Ulus Baker
(B-zone: Becoming Europe And Beyond Anselm Franke (Editor),
Actar/Kunst-Werke Berlin (August 15, 2006), sayfa 298-305)
Between the images of Vertov (or Eisenstein) and those of Tarkovsky or Sokurov
there lies the entire history of the experimental Soviet Union, with the
Muscovite Purgatory, the Second World War, Stalinism and Zhdanovism, the
Khruschev Affair, and the Brezhnev's Era.... This is somehow a possible reading
of recent history, quite difficult in terms of writing, since there are more
people still alive, making the historiography the part of a collective memory.
The first image was constructivist and constitutive, aiming at the continuation
of a Revolution, that of the Great October, and the second was that of the
anxiety, the reneval of the Chekhovian boredom, and of the Foucaldian
disciplinary society.
The same was present in the case of Neorealismo, where the Citta Aperta was
in fact not so much "open" , where the Pax Romana failed to preserve
its own evergreen destination, with the domination of poverty, crime and
purposelesness... And against the radical hopes of constructive cinema, in
Hollywood or elsewhere, almost present in the revolutionary Soviet
cinematography, Bazin comes and says that with less montage, there comes a
supplement of reality, which tells us that action, individual or collective, is
disabled in the post-war society, that we have to witness it, that we tend to
become visionaries of what happens.
The Deleuzian perspective on the cinema gives the account: there is a
missing, philosophical image in between these two historical images, or
moments, and that this is a kind of passage, from movement to time, describing
motion no longer as action but rather as its own impossibility, its own crisis,
whereupon the duration, the Bergsonian "duree" rewrites itself.
That such a non-present image is fully philosophical and conceptual, is the
Deleuzian thesis, contested by a figure like Godard, who believes that one has
to do films before writing. We leave the debate alike, while some of the
partenaries are dead, and try to orient ourselves towards the beyond of
Deleuzi's time-image, probably that of videography.
Bonitzer and Godard, after those who were able to analyse and re-analyse
his own films in the perspective of a conscientiouss cinematography, even
within the blindness of the unconscious, that is, Eisenstein or Epstein, have
been ones of cogitos who were aware of what they did in the cinema, that is,
they engineered what they call the hors-champs, the off-screen. Or we know that
between Vertov and Sokurov, there lies an off-screen which is the entire
history of the Soviet Union and of its outside, the entire Universe...
The power to do something is not making the unmakeable, writing the
unwritible, showing the unshowable -it is rather, like in the case of Maurice
Blanchot, writing the thing which cannot be presented without absolutely being
written. This is the writing of death, of its impossibility, or something which
cannot be said as part of the empirical or visible experience. This was
Blanchot's strive to redefine modern literature, after Kafka or Blanchot,
paralleled with the cinematographico-literary experiment of the parlours of the
nouveau roman, Duras and Robbe-Grillet.
Blanchot's motto, the "parler c'est pas voir", the "speaking
is not seeing" has been encountered by the Foucaldian response:
"voir, c'estpasparler", "seeing is not speaking"... This is
the essential "reversion" of Blanchot's Kantian search for the "higher
faculty of speaking". But Blanchot's search remains on the Cartesian, that
is pre-Kantian moment: it doesn't ask for the reverse. One should ask
"what is the higher faculty of seeing" together with the question
"what is the higher faculty of speaking".
Is it possible, then, to approach the thing as Blanchot, seeking a
non-empirical level of speech, where one can only say something which could
never be seen, and its reverse? Blanchot worked for literature, searching for
the Aufhebung of ordinary speech structures: We are noiw working for finding
the conditions and possibilites of a "higher faculty of seeing",
which is at the same time an ability to create visibilities, to make visible
what is invisible...
Since Kant we live in a world where every idea has to have a
spatio-temporal determination, and no idea is present without having its
structures or institutions. This is the exact definition of our modernity. A
spatio-temporal determination of an idea is its image, and depends on the
faculty of imagination, which suffers from the idea of the sublime, if not of
the idea of the beatiful. Nietzsche recalls that the Jesuit Order or the modern
state organizations could be called as works of art, without any extremist
sublimation. The idea in modernity is nothing without its institutions, or, in
Kantian saying, its spatio-temporal determinations...
Hollywood is an institution, the spatio-temporal determination of the ideas
of Thalberg, of Griffith, of Chaplin and of the American Dream and of what
opposes it: it is "realism" finding its environment and its
geographico-historical integrity. In the same manner, when Lenin declared
cinema as the overall master of the new art, the proletarian one against the
bourgeois, "realism" tended to become a relationship of the
representation with a supposed reality, a reality which is a becoming, a
nothing-yet-there...
The starting point of the second project seems to be already clear --it is
part of the theme we have so much discussed above and lies at the origin of the
history of the cinema (and Godard perhaps is right in defining this discussion
as a "unique" one in the said history). And after all, whence Godard
has engaged himself in making a history of cinema, this could mean that this
history is accomplished and cinema has done what it is supposed to do. This is
because from a Hegelian viewpoint, a history can be made only after the
accomplishment, as the parable about the owl of Minerva would say. Interviewed
by the film-philosopher and his friend Serge Daney, Godard maintains that there
is truly an "end" of the cinema, which should not be conceived as an
accomplishment, but rather as a kind of relative failure. This is why Godard
seems to believe that a history (or, rather a "story") should be accounted
when the thing is still alive, when it possesses still chances and paths of
continuation and development --so, we are far from such positions of declaring
"ends", or "deaths" --the death of the author, the end of
history and the like...
We believe that the polemics between Vertov and Eisenstein are rightly
concerned in the veritable discussion about the "essence" of the
cinema (a "sane" discussion was saying Godard), just because it was
about what is cinema, what it ought to be, and what it will become (or, more
importantly, "what it could become"). Perhaps there is, from a
retrospective viewpoint, a piece of naiveté in the positions of both of these
authors, Vertov and Eisenstein, since they seem wholeheartedly believing to the
absolute powers of cinematography. It was for them a completely new medium,
capable to appeal existence, spirits, and souls, capable to destroy the being,
or to reinvent it, and including language, it can reach horizons all beyond any
superior literary arts.
Or, one should ask: why, while not denying to cinematography such a
conviction of "absolute" power, Dziga Vertov has attempted to
suppress an entire "dramatic" and "fictional" domain which
was already established in those years in the art of cinema? This point is essential
to understand not only the Vertovian point of view in these discussions, but
also to grasp the essence of cinema. A possible answer to this question will
provide an understanding of the subsequent re-definitions of cinema, and its
multiple paths of evolution, and also why every cinematographic innovation had
only two occasion to emerge: aesthetically, from avant-garde positions, and
technologically, from grand industry. If avant-garde means the constructive
destruction of older, traditional and routinized schemes of conservative art,
Vertov's positions is there.
As we have already mentioned, cinematography offered a function of
"documenting" in its earliest instance, in the hands of Lumière
Brothers. Vertov, at first sight, belongs precisely to this wing of the
development of cinematograhy. And when the idea of montage appeared (Méliès),
film-editing and dramatic narration were almost naturally, and easily
introduced, thus creating the fictional cinema. On the one side there was the
fictional cinema, narrating stories, creating dreams, which theoretically seems
to be limitless in creation, and on the other side, there was the
"documentary" filmmaking, under the strict constraints of what is
called as "reality". Actually, Eisenstein who seems to respect both
sides (or wings) seems to have reason, in his polemics against Kino-Eyes. Or
one should grasp also the Vertovian point of view, if one is not naive enough
to believe that Vertov was not even aware of such a banal thing, and ask why he
insistently and regularly denies in cinematography the fictional-dramatic
element.
The issue can only be perceived when we understand exactly the points where
Vertov has been criticized by Eisenstein and Esther Shub on the one hand, and
the Soviet Comissary of Arts on the other, and later, by the doctrinaries of
the "socialist realism", which, sooner or later will eliminate Vertov
from his job. With regards to the existing documents, this appears to be a
"secret history" and is expressed in general through films which were
planned but not filmed, through those which were filmed and banned, but
especially through those which were made by the orders of the regime. Hence,
one should try to read the "intervals" of the images of these films.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, Vertov either appears as an avant-garde founder
of cinematography, or as a simple propagandist of the Sovietic regime. He has
even let himself biased by the Soviet propaganda, while using properly and
ingeniously the possibilities of the cinematographic apparatus --the montage,
and camera techniques. He is quite talented, but he sacrified his talents to
the orders of the communist regime, and so goes on... Officially, such a point
of view is erroneous and can be precisely refuted already at the level of
official history --he is a filmmaker who was no longer capable, by 1930's to
make his own films, just now working as an archive-worker in the State Film
Archive. He might be one of the persons who have invented the idea of
propaganda (agit-poiezds and the like), but what he has done in cinema goes far
beyond this. I believe Vertov intended a domain which lies beyond simple
"realism" in cinema (which is already there), trying to reach a fully
and absolutely "poetic" values of which the newborn cinematography
was capable --and this is the point which makes useless the wild criticisms of
Esther Shub in this period. Eisenstein and Shub seem to share a common
prejudice: that the "documentary" film, or a newsreel should not use
the techniques of montage, that montage was allowed only in fictional films. Deleuze
gives the best answer to such a critique: Vertov has been one, due to his
cinematographic experiences and ideas, one of the people who best understood
how human mind (or brains) operates and thereby, he profoundly understood that
cinematography would not work merely at the level of the montage of images. The
more important thing was the ensemble or the sum total of the relationships
between all of the images, and Vertov was able to make his films in such an
order. This order was not constituted by images themselves, but by the
"intervals" between images --that is, in a space consisting in a
complex set of relationships. This space is defined by Vertov through his
doctrine of the "intervals". For instance, the figure of the cameramen
in his "Chelovek s Kinoapparatom" (Man with the Movie-Camera), i.e.
his brother Mikhail Kaufman appears as a float-in-being, to borrow Virilio's
notion to designate the state of affairs in modern "dromologic" world
--as "beings of speed", as industrial worker or urban dweller; on the
other side, there is the figure of her Vertov's wive, Elizaveta Svilova in her
editing-room, an attentive eye of "slowness", slowing down and
envisaging the flux of images to find out there the appropriate
"intervals", constitutive of the whole of the film. Kino-Glaz shows
us how filmmaking is not simply for Vertov an act of seeing, but especially of
constructing intervals and relationships, which justifies the intensive,
rhythmic and poetic use of montage techniques. Thus Vertov's films appear as
the articulation of the operations of human brain through the means of the
visual world.
Eisenstein's position in the polemic is still more severe: one should not
film through "eyes" (the Kino-Glaz) but through the mind (a cogito of
the film). This argument is a singular, unique moment not only in the evolution
of cinematography, but also in the history of civilization. Eisenstein believes
that an art-work is the only supportable "violence" --it will
directly strike the brain, creating in the mind a necessity of thinking (a
Cine-Fist, instead of Cine-Eye). Moreover, this fist will strike not only
individual minds, but the collective mind of the masses.
Or, is it possible to "strike the minds" without having mastered
the powers of the eye? And if "Cine-Fist" today tended to become a
major expressive tool in advertizing and clip aesthetics, Eisenstein is
certainly not the main responsible of this, but the "societies of
spectacle" and the capitalist regime of signifying through images --the
television and video techniques alike...
Or Deleuze, thinking the cinema through the perspectives of the couple
Vertov-Bergson, reveals at a moment just another regime of images, of which
cinema has been capable in the long run, mastering it as a determinant factor
in the transformation of cinematographic art: this is what he calls, after
Bergson again, as the "time-image", which means to restore the
relationships (intervals) that are beyond time. One can take simply an image
from Vertov, and another one from Eisenstein (successively or in a more sophisticated
manner, graphically, through different rhythms) --and this is the way in which
Godard has established his great documentary Histoire(s) du cinéma-- up to the
saturation of the entire screen. Evidently, the saturation of the screen (a
plein body) is a quite complex phenomenon, and Deleuze already discusses it in
the chapter concerning "framing" (cadrage). For instance, there can
be an "overdose" of an image seen in projection on the screen --say a
dramatic face-- and one feel, on the table of montage, the need to partly
"avoid" the long tenure of exposure of this face. This face should
then be "repeated" --as cut with other images, things, or sounds.
Repetition is affectively the simplest way to avoit overdose of expression and
of the culmination of a feeling. There are many other complex montage
techniques, in fiction films as well as in documentaries, to avoid such an
over-saturation of the image in cinema and video.
Or, already in the logic of repetition and difference (repetition cannot be
maintained without making sense of differences) Vertov did so much things that
from the standpoint of Deleuze's discussion on cinema, this early Soviet
filmmaker appears as the summary total of the entire cinema, and beyond it, as
the one anticipating more developed techniques, such as video and multimedia
(digital images). Why? Just because it is a quite difficult idea to construct
an identification of an organization of images with the topography of the
brain. Even Spinoza was aware that "thinking" was nothing but the
correspondence between the "order of ideas" and the "order of
things". And just assume that the brain is not working, as a Hegelian
would like it, in a dialectical manner. A non-dialectical function is the one
in which every stimulation creates in the mind a topographic unit, which has a
quite complex relationship with all other units, like memories, perceptions and
ideas. Eisenstein too was aware of this possibility --but for him, just as in
Hegelian dialectics, the film that remains as a topological ensemble of units
works dialectically, moving from an idea to another, superior idea, from an
inferior order of passion (pathos, he would say) to another, superior plane of
passion, and than, to another, higher idea etc. Already at the Eisensteinian
level of dialectics, the Whole in cinema can be conceived as the work of the
automaton spiritiualis (the spiritual automate of Spinoza).
However, Eisenstein's conception can only be as a starting point. He
believes that a film is a "totality", a whole --in other words, it is
"given" to the spectator as a thing to be thought upon. In other
words, a film is a "thought" to be thought once more by the
spectator. This means that the film, before being seen by spectators is already
a Cogito, though potentially. A film "thinks". In the same way, we
can say that a book, before we read it, is already "thinking", while
the same cannot be said for feeling or perceiving. Only with reference to
Gabriel Tarde's idea of inter-cerebral machinery we can solve such a paradox:
and we now ask the question "what is a film", as he asked "what
is a book". It is not easy to say, when we are "reading" a book,
we are just simply "thinking" it. We are simply "reading"
it, and any hermeneutic understanding fails. And it is just the same for a
scientific article, or a fiction...
We have not to make here the same error with hermeneutician philosophers.
They are assuming that a book, or a film is something
"understandable" only insofar as they assume behind it the existence
of a mind or consciousness similar to ours. Thus, a book or a film (or any
cultural, "meaningful" production) can only be grasped as an intended
and conscious expression of a "subject" --who is the
"author". What the hermeneutics fails to grasp is that one cannot
"understand" Proust himself (this is just a way of speaking) but
rather, and simply, the text effectively written by him. Structuralists were
the ones who ever conceived such a necessary distinction --yet they grasped it
in an insufficient way: I am watching a film and it creates in me a chain of
thoughts, ideas and affects. This chain can be different in different
individuals. But what is more important is that it always occurs. And when one
perceives that there are many relative chains of the kind, changing from one
person to another, one should also perceive that there is an immanent
"variation" in the film itself (or in a book, or any other thing).
One then assumes that this element in variation is nothing less but what the
author intended to express in his or her work. It is the "intention"
of the author. Or what materially happens is simply my body and mind are
watching a film or reading a book. We can evidently develop a closer
relationship with the author, to reach more depths in the understanding of a
picture, of a film, of a novel. Yet there is something irreducible which
remains: if I don't need to encounter the author, there is something
"conserved" in a book, in a film or a painting, which is the element
of "thinking" in the materiality of the object of work.
This viewpoint can reach even the level of Cézanne's experience, through
which he was able to say that "the landscape I painted was perceiving
before me..." One should note that the distinction (or even opposition)
between "thinking" and "perceiving" comes from the everyday
looseness of these notions. One should only consider the existence of active
and passive perceptions, as well as active and passive ideas. This is why we
have difficulties in discerning what is perceived by a landscape, and what is
perceived by the landscape picture, there, painted by Cézanne. They cannot be
evenly considered under the same heading. That a film is --potentially--
thinking seems to us as a childish thought, or merely as a metaphor, since we
believe that only human beings can think. Or, if they are capable to create in
us a series of thoughts, ideas and perceptions (including affects and emotions
= Kant's "sublime") human artifacts as well as ordered and inordered
rhythms of nature (respectively the mathematical and the dynamic
"sublimes" of Kant) can be said to think. Homeros is in Iliada and
Odysseia, not the inverse...
Some positions of thought can be easily clarified at this point: an
Existentialist for instance would say that what we can perceive is already
human; it is a subject, and it belongs to, or is produced by a human being,
defined as a conscious subject. This is why a work do not think --only the Ego,
the "I" can think, can imagine, can perceive...
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