The Last Few Weeks

The last month or so has been a bit crazy so I haven’t been doing much writing.  During that time I did attend two conferences that I mentioned on this blog: ‘Christian Social Teaching and the Politics of Money’ at the University of Nottingham, and ‘Film-Philosophy’ at the University of Dundee.

I don’t think it’s really necessary to go through the papers I heard at Nottingham.  On the whole, distributivism was the most heavily lauded approach (at least by conference organisers).  Like any conference, there were a few ok papers and a few papers that left me shaking my head.

There were a few tendencies, however, that I found either worrying, perplexing or both.  First, the conference was devoted to thinking about theological responses to a crisis that emerged out of European traditions regarding economics, government, and society.  Why then were all such responses limited to these same traditions.  Granted, there were papers presenting Jewish and Islamic perspectives on the issue, but the tenor of these papers was more comparative than challenging.  There was no suggestion that these traditions offer any real alternative to the Christian interpretation of recent events.  There was no discussion of liberation theology save for a few snide remarks about how the Pope’s recent encyclical reveals how the Vatican is really far more radical than the liberationists have ever been.  I found this stance to be entirely guilty of the kind of epistemological coloniality that I discussed in my post on the Latin American politics conference.  I’m not suggesting Latin American, Asian, African, or indigenous thinkers are inherently more adequate theorisers of religion, politics, and economics.  I just think if one is attempting to challenge the current state of North Atlantic political economy, perhaps looking outside that geography might be a good place to start.  I tried to make this point at the conference, but was never afforded the opportunity.

Second, and more related to distributivism in general, I was troubled by the way property figured into the various debates.  There’s a great scene in Citizen Kane when a drunk Jebedah accosts Kane, saying:

You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered…Remember the working man?… You used to write an awful lot about the workingman…He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That’s going to add up to something bigger than your privileges!

The scene sums up my problem with any theory of political economy that does not challenge on the one hand, the ruling class’ claim to ownership of the means of production, and on the other, the very theories of property that legitimise these claims.  I think that these are basic starting points for considering Christian social teaching and the politics of money.

Finally, there seemed to be a lot of papers that presented the old ‘popular theory x + Jesus.’  The unanswered question in these papers is always ‘Why do we need Jesus? What does he add?’

A week later I attended the ‘Film-Philosophy’ conference at the University of Dundee.  In general the papers were solid, though many of them addressed issues that I have no interest in.

One paper that did touch on some points relevant to my research was Caroline Bainbridge’s keynote on feminist film.  She focused on the institutional hurdles facing female directors.  In a sense, my issue with this approach parallels my criticism of the conference on Christian social teaching.  The criticism fails to escape the boundaries of the debate organised by the dominant theory: namely, auteur theory.  Why single out female directors?  Why not include female script writers who, in both film and theatre, face significant obstacles?  Why not challenge the whole idea of auteur theory, which focuses on the power of the director in a manner consistent with masculinist understandings of hierarchy, rather than discussing the collective nature of the production of film?  Feminist theory that argues ‘women deserve the same recognition, status or success as men’ is always far less compelling than that which argues ‘feminism offers an alternative reading of economic, political, and social relations.’

Anyway, it was nice to have a week almost entirely devoted to academic work rather than usual work.

Review

Alex recently pointed out that Joseph Mai has reviewed Mullarkey’s book on film for the Notre Dame Philosophical Review.  The review, which you can read here, seems fairly solid.  I can’t speak to the nature of Mullarkey’s reading of Bergson, but the problem of relativism is one that I hope to address in my paper next month.  Anyway, it’s worth a quick read.

Strike!

This morning I watched Eisenstein’s Strike!. I found some of the initial montage to be absolutely brilliant and I loved the shot of the factory in the puddle. Russian films from this era are great because you never have to guess who the evil capitalists are (though nothing quite tops the classic Soviet propaganda cartoons). Here are a few additional random thoughts I had while watching the film.:

- It’s interesting that after the strike begins, Eisenstein cuts to scenes of animals, as if to note that with the cessation of exploitation, the natural order has returned.
- Even more interesting is the following scene where the children recreate the actions of the strike. Like their fathers, the children load a goat into a wheelbarrow and push the animal down a hill (earlier the workers had done the same with the administrators at the factory). Already the coming generation has ritualised the action, performing the sacrifice of a ‘scapegoat.’ I don’t know that Eisenstein intended this reading, but it works as an excellent critique of the relationship between revolutionaries and the proceeding generations which, in their ritualisation, establish new exploitative hierarchies in their seeming repetition of the actions of their fathers. Ritual doesn’t have to equal ideology, but that doesn’t many rituals don’t fall victim to this tendency.
- Continuing with the use of animals (again, not necessarily reflecting the intentions of Eisenstein), I thought the parallel images of the cow being slaughtered and the proletariat being massacred worked on a number of levels: 1) to the bourgeoisie, the workers are disposable; 2) they are also regarded as mere animals (this point parallels the argument made by Lewis Gordon, interpreting Fanon, in my post about Latin American theory: namely that the struggle for the oppressed is often not to be regarded as equal, but first to be regarded as other); 3) there is a cycle of exploitation. It is third point that I find interesting, and perhaps less obvious. The people slaughtering the cow seem to be workers, just like those in the factory. The bourgeoisie ignites a chain of exploitation, beginning with the working class and infecting all social and biological (or perhaps ecological is a better term) relations. The working class then exploits ‘nature’ in its struggle to survive. This point works in two directions: the working class, in desperation, engages in unsustainable husbandry practices in order to merely survive, or in hopes of rising to the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. From the other direction, this highlights the political significance of husbandry practices: the cultivation of sustainable practices in the political economy of food is an important aspect of empowering the working class. I guess now we just need to enlist Jamie Oliver and Michael Pollan in starting the revolution…

Article in Film-Philosophy

Todd McGowan’s article in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy is quite good, though a classic example of what Baidou would call the didactic aesthetic.  Entitled, ‘Hegel and the Impossibility of the Future in Science Fiction Cinema,’ it is quite good though curiously doesn’t mention Althusser.  This might seem like a typical critique coming from someone who likes Althusser, but in my defense the piece devotes a significant amount of space to arguing that it is not possible to think the outside of an ideology while within that ideology (and since one is always in an ideology all thought is limited by an ideology).  I would take issue with this point as well.  Having said that, for an article that says a lot that I disagree with, it is very interesting and warrants consideration.

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 3)

In the previous posts I used Peter Greenaway’s four tyrannies to analyse two films that I think engage film as a medium.  At the beginning of this series, I posed a dilemma: if I am right and film’s goal should be to challenge its limits as a medium, what does this mean for regular movies?

I think a series of qualifications need to be made before further addressing this impasse.  First, Greenaway’s criteria are only one example of film challenging itself.  For instance, the famous long take in Children of Men does not challenge the tyranny of the camera in the sense described by Greenaway.  It makes the viewer aware of this tyranny.  It refuses to allow the viewer respite from the rapidly unfolding action.

Second, there are films which are challenging, but are not necessarily challenging as films.  The films of Michael Haneke are an example of this case.  While one might argue that it is challenging in that he rejects cinematic conventions, I would respond that he challenges cinematic conventions that are in fact literary conventions illustrated cinematically (I should here admit that I have not yet seen his films and am going on second hand information).  Similarly, the famous money down the toilet scene in The Seventh Continent is disturbing, but I think it is arguable that is disturbing as an image.  A photograph of a similar situation would also be disturbing.

Third, Greenaway does not make room for the figures and films which established these tyrannies.  Eisenstein and Hitchcock could not challenge the tyranny of the camera because they were too busy challenging the capacity of the camera.  That is to say, this present project is historically specific.  I think this allows these films to be appreciated in their own right without diminishing the critical capacity of Greenaway’s schema.

By regular films, I’m talking about what you find in your typical chain cinema complex and probably 90% of what wins Oscars.  In understanding these films, Alain Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics is quite helpful.  Badoiu is describing art’s relationship to truth and he presents four possible understandings of this relationship.  The first two, didactic and romantic, do not bear on the present argument.  The issue arises in the classical and inaesthetic approaches.  The classical approach is, in brief, an Aristotelian position.  Art’s relationship to truth is inconsequential because the purpose of art is not to relate to truth.  As Badiou writes, ‘within the classical schema, art is not a form of thought.  It is entirely exhausted by its act or by its public operation… we could say that in the classical view, art is a public service’ (5).

As I mentioned a few posts back, I am concerned with developing a theory of aesthetics which values art as a distinct practice of thought.  So it would seem that I should reject the classical view.  Badiou’s approach, inaesthetics, is the one that delineates the space for my own (developing) theory.  My question is whether it is acceptable to allow for a classical operation of mediums by differentiating these forms of expression from art.

I love the show House (at least the first few seasons), and there are films that I have an inexplicable attachment to, despite knowing that they are absolutely terrible.  The Transporter movies come to mind.  My instinct is to say that these movies are relatively harmless and that they do operate in a kind of Aristotelian fashion: you sit down, get lost in ridiculous plots, and at the end of the show the predictable resolution provides a cathartic effect.  Maybe we can just call this ‘movies’ and use ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ to describe what Badiou and Greenaway are talking about.

It’s not long, though, before you realise that these films are part of what Badiou calls the state of the situation.  On the one hand, they reinforce practices within mediums which inaesthetic endeavours try to combat.  If I think that film qua film is defined by the tracing and challenging of its limits, then it doesn’t make much sense to say that the films that sit comfortably within these limits are inconsequential.  On the other hand, these films perpetuate logics, values, and narratives that are politically troubling (I should note here that I have a theory that at the heart of all truth procedures is a political core, so I see Greenaway’s project as a political one.  Badiou, at least from what I’ve been able to read, rejects this conflation, but I nonetheless maintain that all truth procedures are disruptive acts of fidelity).  I put this issue to a friend recently and he pointed out that everything we do is complicit in the state of the situation.  Even if I try to live in fidelity to an event, it is unlikely that nothing I do will avoid complicity

In the end, I don’t have an answer.  I’ll just keep watching House while I hope that the next film sent from my Lovefilm queue is Godard or Greenaway.

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 2)

Godard’s Passion is another example of exploding cinema from within. Like Marienbad, the film doesn’t have a traditional plot. Loosely, the film centres on the efforts of enigmatic director, Michel, who is attempting to complete an increasingly expensive film. A secondary story is spliced into this one, featuring a young woman organising the workers of a factory.

Lets again consider Greenaway’s tyrannies, though without the convenience of a neat schema like Vincendeau’s. First, there is the tyranny of the text. In case you miss Godard’s rejection of traditional narrative, Michel frequently has conversations about plot. Potential financial backers ask for a summary of the story and he erupts; there is no need for a plot, why do they always ask for the plot, etc. The film consists of recreations of paintings, so the scenes on set often involve motionless figures caught in dramatic lighting. In the other story line, there is a scene during a meeting of the workers, where one of the women, Hannah, is reading lines from socialist literature. Whilst the text makes sense in the context of a workers’ meeting, its mechanical presentation can be taken as a rejection of texts determinative presence.

Second, and perhaps most effectively, is Godard’s rejection of the frame. A good deal of the film takes place on the set of the film being directed by Michel. Often the scene transitions from one framed world to another; that is, from the frame of the camera in the film to the frame of the camera filming the camera in the film. The characters of the scene sometimes shatter this border. The film is constantly reminding us that there is something occurring outside, before, and after the frame that presently restricts the gaze.

Third, is Godard’s rejection of character. It is an ensemble cast and the viewer’s identification is left shifting from character to character. In terms of Greenaway’s schema, this point is the weakest in the film.

Finally, Godard effectively rejects the tyranny of the camera. Even in the film, the director views the film one of his two lovers, Isabelle, who is in the film. As they watch the film on a screen surrounded by audio-visual equipment, we are exposed to the malleable nature of the celluloid medium.

All in all, I find Godard’s effort, in this instance, less effective. Granted, Godard did not start out to address Greenaway’s criteria, but he did want to transgress cinematic convention and, in my opinion, this effort is thwarted by his heavy-handed approach to the rejection of plot. In relation to the ‘thin line between brilliance and intellectual pretension, I think Godard falls on the side of pretension. The film lacks the geometric sophistication and deft touch of Resnais in Marienbad.

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 1)

If this post had a subtitle, it might be ‘Travelling the thin line between brilliance and intellectual pretension.’  Picking up on my invocation of Peter Greenaway’s four tyrannies towards the end of my previous post, I want to examine two films that I watched this weekend, and suggest that they both represent refusals of these tyrannies.  Yet I find that demonstrating these refusals brings one to an impasse: does this understanding of cinema negate the legitimacy of ‘normal’ movies?

 

First, it is helpful to recall that Greenaway suggests that there are four tyrannies that govern film:

 

1)      the tyranny of the text

2)      the tyranny of the frame

3)      the tyranny of the actor

4)      the tyranny of the camera

 

This weekend I watched Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, which I’ll just refer to as Marienbad for hereon).  The film garnered quite a lot of attention upon its release in France.  The producers initially rejected it, so Resnais resorted to showing it in a series of small screenings attended by the likes of Breton, Sartre, and Deleuze.  Indeed, according to the presentation given by Ginette Vincendeau (I love bonus features), Deleuze found this film to be a prime example of time-image.

 

Vincendeau also presents the film as a series of four refusals, which, conveniently enough, line up quite well with Greenaway’s four tyrannies:

 

1)      the refusal of plot

2)      the refusal of point of view

3)      the refusal of chronology

4)      the refusal of naturalism

 

Roughly, it could be argued that 1 and 3 refuse the tyranny of the text, 2 and 4 refuse the tyranny of the actor, and 3 and 4 refuses the tyranny of the camera.  The tyranny of the frame kind of disrupts the neatness of this schema, but more on that later.  A brief note: for simplicities sake, I will use the letters assigned to the characters in the original book by Robbe-Grillet. X is the male narrator, A is the woman he speaks to, and M is maybe her husband.

 

The film’s plot, to the extent it can be said to have one, could be summarised as a man’s attempt to convince a woman that they had a love affair the previous year (or at least some previous year).  Yet there are constant challenges to this summary.  We’re never sure if the two actually have actually met before.  We’re not sure if it was actually a love affair or if it was some form of sexual violence.  If it was sexual violence, we’re not sure if it was perpetrated by X or if A is responding to some repressed sexual experience.  At times X seems to dictating the plot; scenes appear and he rejects them as wrong (with it never being clear if this is because the scene didn’t happen or because it’s not happening the way he wants it to).  The scenes cut back and forth suddenly.  Sometimes the background changes while the characters’ clothing remains the same.  Sometimes their clothing changes but the background remains the same.  To the extent the film has a present, we’re unsure if it lasts minutes or weeks.  Thus Marienbadeffectively casts off the chains of nineteenth century literature, which Greenaway claims sits in the seat of power in the tyranny of the text.

 

It is not very long into the film that we begin to doubt the reliability of X’s narration.  For one, A seems to find the retelling unconvincing.  Moreover, as mentioned above, we cannot trust the narration of a character who changes the story to meet his desires or dubious memory.  Marienbad, in rejecting the authenticity of the narrator, leaves the film without a trustworthy point of view.  This situation could be contrasted to Fight Club or The Usual Suspects, where, respectively, we join the narrator in the journey to his realisation or are tricked by the clever narration of the story.  The rejection of the character amounts to a rejection of the actor. This rejection is further demonstrated by the refusal of naturalism.  The characters move in an odd stilted fashion.  The character A frequently seems to obey X’s description of scenes, mechanically moving into position.  A scene in the ballroom depicts dancers moving all in step with one another.  As Vincendeau puts it, in regard to A, what we watch is not a bad actress giving a bad performance, but a good actress giving a bad performance intentionally.

 

At the end of the previous post, I explained that the tyranny of the camera suggests that for too long the camera has determined film.  Marienbad refuses this tyranny in its refusal of chronology.  The editing process is key; it constructs the story that circles the absence of a plot.  It constructs odd situations.  We find the character standing in a garden scarred by their harsh shadows, but the geometric trees lining the avenue cast no shadow.  So the editor participates in the refusal of naturalism as much as the awkward motions of the actors.

 

 The tyranny of the frame is the only form of slavery to escape Vincendeau’s schematisation of Resnais’ triumph.  I think the overcoming of the frame comes in the frequent use of mirrors to create shots containing infinite regresses.  The characters are seen disappearing into infinity.  I suppose it could be argued that this infinity remains bound by the frame, both of the screen and of the mirror, but I think it remains arguable that the frequent reflections manage to at least challenge the frame’s dominance.  Alternatively, perhaps the tyranny of the frame is cast off in the final scene where A and X escape the screen, leaving it empty save for the solemn figure of M.

 

This second option is underscored in an interpretation favoured by French writer Pierre Andelotthat.  It sees X as the only self-conscious character in a cinematic world.  X is thus attempting to liberate A, dare we say, from Greenaway’s tyrannies, defeating text, actor, and camera before escaping the frame.  This fits with the idea of X as director, instructing A and rejecting scenes until at last he frees A.  The couple renders the camera powerless which, as they elude the hold of the frame, refocuses on M, who remains victim to celluloid.

 

I found Marienbad a thoroughly enjoyable film.  Regarding the subtitle, it manages to destroy cinematic convention without slipping into self-indulgence.  The film is beautiful full of geometric shapes and movement that are as much a part of the film as the dialogue.

 

This post is getting quite long, so I’ll leave my thoughts on Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion and the discussion of my impasse to a future post.