Distance(s) #18

Moonlight - Ralph Albert Blakelock, c. 1886-1895, oil on canvas

In Titan's Goblet - Peter Hutton, 1991, 16mm

Des animaux #3

Dalla nube alla resistenza - Straub-Huillet, 1979, 35mm

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Mark Fisher has written on Straub-Huillet for the new issue of Film Quarterly. The article isn't available online, but I've uploaded a pdf here. The following extract is particularly of note:

There is another example of a Straubian shot [in Sicilia!]: at one point during the railway carriage scene, the camera leaves the characters on the train to show instead the apparently empty landscape outside for several minutes. I say 'apparently' because it is important to question our unreflective assumption that such spaces are indeed empty. Deleuze maintains in Cinema II that, in Straub–Huillet’s films, an 'empty space, without characters [...] has a fullness in which there is nothing missing' (p.245). One has to learn to see such 'fullness,' which is not likely to be perceived by the casual viewer, who is more likely to find the Straubian shots frustrating and boring. How is Deleuze’s idea of fullness to be understood in this context? It is worth noting that Deleuze sees geology as continuous with politics. The idea of social 'stratification' is not just a vague metaphor in Deleuze’s work, but rather an expression of the way in which both human populations and the earth are shaped by vast impersonal processes. The unpeopled is therefore not the same as the empty.

We're just trying to document what's left #2

Get Out of the Car - Thom Andersen, 2010, 16mm

Via Andy — Get Out of the Car screens at REDCAT in Los Angeles next month alongside Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet's Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter [The Bridegroom, The Comedienne and the Pimp, 1968] and Fassbinder's Das kleine Chaos [The Little Chaos, 1967]. It's an intriguing pairing. Also, Andersen is interviewed by Vera Brunner-Sung in the new issue of Cinema Scope — on sound (p.20):

There's an impressionistic history of black jazz and rhythm and blues in Los Angeles, which is part of the city's heritage and should be better known. It has been forgotten, to a surprising extent. I think the history of music in Los Angeles is very important to the history of the city as a whole. It's kind of key. My conviction about the importance of music to films has intensified over the years. Bad music, bad soundtracks, have destroyed a lot of movies. The best filmmakers are always the ones with the best musical sense, like Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie, or even Stan Brakhage — when he has music in his films it's always good. One of the most significant advances in modern cinema was the abandonment of non-diegetic music.

Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter - Straub-Huillet, 1968, 35mm

An aside, or: we're just trying to document what's left

A striking and very moving moment in Thom Andersen's latest film Get Out of the Car: a few shots of weathered murals depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe (ten in total), an overgrown chain-link fence, a bold yellow sign. A testimony, or plea, is heard:

I think sometimes in these kinds of struggles we lose a bit of focus of what this really means for the community. It is as if... If I went to your community, and I took down your temple, if I took down your church, that's what we're talking about. These are sacred things. You're taking away our way of life.

The land beyond the fence used to be known as South Central Farm — one of the largest urban community gardens in the United States. It was developed on fourteen acres of land gifted to residents of Los Angeles in 1994, via a revocable permit held by the non-profit LA Regional Food Bank (for a more detailed history, see here). In 2006 it was sold by the City, for unspecified development, via a backroom deal. The farmers, who grew and provided food for 350 families, were evicted, and the land was bulldozed. There is a broadly sickening interview with Ralph Horowitz here, the property developer who demolished the site in the face of the Farmers' resistance. (I couldn't finish it.) The incident reminds me of a recent development closer to home, on a much smaller scale: Lewes Road. In Los Angeles, the farm was reclaimed by the City for a price; in Brighton, the guerrilla community garden was reclaimed by developers in the interest of (re)asserting its antithesis. Both were projects evicted in the face of ruthless corporate enterprise — an opposition to any conception of the land as common, and thus ground on which we can live outside of capitalism. As Andersen says of the (abridged) succession of shots above: "it is the one sequence of overt social criticism I left in the film, and the razor wire that surrounds it (also appearing in the three shots that follow) is the one thing I don’t like that appears." The rest of the film comprises an inventory of dilapidated public architecture, billboards, neon lights and corporate propaganda often subjected to the protest of graffiti, rust and decay — a document of what dominates our cities and their signs: profit motive, with little trace of the whispering wind.

Get Out of the Car - Thom Andersen, 2010, 16mm

Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre - Straub-Huillet, 2006, digital video

Keep to (the) Left #3

Too early, too late, or: no comment

Trop tôt, trop tard - Straub-Huillet, 1981, 16mm

Un film comme les autres - JLG, 1968, 16/35mm

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In my first proper conversation with Godard, I asked him what he thought of politics. In an excessive theatrical gesture of a kind he rarely uses, he mimed injecting a huge syringe into his arm. 'Some people take drugs, some people take politics...'

--Colin MacCabe, Godard (Bloomsbury, 2003), p.280.

Straub: In the world we live in, since human beings are limited and the world is what it is, you can't do three things at the same time, not even two. We're doomed. This is what Schoenberg meant, or close enough, when he told Eisler, 'Instead of getting involved in politics so much, you'd better concentrate on your work.' It's a provocative statement... but it's a fact, you can't simultaneously be involved in politics and make so-called aesthetic objects or works of art or films.

Huillet: You can let things mature, however. You were talking about circumstances earlier. When you're obsessed with massacres and peasant wars as we were and still are, when you finally make Trop tôt, trop tard, it's precisely because all of this resurfaces in a certain way once it's found the appropriate form. [...] When the film was completed in 1981, they told us peasant revolts were all but impossible. Now look what's happening. It's the opposite of a film that's following fads...

Straub: Even in good faith! At the moment I like A Movie Like the Others [Un film comme les autres, 1968] better than some films that were made by the group calling itself Dziga Vertov. Dear Jeannot would certainly not agree since he'd rather conceal this film, but at least it's my opinion. Here's a guy who tried to be humble at a very precise moment in time and just tried to monitor something without imposing his grid of interpretation. He was really within the moment and the fashion of the time, but he functioned without being grist for the mill.

--Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet in conversation with François Albera, 2001, Sickle and Hammer, Cannons, Cannons, Dynamite!, published in the 2004 Viennale & Filmmuseum Straub-Huillet retrospective catalogue, p.47.

Towards lunch, our stomachs rumbling, we talk about the occupation of Nanterre, the Sorbonne and the Theatre de l'Odeon; we talk of the occupation of the six main plants at Renault, and of the closure of the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles. We speak of the men and women of the streets, about 'an inaugural moment of speech' - about the welcome that each could bid the other with no other justification than that of being another person (Blanchot). We speak of De Gaulle's fumbling address on French television, and of panic in government circles, and of the carnivalesque redoubling of the power of authority in the disarray of the marchers (Blanchot again).

After lunch, in a temporary food coma, we speak of the banning of far left groups in France, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne and the infiltration of the police into schools and universities. We speak of the workers returning to work, and the triumph of the Gaullists, returned to government with a good majority at the General Election in June. We speak of the Czechoslovak Spring, crushed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. We speak about the collapse of the Cultural Revolution into terror, and the suppression of Guevara-inspired guerillas in Latin America.

The room seems to grow dark. We feel depressed, terribly depressed. But we invoke, as the afternoon wears on, the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee, whose participants included Butor and Roubaud, Sarraute and Duras: Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful!

Tomorrow it was May: and so we speak, too, about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and the British miner's strikes of 1973-4, about Italian workerism and Autonomia. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, Luxemberg; we speak of Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.

--Lars Iyer, Tomorrow it was May, 22/09/10.

An aside, or: the train pulled out

Notes. 20/09/2010.

Interviewer: Have you read the two writers who have so often been identified with you — Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler?

Cain: I read a few pages of Dashiell Hammett, that's all. And Chandler. Well, I tried. That book about a bald, old man with two nympho daughters. That's all right. I kept reading. Then it turned out the old man raises orchids. That's too good. When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night's sleep, the next day I'm not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

--James M. Cain, "The Art of Fiction No. 69", The Paris Review 73, 1978.

The films which have most excited me recently are Skolimowski's two films and The Enchanted Desna [1964]. These are films about which I don't know what to say critically, which give me the feeling of having a lot to learn. Also Rossellini's film about steel. They are films which cut right through me, whereas with others I can see what to take and what to leave. I say this is great, but I could never do it myself. I don't rate these three films above or below the rest, they are the films I want to talk about because I really don't know what should be said. On the other hand I know very well what to say about Gertrud: I don't mean that I would necessarily be right, but I can say at once that it is like Beethoven's last quartets. Whereas with films like Walkover [1965], I want to talk about them precisely in order to discover what to say. But as I make films, I can look for anything I need to find in a film: I don't need to talk about it.

--Jean-Luc Godard, interviewed in 1965, "Let's Talk About Pierrot", Godard on Godard (Da Capo Press, 1986), p.232.

Interviewer: Are there any rituals that get you going on a literary project?

Böll: When I am involved in an extensive project there is no ritual — I go to work and write until weariness forces me to stop. With shorter projects I shirk: I straighten up my desk and then straighten it up again, read the newspaper, take a walk, tidy up my bookshelves, drink coffee or tea with the lady I'm married to, smoke a lot, let myself be diverted with visitors, telephone calls, even the radio — and then at the last moment I am literally forced to begin, jumping on a train, if you will, that's already pulling out of the station.

--Heinrich Böll, "The Art of Fiction No. 74", The Paris Review 87, 1983.

Interviewer: Your characters and you yourself often say they don't care about anything, which sounds like total entropy, universal indifference of everyone towards everything.

Bernhard: Not at all, you want to do something good, you take pleasure in what you do, like a pianist, he has to start somewhere too, he tries three notes, then he masters twenty, and eventually he knows them all, and then he spends the rest of his life perfecting them. And that's his great pleasure, that's what he lives for. And what some do with notes, I do with words. Simple as that. I'm not really interested in anything else. Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you're confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There's no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same.

--Thomas Bernhard, 1986, from an interview originally published in the Autumn 2006 issue of Kultur & Gespenster, trans. Nicholas Grindell.

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not 'I feel like crying,' which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, 'I feel like tears.' And this phrase – so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it – decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. 'I feel like tears'! That small child aptly defined his spiral.

To say! To know what to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming – like worms when a rock is lifted – under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

--Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), p.107-8.

Such is the lot of a being who is born, that is to say, who, once and for all, has been given to himself as something to understand. If natural time is at the centre of my history, I see myself also surrounded by it. If my first years are behind me like an unknown land, that is not by a chance failure of memory or for lack of a complete exploration: there is nothing to know in those unexplored lands.

--words gathered by M. Merleau-Ponty & J.-L. Godard, "The Testament of Balthazar", Cahiers du Cinéma in English 6, 1966, p.44.

The shelter of time, or: fin de Histoire(s)

The Old Place - JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999, video

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A: Contrôle de l'univers - JLG, 1998, video

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4B: Les Signes parmi nous - JLG, 1998, video

The image isn't good enough in video, but it's easier. You only have two images to work with in editing; it's like having two motifs in music, and the possibilities of creating a relationship between two images are infinite. The big difference is that if you shoot the three stone lions of Eisenstein in video, it can be an entire Warhol movie.

--Jean-Luc Godard, interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1996, "Godard in the Nineties", Film Comment 34.5, 1998, p.60.

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4B: Les Signes parmi nous - JLG, 1998, video

Film socialisme - JLG, 2010, digital video

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Histoire(s) du cinéma 4B: Les Signes parmi nous - JLG, 1998, video

Hiroshima, mon amour - Alain Resnais, 1959, 35mm

Rivette: Resnais's great obsession, if I may use that word, is the sense of the splitting of primary unity: the world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw. I think that for Resnais this reconstitution of the pieces operates on two levels. First, on the level of content, of dramatisation. Then, I think even more importantly, on the level of the idea of cinema itself. I have the impression that for Alain Resnais the cinema consists in attempting to create a whole with fragments that are a priori dissimilar. For example, in one of Resnais's films two concrete phenomena which have no logical or dramatic connection are linked solely because they are both filmed in tracking shots at the same speed.

Godard: You can see all that is Eisensteinian about Hiroshima because it is in fact the very idea of montage, its definition, even.

Rivette: Yes. Montage, for Eisenstein, as for Resnais, consists in rediscovering unity from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealing the fragmentation in doing so; on the contrary, emphasising it by emphasising the autonomy of the shot. It's a double movement: emphasising the autonomy of the shot and simultaneously seeking within that shot a strength that will enable it to enter into a relationship with another or several other shots, and in this way eventually form a unity. But don't forget, this unity is no longer that of classic continuity. It is a unity of contrasts, a dialectical unity as Hegel, and [Jean] Domarchi, would say.

--extract from "Hiroshima, notre amour", a roundtable published in Cahiers du Cinéma, July 1959 (trans. Liz Heron), Cahiers: The 1950s, Harvard UP, p.60-61.

Hiroshima, mon amour - Alain Resnais, 1959, 35mm

De l'origine du XXIe siècle: à la recherche d'un siècle perdu - JLG, 2000, video

Cinema as it was originally conceived is going to disappear quite quickly, within a lifetime, and something else will take its place. But what made it original, and what will never really have existed, like a plant that has never really left the ground, is montage. The silent movie world felt it very strongly and talked about it a lot. No-one found it. Griffith was looking for something like montage, he discovered the close-up. Eisenstein naturally thought he had found montage... But by montage I mean something much more vast [...] to return to what I said at the beginning: the idea of cinema as art or the technique of montage. Novels are something else, painting is something else, music is something else. Cinema was the art of montage, and that art was going to be born, it was popular. Mozart worked for princes, Michelangelo for the Pope... Some novelists sold in huge quantities, but not even Malraux, even Proust, didn't sell immediately in the same quantities as Sulitzer. Nor does Marguerite [Duras]. Suddenly, very quickly, cinema rose in popularity, much faster than Le Pen. In three years it went from thirty spectators to thirty million. Painting has never been popular. If Van Gogh were popular his paintings would go on tour. But cinema was popular, it developed a technique, a style or a way of doing things, something that I believe was essentially montage. Which for me, means seeing, seeing life. You take life, you take power, but in order to revise it, and see it, and make a judgment. To see two things and to choose between them in completely good faith.

--Jean-Luc Godard, extract from a lecture on montage at FEMIS, 1989; cited in "Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph" by Michael Witt, The Cinema Alone (Amsterdam UP, 2000), p.35.

The Old Place - JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999, video

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A: Contrôle de l'univers- JLG, 1998, video

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The Old Place - JLG & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1999, video