message of fascism has been neutralised by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualised. This eroticisation of fascism has been remarked, but mostly in connection with its fancier & more publicised manifestations, as in Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask & Storm of Steel, & in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Visconti’s The Damned, & Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.” Sontag was well aware that the relation of sexuality to power is symbiotic, & that the aestheticisation of power (as famously argued by Walter Benjamin) goes hand-in-hand with fascist ideology. It is, in fact, the dominant “romanticism” of the twentieth century, in which technology & the cult of death are beautifully & performatively intertwined in the “discipline & punishment” of a mass sexualised agonism costumed by Hugo Boss. The fact of this “compromised” ménage-a-trois of aesthetics, politics & sexuality has presented a particular dilemma for social historians, critics, & so on, from the Busby Berkeley spectacularism of Riefenstahl’s 1935 masterpiece of Nazi propaganda, Triumph of the Will, to Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Eva & Adolf at Berchtesgarden” routine from his 1968 film The Producers (or similarly Brooks’s lesser-known 1984 video clip “The Hitler Rap (To Be or Not To Be)”). As Jean Genet says, “Fascism is theatre.” And sadomasochistic sexuality, as Sontag adds, is more theatrical than any other – & by virtue of its excessive theatricality, never far removed from camp, self-parody & kitsch (out of whose sensibility it was arguably born in the first place). To read Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) in this kind of context as “such a superficial soap opera we’d laugh at it if it weren’t so disquieting,” as did Roger Ebert in his excoriating review, is to miss an essential point: a point very strongly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s unpopular reaction to the Eichmann trial, out of which she formulated her thesis on the “banality of evil.” For the truth is that fascism & the psychosexual sado/ maso drama that enfolds it, is nothing if not banal: the “perversity” it describes belongs to everyday kitsch – the kitsch sentimentalism & irrationalism of whole nations in thrall to their own bondage (to a Führer, a god, an idea). It is a drama of ethical dissociation, of role-play, of mass alienation, ameliorated through the gratification of a collective rite, in which “pleasure” is agonised, & in which desire is directed within a regime of harsh regimentation (hence the conventionalised vocabulary of the socalled “perverse” practice of S&M: the “more or less Nazi costumes with boots, leather, chains, Iron crosses on gleaming torsos, swastikas” & other “lucrative paraphernalia of eroticism” as Sontag notes). Just as we see in Riefenstahl’s film the stirrings of mass sexual “catharsis” afforded by the annual Nuremberg Rallies & their various cognates, achieving a kind of apotheosis in Goebbel’s orgiastic Berlin Sportpalast address in February 1943 demanding “total war.” Ebert’s complaint, that The Night Porter – which depicts “a sadomasochistic relationship taken up again 15 years after the war by a former SS concentration camp officer & the inmate he raped & dominated when she was a young girl” – is “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution & suffering,” veers away from any sort of acknowledgement of the inherent rationale of precisely such a titillation. Which is not by virtue of its deviancy, but rather its banality: its 119 120 appeal to a fatalistic authority which, until the Vietnam War brought about its widespread public rejection, formed the unacknowledged basis of the social contract in America as elsewhere. And there is indeed much to be said about the parallels brought to bear between Nazi Germany & the Cold War decadence of the late sixties & early seventies: from the psychopathology of mass collaboration (Hitler’s “willing executioners” refigured as Nixon’s “silent majority”) to the transformation of an aesthetic of power to an aesthetic of commodified revolt (from Elvis to the mods to glam rock to punk). Cavani’s film isn’t alone in exploring this previously taboo subject, & there are good reasons to consider The Night Porter as integral to a broader critical reappraisal of fascism’s sex-&-power aesthetic, not as historically discontinuous, but as something with which “spectacular society” (viz. Debord) remains complicit. It fits within a wider body of work that includes Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned, Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) & Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1976), all of which – by exploring the socalled perversions of power (if this is not in fact an oxymoron) – expose the paradoxes inherent in the logic of transgression & conformity. Additionally, they pose – like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – the question of cinema itself: fascism was the only major ideology to be born of a cinematic consciousness – it was (& is) cinematic to its core. Its subtle expansion into all aspects of daily life, via the evolution of TV & new media, the pervasive seductions of advertising & the omnipresence of computing algorithms designed to reinforce our collective narcissism, represent an almost insurmountable dilemma. It is possible to see in Cavani’s film something of an allegory, along the lines of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” For as Ebert makes clear, it isn’t the “subject matter” per se that offends, but the seduction of form married to an aesthetic banality – one that chimes so closely with the soap opera of our self-enclosed, paranoid cinematic condition that it provokes a kind of narcissistic revulsion at the same time as it fascinates. 4. “Under cover of darkness, while an unsuspecting city sleeps, an alien life form begins to sow the seeds of unspeakable terror.” So runs the tag for Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers – a remake of (or possibly “sequel” to) Don Siegel’s 1956 original: a sci-fi noir filmed at the height of the Cold War, based on the novel of the same name by Jack Finney, published two years earlier just as the US was conducting its first hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll. Kaufman’s version (in which Siegel has a cameo) – released in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Nixon era & the Apollo lunar programme, & coinciding with Jimmy Carter’s deferral of neutron bomb production (resumed under Reagan, then dismantled in 2011) – was one of a slate of ’70s sci-fi films in which the political paranoia-&-conspiracy theme explored in popular movies like The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) & All the President’s Men (1976) is fused with atom-age obsessions about mutating alien life-forms disguised as human doppelgangers: the McCarthyesque “enemy within.” This theme, which has direct antecedents in the evolution of film noir, can ultimately be viewed as a product of the post-War “information” revolution, in which particularly TV contributed to an increasingly simulacral & phantasmatic social reality. The world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is disturbing less for the prospect of being cloned in your sleep by interstellar seedpods & turned into an obedient, affectless vegetable (vide Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) when he’s lobotomised at the end of that film), than for the dawning realisation that this “invasion” is already endemic & has gained control of every stratum of society, that it is employing the existing social hierarchies & organisational systems to propagate itself, & that there is ultimately no escape. Where the prevailing mood of the 1956 original was that of communist infiltration (the Rosenbergs had been executed in 1953 for selling nuclear secrets to Russia, while the film itself was released at the very height of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s “Hollywood Blacklist”), Kaufman’s remake more subtly insinuates the sort of corporatised police state take-over of America that 121 122 had been occurring up through the sixties under the cloak, precisely, of the kind of Cold War propaganda central to films like The Manchurian Candidate (1959), where the threat of “alien invasion” takes the form of hypnosis & brainwashing, creating remote-controlled sleeper agents whose task is to sabotage the free world (i.e. market capitalist USA) – a genre that reaches something of an apotheosis at the end of the Reagan presidency with John Carpenter’s satirical They Live (1988). Where Kaufman’s film particularly succeeds is in the tension it builds between an all-pervasive conspiratorial claustrophobia & the classic theme of the fugitive “individual-against-the system.” Donald Sutherland, who (with love-interest Brooke Adams) leads an isolated effort to “expose” the alien seed-pod conspiracy – as the indignant “eyewitness” of phenomena that are officially denied by government agencies already “infiltrated” (echoes of Richard Carlson’s astronomer & love-interest Barbara Rush in It Came from Outer Space (1953)) – plays the sort of libertarian role typical of the American cultural obsession with the one-man army. (In Siegel’s version, this “everyman hero” is a small town doctor; in Kaufman’s he’s a San Francisco health inspector.) This role of the littleman-who-overcomes is then boldly inverted in what is perhaps The Invasion of the Body Snatchers most striking sequence, which comes at the very end film, when we realise that Sutherland’s character has become “one of them” & is now an agent of the clone invasion – depicted here in terrifying banality of regimented office work. Kaufman’s technocratic alien society is effectively an expression of Arendt’s “banality of evil” by other means: the dehumanisation represented by collective acquiescence to the “capitalist conspiracy” & its fiction of “individual liberty” through the labour of conformity. In this, the film situates itself somewhere between Huxley’s Brave New World & Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, to the extent that it poses the dilemma of a “no exit” under conditions of pervasive conspiracy – whether mediated by alien organisms or the militaryindustrial complex (as in They Live, or David Bowie’s “World Enterprises Corporation” in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)) – but also in the film’s dramatic function, precisely, as entertainment, reinforcing the sense we get from the film (& pervading Abel Ferrara’s subsequent third remake, The Body Snatchers (1993)) of a world of alienated, socially narcotised individuals already “withdrawn into their own isolation cells.”2 It is most telling that, at the film’s end, with the colonising of the city virtually complete, the “Body Snatchers” themselves appear enslaved to their own simulation (like the Tyrell Corporation motto, “more human than human”), continuing the now-meaningless charade of 9-to-5 office-worker servility, as if trapped within a paranoiac “total” vigilance: a group portrait of the “security state” whose only raison d’être is suppression & self-perpetuation. 5. What do government agents, a vaporised highway cop, the “United Fruitcake Outlet,” a sleazy televangelist (“God wants your money”) & a lobotomised nuclear scientist have to do with the $20,000 bounty that’s set dusted-to-theeyeballs “repo men” Harry Dean Stanton (“Bud”) & Emilio Estevez (“Otto”) on the trail of a hot ’64 Chevy Malibu, in 2 Kim Newman, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Empire (14 October 2015): www.empireonline,com/movies/empire-essay-invasion-bodysnatchers/review/ 123 124 competition with the notorious Rodriguez Brothers? This is the question that drives Alex Cox’s spoof 1984 conspiracy film, from the opening scene in the Mojave Desert to its climax in the parking lot of the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” where – in the midst of carnage & confusion – idiot-savant mechanic “Miller” (Tracey Walter: “There ain’t no difference between a flying saucer & a time machine”), with Estavez at his side, pilots the dead-aliensin-the-trunk-powered Chevy up & across the LA sky like a green-glowing UFO. Released the same year as box-office dross like Beverly Hills Cop, The Never-Ending Story, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, & Romancing the Stone, Cox’s lowbudget satire was described by Roger Ebert as “the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn’t made from any known formula & doesn’t follow the rules.” More than conscious of this itself, the film exploits movie stereotypes & foregrounds the social pervasiveness of “generic” consumer products (stripped here of their brand identities), while slyly patterning the background with anti-establishment in-jokes (“Dr Benway to surgery”; “Mr Lee, please return the scalpel Mr Lee”), L. Ron Hubbard gags (“Dioretix”) & mock-acid-damaged profundity (Miller: “A lot of people don’t realise… there’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything”). Unlike the endless studio & independent ’80s exploitation flicks that posed varieties of vigilante action against a dystopian urban backdrop, Repo Man’s synthesis of West Coast car culture, the LA punk scene (there’s a cameo by the Circle Jerks posing as a dysfunctional lounge band), retro sci-fi & Hoover-style government conspiracy (all the agents look like Donald Trump clones, while their female boss sports a mechanical hand), produces a lampooning “social critique” that – in addition to everything else – reaches to the heart of the film industry’s active normalisation of suburban America: part of what commentators in the ’80s began referring to as the Military-Entertainment Complex. Like Bill Fishman’s Tapeheads (1988), Repo Man is as much a product as a parody of the Reagan era, MTV & the cult of the “instant cult movie.” But though Michael Nesmith produced both films, Repo Man (shot by regular Wenders collaborator, Robby Müller, & with an obscure title-track supplied by Iggy Pop) is a film that flips-off the late ’70s Lucases & Spielbergs whose moneygrubbing “blockbuster” viewpoint on the cinema-going middle classes was the product of first vampirising & then unceremoniously terminating the industry’s dalliance with “New Hollywood” – while Tapeheads, on the other hand, is a cynical backdoor effort at working the “cult” formula into a big budget studio franchise (financed by NBC & beefed-up on pseudo “street cred” with a slew of cameos by the likes of Jello Biafra & DEVO & a chart-ready soundtrack by Fishbone). It’s possible to regard a film like Tapeheads as signalling the accomplished fact of the corporate expropriation of Repo Man’s subversive tropology – just as Star Wars ripped off John Carpenter, Sergio Leone & Joseph Newman – posing yet again the question of how to escape the inevitable tractor-beam of the industry deathstar: a cycle repeated in the ’90s with the Disneyfication of Miramax & the founding of the Tarantino franchise (Reservoir Dogs, released in 1992, was instantly branded by Empire – the UK’s biggest selling film magazine – as the “Greatest Independent Film of All Time”). Like Carpenter’s They Live, which pulls the mask from a corporate-infested pop culture, Repo Man’s most distinctive & least assimilable element is its own selfdeprecation (Estevez’s “Otto” is an ex-punk who dons a grey polyester suit to join the “high intensity” of the nation’s 125 parasitic debt-enforcement economy) & its antagonism to precisely the sort of plastic consumer critique that turns pre-packaged “cult films” like Tapeheads into a lifestyle manual for yuppies on the make. 126 6. In a typical effort at understatement Roger Ebert once described Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989) as “one of the greatest” horror films ever made, a work of “true psychic horror” combining “poetry, surrealism, psychological pain & wicked humour.”3 The film explores the classic Oedipal power-triangle, centred – like Hitchcock’s Psycho – around “the perverse emotional & physical enslavement,” as Ebert puts it, “of a son by his mother” (“Concha”: Bianca Guerra, whose character’s name is also slang, incidentally, for vagina). For her part, the mother here has been mutilated by her tyrannical circus-ringmaster husband, “Orgo” (Guy Stockwell), who cuts off both her arms after she effectively castrates him by pouring sulphuric acid on his genitals – revenge at having caught him in flagrante delicto with the “Tattooed Woman” (Thelma Tixou). The Tattooed Woman, in turn, happens to be the mother of deafmute tightrope walker “Alma” (Faviola Tapia), with whom the son, “Fenix” (played by two of Jodorowsky’s own sons) falls in love, & she (the Tattooed Woman) is also the first victim of Fenix’s metamorphosis into a Norman Bates-style serial slasher – performing the role of his mother’s vengeful “hands,” her demon meanwhile having taken possession of his generally disturbed & hallucinatory mind. This wildly entangled psycho-sexual drama forms the basis of an equally complex allegory of symbolic violence & relentless, atavistic passions on a classical plane which – like Jodorowsky’s masterwork, The Holy Mountain – reflects also on the disillusionments of the contemporary “cinematic” myth: the myth, as Bataille says, of the “absence of myth.” Like the classical pre-cinematic “horror films” of Sophocles, Aeschylus & Euripides – who at times seem to be Jodorowsky’s closest contemporaries – allegory here is 3 Roger Ebert, “Santa Sangre,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-santa-sangre-1989 never far removed from burlesque: its tragic reach frequently extends into farce of an even more “tragic,” exuberant, excessive symbolic force. Appropriately the film opens in a somewhat theatrically staged psychiatric institution, with Fenix perched atop a dead tree trunk beside a window, something between a delusional birdman (his initiation into manhood was to have the image of a “phoenix” tattooed on his chest by his father, with an inked throwing-knife) & a primitive stylite. The scene & much of what follows is as much evocative of the Spanish & Italian surrealist, neorealist & horror directors (Buñuel, Arabal, Fellini, Argento – whose brother, Claudio, in fact produced the film) as it is of Pasolini’s 1967 Oedipus Rex, Ken Russell’s Salomé’s Last Dance (1988), & Peter Greenaway’s later Baby of Mâcon (1993). Such comparisons aren’t short in supply, while Santa Sangre itself makes repeated allusions to James Whale’s 1933 film of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man – with a faceless Claude Rains in the title role. Much has been said about the film’s autobiographical aspects – four of Jodorowsky’s sons appear in the film (two in the role of Fenix (Axel & Adam), one as a psychiatric doctor (Brontis), one as a pimp (Teo)) – while the childhood “flashback” narrative, which constitutes most of the first half of the film & is set in a Mexican circus (“El Circo del Gringo”), has been taken to allude to the fact that Jodorowsky’s own father (Jaime, depicted in the director’s accounts as a brute who conceived his son 127 128 by rape) worked in one. Likewise the film alludes heavily to Jodorowsky’s previous work, particularly Holy Mountain & El Topo (in which Brontis accompanied Jodorowsky’s titular character throughout). Jodorowsky himself spoke of his mother (Sara) as cold & remote: “My mother is dead,” he said in an interview, “I had a terrible relationship with her. She had many problems with my father, & she never caressed me. So I didn’t have a mother who touched me.” But while aspects of the film might draw from Jodorowsky’s reservoir of childhood experiences (as is explicitly the case with 2013’s The Dance with Reality), the film itself is far more universal in scope, in the caricatured, archetypal way of a “human abstract” theatricality rendered against the backdrop of collective neurosis: an effect harking back to Jodorowsky’s “lost” early film, Les têtes interverties (1957: about a head-swapping merchant, adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella, Die vertauschten Köpfe), & likewise heightened by the film’s phantasmagoric wanderings through the realms of circus performance, cultish ritual, funeral rites, magic shows, mime (Jodorowsky had once toured with Marcel Marceau’s theatre troupe), & schizophrenia, in search of emancipation from the obscene, tyrannical operations of the maternal spectre. A spectre whose irreality – more primitive & less subtle than Debord’s “spectacle” – nevertheless permeates the very substance of Jodorowsky’s “real” (born as it is of cinema). In its allegorical form, the promise of emancipation is like a child’s toy on a string, there to distract the mesmerised little ego from seeing how it, too, is nothing but a Caligari puppet. What, after all, is more insidious than the illusion of subjective agency, if not the illusion of its disillusioning? As in Holy Mountain, the emancipative disillusionment enacted in Fenix’s ritual destruction of his mama’s effigy, mutely directed by his (equally imaginary) childhood sweetheart, Alma, before an audience of clowns (like the becominginvisible that Fenix earlier craves in order to escape from this theatre of mortification) is – miming some Dantesque morality play – just one more sleight of hand in the neverending manipulations of The Spectacle. If the film ends with Fenix finally in possession of himself (of the instrumentality of his own hands, in which he now realises he “holds his destiny,” by substituted one Oedipal surrogate (the mute Alma) for another (the mutilated Concha)), it is merely in order that he may – in a gesture identical to the miming of a captive bird’s flight into the sky – surrender. 7. Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) has been described as “historiographic metafiction” – “a rearticulation of national memory & […] rewriting of Yugoslav history”4 – though in the realm of critical terminologies it would make more sense to call it metacinema, in the Godardian sense of cinema as “the registrar of History.” In Godard’s thesis, from the vantage-point of the end of the twentieth century, “cinema is… the image of the century in all its aspects.”5 For Godard, echoing Benjamin, cinema – the manifestation of the dialectical image par excellence – in the twentieth century displaces history, which doesn’t wait for Fukuyama to signal its “end.” Where some critics see Underground defined historically – against the background of the Yugoslav Wars up until the Dayton Peace Accord – within a local Balkan matrix, its cinematic reach infuses it with the broader atavistic delirium of 20th century Europe & its global repercussions, seduced by the spectacle of power & other temporal baubles. Based on the play Springtime in January (Prolece u Januaru; 1977) by Dušan Kovačević, Underground – subtitled “Once Upon a Time there was One Country” – traces the fraternally antagonistic relationship & ménageà-trois of two men, “Marko” (Miki Manojlović) & “Blacky” (Lazar Ristovski), & their mutual love-interest Natalija (Mirjana Joković), from Belgrade during World War 2 (the film opens on the morning of 6 April 1941, the date of the commencement of “Operation Retribution,” the Nazis’s ground invasion & aerial bombardment of Belgrade, anticipating Yugoslavia’s surrender 11 days later), through the period of the Cold War, to Bosnia in 1992. Marko & Blacky, former racketeers, become leading 4 Neveva Daković, “‘Remembrance of the Things Past’: Emir Kusturice’s Underground,” European Cinema: Inside-Out, eds. Guido Rings & Rikki Morgan (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2003). 5 Jean-Luc Godard & Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005) 87. 129 130 members of the Communist resistance, & following an escape from a Gestapo prison-hospital, Marko hides Blacky in a cellar & keeps him there even after the actual war has ended by pretending that it is still going on. Marko marries Natalija & becomes a close political ally of Tito & later an arms dealer, selling weapons manufactured by Blacky’s underground community. Eventually, Blacky escapes – onto the set of a film in which he himself is the central character – & eventually the two fraternal rivals encounter each other again in the 1990s in the UN-policed noman’s land between Bosnian & Serb forces where a now wheelchairbound Marko is negotiating an exorbitant arms deal: he’s captured by Blacky’s militia & Blacky unwittingly radios in an order to execute Marko & Natalija as “profiteers” (but not before Marko gets in the line: “A war’s not truly a war until a brother murders a brother”). Their corpses are doused in petrol & set alight: the image of them turning circles on a burning mechanised wheelchair, around an upturned crucifix, is emblematic of the “cosmic” vicious circle within which the protagonist’s (& Europe’s) fate appears to be bound. Later, Blacky himself drowns in the well back in the cellar where he’d spent twenty years underground. The whole things ends with a posthumous, carnivalesque reunion at the marriage of Blacky’s (also drowned) son, “Jovan,” on an island adrift in the Danube, with Marko’s zookeeper brother delivering a soliloquy, ending with the words “Once Upon a Time, There was a Country…” “In the film,” Daković writes, “which has been widely described as kind of visual pandemonium, a Felliniesque spectacle successfully mirrors the complicated image of national history & cinema with ‘the world above ground [quoting Kusturica] portrayed in the full colour of everyday reality’ & ‘the world below […] seen in the faded colours of manipulated lies’” – a conventionalising trope framed, we might add, by an overarchingly “Gnostic” mythopoeia in which the absurdity of all such dualistic “historical struggles” mirrors the idea of an inherently dysfunctional universe created by an imbecile God, that can only be made sense of dialectically because it is in fact nothing but a fabric of contradictions. And it is in this sense, too, that Kusturica’s filmmaking can be considered broadly “dialectical” – in the same way that Menippean satire is dialectical, in its mythic burlesque by highly “physical-satirical” means & its inversion of precisely the kind of historical fatalism Daković ultimately accuses Underground of being (or the act of Serb propaganda other critics at the time considered it as being). What’s more, we’re given the sense that it is in fact this “underground” world, teaming with whole nations on the move, migrating beneath Europe, east & west, in a vast complex of subterranean tunnels, that is the “true” theatre of History-with-a-capital-H: the operational never-centre, you might say, of the “spectacle” above. In Underground, the conventional representation of “truth” & “lies” – of the “real” world & the ghostly underworld – is effectively turned on its head: & it is here that the film most succinctly develops its critical tension with the easy moralism of the times. Its perversely engrossed archetypes – a “kind of eternal orgy” (as Slavoj Žižek says) of parodic national traits – go beyond a simple “carnivalesque transgressive model” & demand that we confront precisely the “call to order” on which historical judgement is founded: something that, in refusing the kind of didactic function Godard identified with pseudomilitant “Internationale” cinema, has provoked Žižek to call Underground “one of the most horrible films that I’ve seen.”6 6 Slavoj Žižek with Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Violence & the Left in Dark Times: 131 132 8. A few years ago (2014), when the Nobel laureate & author of One Hundred Years of Solitude died, the international press orchestrated an outpouring of uncritical admiration for the “father of magic realism” which glossed over his close personal ties with the former Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro – who has now also passed into history. Not only was Gabriel García Márquez a personal friend of Castro, he also acted as an informer, & it is known that his intercessions resulted in a number of anti-communist dissidents in Cuba being gaoled & tortured. He also operated as a type of éminence grise of the left émigré publishing scene in Europe – effectively blocking the publication of anti-Castroists in France & Spain – before, of course, being awarded for his efforts with a Nobel Prize in 1982.7 The Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas, who in contrast died in semi-obscurity (diagnosed with AIDS, & lacking health insurance, he committed suicide on 7 December 1990 in New York), accused Márquez of being “an unscrupulous propagandist for communism who, taking refuge in the guarantees & facilities which liberty provides, set out to undermine it.” In addition, Arenas made the point that, “although not without merit,” Márquez’s work was “not at the level of… writers who have either died in oblivion or been ignored.”8 In Arenas’s view, Márquez & others like him represented the real power of ideological, cultural normalisation in the Cold War period & the substitution for the “revolutionary” discourse of the avant-garde by a central committee romance. Under the Castro regime, Arenas had suffered imprisonment & the repeated destruction of his manuscripts (one novel, Farewell to the Sea – eventually published in Spain in 1982 – had to be re-written three times). In August 1980 he was among the approximately 125,000 refugees A Debate,” For a TV (16 September 2008). 7 At the time of Márquez’s death in April 2014 one critic wrote: “No amount of moral & intellectual wretchedness will earn an artist even the mildest rebuke from most of his professional peers & their related institutions – so long as the wretch hires himself out to communists” (Humberto Fontova). 8 Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M. Koch (London: Penguin, 1993) 302 – emphasis added. permitted to leave Cuba for the US as part of the Mariel Boatlift. His autobiography, Before Night Falls, on which Julian Schnabel’s 2000 biopic of the same title is based, was written during the highly prolific last years of his life & posthumously published in 1992. In a personal memoir originally printed in the PEN Newsletter, Jaime Manrique described Arenas’s situation at that time: Last September, I found out his health was deteriorating. I went to visit him, & he indicated that he wished to apply for a grant from the PEN Fund for Writers & Editors with AIDS. The air in his apartment was stagnant, & the vases in the living room were choked with rotten flowers; on the dining-room table lay copies of the two manuscripts he had just finished – thousands & thousands of pages, & Reinaldo a shipwreck disappearing in a sea of paper. His handsome face was hideously deformed by the lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma; he was very weak, & pale, as if all his blood had been consumed by the disease. He was, in fact, able to speak only with great difficulty, because of a painful sarcoma in his throat. Even so, he wanted to talk. Almost in a whisper he spoke at length about the sadness of being a homosexual in the context of Latin America’s 133 machista culture; about the AIDS epidemic & how it had set back the progress of the gay movement in Hispanic culture, how it was putting us back in the Dark Ages; & about the tyranny of Fidel Castro.9 134 Unlike his previous film, Basquiat (1996), which was assembled from indirect accounts of the artist’s life, Schnabel’s script for Before Night Falls is heavily grounded in Arenas’s own text (& with the exception of a fictional episode centred on a makeshift hot-air-balloon – intended as a means of escape by members of a dissident commune – remains largely faithful to it). Shot in Veracruz, Mexico, the film begins by tracing Arenas’s childhood & comingof-age during the Cuban Revolution in broad painterly strokes that match Arenas’s lyric prose, producing what Roger Ebert describes as “a rich canvas of dream sequences, fragmented childhood memories, & the wild Cuban demimonde”10 (there’s a scene, for example, of the young Arenas receiving a blowjob in a Holguín brothel while fantasising about his best friend). The focus then shifts to Arenas’s development as a serious writer while studying in the School of Planification & later Faculty of Letters at Havana University (the adult Arenas being played by Javier Bardem) & the resulting publication of his first book in 1967, Singing from the Well, when Arenas was only twenty years old. The remainder of the film focuses on the period of the Cuban Revolution’s “betrayal” of its radical democratic ethos, including the suppression of “sexual liberty,” specifically homosexuality, & a concerted, systematic attack – by way of a series of Stalinistic showtrials, imprisonment & constant police harassment – on “dissident” writers. Arenas’s own “internal exile” is initiated with his first arrest in 1973 on trumped-up charges of sexual molestation, from which point the film charts a failed attempt to escape the island & Arenas’s uncertain existence within 9 Jaime Manrique, “In Memoriam: Reinaldo Arenas,” PEN Newsletter, rpr BOMB 82 (Winter 2003): http://bombmagazine.org/article/6392/in-memoriam-reinaldo-arenas 10 Roger Ebert, “Before Night Falls”: www.rogerebert.com/reviews/before-night-falls-2001 an increasingly “underground” culture, on the fringes of a society by now riddled with opportunists & informers, as well as the transformation of literature into a form of contraband to be smuggled out of the country – as in other Soviet satellite states at that time – in order to achieve any kind of publication. Farewell to the Sea was written during an eight-year stretch at the notorious El Morro prison: in Schnabel’s film, Johnny Depp is given a dual role as the sadistic prison officer Lieutenant Victor, & as resident transvestite “Bon Bon” who smuggles out one of Arenas’s manuscripts up his arse. The subsequent publication of the manuscript abroad caused Arenas to be brutally punished (we’re given extended scenes of solitary confinement in the film) & forced to denounce his own writing. Belonging to a reviled subclass of the new Cuban social order, this was euphemistically the only opportunity for Arenas’s “rehabilitation”: to recant &/or incriminate others – a form of public humiliation tantamount to suicide. In an interview, Schnabel explained his casting decision by the fact that “in Reinaldo’s writing, one character can be two, three different personages; somebody can be a man & a woman at the same time,” combining the gender fluidity in Arenas’s writing with the perversity of the political system under Castro & the ambivalent sexualisation of power we find in Genet: “I like to think that Reinaldo would imagine that Lieutenant Victor & Bon Bon could be the same person – that Cuban State Security would go to such extravagant lengths to undermine the stability of the prisoners. The fact that Bon Bon/Lieutenant Victor could be Reinaldo’s vision of beauty & his destruction is a constant in Reinaldo’s body of work…” 9. Sometimes described as an allegorical retelling of Hungarian history from WW2 to the present, György Pálfi’s 2006 film Taxidermia constructs a generational triptych around the doubtful descendents of a servile, hair-lipped, masturbating, voyeuristic, pig-fucking military orderly called “Morosgovanyi,” who winds up being shot in the head by his own commanding officer on a remote outpost, after phantasmatically impregnating the officer’s wife. The resulting progeny, a son, “Kálmán,” born with a pig’s tail 135 136 (duly shorn off), is raised by the officer (“Öreg”) as his own & becomes (in the film’s second part) a champion Hungarian speed-eater. Kálmán’s marriage to the national women’s speed-eating champion, “Gizi” (sabotaged on their wedding night by Kálmán’s team-mate & romantic competitor, “Béla”), produces the eponymous taxidermist, “Lajoska,” who later (in the film’s climactic third part) serves as his by-now washed-up & chair-bound father’s keeper – emptying Kálmán’s toilet tray & bringing the daily supply of chocolate bars that the ex-champ snarfs at the rate of 150+ per hour, wrapper & all, as well as the kilos of lard he feeds to his pet cats (three caged oversized felines that Lajoska keeps at bay with a cattle prod) as part of their “training regime.” While Lajoska stuffs exotic animals in the basement of his taxidermist’s shop, Kálmán spends his days doing nothing but sleeping, farting & watching competition speed-eating on cable TV. Being thoroughly immobilised by obesity, Kálmán is a sitting duck for his meat-starved cats the moment they find their cage left unlocked – the unlucky consequence of a bit of petulantly wilful negligence on the part of Lajoska after having been abused by his “father” as a “human cyst,” “carcass-stuffer” & other choice epithets. Heartbroken by an unrequited love for a checkout girl at the local supermarket, Lajoska – on discovering Kálmán’s partiallyeaten corpse – sets about stuffing the dear departed dad, along with his (euthenised) pet cats, & mounts them in a tableau of surpassing kitsch, before strapping himself into a purpose-built apparatus & committing suicide-bytaxidermy. The film concludes with an epilogue of sorts, in which Lajoska’s “archaic art” – having duly been discovered by his last customer, a doctor, who’d requested Lajoska produce a key-ring from an aborted foetus – is placed on exhibition at an upscale Budapest gallery, while the doctor delivers a lecture to a voguishly mannerist audience dressed entirely in white. These human mannequins of commodity aestheticism, juxtaposed to Lajoska’s crude (headless) personification of Michelangelo’s “David,” provide a final, incisive act of grotesquery on the director’s part (presaging the film’s own reception as cinematic “art” on the festival champagne-&-canapé circuit). Three generations of ritual & unrelenting “self-abuse” thus provide a staging of a nation’s pathological descent through communism (& revolt) to free market economics, each presenting variations of a “degenerate” spectacularism (voyeurism, exhibitionism, alienation, etc.). There are strong echoes, both in its cinematic pathology & visual lushness, of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) & The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), as well as the sometimes lyric grotesqueness of Jan Švankmajer’s Otesánek (2000) – in which, as Pálfi says of Taxidermia, “naturalism is overcome by surrealism,” not by an act of transcendence but rather by way of immanence: the encounter, in place of an ideologically ordered, heroic “realism,” with the grotesquery & obscenity of naked power & powerlessness – whether we call it libido, superego or the State. In this regard, Pálfi’s vision is like that of a present-day Hieronymus Bosch predisposed towards what we might call “dialectical parody.” Dialectical in its play upon a certain historical materialism: parodic in its grasp upon an overstuffed sublimity (both aesthetic & ideological). Just as the nation state pursued its “manifest destiny” as monument, cadaver, war machine, pageant, slaughterhouse & concentration camp, so too this “story about men who 137 hunger, men who have desires that seem boundless & impossible to satiate” communicates a private & collective delirium whose cinematic ejaculations reduce that socalled historical perspective designed to induce a prophylactic distance between modernity &, for example, the barbarity of the Inquisition, to mere ideological abstentionism. As Althusser says, the true manifestation of ideology is always to be found in those areas most seemingly remote from it: in the bestial, spontaneous, orgiastic, perverse, on whom the subterfuge of a Rousseauesque “naturalism” bestows the aura of “innocence.” Here the entire abject cornucopia of bodily fluids is precisely an excess of ideology. The biological, “animal” destiny inscribed in these stigmata, is the no less legitimate offspring of the vertigo of power in all its most narcissistic, pervasive & resilient forms – in its most primitive, visceral symptomatology, & thus its most spectacular – as that ideally untreatable & fatalistic neurosis called “the human condition.” 138 10. In 1965, following an attempted coup allegedly backed by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), army general Mohammad Suharto led an anti-communist purge which ultimately resulted in the ousting of the country’s first president, Sukarno,11 & the institution of a 31year dictatorship which formally ended with Suharto’s resignation in 1998. The purge, led by the army & local “vigilante” units, was responsible for the death or disappearance of over a million people, & was described by the CIA (who would support almost identical tactics themselves fifteen years later in El Salvador) as “one of the worse mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, & the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.” While the present Indonesian government (under Susilo Yudhoyono – whose father-in-law, Sarwo Wibowo, is considered responsible for initiating the mass murders12) 11 Leader of the anti-colonial national uprising & war-time collaborator with Japan. 12 See Caroline Cooper, “The Act of Seeing The Act of Killing,” Guernica (13 June 2013): www.guernicamag.com/caroline-cooper-the-act-of-seeing-the-act-of-killing/ has recently considered bestowing the title “National Hero” on Suharto, Transparency International has named the former dictator “the most corrupt leader in modern history,” having been accused of embezzling between 15 & 35 billion dollars during his presidency; likewise, in 2012, Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights described “gross human rights violations” directly or indirectly ascribable to the Suharto regime & its proxies in the liquidation of the PKI, handing down recommendations (never acted upon by the country’s Attorney General) of legal action against those responsible. Suharto’s anti-communist stance throughout the last 20 years of the Cold War ensured his regime of tacit western support, & with the end of the Cold War little has been accomplished in exposing & prosecuting the crimes of the Suharto era, whose long shadow provides the backdrop for Joshua Oppenheimer’s two documentaries on the subject of Indonesia’s death squads: The Act of Killing (2012) & Look at the Silence (2014). Oppenheimer’s documentaries are unique & disturbing for several reasons, & subvert a great deal of documentary convention in treating subjects like mass extra-judicial murder & genocide: above all, because the films blur the conventions of the genre itself – particularly The Act of Killing (produced by Werner Herzog & Errol Morris), in which members of a death squad re-stage their crimes in highly-theatrical appropriations of American genre cinema (western, noir, musical) that happily blur distinctions between “verity” & “kitsch” (“play-acting with murderers,” is how one review described it13). In doing so, the films poses an ethical dilemma, of presenting a crime of staggering dimensions from the “point-of-view” of the perpetrators. But this points to another & slightly unique problem. Unlike, for example, Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields (1984) – a dramatisation of accounts by New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg & Cambodian journalist & interpreter Dith Pran during the Cambodian civil war in 1973 & the subsequent exposure of the Khmer Rouge “killing fields” where as many as 3 million 13 Bob Mondello, “In Indonesia, a Genocide Restaged for the Camera,” NPR (18 July 2013): www.npr.org/2013/07/26/198439933/in-indonesia-a-genocide-restaged-for-the-camera?ft=1&f=1045 139 140 Cambodians (or 25% of the population) were murdered by Pol Pot’s regime – the orchestrators of Indonesia’s 1965 mass murders remain part of the country’s political elite. While Pol Pot’s government effectively collapsed in 1979, & members of the Khmer Rouge have been prosecuted for war crimes & their role in the country’s terror period, no such judicial scrutiny has occurred in Indonesia, where the 1965 killings continue to be presented as an official victory over communism. Like Chile, where investigation & attempted prosecution of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet for human rights violations was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the United States, it has been shown that Suharto’s regime was actively supported by the CIA, who have been revealed to have provided extensive lists of “communists” to the death squads (the New York Times hailed the overthrow of pro-Chinese Sukarno government as “A Gleam of Light in Asia”14). This raises the disquieting spectre of the Nuremberg principle, whereby the “victors” of the major ideological struggles of our time have stood in a whitewashed ethical relation to the crimes committed by the vanquished. At Nuremberg, the Soviets’ acts of aggression after the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact were never cited, nor were the allies’ revenge bombings of cities like Dresden late in the war. The events of ’65 that are the subject of Oppenheimer’s films exists in this irreal zone of nonavowal. No-one disputes the killings occurred, the question is whether or not they are to be regarded as crimes. It helps, of course, that the events occurred in a remote south-east Asian archipelago nation, at an obscure distance from Western Consciousness (notably most of the filming takes place in the largely impoverished & endemically corrupt northern area of Sumatra, amid typically “third world” scenery, juxtaposed at key moments with shots of the McDonald’s “golden arches,” boutique shopping malls & collections of “limited edition” bling). And as the film’s epigraph, culled from Voltaire, proclaims – with heavyhanded irony that fails in any way to abate as the narrative 14 James Reston, “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” New York Times (19 June 1966). unfolds – “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers & to the sound of trumpets.” But we might easily construct analogies that are more readily sensible at least to western minds. We might consider a present state of affairs, for example, with Bosnia still dominated by Radovan Karadžić, in which a film-maker like Oppenheimer interviews members of the BosnianSerb militias responsible for the Srebrenica massacre & for implementing the order to terrorise Bosniak populations – “to create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival of life,” as was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – & have the perpetrators gladly give a detailed & theatrical account of their actions in front of the camera: not only with an attitude of impunity, but with a dramatic sense of nostalgia for acts worthy of celebration. Or a Spain still dominated by the party of Franco & populated with forces labour camps. Or a South Africa still under Apartheid, with no Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Or a successor state to Nazi Germany – it almost goes without saying – with octogenarian ex-members of the Einsatzgruppen paraded about as quasi state heroes. This is the realm we enter in The Act of Killing, whose apparent surreality & disorientating power stems precisely 141 142 from this ethical rupture in the representation of history. It disturbs because it implicates: not the protagonists, among whom we at least get to witness a performed “cinematic redemption” of sorts at the end, but its western audience, unaccustomed to naked depictions of their own historical violence (it’s one thing to produce revisionist accounts of the genocide of American Indians or Australian Aborigines, but to do so from a position of the unabashed kitsch of contemporary chauvinisms, etc. – this is an act of masterful subversion of both amnesiac nationalism & the liberal niceties content to patronise it). “War crimes,” Adi Zukadry, one of the mass murderers interviewed in Oppenheimer’s film, tells the camera when questioned about the Geneva Convention, “are defined by the winners,” adding: “There are people like me everywhere in the world.” Among the many scenes of bizarre & pathologic brutalism, the Bonnie-&-Clyde-type cinematic adoration of heroic criminality, the rampant corruption & knotted sophistry, etc., etc., etc., there is one scene in particular in The Act of Killing which stands out. It isn’t the elderly Anwar Congo (a leader of the most powerful death squad in northern Sumatra, personally responsible for the deaths of approx 1000 “communists”) demonstrating his garrotting technique, or his collaborator Herman Koto singing in drag, nor their enlistment of villagers (including children) in a reenactment of a massacre fifty years previously in that same village, of members of the same families, or the occasions in which the ex-gangsters portray their own victims. Rather, it is a scene split between the beginning & end of the film, in which Anwar Congo – dressed in black clerical robes, stands at the foot of an “emotionally expressive” waterfall surrounded by dancing girls, overdubbed with John Barry’s “Born Free” – acts out his redemption: the ghost of one of his garrotted victims presenting him with a medal & saying, “For executing me & sending me to heaven, I thank you a thousand times.” It is a scene that encapsulates what Slavoj Žižek calls “a case of obscenity that reaches to the extreme.”15 15 Slavoj Žižek, “Capital,” Symposium: Until the End of the World,” Nuit Blanche (29 September 2012): www.publicjournal.ca/symposium-untilthe-end-of-the-world/ It is the obscene fantasy of power according itself the ultimate alibi: that its crimes are not only not-crimes, but are in fact self justified, above all by their theatricality. As Congo himself explains early in the film, after describing his transformation from “movie theatre gangster” to deathsquad leader (whose crimes were inspired by & modelled on the big screen personae of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino & John Wayne, among others), “Why do people watch James Bond? Why do people watch films about the Nazis? To see power & sadism.” “We were,” he concludes – pointing to a rupture in the cinematic fantasy – “more cruel than the movies.” Consequently, Oppenheimer’s film is as far from the conventional form of “exposé” as we might care to imagine, since its meshing of documentary realism & melodrama abolishes both the filmmaker’s & viewers’ claims to neutrality (& to its implied ethical exceptionalism, the one that allows us to pass judgement: Oppenheimer has stated in interviews that the cinematography of the “re-enactments” sought primarily to meet the viewer’s expectations in filmic terms, in order to involve them in generic “realism” of what they were seeing). It consequently invites us to recognise in it all the theatricality, radical ambivalence & (above all) license, of a medieval morality play, in which ethical alienation – done-up as cinematic postmodernism – is presented as the mode of contemporary entertainment (“Our souls,” Congo says at one point, “have become like soap opera actors”). In doing so, it stages the real dilemma of that cinematic conscience which has grown up with the twentieth century & has so easily given the impression of allowing us, the chosen ones, to absolve ourselves of history. *Published in 3:AM magazine (February 2017). 143 DER AMERIKANISCHE FREUND PETIT | WENDERS | JARMUSCH 144 It wouldn’t be bad to ban the American cinema for a while. Three-quarters of the planet considers cinema from the angle & according to the criteria of American cinema… People must become aware that there are other ways to make films than the American way. Moreover this would force filmmakers in the United States to revise their conceptions. It would be a good things. – Jean-Luc Godard “A film without a cinema” is how Geoffrey Nowell-Smith described Radio On (1979), the debut feature by British director Chris Petit. Co-produced by Wim Wenders’s Road Movies production company, the film was heavily indebted to The Goalie’s Fear of the Penalty (1972) & Wenders’s “road movie” trilogy, Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten; 1974), The Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung; 1975) & Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit; 1976), as well as Monte Hellman’s seminal Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Shot on 35mm B/W by Wenders’s assistant cameraman at that time, Martin Schäfer, Radio On has been described as “alien & alienating,” an austerely minimalist “hymn & homage to the dreamed imperatives of the highway”1 – though in its concerns with durée rather than journeying per se it occupies a position between early French New Wave (& its German analogue) & films like Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1986) & Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (2007) – combining “drift & boredom, jukeboxes, Alphaville, J.G. Ballard & Kraftwerk” (“boredom, relentlessness & drift,” Petit argued at the time, “were the main impulses of the late twentieth century”). Like Wenders, Petit set about to explore the contemporary road journey as cinemascape, proffering a “transcendence of banality” by way of a mobile soundtrack (Bowie’s “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” etc.). “Driving,” Petit has since said, “always struck me as the most unreal thing, especially motorway driving with its illusion of stasis & speed, the driver passive & immobile while everything around moves.” Petit’s philosophy in Radio On (it is possible to regard the film, in fact, as something more akin to a dissertation on the “state of the art”) has more in common with Wenders’s approach than a mere retrospective adoption of influences. Commonalities centred on the question of “action” as an expression not of narrativised drama, but of the cinematic medium itself. At one point in The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge; 1982), Wenders’s film director character, “Friedrich Munro,” tells his cast “the story should unfold in the spaces between the characters.” Like Wenders, Petit maintained an intensely felt distance from the conventional insistence on action & plot in Hollywood cinema, as well as the cultural artificiality that accompanied Hollywood’s domination of the film industry, & of European cultural consciousness, as a whole – while nevertheless conscious of its own seduction by “America” as a pervasive “dilemma” (evinced in Radio On in one quasi-fetish scene of hugely tail-finned American cars that stick out in Petit’s filmscape like ’50s UFOs). As Dennis Hopper asks in Wedners’s The American Friend (1977), “What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” Elsewhere Wenders is more explicit: 1 Jason Wood, 100 Road Movies (London: British Film Institute, 2007). 145 Hollywood filmmaking has become more & more about power & control. It’s really not about telling stories. That’s just a pretence. But ironically, the fundamental difference between making films in Europe versus America is in how the screenplay is dealt with. From my experiences in Germany & France, the script is something that is constantly scrutinised by the film made from it. Americans are far more practical. For them, the screenplay is a blueprint & it must be adhered to rigidly in fear of the whole house falling down. In a sense, all of the creative energy goes into the screenplay so one could say that the film already exists before the film even begins shooting. You lose spontaneity. But in Germany & France, I think that filmmaking is regarded as an adventure in itself.2 146 Where Wenders saw a European cinema narcotised by Hollywood, Petit – whose later films included two German productions, Flight to Berlin (1983) & Chinese Boxes (1984) – was disturbed by British cinema’s avoidance of contemporary experience (Radio On was described in the Guardian as “a diagnosis of [cinema’s] pathologies & discontents”),3 much as New York directors of that late ’70s & early ’80s, from Amos Poe to Jim Jarmusch were motivated by a similar avoidance in American cinema. In fact, Petit is one of the directors with whom Jarmusch, in his first suite of films, has arguably the most in common – not least because both were ostensibly mentored by Wenders (Jarmusch’s second feature, Stranger than Paradise (1984), was partly shot on B/W stock left over from The State of Things – on whose soundtrack Jarmusch incidentally appears as a member of the New York-based no wave band Del-Byzanteens (keyboard & vocals)). Jarmusch began working on his first feature Permanent Vacation in 1979 using (it’s an often repeated story) scholarship funds provided by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation & encouraged Nicholas Ray4 – the director 2 “Wim Wenders (The End of Violence): An Interview with Wim Wenders by Jayne Margretts,” The Director’s Chair Interviews, Industry Central (1997): www.industrycentral.net/director...interviews/WIWEO1.HTM 3 John Patterson, “A Film without a Cinema,” Guardian (2 October 2004). 4 Jarmusch famously showed Nicholas Ray a script while he was a students at NYU: “Ray disapproved of its lack of action, to which Jarmusch best-known for his 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause – with whom Wenders was at that time working on the documentary Lightning Over Water (1980; about the last days of Ray’s own life). Ray had appeared in a minor role in The American Friend & Wenders’s later film Until the End of the World (1991) was named for the last spoken words in Ray’s 1961 Biblical epic, King of Kings. The crew of Lightning Over Water (who appeared extensively onscreen) included Jarmusch, Ray’s personal assistant at the time, sitting at an editing console. Likewise, all three filmmakers have shared an incisive interest in contemporary music: Radio On featured Bowie, Kraftwerk, Ian Drury, Robert Fripp, Wreckless Eric & Devo, while Jarmusch has notably collaborated with Neil Young, Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, & Wenders with Talking Heads, Ry Cooder & a slate of others. Along with an appearance by Sting as a rock-obsessed motor mechanic, Radio On also features Wenders’s wife at that time, Lisa Kreuzer (familiar to audiences of Alice in the Cities & Kings of the Road). Petit’s New Wave/New German Cinema “influences” are plainly advertised in Radio On from the film’s opening long-take, in which the camera lingers on a handwritten note that includes the line, “We are the children of Fritz Lang & Wernher von Braun” (echoing Godard’s line, “This film could be called The Children of Marx & Coca-Cola,” from Masculin Féminin (1966), while referencing the film of Godard’s with which it shares the strongest aesthetic affinities, Alphaville (1965)), while a radio plays through the full recording of Bowie’s “Helden/Heroes” (1977) – just as the New Wave influence on Jarmusch is signposted at the end of Permanent Vacation with Chris Parker on a Manhattan pier about to swap places, in a manner of speaking, with his Parisian/Cinématèque Française doppelganger. And if Radio On “reinvented the road movie for England,” as Wenders once claimed, it’s just as arguable that over the course of the last thirty-five years, Jarmusch has succeeded in reinventing the road movie for America: responded after meditating on the critique by reworking the script to be even less eventful. On Jarmusch’s return with the revised script, Ray reacted favourably to his student’s dissent, citing approvingly the young student’s obstinate independence.” 147 148 both by way of an unlikely detour through ’70s Germany & ’60s Paris in the form of a kind of meta-New Wave autocriticism (so to speak). Importantly, Petit also shares with Wenders & Jarmusch a particularly writerly sense of construction (as distinct from Godard’s preoccupation with textual adornment). Of his 1997 film The Falconer Petit stated – though it could just as well be taken as a modus operandi for Radio On – “I was interested in seeing if there was a way of producing a film which was constructed more like writing – because when you’re writing you don’t necessarily know where it’s going to end up.” There’s a sense in which Petit’s earlier film consists entirely of what Iain Sinclair calls “presenttense images,”5 like driving a camera into a vertiginous terrain: a film “made by a man with his eyes shut” to see life from the other side, where every step is a potential misstep yet thereby weighted with the risk of being inside the instant rather than inside a “perspective” – a “shot in the dark,” as Godard says – separated from the kind of postured attitude filmmaking assumes within conventional “realism,” exemplified (for Sinclair) by David Hemmings’s impersonation of fashion photographer David Bailey in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), where we see Hemmings shooting rolls of film with both eyes open, dramatically affecting the idea of an actor wielding a camera for the camera we don’t see. By virtue of the absence of conventional drama, by virtue of an anti-realist “realism,” it is as if Petit, like Wenders & later Jarmusch, is determined to make us aware of what it is we otherwise don’t see: to give our blindness back to us in the form of an awareness of seeing non-dramatically, in the present, an act of seeing. It is as if, in fact, this experience – dispensing with that of the conventional “cinema” – participates in a cinematography. Our eyes, too, can be metaphorically closed, because the film is no longer a trompe-l’oeil: it isn’t directed to fool the eye, but to bend the camera to it – aware – detached – drifting. As Jarmusch has said: “The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events… I am interested in the non5 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Penguin, 1997) 321. dramatic moments in life. I’m not at all attracted to making films that are about drama.” This in part stems from a shared interest in an almost Cagean aesthetics of process: “auteurs,” in a sense, of passive alienation that is yet – rooted in the attitude of the objet trouvé – neither wholly passivity nor strictly alienating, while nevertheless at a distinct remove from the heroic rhapsodising of Kerouac’s On the Road. Echoing that other great auteur of process, William Burroughs, Jarmusch advocates an open-handed approach: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light & shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (& theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”6 Key to this is a collaborative approach between filmmaker & cameraman, to produce a kind of decoupage in process. Martin Schäfer & Robby Müller are of course exemplary in this respect. Müller – known for his high-contrast B/W images, fast stocks, his fondness for natural light & his very simple technical palette (he used Arriflex cameras & Cooke & Zeiss lenses for most of his career) began his collaboration with Wenders on the 1969 short “Alabama: 2000 Light Years From Home” & continued with Wenders’s 1970 feature debut Summer in the City, going on to shoot such films as The Scarlet Letter, Kings of the Road, The American Friend, Paris, Texas & Until the End of the World. Jarmusch began working with Müller while Wenders was mired at Zoetrope in the early ’80s working on Hammet, shooting Down by Law, Mystery Train, Dead Man, & 6 Jim Jarmusch, “The Golden Rules of Filming,” MovieMaker Magazine (22 January, 2004). 149 Coffee & Cigarettes. (In between, Müller also worked on Repo Man for Alex Cox, Breaking the Waves for Lars von Trier, To Live & Die in LA for William Friedkin, as well as Beyond The Clouds, Antonioni’s last credited movie.) During a discussion at the Lincoln Center, in April 2014, Jarmusch acknowledged that I learned so much from this man about filmmaking, about a lot of things, about life in general & about light & about recording things & about capturing things in-themoment & about trusting instincts. Robby & I had a really wonderful way of working: No storyboard, a shot list only if really necessary for ourselves. I still don’t like making a shot list each day when I’m working. Robby’s idea is about instincts, trusting your instinct & your intuition & Robby would always say things like: “Of course we can plan everything in advance & when we go to that location it’s a different time of day, the light is different, the clouds are different, so why would we cling to the idea we had previously? We must always be on our feet. Think on your feet.” 150 Confronted by an industry in which the present is constantly being lost or erased, like a collective valium, the “task” of cinema is given to recuperate the molecular lattice of experience in its myriad contingencies, its evolutionary immanence. “It is,” Wenders says, “the fate of all culture to be forgotten & to disappear. Sometimes it needs an archaeological effort to bring it back to light. I think it’s an exciting time to be making movies, to record these changes & sometimes to evoke things that are about to disappear, evoke things we might want to hold on to.” 1. Alice in the Cities marked the beginning of Wenders’s long-term collaboration with Rüdiger Vogler (“Philip Winter”; a screen identity reprised with variations in Kings of the Road (as “Bruno Winter”); Faraway, So Close (1993); Until the End of the World (1991) & Lisbon Story (1995)). In Alice in the Cities, Vogler plays the role of a foreign correspondent for a German magazine who has just completed a road trip through the US, documented on Polaroid. In New York he encounters 9-year-old “Alice” (Yella Rottländer) who is subsequently “abandoned” by her mother & who Vogler accompanies across Germany in search for her grandmother’s home, guided solely by a photograph of the grandmother’s house. Vogler, as in all of his appearances in Wenders’s films, plays an outsider character – the Wilhelm Meister type, for example, in The Wrong Move – who here nevertheless plays his unexpected role as Alice’s guardian with a submissive reluctance (“do you think I’m crazy about driving little girls around?”) & seems as much a foreigner in his home country as he experiences being in the US. This has frequently been interpreted both in terms of the social dislocations of post-War West Germany in early ’70s – as a “psychological” as well as “geographical” terrain7 – & as a reflection on the Americanisation of Europe: “The Americans have colonised our subconscious,” says Vogler’s character in Kings of the Road. In constituting the dominant IMAGE of contemporary life, “America” here represents both what is pervasive & all-encompassing, but also what is most alienating: Vogler’s sensitivity to this state of affairs signals what, for Wenders, must be the 7 Cf David Heslin, ”The End is a Transition: Wim Wenders’s Alice in den Städten,” Senses of Cinema (5 October 2014): http://sensesofcinema. com/2014/cteq/the-end-is-a-transition-wim-wenders-alice-in-den-stadten/ 151 152 conscience of any artist (writer/filmmaker) seeking to come to terms with the paradoxical character of one’s resistance to or scepticism towards e.g. mass commodification, while at the same time acknowledging its seductive power. Not only has America colonised the European subconscious by way of the image factory which is Hollywood, but in doing so has colonised our desires. This paradox is nowhere more starkly examined than in Wenders’s approach to film form, which is almost stubbornly anti-American in its refusal of conventional notions of action, yet which is constantly fascinated by precisely that which it rejects. Vogler’s character, while avowing an intensely experienced alienation from American culture, nonetheless remains fixated by its image, to the extent that throughout the film he reflexively seeks the affirmations of the camera in the face of experiences that seem somehow beyond his grasp, vacant, or non-existent. Where the Polaroid serves as a barrier against America’s self-advertised inauthenticity, on his return to Germany it serves as a substitute for the absence of any countervailing authentic experience. These are not the same thing, as Wenders’s Germany still avowed the myth of its own authenticity, even in the face of Hitlerism & its legacies (the discrediting of the romantic “blood & soil” rhetoric of the Nazis etc.) & despite the visible (audible) prevalence of fast food, country music & Coca-Cola machines. All of this however is simply an ideological façade: “home” is a type of indeterminate, vague, ineffable & evasive concept that only seems to be situatable through the intervention of what almost amounts to a deus ex machina, & explains the way in which Alice in the Cities ends in an almost fairytale register of the “happy ever after” type. It is, after all, a kind of Alice in Wonderland, where the “wonder” corresponds to Vogler’s enlarging rootlessness: it’s all just snapshots; the world, a type of Potemkin Village that only makes sense through the viewfinder of his Polaroid, even if the images themselves “never show what it is you saw” – since there is no way for the camera to convey the fact that the image is always, if not “merely,” an image-of-an-image. 2. Permanent Vacation, released in 1980, follows the apparently aimless wanderings of “Allie” (Aloysius Christopher Parker), from a shared apartment on East Third Street on New York’s Lower East Side (where, during shooting, a homeless Jean-Michel Basquiat reportedly slept under the camera) to the abandoned smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, & ending in Battery Park with a final long shot aboard a departing boat looking back towards the city. During the course of these wanderings, Allie encounters several “characters,” including saxophonist John Lurie (of The Lounge Lizards). Lurie’s appearance, busking on a street corner at night, echoes his almost simultaneous role in Amos Poe’s Subway Riders, in which Lurie played the lead – a role described by Poe as “a serial killer saxophone player who… has to go on the street & he plays his saxophone at night in all these very strange places in New York. His saxophone sounds so eerie & strange that people come to listen to him. When they’re listening to him he pulls a gun out of his saxophone case & shoots them. So it’s about a musician who kills his audience.”8 Laurie’s cameo in Permanent Vacation also bears striking resemblances to Debbie Harry’s cameo in Poe’s landmark 1977 film The Foreigner, a film often credited as ushering in the New York “No Wave” style. In that film, actor Eric Mitchell wanders the city in a white suit (as a European secret agent/terrorist named “Max Menace”; Mitchell also appeared in Permanent Vacation as the fence Allie sells a stolen car to). This is a salient fact when you consider Allie’s line at the end of the “dance scene” in Permanent Vacation when he says to his girlfriend, “Leila,” “Sometimes I think I should just live fast & die young… & go in a threepiece white suit like Charlie Parker. Not bad, eh?” Parker, it transpires, is in fact Allie’s namesake, & is referenced elsewhere in the film in the “Doppler Effect” joke, told to Allie by Frankie Faison in the entrance way to a cinema in which Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960) is being screened. By way of further quotation, Parker provided the original soundtrack for one of Jarmusch’s other major 8 Sara Piazza, Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words & Noise (London: Reaktion Books, 2015) 30 153 154 influences, John Cassavetes’s 1959 film Shadows, whose minimal, loose, open-ended structure & improvisational cinéma vérité style were to be the hallmarks of No Wave – an anti-plot quality which is, in the words of critic Michael Wojtas, “that most ineffable yet vital aspect of Jarmusch’s cinema: A slowness that suggests a constantly wandering consciousness, one untouched by anything but the need to just keep moving in search of something unnameable.”9 In interview, Jarmusch has explicitly stated his attraction to non-dramatic cinema: “I’m not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me. All they did was reduce his life to the big dramatic moments you could pick out of any biography. If that’s supposed to be a portrait of somebody, I just don’t get it. It’s so reductive. It just seems all wrong to me.” Marc Ribot, guitarist with The Lounge Lizards, who also recorded with Tom Waits & appeared on the soundtrack of several Jarmusch films, 9 Michael Wojtas, “Blank Generation: Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation,” The Quietus (12 September 2014): thequietus.com/articles/16201jarmusch-permanent-vacation-article has described Jarmusch’s non-dramatic approach in terms not simply of “content” but of the “rhythm” of Jarmusch’s editing, as “a certain kind of flatness, a lack of an arc, or a very subtle arc…” Ribot compares the overall effect as being like an instrumental solo that’s “just a bunch of events,” without the conventional preoccupation with building towards a climax. “The point,” he suggests, “is pointlessness.” Jarmusch, who has himself performed with bands throughout his career, from The Del-Byzanteens (who provided soundtrack on Wenders’s 1982 film The State of Things) to his current band, Sqürl (composing the soundtrack for Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)), has worked with musicians in almost all of his films: Lurie, who took lead roles in both Stranger than Paradise & Down by Law, & also appeared in Mystery Train; Waits, also in Down by Law & Coffee & Cigarettes; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in Mystery Train, whose classic “I Put a Spell on You” is heard no fewer than four times in Stranger than Paradise; Iggy Pop in Coffee & Cigarettes, Dead Man & the documentary Gimme Danger (2016), & name-checked in Paterson (2016); etc. Additionally, Jarmusch has frequently chosen to work with non-professional actors, again in the vein of Cassavetes & Poe, & Allie’s seemingly ad-libbed persona in Permanent Vacation recalls the kind of situational improvisations characteristic of films by Warhol, like Nude Restaurant, My Hustler & Chelsea Girls, in which – like in Permanent Vacation – an often static camera is used, capturing whatever “action” happens to take place within the frame, where each “scene” is constituted by a single lateral tracking shot, or a single continuous static take, such as Allie’s reading of long sections from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. This style of “affectless realism” belies the extent to which the film is in fact constructed from a dense fabric of quotation, emphasising – we might say – its very “filmic” quality, while at the same time eschewing any suggestion of studied “art” (all the more emphasised in its low-budget production qualities). In this sense, the work is as much a collage as a spontaneous working of real-time “documentary” (of a type reminiscent of Poe’s collaboration with Ivan Král on Blank Generation, with its dubbed outof-sync soundtrack). Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin 155 is perhaps, however, the clearest reference point in all of this, marking the direction in which Jarmusch’s approach would evolve in his next film, Stranger than Paradise. Like Poe, Jarmusch’s interest in Godard marked the filmmaker as one of the least “American” of contemporary directors, & perhaps reflects Godard’s own prior interest in the underrecognised work of Jarmusch’s own mentor, Nicholas Ray, among others. It seems to be no accident that Permanent Vacation ends on a Manhattan pier, with Allie planning to head to Paris (as Jarmusch himself had done two years previously, on a pilgrimage to the Cinématèque Française). 156 3. The original title of what remains Wenders’s most highly-regarded film, Im Lauf der Zeit (“in the course of time”), derives from a scene in the previous instalment of Wenders’s “road movie” trilogy, Wrong Move (an adaptation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister co-written with Peter Handke) in which Rüdiger Vogler’s character enigmatically mutters the phrase in his sleep. While Alice in the Cities & Wrong Move both represent a kind of quest for a narrative in which the protagonists can recognise themselves at home, so to speak, in the present, rather than in some “elsewhere” (a mythical America, or an equally mythical Zugspitze), Im Lauf der Zeit a.k.a. Kings of the Road arguably represents the “revelation” that the protagonist’s narratives exist outside the conventional depiction of contemporary life (in advertising, in Hollywood films) in the experienced “passage of time” itself. As Vogler’s “Bruno Winter” says at one point: “For the first time I have the feeling that I’ve passed through a certain time & that this time is my story.” The sense of an authentically-experienced “story” occurs for the film’s protagonists precisely because of their awareness of being, in a sense, outside time, even as their journey is described by a schedule of film screenings at various small town cinemas along the East-West German border between Luneburg & Passau (which, in a way, is also outside space, in a kind of margin of the national consciousness, where everything seems to exist in a kind of limbo) – just as Bruno’s accidental companion, “Robert Lander” (Hanns Zischler), a paediatrician who is first seen in the film driving his VW “Beetle” into the Elbe in a halfhearted suicide attempt, seems consequently to have been “redeemed” from time, as if the entire film & his shared journey through it (its complete detachment from his former life) represents something of an afterlife: a time after or outside of time. We might think of the film’s title referring, then, not simply to the passing of time (though the ambiguity of “passing” in English has interesting implications, here) but also to a passage “of” time: both a path & also a narrative moment. And, just as in Alice in the Cities, Vogler’s experience of alienation mediated by the invasiveness of American culture is equally here the catalyst for his character’s transcendence of alienation – by relinquishing himself, so to speak, to the course of time – in what is less a fatalism than an affirmation of his own being, so to speak. Wenders’s own comments about the film focus this experience of dis-alienation around the absence of a female protagonist (the catalyst in Alice in the Cities, counterbalanced by the several female characters Vogler encounters in Wrong Move – none of whom provide him with the authenticity of “self” he seeks). In Kings of the Road this absence is simply a state of affairs, but for Wenders 157 it assumes characteristically allegorical significance. Soon after the film’s release he wrote: This film is the story of two men, but it doesn’t take a Hollywood approach to the subject. American films about men – especially recent ones – are exercises in suppression: the men’s true relationships with women, or with each other, are displaced by story, action & the need to entertain. They leave out the real nub: why the men prefer to be together, why they get on with each other, why they don’t get on with women, or, if they do, then only as a pastime. My film is about precisely that: two men getting on together, each preferring the other’s company to that of a woman. You get to see the shortcomings of both of them, their emotional insecurity; you see them trying to be mutually supportive & to hide their faults. But with the passage of time they’re no longer bothered by these faults, & when they know each other well enough they begin discussing them. As a consequence of that, they split up. They split up because, on their journey across Germany, they’ve suddenly grown too close. It’s a story that you’re not often told in films about men. The story of the absence of women, which is at the same time the story of the longing for their presence!10 158 Wenders’s examination of conventionalised masculinity here reflects the extent to which American film culture itself represents the major “unseen” protagonist of Kings of the Road, since the journey itself is also a process of discovery of a possible other identity, or existence, or experience of cinema (there is one scene in which Vogler’s “Bruno” splices together out-cuts from a soft-core porno in a projection booth, to produce his own minimalist American “action movie” on a 4-second loop, which he screens to an empty cinema, an ad-voice repeating the words “Brutality! Action! Sex!”). The fact that, following the opening (scripted) scenes, the entire film was more or less improvised in collaboration between actors, cameraman (Robby Müller) & director, Kings of the Road represents quite literally a kind of filmmaking in search of itself, through a stepping-away 10 Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays & Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber, 1991) 13 from “its own” fatal seduction by Hollywood (the quintessential “Siren”): a theme to which Wenders’s subsequent work appears at times almost single-mindedly addressed. A particularly noteworthy feature of the film, in addition to its having been shot in wide-angle B/W (which Wenders has described as “more realistic than colour”), is Müller’s use of extremely sharp focus Zeiss lenses, anticipating his work on Jarmusch’s Down by Law, producing an effect of high-contrast & deep-focus reminiscent of Welles’s Citizen Kane & Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Consequently, the production used extensive lighting, even in exterior shots, as well as frequently employing tracks & cranes, contrary to Wenders’s previous cinéma vérité approach, with the intention of not looking like a documentary, even as (in a certain sense) it was. Here we see that, while Wenders explicitly marks out his distance from a conventional Hollywood approach to action, drama & form, he nevertheless saturates the film, so to speak, in its own technics: the “action” of the film is thus never separate from the “action” of film-making. 4. Stranger than Paradise (1984) began life as a short, first screened in 1983 at the Rotterdam Film Fest, comprising the first 3rd of the final feature-length film, for which Jarmusch employed leftover film stock from Wenders’s The State of Things. This represented both a pragmatic approach to securing funding for the remaining production, as well as a structural approach that would recur in Jarmusch’s films, based around episodic, loosely repeating narratives. In Stranger than Paradise, this structure is developed within the framework of the “comedy of errors,” as a series of missed encounters, loops & bifurcations, concluding with a kind of dialectic reversal: at the start “Eva” (Eszter Balint) arrives from Budapest to stay with a reluctant “Willie”/“Béla” (as in Bartók; John Lurie) in New York; at the end, Béla leaves Florida for Budapest thinking he is on the same flight as Eva, who he wants to convince to remain in the US, which in fact she has. The confusions & crossed lines of communication trace a reversal of fortunes on several levels, reflected in the (rather classical) three-act structure – 1. THE NEW 159 160 WORLD, 2. ONE YEAR LATER, 3. PARADISE – moving from Béla’s Lower East Side room, to Aunt Lotte’s house in Cleveland (where Eva works at a hot-dog stand), to a motel room outside Florida. Each location is defined by a sense of detachment from any actual place, linked together by freeways (an effect heightened by the interpolation of black film by way of section dividers, from stock given to Jarmusch by Jean-Marie Straub; an impression reinforced by the use of black-&-white & the austere camera work – as Jarmusch later noted, “Even though these locations each have a very different feeling, we accentuated the sameness through lighting, filtration, & composition of shots.) In Stranger than Paradise, everywhere is a kind of “nowhere,” both familiar (in its placelessness) & foreign (in its detachment & the prevailing sense of alienation, or rather dislocation). At one point Béla’s friend “Eddie” (Richard Edson, ex-Sonic Youth) asks: “Is Cleveland like Budapest?” This sense of familiarised detachment or strangeness is enlarged in the characters themselves: Eva has escaped communist Hungary to end up selling hotdogs in Ohio; Béla & Eddie are losers going nowhere – their “migration” across Europe & across America might resemble life-journeys (the immigrant story of the pursuit of a new beginning in “Paradise” on which the US was built; the Westward pioneer route & the allegory of selfrealisation depicted by it, etc., etc.) except that even the faintest “awakening” of their individual consciousnesses is marred by missteps. In a series of notes on the film’s production (1984), Jarmusch (half-jokingly) described Stranger than Paradise as a “semi-realistic black-&-white comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern-European film director obsessed with Ozu & familiar with the 1950s American TV show ‘The Honeymooners.’” He went on to add: I wanted the film to be very realistic in its style of acting & the details of its locations, without drawing much attention to the fact that the story takes place in the present. The form is very simple: a story told in fragments, with each scene contained within a single shot, & each separated by a short period of black screen. (This form was originally “inspired” by financial limitations, & limitations in our shooting schedule – but these were known before the script was written, & we wanted to turn these limitations into strengths.) Carl Dreyer, in one of his essays, wrote about the effect of simplification, saying that if you remove all superfluous objects from a room, the few remaining objects can somehow become “psychological evidence of the occupant’s personality.” Instead of applying this idea just to physical objects in STRANGER THAN PARADISE, it is applied to the formal way the story is told. Simple scenes are presented, in chronological order, but often independent from one another. Only selected moments are presented, eliminating, for the most part, points of “dramatic action.”11 Concerning the cinematography, Jarmusch stated that: “Once again, because of the style of this film, each shot had to be choreographed, in terms of the action & the camera. Many shots are static, while others follow the characters, changing compositions & perspective within a given shot. Tom DiCillo & I tried to make each shot 11 Jim Jarmusch, “Some Notes On Stranger Than Paradise,” New York, March 1984, transcribed by Ludvig Hertzberg, www.jimjarmusch.tripod. com/notes.html 161 162 as simple & as strong as possible, while reinforcing the central ‘feeling’ of each scene. It was also important to us to create a kind of uniform atmosphere throughout the film. […] Of course, filming in black & white enabled us to eliminate information (colour) that was not necessary to our story. In the end, the effect of the cinematography & the form of the film, suggests a photo-album, where individual photos are surrounded by black spaces, each one on a different page.”12 The theme of integration that runs through Stranger than Paradise can also be taken as a reference to Jarmusch’s engagement with both the medium & institution of filmmaking in the United States, where his work will end up being regarded as intrinsic to the renaissance of independent cinema in the ’80s, yet also resolutely foreign to the “normality” projected by Hollywood. There is a sense in which Jarmusch’s work actively promotes the sense of being a kind of translation between European & American cinema, but perhaps in the sense of Borges, where the translation is always evoked in the timbre of the film’s language (of the language it speaks & of the language it avowedly does not speak), so that it itself is always, in a manner of speaking, strange, not because it is “foreign” as such, but precisely because it is “American.” There is, accordingly, a kind of locational myopia at work throughout the film: the Lower East Side could be anywhere, we see no defining landmarks, nothing beyond a few intersections; likewise Cleveland. The interiors are predominantly white walls & chiaroscuro. Landscapes are night or day. Lake Eerie vanishes into a wall of white, just as the Florida beach vanishes into a white salt haze. Even the flight to Budapest vanishes into white haze at the end of the film. The general approach, to mirror the use of black inter-frames, might be called “fade to white.” 5. The State of Things (1982) was shot largely in Portugal (at Praia Grande, Sintra, & in Lisbon) during an eightmonth break in the protracted editing of Wenders’s first “American” film, Hammett, produced at Francis Ford 12 Jarmusch, “Some Notes On Stranger Than Paradise.” Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, & followed his work with Nicholas Ray on Lightning Over Water in New York (1980; a film ostensibly about the death of the director while working on the film – a trope Wenders returns to in The State of Things). Wenders’s difficulties with the Hammet production have become legendary, stretching over a four year period from 1978 to the film’s “completion” in 1982 (a version subsequently “lost”), & involving an entire re-shoot on a sound stage, with three editors working simultaneously in three separate cutting suits & two almost entirely different casts – rendering a difficult process for Wenders increasingly vexed & depersonalised. “This impersonal way of working,” he said, in his response to the film’s critics, “is totally unlike my own experience of cutting. I get the feeling neither the story nor the pictures belong to me. They are the property of the studio & the producer.” Nevertheless, Wenders’s experience with Zoetrope & his ongoing critical engagement with “American Cinema” in general provide the immediate framework for The State of Things, a film about the making of a film, sabotaged by a breakdown in communications with an elusive producer in hock to the mafia. It has much of the self-reflexivity of Lightning over Water, with the addition that the “death of the director” (Patrick Bauchau) along with the “death of the independent producer” (Allen Garfield, reprising his 163 164 role from Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom!, where he plays a cheap Times Square porn producer)13 – literally, they are both gunned down on Sunset Boulevard after a night spent driving up & down the strip in a Winnebago – here echoes Wenders’s own witnessing at Zoetrope of the “death” of New Hollywood & the “return” of the Hollywood mafia (there’s even a cameo towards the end by “genre” guru Roger Corman, as Garfield’s lawyer). Bauchau’s Felliniesque “director” is likewise clearly at odds with his task as a hired hand, as opposed to being the film’s so-to-speak “auteur” – a point brought home by the casting of Sam Fuller (best-known for his series of war films, such as The Big Red One starring Lee Marvin) as Bauchau’s cinematographer (it’s no accident that Fuller, like Nicholas Ray, was one of the American directors on whom Jean-Luc Godard & other Cahiers critics based their auteur theory, & this critical arc is clearly present in Wenders’s filmography up till this time & is continued in that of Jim Jarmusch, who likewise collaborated with Fuller shortly before his death on the 1994 documentary Tigero: A Film that was Never Made, directed by Mika Kaurismäki (& was, incidentally, a founder of the spoof secret society The Sons of Lee Marvin)). In The State of Things, Fuller markedly calls Bauchau “Fritz,” & at one point towards the end of the film we see Bauchau standing on Fritz Lang’s “star” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – echoing an earlier Fritz Lang “cameo” in Kings of the Road (where a still from Godard’s Le Mépris featuring the exiled German auteur turns up on a magazine cover). The tension in The State of Things is, as in Wenders’s earlier “road movie trilogy,” centred in a drama in which the major protagonist is primarily absent. That protagonist being “America,” represented here by the invisible economy of Hollywood film production which pulls the strings of the somewhat puppet-like existence of Bauchau’s cast & crew on location in Europe, just as in Kings of the Road America is said to have “colonised” Europe’s subconscious. The film is inevitably seen as addressing Wenders’s ongoing 13 Garfield also appears in Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991) as a San Francisco used car salesman who rips off the two main protagonists as gunpoint. preoccupation with “the difference between European & American cinema,” yet also represents a critical transition between his American-inflected German films of the 1970s & his European-inflected American “road movies” of the mid-’80s: those beginning with Paris, Texas & concluding with Don’t Come Knocking (2005; both scripted by Sam Sheppard). And, as in the opening sequences of Alice in the Cities, The State of Things ends with Bauchau aiming a camera at this ultimately unseen antagonist, this somewhat paranoiac, omniscient “America” that shoots him dead, just as it has, so to speak, shot the film dead. As Wenders stated afterwards, “you can’t always rely on pictures; they’re not always there when you want them.”14 The State of Things is itself reprised in Wenders’s 1995 film, Lisbon Story, in which Bauchau returns as a “missing person” (director “Freidrich Monroe”) who Rüdiger Vogler’s itinerant sound engineer (“Philip Winter”) – invited from Germany to work on Bauchau’s latest project, sets out through Lisbon to find. In certain respects a kind of “afterlife” of The State of Things (& an address to the “state” of Wenders’s idea of a European cinema roughly fifteen years on), explores the anachronistic tensions at the heart of the Euro-American dialect & the question of cinematic “authenticity” (so prevalent in the later work 14 Wenders, “Reverse angle: New York City, March 1982,” The Logic of Images, 21. 165 166 of Godard). Where The State of Things turns around the doomed production of an existentialist sci-fi, Lisbon Story centres on the “dramatic suspense” of Vogler’s search for Bauchau, who – after inviting him to Lisbon to produce the soundtrack for a “return to cinematic origins” type of film production (using an array of antique equipment) – has mysteriously disappeared. The familiar questing form of Wenders’s film incorporates a series of dialectical movements, with the “film within the film” mirrored in Vogler’s “acoustical searching” through Lisbon, & finally his discovery of Bauchau living in an abandoned car, having traced him from a hidden video camera “droppoint” – part of Bauchau’s “expanded cinema” (to borrow Gene Youngblood’s term), whose archives are kept in an abandoned movie house: essaying a diffusion of the cinematic into the “real.”15 Both of these films exploit the trope of the “film within a film,” posing (deadpan yet frequently ironic) questions about cinema’s relationship to “reality” & the future desolation of a world abandoned by images (Baudrillard’s “desert of the real,” for Wenders becoming “the desert of realism”). In The State of Things, the “film within a film” takes the form of a low-budget sepia-toned post-apocalyptic sci-fi, shot in a highly mannered, “existentialist” style, clearly at odds with the dramatic conventions of Hollywood. In Lisbon Story we get two interior films: one is a kind of documentary of the “real,” composed of footage from hidden cameras situated around the city, & in which the figure of the director is effectively erased, or reduced to the status of a collector, archivist, or merely witness (Bauchau’s crisis of faith in cinematic truth – the cause of his disappearance – here becomes subsumed in a video simulacrum of the world recorded autonomously of directorial intent: a kind of “pure” surveillance aesthetic); the other is Bauchau’s original footage for which Vogler is supposed to be producing the soundtrack using radio-era sound effects – 15 Wenders’s anthology of film historical apparatuses in Lisbon Story – along with notable set-piece cameos by Teresa Salgueiro & Portuguese folk-ensemble Madredeus – in turn anticipates Jarmusch’s elegy to Detroit & vintage guitars – with a matching cameo by Lebanese singer Yasmine van Wissem – in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). a sepia-toned hand-cranked cinematograph “documentary” of Old Lisbon (including an interview with Manoel de Oliveira on the spiritual nature of cinema) which segues, after the two protagonists re-unite & agree to complete it, into a Chaplinesque slapstick routine (echoes of Bauchau’s & Garfield’s sing-along in the back of the Winnebago) – the deflationary effect counterbalancing the portentousness that otherwise threatens to overwhelm, not least because Lisbon Story could easily scan as a kind of tourist brochure. Which can easily be said of any number of “story”-driven Hollywood films, too, which frequently appear to be nothing more than product placement brochures padded-out with improbable plot-lines. But as Bauchau says in The State of Things, “stories only exist in stories.” 6. In a 1987 interview Jarmusch described Down by Law (1986) as a “neo-Beat noir comedy,” with Roger Ebert elaborating on this idea, suggesting the whole thing could be read as “an anthology of pulp images drawn from the world of film noir” – a compendium of “grim & relentless” clichés that establish an underlying satire on a range of B-genres: gothic, exploitation, gangster, prisonbreak, fugitive, survivalist, etc. In large part this effect is accomplished by a network of juxtapositions, built around the personae of his three principle actors (Tom Waits, John Lurie & Roberto Benigni) & the shooting location: New Orleans & the Louisiana bayou, coupled to Robby Müller’s lush B/W cinematography. The entire film, & not just its narrative impetus, is thus in a certain sense a “frame-up.” Genre is simply the patsy, the means to get all these elements into the frame, so to speak. Like Stranger than Paradise, the underlying dynamic is of a “comedy of errors,” but in this case the “error” stems from the fact that this ensemble of elements doesn’t conventionally belong within any of the generic frames that the film invites the viewer to construct. Nor is it ever simply a comedy, since what is at odds in the film is, in fact, beings already at odds in an environment at odds in a medium at odds. The film can easily be read as a reply to Wenders’s argument about the relative status of American & European cinema at the end of The State of Things, with Robby 167 168 Müller’s black & white cinematography & deep-focus Zeiss lenses, Jarmusch’s slow-paced direction, & Waits, Lurie & Benigni’s wry, straight-faced self-parodies, all staged in an alien, exotic, yet somehow also monotonous, deadpan, generically fugitive “non-place” (Jarmusch somehow succeeds in making New Orleans & the bayous as anonymous at the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Cleveland & Florida) all working to frame a cinema that is “authentically” cinema because it is openly at odds with itself. In this, Jarmusch assiduously avoids acceding, not only to conventions of genre, or of Hollywood in general, but also to the conventions of “new wave” critique, replete with its own clichés of anti-realism & so on. Like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), which represents a sometimes similar deconstruction of “genre,” Down by Law in many respects refuses to satisfy: where Godard’s film concludes in savage irony, Jarmusch saturates his ending with an almost whimsical, soapy, anticlimax of the “feel good” type carried-off with baldly absurd, high-aesthetic camera work. “Absurd” because, in fact, what it paints is really nothing more or less than precisely that unachieved humanity of sentiment – that overweening sentimentality – towards which the entirety of such a “monumental” film like Citizen Kane built, & which gets tossed out at the end in a kind of “Rosebud” moment of underwhelmingness. Where Welles drew upon the pathos of an “American” tragedy – a pseudo-Shakespearean grandeur of characterstudy – Jarmusch constantly undercuts by emphasising the film’s foreignness to itself & to any such emotional affect. While its technics enlarge a certain mundaneity of life, even under conditions of absurdity (but when is the mundane not absurd?), its internal juxtapositions sabotage everything that is generally taken for granted as “American.” Benigni’s presence is merely the catalyst for this, exposing the inherent contradictions of genre that surround the other two protagonists from the outset & thereby exposing the generic character of America itself: America as genre. This is a large claim, but it can be argued that the further Jarmusch pushes into the “generic,” into the bland, the trivial, the silly, the incidental, etc., the more he is in fact framing the “big picture.” This harks back to Wenders who, though by different means, presents this “big picture” as both “American cinema” & America as cinema: each equally a myth. Not accidental, then, that much of Down by Law reads like a retelling of the Odyssey, in which the inflated mythified wanderings of a few hapless protagonists are already being dressed up by the camera for that inevitable bar-stool recitation, in the full grandeur of the tall tale told through the pellucid lens of a whiskey glass. 7. In Paris, Texas (1984) – the story of a man “who turns up somewhere in the desert out of nowhere & returns to civilisation” – Wenders’s typical “road movie” / “quest” narrative assumes something like a definitive form, drawing together the various threads of the oedipal family drama that has, by facets, characterised all of his previous independent films, from Alice in the Cities, to Lightning over Water & The State of Things: the rites of passage of the “father” – the seeking after the father, the absences of the father, the becoming-father – which is also a rootless seeking after “belonging,” of the self, of time & place, of history, or in other words of cinema.16 Wenders wrote of 16 The film is also notable for Wenders’s ongoing collaboration with Robby Müller – his sixth after Summer in the City, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, Kings of the Road & The American Friend – following a gap in their working relationship between from 1977 to 1983 while Wenders was 169 170 the making of the film: “Actually, I was going to make a far more complex film, because I’d originally intended to drive all over America. I had it in mind to go to Alaska & then the Midwest & across to California & then down to Texas. I’d planned a real zigzag route all over America. But my scriptwriter Sam Shepard persuaded me not to. He said: ‘Don’t bother with all that zigzagging. You can find the whole of America in the one state of Texas.’”17 In many respects, Paris, Texas represents the culmination of Wenders’s early preoccupation with America: the seeking of the self through the other, the self in the other, & the other in the self – & is, in effect, an almost dialectical transposition of Wenders’s “European” cinematic consciousness, onto what we might call an American “ontology” (a transposition echoed in the very title of the film). It’s this dialectic that we see in process in the film’s opening sequences, as Harry Dean Stanton wanders out of the desert, out of a lost history, out of a state of amnesia, to become the film’s instrumental presence, an agent of shooting Hammett at Zoetrope. It was also the first film Müller shot for Wenders in colour. Paris, Texas also marks the beginning of Wenders’s collaboration with slide guitarist Ry Cooder, who provided the soundtrack here & later for Wenders’s 1997 film, The End of Violence & (also with Müller) the 1999 documentary Buena Vista Social Club (shot on digital video). 17 Wenders, “Like Flying Blind Without Instruments: On the Turning Point in Paris, Texas,” The Logic of Images, 67. rectification, & in a sense of “redemption.” Where The State of Things began with a post-apocalyptic wondering through a kind of semi-desert wasteland into oblivion & ends with a groping act of futility to capture & represent the moment of what, essentially, is a dialectical negation, in Paris, Texas we have, so to speak, passed through the mirror. Unlike its predecessors, this film has a specific determination, it is a quest driven by a “secret knowledge,” a “knowledge” gained, as it were, by passing through the desert, its urgency is palpable, it is, in a manner of speaking, a quest that recognises itself as what it is: the self-consciousness of the quest itself resolved into action; whereas, in Wenders’s earlier films, the quest is rather of a self-consciousness enacting the drama of its own seeking. As Wenders wrote in May 1984, after the film’s completion: “From the outset, Paris, Texas had a much straighter trajectory & a much more precise destination. And from the beginning, too, it had more of a story than my earlier films, & I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.”18 In Paris, Texas what most presents itself is the protagonist’s selflessness – as if to say, “here is that absent father you have been seeking in order to accuse, this is what his absence amounts to.” What we have in Harry Dean Stanton’s character “Travis” is therefore something like the other of the rootless, questing “son” who centres the action in Wenders’s previous films. It is, so to speak, a portrait of “responsibility” – of a “care” – that doesn’t need or seek to represent itself, but simply desires to enact itself: not perform, but enact (Stanton’s “Travis” is notably unconcerned with images in the way so many of Wenders’s “sons” are – what we’re given instead is a Polaroid of a sandlot in Paris, Texas, that “Travis” once bought in the belief the town was where he was conceived, counterpointed by his brother “Walt”’s home movies & by a two-way mirror in a Houston strip-joint). It’s as if Wenders is giving us an essay on the meaning of cinematic action as, ostensibly, ethical action: not in any depicted or declarative sense, but as a kind of deontology of cinematic form. Because ultimately Paris, Texas is a cinematic rite of 18 Wenders, “Like Flying Blind Without Instruments,” 67. 171 172 passage, not of its characters, but of its director, & of a certain idea of cinema itself. Wenders’s collaboration with playwright Sam Sheppard on the script for Paris, Texas (reprised in 2005’s Don’t Come Knocking) harks back to his earlier collaboration with Peter Handke on the second instalment of his “road movie” trilogy, Wrong Move in 1975.19 In Don’t Come Knocking, the theme of absent fathers & abandoned children is revisited in composite, completing the itinerary Wenders initially envisaged for Paris, Texas & on which he first embarked in the opening sequences of Alice in the Cities. Where in the earlier film we’re introduced to Wenders’s vision of America through the windscreen of Rüdiger Vogler’s rent-a-car & the viewfinder of his Polaroid camera, Don’t Come Knocking with the camera gazing out over the Utah desert through a rock formation that resembles two eyeholeholes opening onto the sky like a Dalí mask. Roger Ebert described the film as “a curious film about a movie cowboy who walks off the set, goes seeking his past, & finds something that looks a lot more like a movie than the one he was making.”20 Echoes here of Wenders’s The State of Things, of the film- not so much within-a-film, as the film-conspiring-behind-the-film. Like Paris,Texas, the principle motif in Don’t Come Knocking is of the questing father, played here by Sheppard in the role of the truant movie cowboy, Howard Spence. And though the cinematography is the work of Franz Lustig (who also worked with Wenders on the 2004 film, Land of Plenty) rather than Robby Müller, the saturated colour & visual referencing to Paris, Texas is so prevalent that the result is far more a tribute to Müller’s accomplishment in the earlier film than to the kind of Edward Hopper pastiche the camera’s palette has on occasion (& at Wenders’s 19 A loose adaptation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister featuring performances, among others, by a young Nastassja (daughter of Klaus) Kinski in her first screen role). In Paris, Texas, Kinski plays Travis’s missing wife (“Jane,” mother of their son seven-year-old son, “Hunter”), who Travis eventually tracks down working in a strip-joint (managed by none other than John Lurie). 1n 1993 she appeared in Wenders’s Faraway, So Close, along with Rüdiger Vogler. 20 Roger Ebert, “Don’t Come Knocking” (2006): www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/dont-come-knocking-2006 own prompting) been regarded to be. Set mostly in Butte, Montana – a former mining town which at the end of the nineteenth century had been one of the largest towns in the Rocky Mountains, with a widely infamous red-light district – Wenders’s rendering of the American “frontier” in modern decline is, like Jarmusch’s Nashville, done to the point of producing a sort of pastiched cinematic “ghost town,” evocative of a studio back-lot. The effect is to present the action of Spence’s somewhat laconic (even inert) quest for his unknown son, his re-encounter with the son’s mother (played by Jessica Lang), & his accidental encounter with an unknown daughter, as a kind of Big Screen melodrama, where everything else fades into a background of incidental extras & “scenery.” In a sense, Wenders is restating his thesis that America is cinema – that there’s no “riding off the set,” that even these narratives of escape into the “real,” of “selfdiscovery,” & of “redemption” are all just so many setpieces played already (& in exactly that way) in that movie we call the collective consciousness. As ever, Wenders isn’t concerned with the way the cinematic image depicts, or fails to depict, so called reality, but how reality “itself” is projected by the image. Like the town of Butte, everything comes across as a kind of ruin: a ruin, so to speak, of the visible, of some concrete image of itself. What remains is this supersaturated entropic vision, of detours & deferrals, of “quests” that lead nowhere other than to the convenient necessity of themselves – a form played-out one more time, for old times’ sake, where we discover that none of those “old times” ever really existed, they’re just the backstory every script comes burdened with. 8. As Roger Ebert wrote in the first of two reviews he published of Mystery Train (this one immediately after its release in 1989), Jarmusch’s film isn’t about Elvis, Memphis or “dusty Amtrak coaches”: “The movie is about legends, & people who believe in them, & in fact it is the movie that believes most of all.”21 There is a certain kind 21 Roger Ebert, “Mystery Train,” www.rogerebert.com/reviews/greatmovie-mystery-train-1989 173 174 of evangelism not so much in the film’s subject matter, or even its structure, but in what comes through the lens, through its way of seeing the world in a minimal palette of saturated colour, like decor from that other American Dream: the outsider’s vision of America as The Dream, & its icons as more than simply icons, but as ghosts who speak. Real ghosts. That speak through the radio, through train windows, through billboards, through museumised recording studios & derelict hotels that look like old film sets. The ghosts of genre: neo-Noir, rock-n-roll, the “New Wave” 1960s translated into period Americana, etc. The genre of place: of Memphis as a synecdoche of all these things. In an article by Scott Cohen in Spin, Jarmusch (who – as with Down by Law – hadn’t visited the film’s location before scouting a couple of months before shooting began) was described as driving around downtown Memphis in a blizzard with no particular direction in mind & coming upon “the intersection of a dilapidated hotel, the Arcade Diner & the train station. ‘Man,’ Jim thought, ‘this crossroads is filled with so many ghosts. You know Robert Johnson walked down that street, you know Muddy Waters was in that train station.’”22 Jarmusch’s film, in a sense, becomes a medium for those ghosts to speak, & yet at the same time to communicate their invisibility within a myth cycle that, for example, has enshrined Elvis Presley above the likes of Rufus Thomas “the real King of Memphis.” According to the Mississippi Blues Commission, “Rufus Thomas embodied the spirit of Memphis music perhaps more than any other artist.” Thomas himself appears during the opening scenes of Mystery Train, when the two Japanese tourists – one of them a virtual Elvis mystic, the other a devotee of Carl Perkins, author of “Blue Suede Shoes” – arrive at the train station in Memphis. “An old black guy in the station asks them for a light,”23 but neither of the tourists realise who he is. Like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s appearance as the Arcade Hotel desk-clerk: it’s as if Jarmusch is intent on 22 Scott Cohen, “Strangers in Paradise,” Spin (March 1990): jimjarmusch. tripod.com/spin90.html. 23 Cohen, “Strangers in Paradise.” showing how The Dream gets carried around by that whole parade of forgotten or marginalised history – just as the film itself really is an ensemble production, not only written for but carried by seemingly “minor” roles: Cinquée Lee, Joe Strummer, Tom Waits’s unseen radio DJ “Lee Baby Sims,” John Lurie’s unobtrusive soundtrack. This is all part of the “dream behind The Dream,” the outsider as America – a dialectical examination of a theme played out in three parts (“Far from Yokohama,” “A Ghost,” “Lost in Space”), whose “action” hinges on the cult, ghostly manifestation & “embodiment” of Elvis (Hegel’s profane “God” in Vegas drag), an early morning gunshot, & the reception desk at the Arcade Hotel. It’s a dialectic played out between Robby Müller’s lens & a landscape which (as in all of Jarmusch’s films to date) appears strangely empty: like a dream that has become conscious of what it is &, like the characters at the end of the film, is seeking a “way out.” But just as the script for Mystery Train was written without Jarmusch ever having been to Memphis, so too the dream is not a place (it’s instead a kind of epicentre of cultural impacts: Carl Perkins, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, Martin Luther King), & the only way to get there is on the “mystery train,” but who knows how you leave. As with Wenders, it’s not just that a certain 175 idea of America has colonised our subconscious, but that America is our subconscious: the “real America” is nothing but a myth. 176 9. Appearing in Wenders’s filmography between Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] & Faraway, So Close, the 1991 “ultimate road movie” Until the End of the World (1991) – shot by Robby Müller in Cinemascope – maps the director’s protracted agonistic search for the lost cinematic dream onto a global stage, in which the materialism of the commodity-saturated West at the end of the 20th century is extruded via a fugitive/quest narrative projected across China, Japan & the recently defunct Soviet Union, into a remote tribal aboriginal community in central Australia, after an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) high in the atmosphere (brought on by the US downing of an Indian “nuclear satellite”) has knocked out all electronicbased communications (& transport): providing the doubleentendre of the film’s title, “the end of the world.” The film follows William Hurt (“Sam Farber” alias “Trevor McPhee”) on a “secret personal mission”24 to record video images of his extended family on a prototype VR camera – invented for the US government (echoes of Douglas Trumball’s Brainstorm (1983)) by Sam’s semi-estranged father, “Henry Farber” (Max von Sydow) – that will allow his blind mother, “Edith” (Jeanne Moreau; in hiding from US agents at a secret underground lab at the Mbantua Cultural Centre between Coober Pedy & Alice Springs), to “see” (once said images have been re-converted to brainwaves, etc., etc.). “All I want,” Sam says at one point, “is for my mother to see & for my father to know that I love him.” In the process, Sam – who has a $500,000 reward on his head & is being pursued by a bounty hunter (Ernie Dingo) – encounters “Claire Tourneur” (Solveig Dommartin), an accomplice in a bank robbery & the bored ex-girlfriend of writer “Eugene Fitzpatrick” (Sam Niell), who he in turn steals money from while hitchhiking in France & who, after a second chance encounter in Paris, immediately becomes 24 Roger Ebert, “Until the End of the World” (1992): www.rogerebert. com/reviews/until-the-end-of-the-world-1992 infatuated with him, hiring private detective “Philip Winter” (Rüdiger Vogler) to track Sam down, first to Berlin, then Lisbon, Moscow, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Tokyo, San Francisco & finally the opal-mining town of Coober Pedy in the South Australian desert. Like Faraway, So Close & Million Dollar Hotel (2000; on which Bono has a co-writing credit), Until the End of the World features a U2 title track along with “futuristic” work by artists including Talking Heads, Julee Cruise, Crime & the City Solution, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Depeche Mode, kd lang, among others. Wenders reportedly approached each of the musicians with a request for tracks that they felt reflected where their own work would be in the year 1999. At a Q&A at MoMA in March 2015, Wenders claimed that the length of the film – 158 minutes at its original theatrical release, nearly five hours in the 2015 director’s cut – reflected his desire to give the soundtrack full prominence, with the film’s episodic structure throughout the first two-thirds mirroring that of contemporary music video in a kind of genre mash from postmodern espionage/detective drama & sci-fi thriller, to “visionary fantasy”; from Old World to New World to what Ebert (aptly mixing his metaphors) called “that Mecca of metaphysical motherlodes, the Australian outback.” The crux of the film comes when Sam’s father reinvents his camera after his wife’s death, from a device that allows the blind to see, to one that records & makes 177 178 visible our dreams: a conversion Wenders presents as a form of heresy, played out against the trope of the Aboriginal “Dreaming” (the creation cycle), & the white Henry Farber’s refusal to observe the customs of mourning: his scientific vision becomes an obsession to which this ultimate father figure is prepared to sacrifice everything & he is eventually abandoned by his adoptive tribal members as well as his own son, & finally taken into custody by the CIA (or whoever). The “spiritual reconciliation” between Farber & his lost son, symbolically enlarged here in the theme of estrangement from the world & the profanation of “dreams,” occurs only by a kind of proxy, with Sam visiting his dead father’s grave back in America towards the end of the film. Meanwhile Claire’s infatuation with Sam is transformed – thanks to her pliability as a test subject for Farber’s experiments – into a narcissistic junk-sickness once she becomes addicted to the low-grain recordings of her own dream-life produced by Farber’s magic camera. After Gene kidnaps her from the lab, she’s left staring fixedly into a handheld video monitor until the batteries run out & withdrawal kicks in: a parable for the VR addiction of a pornotopic space-age “society of the spectacle.” Eventually Claire, released from her own dream-machine addiction via the agency of Gene’s prose fiction account of their adventures (this account, overlapping with the screenplay itself, is co-author & novelist Peter Carey’s bid for the “redemption of the word” here), winds up spending her 30th birthday on a low-orbit Greenpeace satellite gazing at the Earth instead. All this as if to say that the proverbial end of the world arrives not with the bang of nuclear Armageddon, but with a whimper, rather, of imageanaesthetised solipsism – the vertiginous spiral of the open-ended “end” of the pornotopically deferred fantasy of laying eyes on the “impossible,” so to speak, the revelation of the unpresentable, of desire itself, & in the process apprehending that very process, seeing oneself seeing (oneself), etc. The eternal theme of “blindness & insight” is played out here in the form of a capricious subjectivity elided with the mirror of consumption. The question as always is to what extent “cinema” – as a seeking after disillusionment – intervenes in this seductive “slumber of reason” (slumber in the form of reason), even if only as the (anachronistic) figure of a (critical) reflection. 10. Conceived by Jarmusch as a “psychedelic western,” Dead Man (1995) represents a mash-up of William Blake, Homer, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Sergio Leone shot in hardboiled B/W by long-time collaborator Robby Müller. On its release the film was virtually buried by Miramax on the art house circuit, where it nevertheless achieved cult status & was compared by Jonathan Rosenbaum (who hailed it as a “masterpiece”) to the writings of William Burroughs & Thomas Pynchon. In his review for the Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum adopted Pauline Kael’s term “acid western” (coined to describe Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1971) to convey the hallucinatory & hallucinogenic character of the film’s journey through “America as a primitive, anarchic world,”25 similarly evoking Burroughs’s line that “America is not a young land: it is old & dirty & evil.” Staking a claim for Dead Man’s otherwise neglected seriousness (on its release, it was mostly disparaged or ignored in the mainstream press), Rosenbaum further emphasised the film’s literariness (in addition to Blake, who Jarmusch described as a “visionary” & ‘revolutionary” who “was imprisoned for his ideas”), opening the review with a quote from Pynchon’s 1984 short story collection, Slow Learner – “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude towards death”26 – in turn drawing attention to Jarmusch’s own decision to begin the film with a quote from Henri Michaux’s “La Nuit des Bulgares” (1938), to the effect that “It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.” The film – without dialogue for the first five minutes – follows Johnny Depp’s accountant character, the eponymous dead man “William Blake,” across centralnorth America, from Cleveland to a depraved frontier town called Machine (“a nightmarishly squalid settlement of meanness”27), where he’s wounded in a parodic crime 25 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Acid Western,” Chicago Reader (27 June, 1996). Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (New York: Little, Brown, 1984) 5. 27 Rosenbaum, “Acid Western.” 26 179 180 passionel shootout with the son of local steel magnate “Dickinson” (Robert Mitchum, in his last film role), who duly posts a frontier-wide bounty on Blake’s head. The remainder of the film is part fugitive drama, part quest, as Blake is led by an ostracised Plains Indian he encounters, called – in a direct allusion to Il mio nome è Nessuno (1973) – “Nobody” (a.k.a. “Xebeche: He who talks loud, saying nothing”; played by Gary Farmer), across the American Northwest to a Kwakiutl settlement on the Pacific coast. The purpose of this increasingly allegorical journey is to “return” Blake (the “stupid white man”) to the “foreign” world from which he has come (by implication, the Land of the Dead, or of “death” simply, since this appears everywhere in the film to be the white man’s principle characteristic): a symbolic journey to undo history – a journey, as Nobody says, through the mirror. (Significantly, Nobody’s ostracism stems from his having been abducted as a child & taken across the ocean to England – where he encounters the poetry of the other William Blake, whose Marriage of Heaven & Hell he regularly quotes throughout the film: after managing to return to his tribe, his accounts of the Old World are regarded as tall tales, the inventions or visions – like Blake – of an idiot, & so – also like his white counterpart – he becomes a kind of unwitting fugitive: he is given the name “Xebeche” by his people, but he “prefers” Nobody, a name with ambivalent echoes of Blake’s “Noboddady.”) The central trope of Dead Man – that “William Blake” is already dead, so to speak (1. because the bullet lodged near his heart can’t be removed, & 2. because he shares his identity with the long-deceased English poet) – echoes the generic fatalism of film noir, but – like Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) (1950) – with its fatalism spectacularly literalised. This literal fatalism is augured at the film’s outset by the enigmatic appearance of the train fireman (Crispin Glover) during the long opening sequence – who asks Blake, “And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat?” – & is otherwise adverted to throughout the film in what Rosenbaum describes as “a horrified view of industrialised America comparable with the apocalyptic visions of both Blake (the poet & Depp’s character’s namesake) & Burroughs, superimposed over an image of the American west haunted by the massive slaughter of Native Americans.” The exposed ideological ugliness in Jarmusch’s film nevertheless also adverts to another “haunting,” by those regimes of representation in which the act of America’s dispossession is itself dispossessed. Like Burroughs’s 1987 novel The Western Lands, the westward journey towards death in Dead Man discloses a journey into America’s dark heart of genocide & atavistic nihilism, of frontier capitalism & cannibalism, otherwise re-dressed & paraded through a century & a half of “realist” literary & film propaganda under the guise of the great white Frontier Myth, a kind of American Arthuriad. Robby Müller’s hypnotic black & white cinematography & Neil Young’s slow detuned guitar convey the sense that Jarmusch’s film, too, is a kind of journey – into the counter-realism of a collective unconscious, conjuring or dredging-up “a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic, hankering after its own lost origins.”28 *First published in 3:AM magazine (March 2017). 28 Rosenbaum, “Acid Western.” 181 LUMPENPROLETARIAT WRITINGATTACK|ANTISYSTEM|SUBLITERATURE 182 The apocalyptic tone of ’80s underground art, film, writing – from prognostications of the coming police state to a refusal of commodity hypernormalisation – has all the poignancy today of a Cassandra Complex on permanent exhibit at any one of those bastions of State Culture, from the Tate Modern to MoMA to the Palais de Tokyo, that encircle the Western World’s collective consciousness like the mind-forged manacles of a “mythic postmodernism” in which “everything is permitted” because nothing unpermitted is in fact possible. Confronted with the present state of the Culture Industry, history would indeed appear to repeat, no longer as the outrageous parody directed by the underground at ’80s institutional kitsch, but as realism: today, what polymathic critic & playwright Richard Marshall called the “insolent laughter of the angry & the powerless”1 has itself been appropriated by the forces of reactionary normalisation, from Brexit to Trump to the general drift throughout the socalled West towards 1 Richard Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath,” www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/oct2001/Vatican_bloodbath.html a “permissive authoritarianism” – authoritarianism dressed up as righteous indignation, as the legitimate voice of the “dissenting imagination.”2 Addressing the fate of the underground through the intervening years, cinematographer Duncan Reekie has identified a common set of causalities centred on a state-funded institutional project to construct a verticallyintegrated monopoly over all aspects of contemporary culture. Similar effects can be identified across the arts, with their increased separation & compartmentalisation within a corporate/bureaucratic framework, constituting the gentrification wing of industrial mass consumption. With the incorporation of the ’60s counter-culture into the machinery of normalisation, the re-emergence of an underground from the late ’70s onward corresponded to an increasingly fraught & combative stance. “Learning from the vulnerabilities of the 1960s,” Reekie argues, where “the counter-culture in Europe & America lost its radical momentum whilst the avant-garde effectively institutionalised itself as the legitimate dominant form [of experimental art],” the new underground – finding itself doubly excluded “in the face of a reactionary political backlash, comprehensive… appropriation, commodification, disenchantment & compromise” – specifically valorised “the radical democratic & egalitarian aspects of popular culture: amateurism, conviviality, improvisation, illegitimacy, profanity, transgression & collectivity.”3 Abandoning “the naïve optimism of the ‘hippie love generation,’” this new underground “traced a darker subterranean course which retrenched counter-cultural opposition as an ironic celebration of disillusion & negation [centred around the punk & post-punk movements].”4 In doing so, it “deliberately & ironically sought to outrage & incite… audiences by enacting spectacles of lurid violence, sex, drug use, blasphemy, obscenity & perversion,”5 2 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” Duncan Reekie, Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2007) 187. 4 Reekie, Subversion, 187. 5 Reekie, Subversion, 188. 3 183 184 exemplified in the work of filmmakers & writers in the US like Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, but also Kathy Acker & Denis Cooper. In the UK there’d been Alan Moore, Chris Petit, Peter Whitehead, but more decisively Richard Allen (a.k.a. James Moffatt), whose eighteen volume “skinhead Bildungsroman” (including Boot Boys, Teeny Bopper Idol & Knuckle Girls, all published by the New English Library during the 1970s) echoed through the work of Stewart Home, Jeff Noon, the ’90s “New Weird” (China Mièville, Jeff VanderMeer, K.J. Bishop), & Steven Wells’s Attack! Books. In a series of related articles for the journal Alluvium in 2012 focused on Home & Wells, Mark P. Williams developed the term “subliteratures” in reference to “fictions of resistance” & “insurgent subcultures” emerging in tandem with the new underground: a kind of writing radically opposed to the “dominant culture of postmodernity” – what Francis Fukuyama famously called capitalism’s masterstroke, being in every essential respect “the culture of globalisation.”6 Corresponding to a millennial turn marked by widespread popular protest against the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation & IMF that culminated in violent clashes with police in Seattle & Prague, Williams identified “a demotic, DIY approach to textual experiment” infused 6 Mark P. Williams, “Alternative Fictioneers,” Alluvium 1.1 (2012): http:// dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v1.1.02 with radical politics, whose “defining aesthetics are characterised by excess & resistance to dominant culture.”7 With roots in the Thatcher/Reagan era anti-Establishment, “subliterature,” like the new underground cinema of the time, produced interventions in “mythic postmodernism’s” rehabilitation of culture into a “heterogeneous spectrum,” one that was supposedly “democratic” & “egalitarian” but was in fact designed to expropriate positions of potential opposition & disguise the hegemonic ambitions of corporate state art,8 in the “post-historic” absence of countervailing political forces. Redolent of Debord’s “integrated spectacle,” this heterogeneous spectrum was specifically intended to define, of course, such contestative terms as “underground,” “experimental,” “anti-art” & “transgression.” Williams’s “subliteratures,” then, were concerned not only with a critique of a dominant status quo, but an effort to combat those forces of expropriation aimed at neutralising precisely such critique – both in literary & broadly cultural terms. Informed in part by an insurgent anti-art tradition traced by Home in his book, The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents From Lettrisme To Class War9 – & in antinovels like Defiant Pose10 & Red London,11 & subsequent pamphlets like Market Forces: Or Why Despite My MoneyGrabbing Change in Career Trajectory it is Impossible for Me to Sell Out to the Institution of Art12 – this emergent “subliterature” actively eschewed the status of Literature or Art (“in essence a market in luxury goods”13) in order to operate as an extension of “other cultural realms” that likewise “offer resistance to categorisation by form.”14 For 7 Williams, “Alternative Fictioneers.” Reekie, Subversion, 201-2. 9 Stewart Home, The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents From Lettrisme To Class War (London: AK Press 1988). 10 Stewart Home, Defiant Pose (London: Peter Owen, 1991). 11 Stewart Home, Red London (London: AK Press, 1994). 12 Stewart Home, Market Forces: Or Why Despite My Money-Grabbing Change in Career Trajectory it is Impossible for Me to Sell Out to the Institution of Art by “Stewart Home” (London: Vargas Organisation, 2014). 13 Home, Market Forces, 1. 14 Williams, “Alternative Fictioneers.” 8 185 186 Home in particular, writing (in the genre-bound sense of the commercial publishing industry & its various academic fronts) has never been a justifiable end in itself, but one of an integrated set of means of pursuing an “abolitionist” programme to undermine “social separation” by “simultaneously confronting ‘politics’ & ‘culture.’”15 This places his work, along with other “subliteratures,” within a broader framework of experimental activism that doesn’t reduce to the usual categories & overlaps with similarly heterogeneous projects, ranging from the Detroit-based Underground Literary Alliance to “the radical feminist peace movement, the free festival/traveller subculture, the urban squatters network, the anarcho-populist Class War group, the fanzine/mail art network & the post-Situationist provocations of groups such as Karen Eliot & Smile magazine.”16 In keeping with the nonconformist ethos of such groups, part of the “subliterary” aim has always been to confront official cultural inertia by sabotaging its schemes to put the underground – as Michael Jackman says – “under glass.”17 As a broadly experimental writing, these “insurgent subliteratures,” “have common tendencies rather than traditions, playing,” as Williams observed, “at the boundaries of acceptable & unacceptable representation”18 – ranging from the world of British action comics & the “avant-pulp” scifi of Jeff Noon (“exploring the ever-changing borderzone between genre fiction & the avant-garde”19) to NME music journalist Steven Wells’s Attack! Books.20 Founded in 1999, Attack! – described as “a series of millennial antinovelistic assaults on literary culture” – was a shortlived imprint of London-based Creation Books running to only six titles: Mark Manning’s Get Your Cock Out, Raiders of 15 Home, Introduction, The Assault on Culture. Reekie, Subversion, 191. 17 Michael Jackman (Underground Literary Alliance) in interview with Andrew Stevens, “Swimming Against the Mainstream,” 3:AM (January, 2004): www.3ammagazine/litarchives/2004/jan/interview_michael_jackman.html 18 Mark P. Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures: Fictions of Resistance,” Alluvium 1.7 (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v1.7.01 19 Jeff Noon, author note: jeffnoon.weebly.com/about.html 20 Williams, “Alternative Fictioneers.” 16 the Low Forehead by Stanley Manly (pseudonym of Neil Nixon), Tony White’s Satan! Satan! Satan!, editor Steve Wells’s Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, as well as Vatican Bloodbath by Wells’s collaborator & British music journalist Tommy Udo (who happens to share a name with the psychopathic gunsel played by Richard Widmark in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 Kiss of Death), & Stewart Home’s Whips & Furs: My Life as a Bon-Vivant, Gambler & Love Rat by Jesus H. Christ, published in 2000, a “détourned ‘historical’ novel… based on the faked fifth volume of My Life & Loves by Frank Harris” fusing plagiarism, pornography & an “extremely distasteful” internet autobiography of the Son of God.21 Occupying “the dangerous borderland of grotesque comedy, sexual liberation & vertiginous horror,”22 Attack! Books was founded on the premise that “contemporary Literature (as index of middle-class culture) could be shortcircuited with contemporary tabloid writing (as index of working-class culture) to produce something which would upset all of the social conventions surrounding the two.”23 21 Home: “The content is lifted & adapted to the required historical setting from two out-of-copyright sources: An African Millionaire by Grant Allen & The Lustful Turk by Anonymous. Just as Alex Trocchi – who faked the final volume of My Life & Loves – satirised Frank Harris in his text, so I’ve used this work to burlesque Anonymous in particular (whose squib The Lustful Turk really stinks).” 22 Reekie, Subversion, 190. 23 Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures.” 187 188 Self-consciously adopting the stance of a “popcultural avant-garde” in the tradition of Swift & Sade, Dada & Burroughs, Attack! Books aimed at subverting what Richard Marshall, writing in 3:AM magazine, called “Rupert Murdoch’s efficient hegemonic tabloid machine,” by mimicking the “tabloid gothic style in a gloriously brutalising, cranked-up extreme inversion” infused with “cartoon violence & sex” in order to affect a “splenetic satire” & “sustained scorn” of “radical dissenting” intent.24 According to Marshall, Attack! Books constituted a twopronged cultural offensive, aimed both at the “boring selfregarding prose” of the British literary Establishment – which had sought to monopolise the discourse on contemporary literary culture “to the exclusion of anything else & the exclusion of anyone else” & in whom it sought to provoke “anguish & disgust” – & at the “right-wing tabloid agenda” which, by “master[ing] the prurient moment” had usurped the expression of a popular consciousness, “relat[ing] the lurid details of the murder or rape case in order to put across their wobbly moralism that murder & rape are terrible & not entertaining.” Consequently, it was the aim of Wells’s Attack! Books to “tap into a popularist, inclusive & democratic context that rudely dissents from the powers that be…” an “insolent laughter,” as Marshall says, “of the angry & the powerless.”25 Wells’s “splenetic satire” was as far removed as might conceivably be possible from “civilised ironies” familiar to readers of The New Yorker or Times Literary Supplement, where one was more likely to encounter – in the words of Australian poet Michael Dransfield – “the Official Poets, whose genteel / iambics chide industrialists / for making life extinct.”26 A sense of just how removed can be gleaned from Wells’s Attack! Books manifesto: 24 Richard Marshall, “Popular Culture at its Most Mental,” 3:AM (2001) www.3ammagazine/3am/popular-culture-at-its-most-mental/ 25 Richard Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath,” 3:AM (October 2001): www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/ oct2001/Vatican_bloodbath.html 26 Michael Dransfield, “Endsight,” Collected Poems, ed. Rodney Hall (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987). This generation needs a NEW literature – writing that apes, matches, parodies & supersedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL! We will publish writers who think they’re rock stars, rock stars who think they’re writers & we will make supernovas of the stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed drooling idiot-geek geniuses who lurk in the fanzine/internet shadows... The self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the “literary scene” must be swept aside by a tidal wave of screaming urchin tits-out teenage terror totty & DESTROYED! ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! Wells’s generic hyperbole, like Wyndham Lewis’s détourned tabloid Vorticist rants against the “RHETORIC of EUNUCH & STYLIST – SENTIMENTALIST HYGIENICS / ROUSSEAUISMS (wild Nature cranks) / FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS / DIABOLICS – ruptures & roses / of the erotic bookshelves/ culminating in / PURGATORY OF / PUTNEY,” wields a brand of “humour… caused,” as Lewis says, “by sudden pouring of culture into Barbary”: “We set Humour at Humour’s throat.”27 Like Lewis’s moral scourge, Wells targeted the “impassioned & judgemental right-wing prose” of the British tabloid press “using sex & violence as entertainment whilst simultaneously attacking such a use” as a countertactic to the prevailing culture of hypocrisy, from the Sun newspaper to the Arts Council.28 “This is,” Marshall argues, “in a sense outlaw language” evoking a “stupidly powerful affective moment” that “doesn’t make any concessions to ‘polite society.’ After all, decorum & sophistication are the mannered restrictive forces working out of the middle class elitist position that reviles this sort of writing. As Steven Wells wrote in one of the many publicity manifestos he put out for Attack! Books, ‘Subtlety is found in the dictionary between Shit & Syphilis.’”29 As with Lewis’s barbarous “humour,” the obscenity & infantile joke at the heart of 27 Wyndham Lewis, “Vorticist Manifesto,” Blast 1 (1914) 18. Marshall, “Popular Culture at its Most Mental.” 29 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” 28 189 190 tabloid culture is here détourned into “the tough, idealistic egalitarianism,” as Marshall calls it, “of the dissenting dream; it discloses the dream & mocks the trials… it bombs into view the stupidity of the present, & clears the ground for a full view of the lost Eden, to which we are thus, ideally, restored. Its baggy, dirty vernacular pulse & vision is that of the Luddite historical imagination, the humane bodily material understanding that is found in every fart, dump, piss & fuck of James Joyce’s anti-colonialist, dissenting masterpiece Ulysses.”30 And here, too, the double-pronged aspect of this attack is brought clearly into view, in the evocation of an aggressively “pop-cultural avant-garde” in the post-Joycean mould, for whom the language of dissent must be reexpropriated from the tabloid press & turned upon the Eliotic decorum of a literary Establishment for whom “dissent” is domesticated windowdressing of the “worlds revolve like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots” type.31 The ideological (aesthetic, class) normalisation of “literature” 30 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” T.S. Eliot, “Preludes,” from Prufrock & Other Poems, in The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1963). 31 – according to “taste, decency, commercialism”32 – is thereby exposed in its core contradiction. As Marshall goes on to note, “The Attack! Book project, in its essential thrust ventriloquises in maniac tongues the organising idea… that modern literature, as opposed to other types of writing such as pulp & genre fiction, is a strategic response to mass literacy by an intellectual elite wanting to keep out the great unwashed & thus maintain what Bourdieu would call their cultural capital.”33 There is, so to speak, no neutral ground, contrary to that “heterogeneous spectrum” hocus behind which the Oz-like machinations of the Culture Industry have sought to disguise themselves. Hence, for Marshall, “Only by understanding this phantasmagoric world… is it possible to understand what [Attack! Books are] attempting to challenge.”34 In a review of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath in 3:AM magazine, Marshall elaborated further. “Art critics,” he advised, “can look at the primitivist art of Alfred Wallis & understand it as great painting even though it’s not Canaletto. Attack! Books are designed to bring about the same inclusivist approach to writing.”35 Wallis was a Cornish fisherman & self-taught painter born in the midnineteenth century but who only began producing art in the 1920s. Described as “naïve,” his work – often painted on cardboard from packing boxes using industrial marine pigments – ignores perspective & possess a topographical “map-like quality” reminiscent in part of later artists, like Sydney Nolan & Jean Dubuffet. Ben Nicholson, in a remark made at the time that was somewhat prescient of Harold Rosenberg’s 1952 pronouncements on “Action Painting,” asserted that, “to Wallis, his paintings were never paintings but actual events.”36 Wallis’s vernacularism, like Joyce’s, 32 Richard Marshall, “Review of Judas Pulp: Raider of the Low Forehead by Stanley Manly,” www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/sep2001_judas_ pulp.html 33 Marshall, “Popular Culture at its Most Mental” – emphasis added. 34 Marshall, “Popular Culture at its Most Mental.” 35 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” 36 Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” ARTnews (December 1952): “The big moment came when it was decided to paint… just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from value – political, aesthetic, moral… At a certain moment in time, the canvas be- 191 Jean Dubuffet, L’adieu à la fenêtre [Farewell from the Window], 1949 192 represents for Marshall an essential “contemporaneity” bound up with an array of “critical & creative techniques” that “embrace contingency, juxtaposition & stylistic dissonance.” At the same time, their work explores “the centrality of contradiction & excess… which extends to the attempt to classify them in aesthetic or political terms,” such that the style of their language (painterly, writerly) constitutes at the same time a critique.37 This eventness of the artist’s vernacular is what informs the sense of militant action Wells injects into the “verbose & symbolic excess,” the “transgressions of theme, style & taste,”38 typified in Attack! Books: a trait Marshall comes to identify with what he calls the “dissenting imagination,” to whose antecedents he adds John Milton as “the poetic godfather” – “republican, libertarian & anti-hierarchical” – gan to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to reproduce, redesign, or ‘express’ an object… what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” 37 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” 38 Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures.” claiming Paradise Lost & Absolem & Achitophel as “its great Ur-texts.”39 And if the reader detects a whiff of “pretension” that gilds the lily, so to speak, of absurdity in this retrospective secondment of the high canonical Milton (deemed by Sam Johnson second only to Homer) to the Attack! mob – aping, so it may seem, the Surrealist rummaging for ancestral portraiture à la Sade, Lautréamont, et al.) – it’s worth for a moment considering the more vital legacy of this seventeenth-century civil servant’s poetic dissidence. This legacy, for which Miton is acknowledged in the Romantic & Modernist traditions, stems not from the routine anthologisation of blank verse ditties sacred & secular, but from Milton’s apology for regicide, his polemic against censorship, & what must – at least since Blake – be attributed a subversive employment of the heroic couplet on such regal & grandiloquent a scale. Keeping in mind, also, that the equally bold iconoclast Blake (“ruin of space, shattered glass & toppling masonry”40) – & one of Milton’s most incisive readers – was, till quite recently, condemned by the same Establishment that accorded Milton such fulsome praise – as a lunatic purveyor of mystical kitsch. Yet Blake, like the “acrimonious & surly republican” Milton – but unlike the fair-weather-“radical”turned-Poet-Laureate Southey – refused to be redeemed by later recanting himself. Blake’s uncompromising refusal, to submit before the sacerdotal order of literary-political taste, provides a direct model for Wells’s own “passionate ethical desire,” in Marshall’s words, “to point up the hypocrisies & stupidities of the world around him”41 – but most importantly to do so, like Blake, in the language of that world. For Blake, this meant the all-pervasive language of institutional Christianity & its manifold dissimulations; for Wells, it meant the equally pervasive & dissembling language of tabloid media. 39 Marshall, “The Primitivist Offence of Tommy Udo’s Vatican Bloodbath.” Echoed in Joyce’s Ulysses (London: The Bodley Head, 1934) 683. 41 Richard Marshall, Obituary for Steven Wells, “Swells RIP,” 3:AM (June 25, 2009) www.3ammagazine/3am/swells-rip/ 40 193 Stewart Home by Marc Atkins, 1999 194 Marshall finds a similar core critical impetus in the work of Stewart Home, whose anti-art activism clearly impressed Wells & has persisted beyond the limited scope of the Attack! Books project. Home, who Mark Williams described as “a self-conscious enigma”42 & who Iain Sinclair once called “a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror…,”43 had more or less systematically set about during the 1980s to position himself within precisely the sort of dissenting tradition Marshall identifies with Milton, Blake, Carlisle & Hazlitt – one that, as Home himself proposes, runs “from the Free Spirit through the writings of Winstanley, Coppe, Sade, Fourier, Lautréamont, William Morris, Alfred Jarry, & on into Futurism & Dada – then via Surrealism into Lettrism, the various Situationist movements, Fluxus, ‘Mail Art,’ Punk Rock, Neoism & contemporary anarchist cults.”44 42 Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures.” Iain Sinclair, “Who is Stewart Home?” London Review of Books 16.12 (June 1994) 21-22. 44 Home, The Assault On Culture, 4. 43 A tradition, Marshall adds, of “piss-takers, pranksters & jokers who used their slapstick rhetoric & parodic works to entertain, incite, educate & instruct a huge radicalised readership.”45 These last remarks first appeared in 3:AM magazine in April 2001, in Marshall’s “review” of Home’s second novel, Defiant Pose, ten years after that book’s release, but coinciding with the height of Wells’s activities at Attack! Books for which, in many respects, Defiant Pose – “a story,” as the dust jacket blurb announced, “straight from today’s headlines” – served as a model. In fact Marshall’s review was intended to appear “in a filthiedup version” as part of one of several Attack! Books later abandoned when lack of funds forced Wells to discontinue publication at the end of that year. Marshall’s addition to the franchise eventually made its way before the public under the title Dirty Manga Bastards, by the pseudonymous “Johnny Pulp”46 – one of eleven books authored by Marshall (including Cancer Boy, Postcards of the Hanging & The Millennium GM Killer Mutant Lesbian Baby Plague) in a binge of attempted institutional sabotage & printed simultaneously under Randolph Carter’s Neo-Attack imprint in 2005.47 The new series – part continuity, part homage to what Marshall described in his obituary to Wells (who died of cancer in 2009) as “a publishing venture that is still… one of the most daring & truly radical of its kind”48 – was a bizarro mash-up of post-apocalyptic noir, pulp action comics, cyberpunk, transgender porn & continental philosophy (Marshall’s “filthied-up” review of Defiant Pose – comprising chapter 16-17 of the book: “Madame Atamos Sheds Her Skin” – is punctuated with random appearances by “the Jean Paul Sartre Mayhem Monster,” “the Albert Camus Car Crash Killer,” “the Roland Barthes Blitzkrieg Beast,” “the manically depressed Louis Althusser Strangling Raptor Creature,” “the incredibly complex & convoluting 45 Richard Marshall, “The Defiant Pose of Stewart Home,” 3:AM Magazine (April 2001) http://www.3ammagazine.com/politica/apr2001_stuart_home.html 46 Johnny Pulp, Dirty Manga Bastards (London: Neo-Attack, 2005) 105ff. 47 Williams, “Alternative Fictioneers.” 48 Marshall, “Swells RIP.” 195 196 Jacques Lacan Ringmaster Killer Psycho Hysteric,” & “the Nietzschean House Of Whipcord Foucault Fuck Machine”). The Neo-Attack project, in common with its predecessor, only accedes to being “Literature” in ways similar to Home’s claim to being an “Artist” & “Writer” – which is only insofar, as Williams says, that all three terms are thereby exposed as “public demonstrations of the inevitability of reproducing one’s own alienation under capital & therefore show forth the contradictions which affect us all.”49 Like Williams’s term “subliterature,” the labels Home’s work has been least inclined to reject are anti-novel & anti-art: the assault on reactionary culture & the “negation of present social conditions,” in Williams’s view, being “key to all his writing.”50 What all of these subliteratures share, however, is an additional scepticism towards the sort of liberational narratives lazily associated with historical avant-gardes, whose “socially-transformative aspirations” are boiled down to the sort of naïve soundbite “dialectics” of “opposition & transcendence” that can fill a column-inch of catalogue space in the latest Taschen Art Now.51 As Jack Sargeant writes in his recent study of underground film, Flesh & Excess: “The notion of an authentic moment realised in transgression would render such actions beholden truth”52 – for which reason neither Home, Wells nor Marshall “depict nor search” for any such “truth.” Instead, where they arrive is at “the Wittgensteinian place where there is nothing that can be said & all that is left is silence… No amount of irony can redeem it, & so it is redeemed!”53 Redemption here is thus never of the concluded sort, but a tactical détournement: a parodic excess always prepared to up the ante on each occasion that “realism” – as the discourse of institutional normalisation – rises to meet it. 49 Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures.” Williams, “Insurgent Subcultures.” 51 Consider, for example, Home’s 2010 “novel,” Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (London: Semina) which combines internet penis-enlargement spam with contemporary art-industry buzz (“Nan Goldin Will Give You Head Every Single Night When You’re a Large Nine Inches!”). 52 Jack Sargeant, Flesh & Excess: On Underground Film (Los Angeles: Amok, 2015) 175. 53 Marshall, “Review of Judas Pulp.” 50 Such acts are beyond mere satirical grenade-lobbing & verge on all-out aesthetic “terrorism” – insofar, at least, as that term is denominated by the powers-that-be. Home once suggested his work occupied “the opposite position of Baudrillard, who says what’s real becomes simulated. My position is what’s simulated becomes real.”54 There is a sense that Home sees the task of “subliterature” as not simply opposing or sabotaging the status quo, but as inciting the status quo to assume its “forms” – or rather its parodic non-forms – by way of a perverse incrementalism. On the one hand this produces the absurdities & self-contradictions we witness with such things as the Goldsmith’s Prize for “Innovative Fiction”55 – declarations of intent, as Reekie 54 Stewart Home interview with Alexander Lawrence, The Write Stuff (1995): www.altx.com/int2/stewart.home.html 55 The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 “to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” While primping itself as alternative to the existing official prize culture, there has been, since its inception, significant overlap between its shortlisted authors & those appearing on the shortlists of “major” corporate prizes like the Booker, Orange & Baileys – an unhappy coincidence pointed out by Nikish Shukla in an article for the Guardian: “The 2014 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist: Why it’s neither ‘Creative’ nor ‘Daring’” (2 October 2014). A disingenuous November 2016 headline in the New Statesman on the 197 198 says, designed to appropriate a subcultural style “whilst actually showcasing their own state-funded institutional product”56; on the other it conjures into reality such obscenities of naked power as Donald Trump. Trump, who could just as easily be the product of Marshall’s “Attack! Anime” – a grotesquely overblown super-ego rampaging through the halls of consolidated Western power – represents precisely that species of negational avatar which “subliteratures” exist to incite, like the proverbial Golem, from an oblivious sleep atop its horde of dirty linen. If there is any “truth” to be revealed here, it is that the radical nihilistic impulse that appears to be embodied in these texts, is in fact “nothing” but a cracked mirror held up to the image of Power: that violent automaton pursuing its apocalyptic career in the blissful illusion that the supposed consumers of this Zardoz fantasy are somehow unaware. These are properly “deconstructive texts” in the sense that they burlesque rather than conventionally critique: they occupy the very language of disenfranchisement that is otherwise employed to demonstrate that they do not really exist. There is nothing of a Foucauldian paradigm here: this is not some pretence to an authentic voice of the excluded, a critique of the history of reason from the POV of the madwoman in the attic. The truly subversive character of the sublit project is that it is first & foremost a “locus” of détourning action – a radical poetics – a tropism. While the theorisers of the recuperated avantgarde toil to contain & expropriate the thing they imagine subliterature to be, their grasp necessarily comes up empty: there’s prize ran, “What is Innovative Fiction Today?” but, as the prize’s cosponsor, the New Statesman already had the big answer to that pressing question. In addition to its claim of representing “experimental” writing, the Goldsmiths Prize committee is chaired by Blake Morrison, a serial recipient of British Council funding & past editor of the Council’s New Writing anthology, widely regarded as an anti-experimentalist responsible for the wholesale exclusion of British “experimental” writers from grant consideration, & whose own “prize-winning” work lies firmly within the bounds of the establishment. In short, the Goldsmiths is yet another front for a consortium of self-validating vested interests seeking to expropriate the ground, terminology & prestige of a literature radically opposed to it, rewarding small “feeder” presses like Galley Beggar that exist to hedge the establishment’s bets. 56 Reekie, Subversion, 9. nothing to grasp, in any case, but a hologram of their own transgressed image, which they are more than adept at attending to. Moreover, if the subliterary assault on the “elite nepotistic enclaves”57 of Culture shares an historical impetus (as Home & others insist) with a broadly “proletarian” stance, it does so in the sense that proletariat – specifically in its “radical” formulation as what Marx called Lumpenproletariat – defines a non-possession of “means of production” as well as evoking a non-class of non-productive, degenerated, submerged social elements, a species of formlessness, in fact, constituting an unshaped (& categorically resistant) political consciousness – one that, in its chronic heterogeneity, necessarily remains unclassifiable, unredeemed, useless. Valorised by the Situationists as a demographic of urban drift & a manifestation of the “no work” ethos, this subproletariat is the very opposite of anything that could be called a movement let alone a class, & is perhaps better considered according to the sense of Bataille’s l’informe58: that non-category of the conventionally “excluded,” as in gobs of spit, vomit, piss, shit, ejaculate, etc.; as in the reviled; as in human waste, trash, scum. If the “subliterary” draws its impetus from such an aestheticopolitical formlessness, it does not thereby represent it, rather it amplifies its disturbances, which (like a retrovirus) are in turn “given form” by the expropriative whitewashing action of institutional power – exposing, by infecting, that “secret” & equally unformed reflection at its core. It is like that abominable unsleeping creature that flies through the night polluting the vacuous dreams of all the little infant captains of industry, whose beatific repose is the faceless pornography of other people’s nightmares. *Presented as a lecture at Prva Stran: Literature Against the System, Department of Comparative Literature, Arts Faculty, University of Ljubljana, 2 December 2016; published in 3:AM magazine (January 2017). 57 58 Reekie, Subversion, 9. Georges Bataille, “L’informe” (1929). 199 LE SABOTEUR AESTHETIC TERRORISM | CORPORATE PORN 200 Rags. Petrol. Matches. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales & incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance around the fire & heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. – Virginia Woolf, urban terrorist The condemnation, though not without reserve, of eroticism is universal. There is no human society in which sexual activity is accepted without reaction, the way animals accept it. It is the object of a taboo everywhere. It goes without saying that a taboo of this kind provokes countless transgressions. Marriage itself is, initially, a kind of ritual transgression of the taboo on sexual contact. This aspect is not habitually perceived, because a general taboo on sexual contact appears absurd to the extent that we rarely see the taboo as essentially a prelude to the transgression. The entirety of religion is a regulated harmony of taboo & transgression. The paradox is not in fact in the taboo. We cannot imagine a society wherein sexual activity would not be irreconcilable with the attitude assumed in public life. An aspect of sexuality opposes it to the fundamental calculation of a human being. Every human being envisions the future. Every act is a function of the future. The sexual act, for its part, might have a meaning in relation to the future, but first this is not in every case, & eroticism, at least, has lost sight of the genetic bearing of the desired disorder. Sometimes it even suppresses it. I insist on this specific point: could a human being reach the summit of his aspiration if he did not first abandon the calculation to which the organization of social life binds him? In other words, wouldn’t a condemnation pronounced from a practical point of view, precisely from the point of view of the future, determine the limit beyond which a supreme value was at stake? – Georges Bataille, librarian It is as if one were trapped in a theatre & had to follow the events on the stage whether one wanted to or not, had to make them again & again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one’s thought & speech. – Walter Benjamin, alleged suicide Everywhere the liberation of artistic forms has signified their reduction to nothing. – Guy Debord, bourgeois intellectual History has been replaced by technology – Jean-Luc Godard, pasticheur No region of the world can today achieve the transition to stability & democracy through peaceful means. The crisis is lurching towards its climax. To be cut off in parochialism or to postpone the struggle means being caught up in a vicious circle of ever-worsening decline… – Ulrike Meinhof, journalist 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 POSTLUDES CINEMA AT THE END OF THE WORLD 218 Long interstellar voyages – if they are ever undertaken – will not use dead-reckoning on the Sun. Our mighty star, on which all life on Earth depends, our Sun, which is so bright that we risk blindness by prolonged direct viewing, cannot be seen at all at a distance of a few dozen light-years – a thousandth of the distance to the center of our Galaxy. – Carl Sagan, Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective It’s 1973, the Apollo programme’s been on ice since last December. After Cernan & Schmitt, no more whitey on the moon. Science fiction just turned retro. On Earth, meanwhile, Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars have just glammed it up for the encore at the Hammersmith Odeon. It’s a sign of the times. “See you round, sweetheart,” grins Robert Fuest’s hunchbacked mutant three months later, as he/she/it salutes the camera & lurches forth from Professor Cornelius’s secret Lapland laboratory & ex-Nazi U-boat pen into the icy tundra, fate as yet unreported. It’s the closing scene of The Final Programme (a.k.a. The Last Days of Man on Earth), a loose adaptation of the first of Michael Moorcock’s “Jerry Cornelius” novels (1969), panned by the critics & “shunted into obscurity.” Following on the heals of The Abominable Dr Phibes & Dr Phibes Rises Again, this “psychedelic sci-fi” crossed with “protopunk” can now be seen as a gleefully ironic Accelerationist Manifesto avant la lettre.1 Miming Capitalism’s preoccupation with the “end of history,” the film transmutes the atomic doomsday scenarios of Cold War daytime television into a fast-track to evolutionary posthumanism. The dilemma might rather be posed thus: “How to fabricate a new Messiah, harbinger of a new era? A gigantic computer, augmenting the brains of illustrious scientists, gives birth to a hermaphroditic monster capable of reproducing itself.” The eponymous final programme is exactly what it says it is, the ultimate bit of algorithmic voodoo in the transcendence of human frailties to the bioinformatic beyond, which looks remarkably like a throwback to something that just crawled out of a primordial swamp (Return to the Planet of the Apes). Fuest’s cyborg “fantasy” nevertheless stakes claim to a serious thesis, for if the doomsday box & climate catastrophe both lie upon the plane of progress & the perfectibility of the species, so does the existential paradox of a Human Condition in the wake of an evolutionary process that never stops. Perhaps, though, it may be détourned: the Anthropocene as final solution to the problem of what the future may hold for a species outpacing itself towards extinction. Mate a virile sardonic Jon Finch with a quite literally man-eating Jenny Runacre, zap in a bit of solar-nuclear fusion, brains in jars & a mainframe that thankfully hasn’t been programmed to talk like some sort of vocational guidance counsellor, & you get a preview of what it looks like when accelerated eugenics runs head-on into the whitewashing narcissistic feedback-loop of its own accomplished image. It ain’t 1 Per “Accelerationism”: “Roughly speaking, there’s two camps: those like Nick Land who think Capitalism will speed up & evolve into something else out of its own internal differences; those like Benjamin Noys who think that Capitalism has to be confronted & negated from without by a radical social force. Where I differ from both schools of thought is that both seem to think this can still be described as ‘Capitalism.’ But what if the leading edges of the social totality were already something else?” (“McKenzie Wark | Information-Commodification,” Interview with Marvin Jordan, DIS Magazine (2016): http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/56968/mckenzie-wark-information-commodification/) 219 220 pretty. Picture an hermaphroditic Dr Phibes doing a Quasimodo routine – as far from Ultima Thulite visions of Barbarella-esque racial purification as any species which isn’t already a parody of itself could hope to get. Reminding, of course, that the “future” is always by degrees alien, & not merely alienated from the programmatic deliria of every futurism. Which is indeed disappointing to those aesthetes of progress-by-design. Fuest’s Frankenstinian monstrum would simply be a glitch in need of instant rectification, were it not for the inconvenient fact (it’s a film, after all) that the options have been drastically narrowed, since – like the prevalent doomsday scenario hanging over the heads of the Cold War’s willing & unwilling executioners alike – for this New World Order to be born, the Old must first be snuffed out: a bold evolutionary leap as irrevocable as entropy. Fastforward, but no rewind. Too bad if the Accelerationist gambit winds up resembling a travesty of “ontological mutation” without the mascara: the “historical production of the category of information”2 deformed (of course, we’ve all come to love our “deformities”) into a (Hosanna!) Artificial Intelligence tripping the louvered light transcendent of all that Posthuman Autopoiesis bureaucrats dream of at night. The Algorithmic Subject stumbles on towards the next reflective surface – it might be nothing 2 McKenzie Wark, “Accelerationism,” Public Seminar: http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/11/accelerationism/ more than a binary switch, a twinned particle in an ion trap, or a pair of tweezers down a jockstrap. What matters is that it impinge upon something. Call it materialist aesthetics, getting back to first principles (before anyone or anything else can get their dirty little tentacles on it). Call it avantgardism après la lettre – but then what other kind of avantgarde is there?3 (“Like” Schrödinger’s idiot savant, you never know if the apocalypse switch has been flipped inside the doomsday box until you take that peek: but it always sees you first.) Prepare for the jump to hyperspace, speculation at light speed: all those point-to-point vectors rushing out of the screen in 3D, like an orgy of Cartesianism. Do we expect our posthuman avatar to sit there gushing at the view? That “cascade of Anthrocidal traumas – from Copernicus & Darwin, to postcolonial & ecological inversions, to transphylum neuroscience & synthetic genomics, from nanorobotics to queer AI – pulverise figure & ground relations between doxic political traditions & aesthetic discourses. Before any local corpus (the biological body, formal economics, military state, legal corporation, geographic nation, scientific accounting, sculptural debris, or immanent theology) can conserve & appreciate its selfimage within the boundaries of its preferred reflection, already its Vitruvian conceits of diagrammatic idealisation, historical agency, radiating concentric waves of embodiment, instrumental prostheticisation, & manifest cognition are, each in sequence, unwoven by the radically asymmetrical indifferences of plastic matter across unthinkable scales, both temporal & spatial.”4 The whole array of pathetic fallacies, in other words, dolled-up, like some Faustian Final Pogrom, in so much alchimerical futurama. Which is why Accelerationism is pure Humanism, of course. Remember Doctor Lacan’s snap-o-matic? Positioned on its tripod, H.G. Wells-like, “in a world from 3 For Walter Benjamin, the dissolution of aesthetic autonomy is less the work of the historical avantgarde than an upheaval in the techniques of mass media. (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1995).) 4 Benjamin H. Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics,” e-flux 46 (June 2013): http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/some-trace-effects-of-the-post-anthropoceneon-accelerationist-geopolitical-aesthetics/ 221 222 which all living beings have vanished,” trained on the reflection of a mountain in a lake (lac)?5 For “living beings” we need only reinsert “human beings” to inflect (as indeed intended) the “materialist definition of consciousness” posed here as a problem of a problem of the “ends of man.” The fantasy of “seeing ourselves” from the position of a universal category: the other “species,” the other form of “intelligence,” etc. “This avenue toward posthumanism is a reckoning with planetarity & its incompleteness… From that outside looking back in, the generative alienations brought about by potential xenopolitics, xenoaesthetics, xenoarchitectonics, xenotechnics, & so on, turn back upon the now inside-out geopolitical aesthetic for which the relevance of human polities (human art, human experience) seems weird & conditional.”6 As it was once said, the eye by which I perceive The Man isn’t the same eye by which He perceives me. Nor the philosophical bat, nor Fuest’s Übermensch, nor Accelerationist AI. It isn’t simply a question of switching the terms in some dialectical shell game, like the (deconstruction-never-happened) infatuation with “new concepts” handed down from the ad execs at D&G: “We need a new language to describe emergent 5 See Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory & in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 46. 6 Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” forms of commodity economy. It’s not neo anything or post anything. It’s not late Capitalism or cognitive Capitalism. Modifiers won’t do. It’s based on an ontological mutation: the historical production of the category of information.”7 Back we are in the Pre-Cambrian of ontolinguistics dreaming once more of Post-Historic semanticisms. (I means what I says I does.) Though as Wittgenstein’s mistress put it, “If an idiot could speak, we could not understand him.”8 So if, getting ahead of ourselves, we could eavesdrop on our own posthumorous evolutionary condition, what would we hear, what would we see, through the scanner darkly of our obliging avatar? Some autoencoded Blade Runner analogue? Some dreary “machined aesthete” to confirm our fondest hopes or worst fears, that après nous, le Deleuze? Or that, in History’s aftermath, its Fukuyamas all the way down? Picture again that Kodachrome on the lakeshore, dutifully recording (on His behalf) The Man’s unpaid absence from the picture, a disappearance act to beat the band, elegantly finessed into this most sublimely anaesthetic of all algorithms – namely, becoming God – in which “we” collectively rehearse the role of Judge Schreber to an audience of avid proctologists? Something to jerk a tear or raise a hard-on in any selfrespecting non-entity let alone a “neo-Humanist” AI? The socalled irony here supposedly being that what’s dead already in this picaresque snuff-film of ours is the quaint idea that humanity’s still there, “outside” the commodification mincer (all you need to do is find a way to slip past the spinning blades unscathed); that the very essence of humanity isn’t itself incorporated to the hilt in the engines of “control & value,” etc.; that, in fact, humanity isn’t already “posthumous,” isn’t already that ground-down Frankenstein skinjob we make believe only the least believable future has in store for us. What, after all, is this thing we call Artificial Intelligence if not the very apotheosis of the Human Condition (both en avant & after the fact)? Which is to say, of that evolution of “symbiotic 7 Wark, “Accelerationism.” Not quite Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (London: Macmillan, 1953) 223. 8 223 224 exchange” (language, i.e., in its broadest ramification) out of which the human abstract a.k.a. commodity fetish makes a show of “merging” into Marx’s “paradigm shift”? In other words, so to speak, in a manner of, etc.: from the mists of pre-industrial proto-history into the fully-fledged alienation of automated self-production? And by declensions ineluctable if not unelectable, to McLuhan’s “2nd commodity evolution”: which is to say, from domestic product to classified information? And thus, in turn, to yet a “3rd evolutionary phase”: the commodification of (all) future possibility “as such,” etc., etc., etc. And since what we’re talking about is really a kind of retrospective paradox – an “historical perspective” on “successive disillusionments,” like the paranoiac awakening of They Live or the retrofuturist “devolution” of The Final Programme – this “future possibility” is (thus) always already involved in a regress to “first principles.” Call it “commodifickation at the origin”: a recursive future-feedback loop like Adam’s navel or Faust’s fountain-pen where all the outcomes, no matter how antithetical, are incorporated a priori in a squiggle of quasitranscendentalism (self-affirming re-obsolescence in perpetuity, no less, like shite off a shovel). Call it, if you must, a God Machine on the Instalment Plan, or simply a godemiché for meta-Capitalism’s VIP event horizon: a Who’s Who from Malthus to Nuclear Armageddon to Climate Catastrophe to War of the Worlds, dot-dot-dot. All these bespoke permissibilities attesting to the dubious fact that (in the final analysis, etc.) the Anthropocene’s import isn’t the degree of change inflicted on the world by abstracted human agencies (KGB, BHP, DNA), but globalised Liberal Humanism’s dishing-up Fukuyama-like of the s(c)um of all possible future world-states in a free-for-all cornucopia (this “Material World” & not some Garden of Gethsemene ecological mythomeal to chew on). And to the extent that such “agency” – as a complex of pseudo-computable subjectivities – comes packaged with algorithmic pink ribbons on & little copulating ones & zeros, so too “The World” – like a Pacific All Risk wet fantasy of bankable balance-sheets, adding up to a double-indemnified conspiracy engine always demanding its due from a system that’s been rigged from the start. “See you round, sweetheart!” The humanitarian veneer over all this tends meanwhile to reflect with undiminished sameness the question of how to weather the “real” & “psychic” perturbations of this version of the “End of History” (catastrophe amelioration) in a way that’ll permit a maintainable degree of normality in the hereafter (how many suckers does it take to buy a confession from the Man?). Which is to say, in the hereafter of the ultimate “disillusionment” (improbability max: a seismic shitstorm hits the fan, but you’re still prepared to hand over your umbrella if the price is right). All the plots hatched out of this accelerated futurismus are still no more than pale epiphenomena, like everything else, of those “ideological conditions” (cryptoHumanist metaCapitalism) they make such pretence to dumping on the tracks, or in a vat of acid, or firing into deep space. So much for analogies. Confession’s just a short con for a slice of posterity when the chips are down. “Captains log, stardate 2666: We blew it!” Flashforward to the “Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Oddity. All these programmatic bugbears about the collective “afterlife,” redecorated to resemble what they are: a “technologically assisted” narcissism accelerated to lightspeed – one that’s always still somehow belated, though, like those decapitated heads in the Place Vendôme getting their eight seconds of hindsight before being sucked back into the video vortex? Just one more rampant messianism dissolved into the mix, with all the other debunked false categories & theoretical fictions: subject, 225 226 consciousness, history, science, ideology… Hyperstitions of the zero degree or final analysis, where ambivalence teeters on the brink of any narrative but this one (if only for the sake of “causally bringing about its own destiny”9). The whole ideational feedback circuit phasing out to a topology of equivalences, tending towards the disconcerting fact that between a “false belief” & an “idea” there is only the perverse arbitration of a cinematic deus ex machina, like an occult influence inscribed on Entropy’s forehead (all hegemonic doodads being inherently spectral, in any case). Work the trick fast enough & no-one’ll even notice that, from the preponderance of arbitrary POVs, they’re already dead. Constant acceleration being, after all, the Universal Condition (“every point is already a vector”; “every signified is already a signifier”). From Big Bang to Cosmic Crunch: metaphor machines of the next instalment of the Ultimate Extinction Event (the “Death of God” on interstellar relay fiddling the DEFCON switch, etc.). Weltschmerz commodification. “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic fistfuck of the first degree.”10 The credits roll but there’s no-one left watching. The cinema’s empty. In fact, there is no cinema. There’s no screen. No credits, either, just bits of metadata, algorithmic interference coming through the vacuum: EMR signatures emanating & simultaneously ceasing to emanate from a region in timespace designated in advance as The End of the World (Cecil B. DeMille directing from beyond the grave, with a slate of sequels already in pre-post-production – TEotW2: Madame Atomos’s Untimely Revenge, TEotW3: Fahrenheit 2000, TEotW4: The Ultimate Extinction Event, etc., all the way down to TEotWX: Apocalypso Redux). The repeat signature sequence is priceless: Earth in c600 or 6million years, rising 9 Not quite Nick Land interviewed by Delphi, “Hyperstition an Introduction” (2009): xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf. “Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams, hyperstitions are ideas that… engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles” (Carstens). 10 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 242 – translation modified. out of the black in a single continuous panning shot, as if Lacan’s camera on the shore had magically drifted off, out to the edge of space now, some “Voyager” analogue with its eye still trained in the rearview mirror – & from that vantage, ideally situated to “experience humanity’s destruction” (though weather or not “as an aesthetic pleasure of the first degree” is a moot question: this isn’t Star Wars, kids). For if – as the lacklustre psychoanalyst went to pains to convey to his proxy audience of avid AntiOedipustules11 – this cinemendoscopic Angelus Novus thereby defines a certain condition of what we call subjectivity (being, the assumption of an image, in which a self-consciousness is simultaneously constituted & abolished – “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”). Yet the one doesn’t mandate the other, just as the existence of conditions of life does not mandate life. And if our celestial cinematograph can be said to experience our own destruction for us, this would simply be in order to constitute a “human hypothesis.” For even in the event of “our” collectively assured destruction, it would remain necessary yet to posit that “interpassive subject” which is the other of the image in which this “technological consciousness” of The End is constituted. Just another mystifying “transcendence” of the socalled Human Condition? Just another wet-wired “prosthesis” to do the job on the Man’s behalf? Give the Other that Big Bang we’ll never get to experience ourselves (because it’s only ever the Other that experiences anyway: the pleasure’s always vicarious)? All the techno-Cartesianisms promising their adherents a fast-track to the Holy Mountain are more than happy to take your cache: in the future, everyone’ll have their very own built-in peepshow to be world famous in. What difference does it make to your average Quasimodo if the “categorically human” is really (& has been all along) a flagrant prosthesis of its own devising? “A prosthesis of a prosthesis, my god!” Well, they’ve been queuing up since before Homo Sap2 first slouched out of darkest Afrique for a bit of that authentic separation-from-experience you get 11 They (D&G) couldn’t help themselves, they had to know what daddy thought of their little castration joke – so of course they sent a woman to find out. 227 228 banging Neanderthals into extinction. Like an army of pillowbiters sabotaging the Great Creation to which all this is surely a contingent adjunct? Did someone say “sexual ambulance”? So much for the human hypothesis. “From originary technicity to the technological sublime, so said, the immanence of ‘species obsolescence’ speaks to the escatological view of the ‘perfectability of Man’ (apocalyptic monotheism),” if only because every schmuck loves an underdog who ends on top. Imagine waking up with a hangover & being handed that “the essence of humanity is nothing human” rap first thing in the morning? It’s bad enough when it’s zombies on the TV. All those “primordial simulacra” passing themselves off as the genuine dingus. On the mindfuck continuum, this scores in all categories. Now comes the part when the eggheads explain to Jerry Cornelius all about his Motherboard Complex. Confronted with this unpalatable formulation, it seems to Jerry that someone’s been pulling the viscose over his eyes. Will there be time to break Capitalism’s purchase upon the nearfuture Spielberg techno-sentimentalist afterlife? What Jerry needs is a lusty Miss Brunner with whom to transform into that hermaphrodite cave monster he knows is lurking there inside himself & hijack the nearest space rocket tout de suite. In the next scene, Jerry’s turned into a Bolex-wielding Stanley Kubrick. He looks like he’s surfing one of those black monolith things through a psychedelic timewarp in the vicinity of Jupiter. In fact, he’s really an android, or not even an android, just a computer programmed to “think” it is: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, however, this God’s Eye Instamatic gets to play the Real Deal with the definitive take on the Big Picture down there – no sequels this time round, it’s the final remake in all its terminal glory, the Closing Scene to trump all the closing scenes since light was let be. Our Kosmo Kubrick here’s seen ’em all, so he ought to know. We hear him speak those immemorial words: “And… ACTION!” No retakes, he’ll get this down in one, the whole Technicolor calamity of it. But for all the superdooper array of computational potential, this “apocalyptic scene” might just as well’ve been CGI’d in some barrio backstreet abortion clinic. With no anaesthetic sentimental faculty of its own, the whole thing’d be bound to end up looking like something dredged from an atom-era movie repository, all about the eternally thwarted nostalgias of beings “lost in space” (no more Bluegrass on the Euphrates, no more Pale Blue Dot by comparison neither). At a certain remove, even this supposed singularity of “final ends” would be cast in doubt, or adrift, or merely off. Diffracted through the cosmic lens, the broadcast news of humanity’s little Extinction Event would bifurcate, trifurcate, “become” plural, separated (at some stage) from itself by factors of lightyears: a perturbation in the universal grammar, the present subjunctive of an “Artificial Intelligence” drunk on a cosmic bender. Our Kubricked Angelus duly computes this apparent contradiction, this “strange superpositionality.” Yet on a sufficiently ambivalent scale, micro or macro, this might be reckoned as no anomaly at all, but the secret elemental condition of Creation Itself! Has our space oddity Angela Nova therefore touched witlessly upon the solemn truth of what we, in a terrestrial fit of narcissistic circumscription, call “consciousness” (out there!)? A consciousness beyond consciousness, & beyond death even? (My god, maybe there is a sequel in this after all!”) Could this posthumous impulse be nothing more than the product of a misplaced prefix? A congruous improbeability? A critical mass defined by a singular conjunction of circumstances? Some comic impost only coincidentally farced on “Spaceship Earth” – being a goulash of gravity, an axis of eccentricity, an excess of atmosphere, an overabundant animal magnetism, a too liberal distribution of “sympathetic molecules,” 229 230 intemperate zones, periodic lunacy, etc.? All giving rise to that particular tribe of entropophagi some genius baptised “Intelligent Life” & not just that collective neurosis called “Capitalism with a Human Face”? Well, at some point every experiment gets its plug pulled for it. Should this one be any different? Does the end product so far justify an extension of the franchise? Was the idea to can muzak-toshit-by or a break-out number that’d chart? Or deathless art? Because we can’t do without them, there’re always dilemmas of this kind: What is to be done? Do we wait for the ship to sink while the proles are patching the hull, or scuttle it proactively in hope of bringing about a seachange in conditions (who knows, the water mightn’t be so deep, the ship might come to rest & form an island, ocean levels might drop, a volcano might rise up & bear us Ararat-like above the waves, “God” might recognise our plight & take pity, or everyone on board might suddenly perceive the error of their ways & collectively change the course of history by sheer dialectical force of this insight, etc.). Or else the metaphor’s on a wrong keel & it’s all about whether or not to stay stuck in the commuter traffic or take the initiative & hijack the grid, playing Chicken à la Unabomber with the AI up there running the show (THE FUTURE IS NOW) till the whole system crashes head-on or shits itself to death? Mad Max for the philanthropically-inclined Play Station jockey indulging an after-hours hacker fetish. Does he suspect that he, too, might be just another replicant picking a fight with The Man out of a chronic sense of under-employment / impotent self-loathing / incurable Oedipus Complex / delusional grandeur, etc? Maybe he’d feel better if he went out & bought something, a package holiday to Alpha Centauri perhaps? Or bowled for Columbine? Or joined a counterinsurgency in one of those sub-Saharan dictatorships? Or founded a cult south of the proverbial border, with enough Cool Aid freighted in to offset the obesity problem in the rest of the developmentallychallenged hemisphere? Do you think this is some kinda parody? “There’re maniacs loose in this world & the other maniacs aren’t doing (enough) to stop them!” “Well, the only way to deal with a maniac…” Now there’s one kind of maniac you’ll never beat. The maniac within. So our console jockey goes to the hot seat with a sense of purpose & that look in his eye which says, “Buckle your belts, kiddos, coz Kansas is going bye-bye (again)” (just like in the film), & when they switch the juice on, the whole Matrix goes fizz – it was all just in his head (right where the machines’d hidden it, “no-one’ll ever find it in there, hehe”). And so concludes our final transmission (why go on?). They’ll still be receiving this schlock out in Quasar Country on its return run down the wormhole. Video-waves stirring the dustmotes of unformed future solar systems. Weird theremin music. Now, the authentic aura of humanity’s self-destruction ought to be worth something out there, even if only a firstdegree “aesthetic pleasure” for some extraterrestrial squidin-a-jar. But aura already got snuffed, there went history, too. It was the perfect crime, right out in broad starlight. The constellations crowded around taking selfies with the corpse, which didn’t exist. The only proof was that everything appeared absolutely normal. Far too normal. Right down to every little dysfunctional detail. It was like someone’s nineteenth-century God fitting up the fossil record on them dinosaurs & evolution, biggest fake-out of all time. Just to be fair they still gave everyone an opt-out, only they weren’t supposed to use it. Sometimes they’d get enough people in the same place all determined to hit 231 232 the fastforward switch, give The Man a helping hand (like it says in the Book, God advances those who advance themselves). Call it progress by all the right alternative means. Other people just prefer to take their time about it, feel they’re making a contribution to the cause, get the most out of their own suffering & that of others, & do their best to ensure it gets shared around all down the line. “Well if you don’t, someone else will.” But to say that humanity’s obsolescent isn’t only uncharitable it’s a contradiction in terms. A man (& woman also) should own at least his/her own alienation. The miracle of life is that it always makes more of itself despite us (“What’re you taking about? We’re the only show on this here rock!”), all those additional little Surplus Values adding up, multiplying, dividing, logorithmising in a miraculous orgy of entropy to which someone’s existence at least ought to bear witness. And having born witness mayn’t it thus affirm how the “essence” of humanity didn’t come into being with the first cell division, but with the birth of Capitalism (or vice versa)?! That it is, in fact, symbiotic with the evolutionary process as expressed in the world as such & our front-row seats in it (“Executive Producers,” no less &, hey, isn’t that George Pal?). This “Capitalism” shtick isn’t some bit of transactable artifice imposed willy-nilly on the world, brother (no, no, no!), but the way the world is, the way it was meant to be! Dig, it’s a total, groovy, fully-surround environment, real in every respect, & it runs on nature’s very own pure entropy! Maximised to serve your needs, brother. Why worry about a world reduced to famine, war, slave labour, disease & rampant poverty, when you can sign up to our 3-step plan. It’s bye, bye, bye to the down-&-out doldrums & hello to the mortgage mamba! A body’s soul’s her own to sell, sister! That’s right, just sign on the line. There’s a friendly robot waiting right now to take all those worries off your shoulders in one gentle swoop. Hell, it even looks just like you! See, those’re holograms that’re its eyes… Well, would you prefer the world to end with a whimper, or tinsel in a snowdome? Because we know that all the kitsch of History ends when we do. But owning a monopoly on kitsch in this Universe, we also know that in a very essential sense we’ll never end! (Hallelu!) The unmortgaged soul will travel outward like Voyager among the heavenly spheres: freed of the frail vessel of its physical body, it’ll journey in the Eternal Image, to mingle in the cosmic background radiation, amplified across the aeons. A pretty picture: you could blink & miss the whole show. Which is why we hired God to shill for our All Risk Premium Insurance Package. So that, even if we’re not around to do it ourselves, we’ll have our exclusive all-modcons Angelus Novus to shed a tear on our behalf, freshen the flowers, play back through the family album, pen one final never-ending obituary as deathless as [insert preferred canonical gush here]. It’d be efficacious, after all, for our guardian angel to know how to sing the “End of History” when the time comes, & clock the cosmic significance of it through the interstellar winters ahead (so that, spawning its nth-generation subprogramme millennia hence, it could solemnly say, “I was there”). Maybe toy with the cryogenic genome, see what kind of bio-soft knickknacks it can come up with, till, skidding through space at terminal velocity, the cosmic radiation finally fries its motherboards &, well, who knows, maybe that’s when ectoplasm from Betelgeuse intervenes with preservational cloning tools, for the sake of the archaeological register (call it, “historical thought without negation”12)? La-de-dah. Got all that out of your system? Because, at a certain point, you know, all the imaginable contingencies (manned missions to Jupiter, human spores fired in pods at far-off exoplanets in a probabilistic longshot, etc.) get crunched. China Syndrome, Anthropocene, Solar Blow-Out: the after-story isn’t going to win any Oscars. The “post” “outside,” or “beyond” of this inflatable existence of “Capitalist-Humanist form-filling” is a margin of survival so sleight it makes the resurrection of public services in Hiroshima four days after the A-bomb look like Ed Wood instead of just national-socialist realism. Who needs escape fantasies, anyway? They’re all just the same ol’ “woe betide this historical situation that’s befallen us,” & which the little guy from the village gas station turns out to be miraculously qualified to overcome. He knows that the “historical production of information as an ontological 12 The “pure historical consciousness” of The Thing as such? 233 234 reality… trapped in the commodity form” just needs to be zapped back “outside strictly capitalist forms of the mass production of The Thing,”13 & as soon as the smoke’s cleared they can turn on the uplift music. They’ll peer out from the ruins & see a bright future beckoning. Anarchosyndicalist pods on Mars, perhaps. Does the little guy need to worry about “abstraction,” “surplus-value,” “commodity” in order to get the job done? Does he need to grasp how all aspects of human life are governed by ideology? That he himself exists on the same evolutionary path as “all forms of symbolic exchange,” from “primordial” enzyme transcription to the mass market in “libidinal economy” of the technomutational present? No, because the little guy intuitively grasps that the poetics of “Capitalism” constellates the world, both as we know it & as it is possible to be known. It helped that, when they zapped whatever it was that they zapped into outer space, the EMP took down the instant media replay text-scroll commentary. They’ll have to think for themselves now, re-invent the first wheel in low-gravitational orbit, build a familiar future out of the onto-epistemological chiasmus of the rock they’ve left behind! They’ll only have positive things to say about “the aporia of the Post-Anthropocene,”14 making a fist of it, so to speak, battening the hatches, taking in the view from the periscope of that Promised Landing waiting just beyond the horizon of space itself! New worlds! Vast tracts of most immaculate Virgin Real Estate! Dvořák on the shipboard sound-system. They’ll pilot this “re-integrated spectacle” of the lost world’s own-most im/possibility like “the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw Capitalism as a sort of alien species invading human time from the future.”15 Timeslip dead-ahead! And now we see the USS Adam Smith crash-landing on the lone & level sands stretching away from Liberty’s clenched fistula. “Something kinda familiar about this place. Sure we hit the right co-ordinates?” An anachronistic sun “rises” & “sets” over McLuhanesque data-drifts, like a rehash of Deleuzo13 14 15 Wark, “Accelerationism.” Bratton, “Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” Wark, “Accelerationism.” Guattarian categorical inflation turned to Soviet satellite bureaucracy in arrested come-down. Call it, Wie das Universum sich selbst als Arschloch neu erfand, as performed in its own prospective rearview mirror.16 Or else, somewhere along the line, our Angelus Novus, who’d always given the impression of heading in the other direction, re-arrives out of the blue with its Betacam pointed straight at us & that fatal image, which wasn’t supposed to’ve happened yet, reflected in the lens like a cinema screen filling up the sky. Lightening flash. Ah-ahhhh! But we’d already dreamt it, already lived that film a million times before. *First published in Allegorithms, eds. Vít Bohal & Dustin Breitling (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2016). 16 Land’s quasi-paradoxical future-as-thanotonic-afterlife was indeed already anticipated in Marx’s Grundriese, & is simply one more anachronism in the belated form of an “accelerationist” rhetoric, leaving the passing impression of a déjà vu like a crank on the corner with handpainted sign proclaiming THE END IS NIGH. Which of course it is, & always has been. But some ends are more nigh than others. But what if we gave the crank a quantum computer instead, with a built-in improbability drive & virtually infinite horsepower? 235 236