Illuminations #8

At Sea - Peter Hutton, 2007, 16mm

At sea #3

The crisis deepens. Ships are again laid up by the hundreds, manned by skeleton crews, or sent to the scrapyards of Bangladesh before their time. Ten percent of the world's fleet is idle. Shipyards are again in trouble as orders for new ships dry up. Riding high in the water, they carry only empties, with nowhere to go.

A ship is not an isolated thing, but a unit in a makeshift ensemble. Behind it all is backbreaking toil, and dockworkers' casual physical feats. The link between the ship, dock and city streets is seen in the Hong Kong street porters of the 1960s photographed by Ed van der Elsken, which show the physical definition of work: moving a mass, over a distance.

The Forgotten Space - Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, super 16mm

At sea #2

The Forgotten Space - Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, 2010, super 16mm

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We wanted to make an openly Marxist film, to really redeem, in the discourse of film, that critical way of looking at the world. The crash has put basic analyses of the crisis tendencies of capitalism back on the table in a way that they weren't previously, so it's strange that there are films that seem to have fallen into the crime genre in order to explain what has happened. I'm thinking of Inside Job, which takes the form of a kind of detective novel, presenting a rogue's gallery of criminal financiers. But at the same time it's a film that suggests, perhaps incorrectly, that there was a golden age of Keynesianism, as if a kind of Keynesian utopia has been destroyed by neoconservatives, none of which helps us understand the cycles of capitalism, or the intractability of the problem of crisis. So much as we might now want to see more Keynesian policies pursued, there's also a need to understand these things in a deeper way than the culture of the popular documentary film allows, even though it has opened itself up in a good way to current political problems. We felt the need to make a tougher film.

A problem with documentary is that there's this extraordinary need for embodiment, for telling the story. Our producers would ask us from time to time, in a nervous way: what are all the little stories that you want to tell? And while it's true that we have all these stories of individuals who work at different sites along the supply chain — or are excluded by it, caught in the interstices, jettisoned by society — my response was that what we're struggling with here is the big story. And no-one thinks they can tell the big story anymore. Everyone's given up. They're feeling hopeless, and of course I see that — I teach in an art school, so I know how difficult it can be for younger people to feel like they have the ability to tell this story. Perhaps it's similar, in a way, to the recent turn in economics away from macro- to microeconomics: tending your little garden while the whole earth is trembling...

--Allan Sekula, May 2011, via.

At sea #1

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Silver and copper chariots——

Steel and silver ship's bows——

Hammer the foam,——

Heave up stumps of brambles.

——The currents of the heath,

And the huge ruts of the ebb tide

Swirl toward the east,

Toward the pillars of the forest,——

Toward the timbers of the pier,

Whose angle is struck by whirlpools of light.

--Arthur Rimbaud, Seascape, from John Ashbery's new translation of Illuminations (Carcanet, 2011), p. 109.

Des animaux #7

Douro, Faina Fluvial - Manoel de Oliveira, 1931, 35mm

An aside, or: digressions on the photographic agony #6

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We do not die twice. In this respect, a photograph does not have the power of film; it can only represent someone dying or a corpse, not the elusive passage from one state to the other. In the spring of 1949, you may have seen a haunting documentary about the anti-Communist crackdown in Shanghai in which Red 'spies' were executed with a revolver on the public square. At each screening, at the flick of a switch, these men came to life again and then the jerk of the same bullet jolted their necks. The film did not even leave out the gesture of the policeman who had to make two attempts with his jammed revolver, an intolerable sight not so much for its objective horror as for its ontological obscenity. Before cinema there was only the profanation of corpses and the desecration of tombs. Thanks to film, nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one of our possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem, the eternal dead-again of the cinema!

--André Bazin, 'Death Every Afternoon' (1958), in Rites of Realism (Duke UP, 2003), p.30-31.

Finding the criminal #3

The time is too short / but never too long / to reach ahead / to project the image / which will in time / become a concrete dream.

--Wire, 'Lowdown', Pink Flag (1977).

In Vanda's Room - Pedro Costa, 2000, digital video

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[On undramatic long-take art cinema today.]

I think there's this petty fascination with what people call an image. Artists like what they’re doing as artists, or supposed artists, but you never see a bricklayer contemplating his stone for half an hour then saying: ‘oh yeah, maybe I’ll add another stone.’ That does not happen.

A lot of people today, even filmmakers, have not seen what we called cinema, and are relatively unaware of its craft, its past. They don’t know it, and sometimes they despise it, saying: yeah, I don’t care, or I don’t have time to see that, times have changed, this is not the same world. But the work we’re doing, I feel, belongs to a certain reality and a world of work that has a past, and I can't escape it. And I think the only way to move forward is by not escaping it and instead confronting certain things. Not refusing Chaplin’s films is a way of moving forward, not dismissing them as bullshit, because they're about details, the way people move, where you place the camera (the height, the sound), etc. They're not about ideas, those everything-goes ideas that produce all those long shots, the contemplation of some void: a mountain, a street corner that could be in Hong Kong, Paris, anywhere...

You should see Ozu, or John Ford: their shots are much longer. Three seconds in John Ford is three thousand years. Any young video artist has to work very hard if they want to tell their story in three seconds. When I was making In Vanda's Room, I had a feeling — a normal feeling — that what I was seeing and what Vanda was doing was an attempt to tell fragments, particles, centimetres, inches, seconds of a very long moment. This moment could be ten minutes, an hour, and it took ten days, ten weeks. Because it’s like Proust, or Kafka: it takes a century to tell just one second. And that’s very hard work in film.

--Pedro Costa, in conversation with Craig Keller and Andy Rector in 2008 for Finding the Criminal (2010). Available via.

Finding the criminal #2

Juventude em Marcha - Pedro Costa, 2006, digital video

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At the time, in the intelligentsia, people had been shaken by 1968. The delirium didn't last very long, about two years. During that time, we went pretty far with the idea that 'we won't be filmmakers', which was fine with us, as none of us was a born filmmaker, so we'd found a justification: we won't be filmmakers because there are much more important things to do! Which was to create a great Chinese-style cultural front with mass appeal, etc. But as soon as reality entered the picture, it fell apart. I'll only note that, without knowing whether it's to our honour or whether, on the contrary, it's a sign of absolute collective baseness, but we plunged politically collectively.

That enabled us not to belong to any group since we became our own group. We were quite naive, and took it to a point at which it almost became pathological, but we stopped in time. We didn't do anything base in relation to cinema. Which is to say that we never said anything good about, I don't know, an Elio Petri film, as all the leftists liked them. We always said good stuff about Straub and Godard and everyone told us off, because those films were considered indigestible by everyone, and they were indeed quite difficult films. We had absolute fidelity to our tastes in cinema, our Cahiers tastes, even if reduced to a very Jansenist base. Godard, at the time, was also very naive, very Maoist. He was more active than us; he did lots of stuff and we followed him a bit. As for Straub, he was a very important filmmaker to us, and is still very important to me — even if, well, we're all twenty years older. Back then, we went on, following a little minuscule line that should have broken a hundred times, but didn't, which just goes to show that it was solid after all.

--Serge Daney on writing for Cahiers du cinéma during its militant phase in the early 1970s, in Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils (1992).