This week’s readings are united by two things. On one hand, they recognize that the films under discussion reject Classical Hollywood cinema and the familiar formulae of cinematic realism. On the other hand, the readings all try to supply an account that helps viewers make sense of the (sometimes) senseless—or at least radically different—priorities of the films and their directors.
I’ll begin with Sitney’s Visionary Film (1979) because I think it may help bring some order to this motley collection of films and videos. Sitney identifies the structural film as an important development in American avant-garde cinema (369). In his view, structural film, which “insists on its shape” (369) rather than content, has four key characteristics:
- “fixed camera position”;
- “the flicker effects”;
- “loop printing”; and
- “rephotography off the screen.” (369-70)
But instead of investigating these characteristics in detail, Sitney turns to Andy Warhol as the most important precursor of structural film. In Sitney’s account, Warhol demolished a whole series of film-making myths about, inter alia, narrative, duration, attention, and directorial agency (371). Among other strategies, Warhol “simply turned the camera on and walked away” (371-72). He made films of “normal” length in which very little happens. He also made very, very long films in which literally nothing happens. Sitney calls this Warhol’s “temporal gift”: “duration” (374). In a more philosophical register, Warhol—cast in the role of mindfulness meditation guide—forced the viewer to attend to attention, which may “trigge[r] ontological awareness” (374). Both duration and “ontological awareness” on the viewer’s part are antithetical to traditional cinematic norms, where the goal is typically immersion in the world on the screen rather than a reflection on the conditions of viewing itself.
Thiher’s (1977) essay on Un Chien Andalou situates the film in relation to the codes of silent cinema. According to Thiher, silent film’s syntactical developments were largely aimed at rivaling the realist novel from a narrative perspective (38). Surrealists like Buñuel and Dalí rejected this “bourgeois ideology of realistic mimesis” (39) and developed a whole range of alternative strategies around the axiom of “ludic activity . . . that attempts systematically to subvert the rules of the game” (39), including:
- Attacking spectatorial passivity (this is how Thiher interprets the famous gesture of slicing the eyeball) (39);
- Rejecting linear chronology (39-40);
- Disturbing the causality implied in “conventional filmic syntax” (40);
- Employing black humor “to abolish the distinction . . . between the repressive working of the reality principle and the pleasure principle” (42);
- Rejecting meaning in narrative (even if there is still “sense”) (42); and
- Substituting mimetic logic with (Freudian) dream logic (but ultimately asserting that “film can be a mimetic means for representing the world of repressed desire”). (46)
In Thiher’s estimation, Un Chien Andalou amounts to a critical intervention within film—one that subjects it “to the same kind of self-criticism and ironic subversion that the modernist notion of self-consciousness had already subjected literature and painting” (48).
In her essay on the Akerman-chamber/-bedroom, Ivone Margulies (2007) does two helpful things. First, she orients us to the milieu of feminist cinema in the 1970s, and she situates Ackerman’s work in the broader context of video art, a related medium that we might do well to investigate alongside our videos for this week. In terms of the working principles of Akerman’s cinema, Margulies identifies the following strands:
- Focus on everydayness;
- Centrality of social reproduction (i.e., domestic labor, care work);
- Anti-psychological orientation that blocks the representation of interiority (this works as a double rejection of Classical Hollywood and of the distortion of women’s subjectivity in Freudian accounts);
- Spatial relationality (Akerman’s rooms are simultaneously agoraphobic and in dialogue with the outside world);
- Hyperattentiveness to mise en scène and the tableau;
- Performativity over interiority or self-exposure (in terms of Akerman’s own presence in the films).
In the course of situating Akerman’s preoccupation with small domestic spaces, Margulies mentions two video artists working around the same time: Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci. Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” is a send-up of cooking instruction videos, in that nothing is cooked. Instead, Rosler creatively repurposes kitchen utensils to stage an aggressive performance that rejects the idea that women’s place is in the kitchen. Acconci’s creepy, compulsively watchable 1973 video “Theme Song” is probably the better video to put in conversation with Akerman’s (rather than the one Margulies discusses). In both Acconci and Akerman, we find the artist reclining in a domestic space, addressing the viewer, although the similarities end there. I bring up the work of these two video artists because, although it started much later than experimental film (the Portapak video recorder wasn’t widely available until 1967-68), video art developed parallel critiques of conventional cinema and television, such that it may make sense to consider the two media and their critical discourses together.
Questions:
- Is it still correct that “the precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness”? Do “they operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other”? (Sitney 1979, viii)
- Should we consider experimental film and video art together?
- From an auteurist perspective (or not), how do we think about directors, like Greenaway, who make highly experimental work, but who also make avant-garde films (“The Pillow Book,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover”) and somewhat (somewhat!) more conventional Hollywood films (“Eisenstein in Guanajuato”)?
- I’m not sure how others feel, but I break out in a sweat every time I watch “This Is America,” but I keep going back to it. I’ve been trying to think about the video in terms of Black cultural production and what it means for the video to be directed by a non-Black person. (Could 12 Years a Slave have been directed by a non-Black person? How would that have changed its conditions of reception? The viewer’s interpretation of the spectacles of Black suffering depicted in that film?) I’m wondering whether the fact of Murai’s non-Blackness affects the formal and aesthetic choices made in the video. I’m not sure how one would go about answering that question, except by comparing it to music videos made by Black video- and filmmakers self-consciously working in that tradition, like Arthur Jafa (Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky”) and Kahlil Joseph (Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes”).
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Bibliography
Margulies, Ivone. “La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator.” Rouge 10 (2007). http://www.rouge.com.au/10/akerman.html.
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Thiher, Allen. “Surrealism’s Enduring Bite: ‘Un Chien Andalou.’” Literature/Film Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 38-49.