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n the occasion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s centenary celebration, the 18^th issue of Cinemascope explores the complex relation between the art of the italian director and the mystery of reality, a realm inviting the spectator to get lost into the ambiguity of the image. All the essays of the current issue are completely absorbed by this dimension. The key words are: challenge, awkwardness, immersion, syndrome, transition. These are not definitions, but, above all, some ways to investigate a fleeting territory where the sense is never unique, but always fragmented and multiform. This ability to observe and penetrate the world produces surprising effects in the universe of Antonioni.

In The Purposeful Awkwardness of Continuity Editing, Marshall Deutelbaum examines the opening of L’eclisse (1962), defined by the violation of the 180-degree rule, and by an assembly of the shots “less than perfectly realistic”. The first ten minutes of the movie, “an encyclopedia of purposefully flawed analytical editing”, forces the audience to consciously establish the spatial relationships and to focus the attention on the image: denying the illusion allowed by the continuity editing, Antonioni reveals the experience of puzzling lived reality, as confirmed in the famous final sequence.

L’eclisse, and particularly its striking ending, is also at the center of Antonioni’s Cinema as Being-in-the-world, a Heideggerean analysis carried on by William C. Pamerleau. The author suggests that, viewing Antonioni’s work through the lens provided by Heidegger’s concepts, we can appreciate how this style of filmmaking permits to understand who we really are, allows us to assume a critical position on our own world: Antonioni’s being-in-the-world means to find “our own world before us”. More than any of the other films of the italian director, L’Eclisse makes use of mundane objects and environments in order to exceed their usual symbols, and it is not surprising that L’Eclisse is the most evoked title of an issue focused on the Antonioni’s gaze on reality, a movie, as Hamish Ford points out in his article, in which realism and modernism converge in a provocative way. With Challenging Realism in the Early 1960s Films, Ford works on the paradoxical Antonioni’s modern realism, visible in the masterpieces of the Sixties -L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L‘eclisse and Deserto rosso (1964) – a “Tetralogy” rendering the world “through a focus on the objects, places, spaces and forms of the physical reality in front of the camera as transformed by its inherently artificial gaze”. In these movies of Antonioni the reality becomes more imposing and ineffable than ever.
Also Henry M. Taylor, author of Blow-up and the Kennedy Assassination Syndrome deals with knowledge and epistemology of the representation of reality, and seeks to elaborate how Blow-up (1966) retains its fascination by conjuring corresponding fantasies of plot and conspiracy. Anticipating the later attempts, inspired by the Kennedy assassination, to analyze films and images in order to provide visual evidences, Blow-up warns us that “reality is not discovered or revealed, but constructed”. After all, the construction of reality is an important direction in Antonioni’s work since his early documentary activity: in the Italian cinema of the post-war, Antonioni is sure enough who has involved oneself with the documentary in depth. This experience, even if quantitatively limited, signs the Antonioni’s debut behind the camera, and offers important reading keys about his aesthetics and relation with the reality.

The issue ends with an analyses by Roberto Cavallini devoted to L’amorosa menzogna, one of the early documentaries by Antonioni. In this article this short film is read through the Jacques Rancière’s speculations. In particular, the author argues that this brief documentary is, like the French philosopher said, a “labour of fiction”, not less than a fiction movie. Employing the words of Cavallini, “the labour of fiction becomes probably Antonioni’s unusual melodramatic attitude on how to tell authentic stories through the invention of lies”.

As a philosophical thriller, Blow-up (1966, UK), Michelangelo Antonioni’s first foray into filmmaking outside Italy, marks a milestone in the evolution of the modern conspiracy film as it would emerge in the 1970s, by simultaneously anticipating and problematising the latter avant la lettre.[ii] Straddling both mainstream and art-house cinema in an elliptical story set in the heyday of fashionable and hedonist Swinging London, Antonioni employs what are by now stereotypical elements of the mystery and thriller genres, including the figure of the investigative protagonist, only to have their trajectories fizzle out, thereby leaving the spectator with permanent gaps of knowledge and transforming suspense into allegory.

Having been the object of countless discussions, examinations and interpretations, it might seem that Blow-up would have by now exhausted the scandalous fascination it once held as the coolest and hippest movie around. With its original contexts now long a thing of the past, the replacement of analogue film by CGI and digitisation, and a new global configuration of big-budget blockbusters as well as low-budget art-house and genre productions across a broad range of media and as part of interactive “convergence culture”[iii], it comes as a refreshing surprise that Antonioni’s mystery and puzzle piece is still capable of firing the enthusiasm and imagination of contemporary film students.[iv]

Beyond the superficial allure of its immediate cultural settings, Blow-up addresses crucial questions of how we perceive and construct reality and how this reality is always in danger of turning into a private delusional fixation, the reverse of which is a dissolution into meaninglessness. As such, I would argue, and beyond the constraints of modernism, Blow-up‘s epistemological puzzle and investigation into the nature of the photographic medium and its relation to reality still very much fascinate us today.

Thus the film’s famous centrepiece depicts the protagonist, a photographer, enlarging a series of pictures he has covertly taken of a couple in a London park. Contemplating the blown-up prints, he comes across what appears to be a murder plot. But how reliable is his visual evidence, and did the crime really take place? While it is at first suggested that enhancing a photograph reveals more of reality, as the film progresses this idea is deconstructed and photography’s representational claim put into question. Instead it would seem that the protagonist has fallen prey to his desire for the imposition of—ultimately arbitrary—narrative construction and meaning.

As if possessing an uncanny Lacanian knowledge in the real, Blow-up effectively appears to predict the many attempts since the late 1960s by Kennedy assassination buffs and researchers to find evidence of a conspiracy to kill JFK by blowing up and enhancing the existing amateur film material and photos taken on the day of the assassination and which purportedly reveal the presence of the “second shooter,” the eminence grise behind the “Grassy Knoll,” who supposedly fired the fatal head shot that killed the president.

This essay therefore seeks to elaborate how Antonioni’s film retains its fascination by conjuring corresponding fantasies of plot and conspiracy, while simultaneously revealing and insisting upon the traumatic and open wound of meaninglessness and contingency that gives rise to them in the first place, thereby illuminating the disavowal at play in some of the most persistent JFK assassination theories.

The film’s plot can be briefly summarised. The bored and wealthy London fashion photographer Thomas (David Hemmings, his character remaining unnamed) spends his spare time working on a volume of realistic photos of the working class. During his search for suitable motives to contrast this with, he enters a quiet and isolated park. There he takes pictures of a lonely couple, but is discovered by Jane, the young woman (Vanessa Redgrave, also unnamed) who insistently demands to be handed over the negatives. Thomas makes her the offer of picking them up the next day at his studio. But on the very same day he encounters her at his front door, clamouring for the pictures. Depicting her together with an elderly lover and married man, the incriminating photos must be destroyed. Thomas shows her his studio and has her partly strip to take some stylish shots of her. On her way out, he hands her the wrong set of negatives. During the process of developing and enlarging the black-and-white pictures from the park, he discovers several details in the background (a male figure hiding in the bushes with a pistol in his hand pointing towards the couple) which strongly suggest a murder plot involving the young woman, the apparent assassin in the bushes and the elderly lover as intended victim.

Euphoric, the photographer phones his agent about his discovery, but the latter barely pays attention. Upon enlarging one of the prints, seemingly depicting a corpse lying behind a tree and thus indicating that a real crime actually took place, Thomas—without his camera—returns to the park at nighttime, where he finds the dead body of the man in the blowup. However, back in his studio, someone has broken in and stolen all the negatives. Only a single hidden, vastly enlarged and grainy print remains, now useless in its complete abstraction. The next morning, the corpse in the park has also vanished. On his way out, Thomas passes by a tennis court. A group of anarchic pantomimes, whom we already encountered at the film’s beginning, arrive on a jeep and start miming a game of tennis without rackets or ball. When the imaginary ball flies outside the court, the protagonist after a moment’s hesitation joins in their game and throws the ball back. The film’s final high-angle shot of the lawn shows him fading out and disappearing from the image.

Let us examine the first key scene more closely. After visiting an antiquarian shop the photographer enters a nearby park, vaguely in search of interesting topics. There he spots a lovers’ couple climbing up a slope. He follows them from a distance and reaches an open green with some trees and bordered on either side by fenced-in brush.

We observe the photographer discretely observing the couple. He surreptitiously takes a number of pictures of the park and the isolated couple, hiding behind trees or in the bushes. All we can hear on the soundtrack is the wind rustling through the leaves of the gently swaying trees. Apart from the photographer and the two people in the distance no one can be seen. Several, consciously non-classically composed long shots, partly high-angle and overhead, depict the park’s emptiness, the nothingness, which, as we will eventually realise, represents the ontological base of the film and will later, somewhat reminiscent of sensory deprivation effects, give rise to fantasies and delusional cognitions. Here it is worth recalling Noël Burch’s conception of off-screen space, according to which the longer we are confronted with empty on-screen space—i.e. space without characters to fill and subordinate it to the action—, the more off-screen space grows and expands in the imaginary.[v]

The 14 shots on the lawn prior to the photographer’s discovery by the woman have a total duration (at 24 fps) of 178 seconds or 12.7 seconds per shot.[vi] By Antonioni’s standards—in view of his repeated use of temps mort in his Italian films, most famously in the tetralogy L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962) and Il Deserto rosso (1964)—this represents a relatively fast cutting pace, but not, however, in relation to classical Hollywood filmmaking (where average shot lengths would have been well under ten seconds). The takes here seem to last longer than they do in reality, because so little happens in the individual shots. What predominates is observation and perception-images, with an onlooker who through the reflexive mechanism of re-entry is himself being observed by the enunciation: the photographer’s relation to his pictures equals the relation of the filmmaker to his film. There is no dialogue here, no extra-diegetic music, and we have hardly any sounds—with the exception, as already noted, of the very present breeze and rustling foliage as a marker of the ephemeral real. There is an emptiness, a minimum of action, a vacuum, which by itself creates a sense of expectation, but which for the time being is not fulfilled. Antonioni—himself also a photographer—is not really interested in sustaining a strong arc of tension, but more concerned with observing the observer, with the images as images, and with the intersection and relation of the two visual media film and still photography, the former in colour, the latter in black and white. The gap between the two media will enhance the possibility of the imaginary seeping in and giving birth to the fantasy of a conspiratorial plot.

It is noteworthy that the film’s chosen camera perspectives are not identical with those of the photographer—an important aspect, as not only here but throughout the film the question of perspective both in narrative and visual terms plays a crucial role. We vaguely anticipate that something will happen, without yet knowing what exactly. We are in a state of curiosity and internal or atmospheric tension. In this respect it is very noticeable how Antonioni stages the emptiness of spaces, which are accorded primacy over character-centrered action. This is particularly evident in two almost identical shots depicting the image’s blankness with the two lower thirds simply showing us the lawn: both quite unorthodox compositions that eschew visual balance. A long and high-angle shot literally suggests an omniscient, almost divine perspective, with the enunciation being explicitly marked. Neither can we see what the photographer’s interest is in the couple. What is he looking for? What’s so fascinating about this setting? Perhaps his intention is not discovery, but, on the contrary, to provoke something? Will something materialise in the vacuity of these images?

Alarmed by the photographer’s voyeuristic intrusion, Jane runs after him as he is about to leave the park and addresses him. She is obviously so intent on being undisturbed and unobserved in her private sphere that she first asks him to give her the film, and, when this plea produces no results, pathetically attempts to wrest the camera away from him. Her urgency seems exaggerated and serves to arouse suspicion and to establish a mystery: what is so special about these pictures? This is the plot point 1 or first turning point. The relatively banal snapshots have all of a sudden been invested with new interest. It is the woman’s curious desire which establishes an investigative narrative driven by a lack of knowledge and the desire on the part of the protagonist to find out about the secret suddenly connected to his images. Through contagion her desire to obtain the photos will become his desire to know what is hidden in them. So this is also a story about control or the loss thereof.

To get into the possession of the pictures taken of herself and her lover, Jane visits Thomas in his studio (midpoint). The erotic rapprochement of the two ends in a mutual deception: the photographer gives her the wrong film, while she—as we will find out—leaves a false phone number with him. In the subsequent sequence (0’58“05’’–1’09“23’’) the protagonist develops and enlarges his photos. From this point on until his sensational “discovery” and futile attempt at communicating it there are 44 shots with an average duration of 16 seconds (at 24 fps). This stretched slowness is deliberate. Apart from some barely noticeable ellipses regarding the time for processing film and prints, Antonioni stresses real time including temps mort, and Carlo Di Palma’s camera achieves elegant, mobile perception-images. Later lounging on his sofa and smoking a cigarette, Thomas in a mixture of absentmindedness and concentration contemplates two prints hung side by side on the wall. Suddenly he seems to notice something, straightens up and leans forward.

The photos want something from him; they return his gaze and become visual traps in that he encounters his own look as that of a crime. The process of transforming the real in motion into motionless images is reversed. The photographer’s point of view pans across the two pictures of the couple in the park, simultaneously zooming in. In this connecting movement we can already recognise the attempt of retrospectively narrativising events and giving them meaning, even if we don’t know yet what the photographer is specifically interested in. Repeatedly gazing at the black and white prints, his look is at the same time not identical with Antonioni’s camera observing the protagonist looking. Connected through his filmic gaze, Thomas successively combines the separate photos into a sequence of shots. Linking the diegetic looks of the couple as in cinematic continuity editing, he makes further enlargements and arranges them on the wall in matching order. The thereby gradually resulting narrative emplotment simultaneously refers to the conspiracy and its retroactive reconstruction: creating a narrative is thus synonymous with the forging of a plot. We note here an inherent affinity between the classical Aristotelian structure of the dramatically closed film and conspiracy at the diegetic level: the structural analogy between intrigue and drama not only consists in the conspiracy making for a good plot, but also in that a drama with its characters forming a tight ensemble appears better integrated than a narrative in which constantly new and unknown characters are introduced.[vii]

The photographer’s look is lured by the look of the woman as a form of excess, and by the question where and at which object she is looking, aside and away from her elderly lover. Because what is disquieting about these pictures is the look of the active, dominant woman, who—unlike the models Thomas uses and abuses for his fashion photography—does not present herself as the object of the male gaze, but is driven by her own, dangerous desire. But what does she desire? Why had she deperately tried to snatch his camera, what is to be seen in these pictures, which secret is held by the negatives? Through a continuity of looks Thomas attempts to construct a story to reveal the riddle. It is the emptiness, the constitutive lack or—to use Lacan’s terminology—the phallus which motivates the photographer’s search. He strives to locate it in the image and to fill its space with positivity. And he will find it (a possible sexual interpretation of this sequence will be discussed later).

Strictly speaking we are dealing here with four semiotic levels of reality: 1. the park as such as absent referent, in which Antonioni’s camera filmed the previous events; 2. the events in the park as depicted by Blow-up in moving pictures (the first order of signs); 3. the black and white photos as such which have frozen in time single instances and views of the park, thereby having to be understood as both documents and as medial transposition (the second order of signs); 4. and finally, again captured in moving pictures, the photographer’s narrativizing look at his photos (the third order of signs). On the one hand, the photos do not represent reality as such but only excerpts of it; on the other, these visual representations are necessary to lend the ephemeral events in the park a stable reality. But images always either signify too little or too much; they require contextualisation to gain proper meaning. And this genuine meaning is only produced through a temporal and causal, i.e. narrative arrangement. Only by being linked causally and temporally into a chain of action—a narrative system—do the individual elements obtain their logical meaning. By contrast, in isolation they would have little to communicate about the represented reality and become freely interpretable as a pure screen for projections without, ultimately, any evidentiary value—as Thomas ultimately finds out after discovering that all his negatives and prints have been stolen, the corpse in the park has disappeared, with only one enlargement reminiscent of his neighbour’s abstract painting remaining in his possession.

We will see that in this respect Blow-up shifts away from the philosophical position of realism, i.e. from the assumption that there is a discrete reality preceding and independent of the observer which can be more or less objectively grasped and discovered. Instead Antonioni adopts a formal “anti-Kracauer” position corresponding with constructionism: knowledge about reality is not passively reveiced, but actively produced; there is no reality independent of the observer; cognition serves the organism’s adaptation to the environment; the representation of reality is about the organisation of the cognitive subject’s experiential world and not about objective knowledge of a reality “out there.”[viii]

For the time being, however, Antonioni’s film does give us the impression that what is at stake here is less a construction of reality than its discovery, by invoking the revelatory powers of the photographic medium. Hence the photographer’s assumption that an enlargement of the prints (“blowup”) brings more information to the fore and produces an additional visibility, similar to the functioning of a microscope (which from a scientific viewpoint is hardly the case—rather, the subsequent revelation of a man hidden in the bushes and pointing a gun is clearly an instance of viewer perception manipulated by the filmmakers). In fact it will be seen that it is the would-be scientific, microscopic procedure as such in the search for the key to the riddle that effectively produces the latter in the first place.

Beginning with the enlargement of the couple (2b, 3), the protagonist concentrates on the woman’s look away from her lover into off-screen space on the right. Through a continuity of looks via match cuts he tries to transform a pure succession of photos into a story with necessity and causal links, just like a cutter would do this with film in an editing room. This procedure is also reminiscent of the work of film analysis: a moving sequence (read: profilmic reality) is analytically taken apart and dissected into individual shots (here in the form of photographs), only to be finally put together again in the act of analytical synthesis and interpretation. Of course in this process, the initial reality and the analytically reconstructed end reality are not identical, due to the work of displacement. To be precise, it is the film analysis which actually produces the objects it claims to exist prior to being analysed. And what makes the analysis tenable is ultimately its rhetorical power of conviction.

Thomas marks a spot in the background behind the fence as the object of the woman’s look. After enlarging this detail in his lab, he attaches the prints in linear succession to the wall in order to construct the continuity of events and thereby of the supposedly real story. Antonioni’s film camera shows us the prints in a silent sequence as the narration of a crime, the reality of which is signalled in the main character’s perception by fading in the swoosh of the forest of leaves (9–25).

Behind the picket fence is a man hidden in the bushes, holding a pistol with telescopic sight, pointing in the direction of the couple (14–16); this is the place the woman’s look seems focused on (17–18, 20). Upon closer inspection, the actually revealing shot here is still 17, depicting the young woman looking straight at us, the very place of the assassin. Since this is one of the photos that Thomas took, it follows … that the man hidden in the bushes with the gun is no one else but the photographer himself! In a weird turn of events the protagonist has managed to inscribe himself into his own photography, in the process of which transforming his camera into a gun. The investigator of a crime simultaneously turns out being the very perpetrator of that crime. He has become part of an oedipal scene expressing his desire to kill the father and sleep with the mother. This meaning, however, eludes the protagonist and first-time viewers of the film.

The photographer’s look—as an extension and instrument of the look of extra-diegetic director Antonioni—is continued in the look of Vanessa Redgrave’s character. The sequence is framed by the photographer contemplating his prints in their sequential linkage (8 and 25). Thus in his mind the park is the setting of a crime about to happen. But neither the photos which in themselves as a construct of a mental montage cannot guarantee this truth, nor the photographer’s subjective cognition are able to lend the pictures anything resembling an objectively secured truth. What is missing is an intersubjective, symbolic verification. Only intersubjectivity transcending the private opinion would be capable of securing the photos’ reconstructed truth.

It is the discovery of the man in the background of the bushes (13–15) watching the couple embracing (13–15) and pointing his pistol in their direction (16)—as Thomas’ projective inscription of himself into the picture[ix]—, lends the photographic fragments of reality and the per se banal fact of a couple embracing in the park the required melodramatic touch which charges the events with narrative significance. The couple’s problem is after all that the man is really too old to function as phallic lover. The woman’s looking away during their embrace not only indicates that she knows about the hidden assassin and is part of the plot to kill her partner; first of all her look suggests her distraction, that her elderly lover cannot satisfy her desire, which her detached look now directs towards a different object. Her elderly partner is incapable of satisfying her and virtually impotent. But the missing phallus reappears elsewhere, displaced onto violence in the form of the pistol of the man in the bushes. It is the absent phallus of the older man, the woman’s lack of satisfaction, which has the protagonist search for that element which ex negativo returns meaning to the whole setting and guarantees the cohesion and truth of the pictures. Searching for the absent and structuring lack of the photos, the photographer finds it in the displaced form of the pistol as a super-phallus of violence and power, which acts for the whole scene both as master signifier and as veritable money shot.

At the locus of displacement from the sexual act to photography—a displacement which already was evident in Thomas’ famous early photo session with model Verushka (subsequent stills 1–3) and in which the act of photographing almost resembles rape—, now symptomatically a gun appears. Ironically, as becomes obvious in retrospect and without elaborating the double meaning of the word “shot”, there seems to be more truth in his fashion photography, which makes no claims to realism and represents a reality of antecedent distortion prior to shooting, than in his supposedly “realistic” pictures. The photographic medium only seems to capture and reproduce reality, while in effect it displaces it.

But since reliable reality needs to be socially constructed, as symbolic interaction, the enlarged photos by themselves are insufficient. They require embedding in language, an explicit narrativization, to produce a stable story and theory in order to lend the prints intersubjective meaning. Without it all the photographer is left with is a vague conspiracy belief. Hence right after his “discovery,” Thomas phones his agent Ron. Enthusiastically he tells him that the pictures in the park have turned out fantastic, that he’s discovered a crime and prevented a murder. It seems as though in finding an external narrative, the protagonist amidst his everyday life of fleeting thrills and cynical irresponsibility has also found a story to his own so far vacuous existence, in stabilising it through a sense of meaning. However, his counterpart on the phone doesn’t pay any attention, leaving the murder hypothesis unverified, all the more so when the doorbell suddenly rings and Thomas, all too ready for some distraction, invites two girls in who are overeager to become fashion models, and this is followed by a frolicking orgy.

Of course the protagonist’s first conspiracy theory will turn out to be incorrect when he later spots the corpse of the elderly lover lying behind a tree in one of the enlarged prints (23 above) and subsequently actually discovers it in the park at night. He did not prevent a crime, it really took place. Or so it seems. Focusing on Thomas in medium close-up, as the camera pans down we see the dead man lying on the ground behind the tree in a grey suit and with an almost ghostly, waxen pallor, and with fixed open eyes. The only sounds are the wind in the trees and after the discovery of the body, a sudden crackling sound—as if somewhere else were present unseen and watching. There’s something surreal about the moment. And significantly, the protagonist has left his camera behind and is therefore unable to take a picture documenting the corpus delicti.

Upon returning to his studio, all the negatives and prints have been stolen, with only the already mentioned much enlarged and grainy still of the male corpse remaining (4 and 6 above). Now deprived from contextualisation by the other photos, and without clearly recognisable objects, this photo in itself is incapable of proving anything. Thus denarrativized, it has become quite useless. 

“The Men Who Killed Kennedy”: figures behind the stockade fence of the “Grassy Knoll” in Dealey Plaza

Blow-up here anticipates the later attempts, sometimes bordering on the absurd, by self-declared Kennedy assassination researchers, to engage in endless photographic and computer-generated image enhancements of amateur photos and footage taken on the day of the assassination, and in this modified form reminiscent of Rorschach tests, in order to provide visual evidence for the presence of the “second shooter” behind the “Grassy Knoll,” who, according to numerous accounts, fired the fatal head shot that killed the president. The stills above stem from Nigel Turners five-hour television miniseries “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” (UK/US 1988/95), namely from the second episode, “The Forces of Darkness.”

In this illustration, the enlarged still on the right represents the supposed second shooter in police uniform firing the lethal shot. But only when you already believe in this representation can it be photographically “proven.” The same by extension also applies to the most famous filmic assassination document, the 8mm film shot by Abraham Zapruder, a local producer of women’s clothing. The Zapruder film is a typical postmodern object of undecidability, recalling the often mentioned crisis of representation. But in distinction from Antonioni’s film, where within the fiction the photographic blowup indeed reveals a surplus of information, the same can hardly be said of the Kennedy images. Where was the fatal head shot fired from? 

“Image of an Assassination: A New Look at the Zapruder Film” (above with frame numbers)[x]

The stills reproduced here stem from an enhanced version of the Zapruder film which the photographic lab worker and JFK assassination researcher Robert J. Groden produced in the early 70s and which was first presented to a national television audience in 1975 in Geraldo Rivera’s talk show Goodnight America (one of the effects of which was the re-investigation into the JFK and Martin Luther King murders by the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1976 to 1978, with Groden, one of the most dedicated proponents of a conspiracy theory, serving as photo analyst). Aspiring to elicit from the document the entire historical truth, Groden amongst other procedures also made use of extreme enlargements (see above), even if this leads to paradoxical results:

Zapruder’s amateur film of 26 seconds duration remains a mysterious object: you may watch it twenty, thirty or fifty times, in normal speed, in slow motion or even freeze individual frames, especially frame Z313—the Warren Commission numbered every single frame of the document—, which shows Kennedy’s exploding head; you will never be able to tell with certainty where the fatal shot was fired from; even although to layman’s eyes it doesn’t seem as though it came from behind (i.e. the Texas School Book Depository). In his textbook study of the Kennedy assassination, Peter Knight emphasises this aspect repeatedly. Thus, both proponents of the official version as well as conspiracy theorists use the Zapruder film as starting point and guarantee of their discourses:

Hence the notorious single bullet theory—also known as magic bullet theory—, which explains how a single bullet could have caused a total of seven separate wounds in the bodies of Kennedy and of Governor Connally sitting in front, and which is still doubted by most Americans, was also put forward and explained by the Warren Commission on the basis of the Zapruder film.[xiii] It is precisely due to its overt deficit as visual evidence, by on the one hand shockingly depicting the event without on the other clarifying it unambiguously, that the Zapruder film functions as a catalyst for the creation of conspiratorial discourses, whose proponents, however, in their continuing search for the definitive truth, the Holy Grail so to speak, all too often appear as contemporary versions of Don Quixote. In their quest we may also recognise the (proto-fascist?) utopia of a world in which everything and everyone is in the right place at the right time, a utopia of order, which in its sense of total enclosure provides a sense of relief.

One of the most impressive examples of such a utopia of order is provided by Oliver Stone’s political thriller JFK (US 1991). Its introductory sequence ends with the Kennedy cortege turning into Dealey Plaza. In a virtuoso, almost manic montage interweaving documentary footage with fictionally reconstructed scenes, the film strives to spatially cover everything, charging every moment with significance, having all the characters and personnel stand in the right places and having everything refer to the central event. Here there are no blind spots, no wasted moments. The reconstructed historical reality appears as a theatrical space, staged as if fatefully predeterminate, with the entire chain of events permeated by a strange sense of rationality. History unfolds here with the causal and logical stringence of fiction.

At the climax of the action, during the trial against local businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), accused of conspiracy in the murder of the president, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) uses a model of Dealey Plaza to illustrate the assassination. With the assistance of two of his legal associates he has just demonstrated the improbability of the magic bullet theory and shown that without it, one would have to conclude that another—fourth—shot had been fired, which would imply a second shooter and hence by necessity a conspiracy. The model features tiny cars and individual figures to represent the sequence of events from Garrison’s perspective, a complex plot involving, as we learn in the course of his presentation, the “military-industrial complex,” high government circles including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, to remove “King Arthur” from his castle Camelot in a veritable coup d’état. Central to this entire reconstruction is the instant Kennedy is hit by the last, fatal shot, with his head (as it seems) first snapping back with a jolt and surrounded by a reddish halo before tilting forward. 

Garrison plays this moment, captured by the Zapruder film, almost compulsively over and over to a disgusted courtroom audience, almost as an invocation of the mythical hole in the symbolic order around which everything else is constituted. It is a hole in the truest sense of the word, which at the same time shockingly depicts human vulnerability and fetishistically evokes that indisputable, fascinating piece of physical reality at the very centre of the historical event, marking a traumatic rupture in the historical consciousness of an entire generation.

If therefore the murder in Blow-up ultimately only exists in the protagonist’s subjectivity and not in an intersubjectively shared reality, as Antonioni’s film would suggest, then the plot and the crime lack an objective basis. Maybe there never was a murder? In this fashion Antonioni fathoms the aporia of the photographic medium as evidence of the real. And indeed, the camera may very well “lie.” Reality is not discovered or revealed, but constructed. As a construct, however, this reality is only ever tentative and not stable once and for all. In this implicit message we also recognise an analogy to the social irresponsibility of the protagonist and—by extension—of his whole generation, even if Antonioni views it deeply ambivalently, partly fascinated, partly rejecting it.

When in the famous concluding scene in the park the group of noisy mimes reappear in order to play an imaginary game in a tennis court, the protagonist intently watches their simulation. While two members—a man and a woman—of the troupe mime the game without rackets or ball, and the other mimes watch from outside the fence and react to it by intently following the non-existent ball with back and forth movements of their heads, as if it were a real game, for the protagonist, too, semblance begins to turn into reality. According to the classical sociological theorem, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences:” David Hemmings’ character enters the reality of the game when a “ball” lands outside the court and the film camera pans after the—for us—non-extenent ball. The protagonist picks the ball up and throws it back to field. With the camera remaining on the photographer, he—and we along with him—start hearing the sound of the tennis ball being hit back and forth, the game has become real for him. He has decided to recognise the reality of the performance and to continue it through his participation. He has effectively entered into an unwritten contract with the mimes, as soon as he has decided to play along. With this constructionist perspective—there is no objective reality, instead reality is an intersubjective, social fiction—Blow-up closes, thereby pointing ahead of the conspiracy films of the 1970s and towards the mindbender or mindfuck films that have proliferated especially since the late 1990s.

Antonioni’s film seems to tell us that it is better to participate in a collective illusion than to insist on a purely individually experienced “reality” that cannot be socialised, since the latter too is solely a cognitive and narrative construct. In this sense the final scene in the park should not be understood as a repudiation of the conspiracy plot, but as its metafilmic commentary. The silently “conspiratorial” troupe of mimes suggests that every collective reality has aspects of a conspiracy, in the double meaning of the word plot. At the same time this perspective—reality is based on an individual decision to participate in the game of others, which is “only” a game—is free from any “objective” responsibility. There is no binding order beyond the situational.

T

his article explores the ways in which Antonioni’s work, homing in on the first four 1960s films, presents a historically embedded yet today still radical cinema in which the filmmaker’s famous modernism and a highly developed form of realism coexist in provocative and generative ways. Describing what he sees as the central contradiction and exponentially enabling antinomy of modernist works, P. Adams Sitney writes that they ‘stress vision as a privileged mode of perception, even of revelation, while at the same time cultivating opacity and questioning the primacy of the visible world.’ (1992, p. 2) He later provides a quote from Maurice Blanchot that beautifully illustrates the resulting material, aesthetic, and conceptual reality: ‘Present in its absence, graspable because ungraspable, appearing as disappeared.’ (ibid, p. 102). Such is the properly paradoxical, inherently dialectical enunciation of modernist realism exemplified by Antonioni’s mature work.

Elsewhere I address the conceptual implications of Antonioni’s special aesthetic innovations, arguing in particular for L’eclisse’s (1962) substantive philosophical impact (Ford, 2012). But this is only possible thanks to a very immanent, far from rarefied reality presented by the films incorporating a very real Italy of the post-war period and the filmic image itself. More than debates concerning much-discussed metaphysical schemas of religious or secular values, it is ultimately through at once larger yet also inherently more quotidian forces that Antonioni’s cinema mounts its repeated blows. In his book The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard suggests:

In Antonioni’s cinema, space and time are the primary sites within, upon and from which an immeasurable violence is played out. This constitutes the historically specific world presented by the films – the only reality on offer.

Describing the director’s remarkable first colour feature, Il deserto rosso (1964), Peter Brunette writes: ‘There is no sense of spirituality here, no redeeming transcendence’ (1999, p. 105). The film neither proselytises present-day technologised reality and its economic-industrial dictates or ethically decries it in favour of a different vision (the reason Antonioni’s cinema is ultimately so difficult for those seeking to forge clear-cut political analyses). The filmmaker’s distinct modernism not only casts doubt upon the building blocks of classical and ‘traditional’ modes of both life and cinema alike, but equally contemporary, allegedly ‘modern’ ones (the question of what constitutes the modern very much in play). L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L‘eclisse and Il deserto rosso – still the peak of Antonioni’s fundamental remaking of the cinematic image in my view, despite the considerable and diverse claims of his other work – demonstrate their immediate modernity’s inherent oppositions and unreconciled problems at the same time as rendering that reality in increasingly ‘stylised’ ways. The last film of this cycle famously illustrates the ‘pro-filmic’ world it portrays as rather uninhabitable, environmentally but also conceptually, for the kind of humans who build and administer it. But neither Il deserto rosso nor its director in contemporaneous interviews (perhaps counter-intuitively in this case) suggest denunciation, and the remarkable aesthetic incarnation of reality on screen is clearly the source of real fascination and creativity for filmmaker and viewer alike – no matter how we feel about the worldly ‘facts’.

18_HF_001 - Deserto rosso (M. Antonioni – 1964)

Increasingly, the critical tenor in Antonioni scholarship is to try and avoid or heavily bracket talk of ‘alienation’, which is now often understandably seen as a dangerous simplifying cliché by recent commentators such as Rascaroli and Rhodes (2011) following Brunette (1998), who instead favour (as is the trend in recent academic film studies) detailed historical contextualisation. Brunette argues that the familiar descriptions of Antonioni’s famous 1960s films in particular as offering vaguely existentialist and ahistorical fables about ‘alienation’ and loss of identity tends to downplay socio-political details and interest, thereby underselling their substantive radicalism. Stressing unknowability and incommensurability, he writes that ‘nothing ever seems to add up in these films … beyond a vague sense of uneasiness and alienation, and thus most critics have this to be what they are about.’ (ibid, p. 3) Yet while treatment of this often misused concept and long-familiar trope as the key to understanding Antonioni’s most influential work can easily have the effect of disavowing the films’ enormous diversity of thematic suggestion, aesthetic form, and affective power, there are also more precise, historical reasons for its application.

In his long 1958 forward to the second edition of Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1 – as it happens, composed on the eve of post-war film modernism’s famous 1959-60 inauguration with L’avventura and select initial works of la Nouvelle Vague – Henri Lefebvre argues (using the gendered language) that the products of ‘modern man’ and ‘his works function like beings of nature. He must objectify himself… If man has humanized himself, he has done so only by tearing himself apart, dividing himself, fragmenting himself (1991, p. 71). In the main text that follows, written in 1947, Lefebvre reads as if directly addressing the disconnect but also the ambiguous possibility charted in Antonioni’s films from the period no matter our critical position or thematic conclusions: ‘Man attains his own reality, creates himself through, within and by means of his opposite, his alienation: the inhuman.’ (1991, p. 170). Carefully considered in light of Antonioni’s idiosyncratic realism, alienation can be one legitimate means to a historically grounded understanding of the films. The problem, I think, occurs if we then jump to a critical conclusion as to what alienation as framed in this cinema ‘means’, in particular the presumption that it inherently leads to despair and cessation of assumed ‘human’ progress. Just as alienation is often an effect or weapon of capital and political power, the complex aesthetic and spectatorial effects of Antonioni’s realism demonstrates it can also be harnessed to pursue very different, radical re-forgings of reality and the human. This ambiguity is a key to the films’ ever-expanding life, concurrently critiquing and exhibiting confronting openness with the same gesture.

Providing a rigorously secular vision of the world, the four early ‘60s films (sometimes bundled together as ‘the Tetralogy’) present pressing challenges at the heart of an everyday reality, no matter how unique and ‘advanced’ its sound-image rendering. While often appearing via quite ‘abstract’ aesthetic patterns – the framing of Marcello Mastroianni and especially Jeanne Moreau against the diverse architectural bodies and surfaces of Milano in La notte; Vittoria’s intimate exchanges with the natural and human-made textures and spaces of palimpsestic Roma, both its fabled centro storico and recently rebuilt EUR periphery in L’eclisse, until such reality seems to take over the whole film in its famous final minutes; or the highly manipulated, sometimes literally painted colour palette and depth-flattening camerawork of Il deserto rosso rendering Ravenna’s industrial region, quay, and town centre – the films’ characters respond in often quite precise ways to their distinct phenomenal realities. Meanwhile, as is so often discussed, the camera itself frequently offers a slightly ‘removed’ perspective on the human events, regardless of spatial proximity. So important to Italy’s post-war ‘economic miracle’, L’eclisse portrays the Borsa (then Roma’s stock exchange) as an architecturally commanding space housing an intriguing but impossible-to-comprehend reality. With the film’s famous stock market crash scene, this locale – once devoted to religious worship, at the time of the film the centre for secular, modern prayer – is treated by the camera with fascinated detachment for a full fifteen minutes as if watching an ancient ritual or futuristic practice about which it offers no inside knowledge. The architecture and the abstract human activity gradually eclipse narrative requirement, making us forget the purpose of the scene, which is so incremental and stretched out that some time elapses before the viewer realises ‘something is happening’. As the seemingly chaotic human movement on screen develops into an ‘event’ its reality is delivered by increasingly ‘documentary’-like yet immaculately composed images that seem to take over the film, such that when our presumed protagonist finally emerges very late in the scene her appearance is quite a surprise.

18_HF_002 - L’eclisse (M. Antonioni – 1962)

Antonioni’s project as laid out in the epigraph quote necessitates a remaking of realism, which in its classical Hollywood narrative, Italian neorealist, documentary or politically revolutionary forms is no longer realistic both in terms of what it shows and how. To confront this challenge the director explores everyday reality’s uncanny and even sometimes bizarre appearance as powered by rapid economic, technological and environmental change, including that of the heavily virtual reality of the moving image, in sustained and often surprisingly diverse portrayals of this modern world’s physical and perceptual conditions. This portrayal of modern appearance and experience via a medium reflexively acknowledging its own crucial role in the re-conceiving of reality is inextricably affected by arguably the central characteristic of this cinema: a radically enhanced ambiguity. Far from a rarefied philosophical issue, the films demonstrate this confronting concept and experience as at the heart of the modern everyday in all its confusion and provocation. Lefebvre sees ambiguity as ‘a category of everyday life, and perhaps an essential category’ of contemporary modernity, continuing with an enormously resonant passage:

This evokes uncannily well both the post-war reality charted in Antonioni’s peak modernist cinema addressed here and the fundamentally paradoxical lens through which we see it on screen.

The most historically important discussion of ambiguity in the cinema is André Bazin’s influential account of Italian neorealism, famously arguing that the late 1940s films of Robert Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti ‘transfer to the screen the continuum of reality’ (1967, p. 37). This cinema brought about innovations later expanded by Antonioni in liberating both space and time from the hegemony of narrative movement so as to forge a much more ambiguous image, the deep focus textures of which, Bazin argued, allowed the viewer an enhanced perceptual realism and therefore a more ambiguous image to aesthetically explore and thematically interpret (ibid, p. 39). Neorealism’s lingering ethico-political certainties and aura of commitment, however, seem long past by the time of Antonioni’s early ‘60s films. (His one rather abstract contribution to the ‘neorealist’ tradition in terms of aesthetics and featured socio-economic class, 1957’s Il Grido, is arguably outdone by the later Zabriskie Point in 1970 when it comes to a heavily qualified appearance of political engagement.) Yet startlingly passive in their wandering and gaze as a result of no longer having an external crisis by which to initiate and virtually centre the search, the films’ female protagonists are effectively gentrified, updated and gender-appropriated versions of neorealism’s wandering male seers: middle-class figures indicative of Italy’s socioeconomic transformation (infamously concentrated in the north). No longer part of an agrarian, proletariat, or impoverished family fighting for external survival, a seemingly well-educated and notionally single female protagonist like Vittoria in L’eclisse is both a direct result of the country’s post-war resurgence, much freer and more modern than her neorealist forebears, yet appears both interested in and vaguely dissatisfied with such a reality. The individuated, newly ‘liberated’ subject passively moves through and observes the exponentially modern world with no essential purpose, unable to conceive definitive action within it.

This more ‘modern’ protagonist is at once more intimately felt than the often heavily archetypal, non-individuated characters of neorealism, yet the re-figured realism of Antonioni’s early ‘60s films at the same time fails to support the ontological inscribing of subjectivity and its gaze, primarily undermined by the veracity of the opaque phenomenal real charted by the films. Just as Antonioni’s cinema constitutes a notably more ‘detached’, elliptical yet also modulating examination of these questions than we see in neorealism, so is subjectivity both more strongly sensed and essayed yet also portrayed as operating from a position of increased uncertainty – a crisis fuelled by lack of surety as to what constitutes the objective world. When it comes to both subjectivity and mastery of the objective environment – as opposed to the latter’s apparently material facticity in the films – Antonioni’s cinema presents reality as made up of conditions as described by Lyotard when he writes: ‘Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality” of reality…’ (1978, p. 77) The director’s radical ‘updating ‘of realism has the inevitable effect that physical and human reality looks increasingly strange and ‘stylised’, hence his cinema’s historical portrayal by some critics as primarily interested in pictorial effects rather than ‘content’. While often challenged by Antonioni’s defenders, like the matter of alienation, this response can also be too quickly dismissed.

There is certainly a lot to be gained from reading the films in the form of precise historical portraits, as much recent Antonioni scholarship seeks to do. Yet in the process we can easily overlook that through peak enunciation of the director’s highly idiosyncratic modernist aesthetics, the early ‘60s films in particular also transcend this ‘reality’ on and beyond the screen. In this sense they become heavily virtual and singular texts that for many viewers – both familiar and otherwise with the director’s style – evoke what Martin Heidegger called in 1935 the ‘solitary’ work of art (1993, p. 191) seeming to stand apart from the rest of the film-world, having ‘cut all ties to human beings’ (ibid.). The films are certainly interested in the great human drama, but their way of formally presenting the human subject, its immediate spatial reality and inextricably bound relationship between the two, requires significant viewer input to make sense of and ‘feel’. Such an engagement can bring about the sense that, in Heidegger’s words, something very new, different, perhaps even ‘extraordinary’ is ‘thrust to the surface’ while here the conventions of cinema, ‘the long-familiar’, is ‘thrust down’ (ibid.). However, this equally important ‘truth’ or reality of Antonioni’s peak modernist work as it appears to the viewer is not ultimately in contradiction with the fact that the films also both emerge from precise historical conditions and chart a very human reality. It is arguably their uncommonly developed and rigorous means of presenting such a reality that can make them look so strange and ‘cold’.

In 1957, long-time Antonioni scholar Renzo Renzi argued of the gaze through which we view the world as causing a perceived ‘coldness’, that it ‘is in fact a sign of self-conscious responsibility, aware of the shortfalls of moral judgment and clear annunciations about the reality from which the films emanate.’ (qtd. in Rohdie, 1990, pp. 92-3) This lack of judgment is both moral and epistemological: not only a refusal to proclaim how things should be but also how they are. Both are cut down through an always shifting emphasis on the vagaries of audio-visual perception faced by the viewer. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that perception responds ‘to a situation and to an environment which are not the workings of a pure, knowing subject.’ (1964, p. 4) Floundering in the ambiguities (moral, political, perceptual) of their respective corners of post-war Italian reality, Lidia, Vittoria, Claudia (L’avventura), and especially Giuliana (Il deserto rosso) are not ‘knowing subjects’ in this sense. Neither, quite differently, is the viewer. We do not confront perceptual problems ‘with’ the characters of these films, even if we sometimes feel ‘closer’ to them than with most of Antonioni’s later features (as Rohdie argues of the films following Blow-Up). The camera is on the one hand unusually liberated to seek out details, textures and environments adjacent to or even outside the domain of human drama, most radically in L’eclisse with its famous final seven minutes, but really from the very first frame.

Like many subsequent writers, Pier Paolo Pasolini draws attention to a development in Il deserto rosso whereby the camera loses interest in Corrado’s attempts to entice potential employees sitting in a Ravenna warehouse with his slated Patagonia business venture. The viewer is then presented with a

Pasolini is precise in highlighting the shift from the ‘distressingly real’ worker’s face to the sheer abstraction of the coloured line, however the cut between the two is less a shift of perspective and focus than a mark of continuity that exemplifies Antonioni’s unique rendering of reality. These films’ egalitarian gaze treats a decontextualised painted line on a wall and the weather-beaten visage of an ‘authentic’ human being as of equal graphic and ‘objective’ interest. With the cut between the ‘human’ and the ‘inhuman’, realism and modernism dissolve into one image. The wonderfully evoked ‘insane pan’, meanwhile, isn’t the end of the jolting ‘distraction’ away from any narrative shards and human vestiges, when the film cuts to a shot outside the warehouse dominated with futuristic-looking bright blue bottles stacked neatly on straw bedding.

18_HF_003 - Deserto rosso (M. Antonioni – 1964)

The scene, only ever very tangentially and hesitantly connected to the film’s already loose story of Giuliana, thereby concludes with narrative interest and information about the scenario entirely overcome by aesthetic detailing of material space – including that of the worker’s face, then moving beyond the human. With such diversions into physical, spatial and graphic reality, no matter how ‘artificial’ its appearance and compositional effect – Il deserto rosso’s environment and portrait of then-‘hi tech’ modernity suggesting such a distinction as no longer viable – and away from a purported diegesis, important narrative information ‘goes missing‘. In compensation, the viewer is invited to imbibe and process veritable explosions of aesthetic and conceptual material gleaned from this very precise reality, just as we do in other scenes where the film lingers on enormous eruptions of steam and coloured gas emanating from the abstract industrial landscape as if from a primordial fissure in the earth’s crust.

John David Rhodes writes of the Chinese Government’s outraged response to Antonioni’s remarkable 1972 documentary Cina Chung Kuo: ‘In a sense, the Chinese officials – whether they knew it or not – were saying something true about Antonioni’s cinema: it was often looking at what seemed to be the wrong things. But such looking constitutes his style.’ (2011, p. 297) Through ‘looking at the wrong things’, narrative (or indeed ideological) attenuation generates room for so much else. But this potential liberation of the gaze comes at the strongly felt cost of its habitual epistemological privilege. Not ‘knowing’, never getting a sense of control over what we see, in fact paradoxically enables a much clearer vision of modern reality itself as characterised by opacity and fragmentation. The net benefit of this process is an enormous outpouring of textural and spatial detailing. Let us consider a relatively unostentatious example in the form of a sequence from La notte, itself today the least discussed of Antonioni’s ‘60s films (despite arguably being more closely tied to historical context, the social and cultural climate of il boom essayed at its powerful centre).

18_HF_004 - La notte (M. Antonioni – 1961)

In a brief sequence away from the mansion party that comprises the second half of the film, rather than giving us access to the car in which Lidia and a young man seem to talk and flirt, we can hear nothing beyond the sound of rain as the camera leaves us mutely outside for over a minute during which we glimpse snatches of what looks like an animated conversation played out on her face as distorted by water pouring down the window.

While the viewer can interpret Lidia’s apparent pleasure at her hermetic, private encounter away from both the high-decadence gathering and the viewer’s own sound-image, this notional protagonist and her problems have been so little fleshed out in the preceding film (now nearing its end) that our narrative attention risks badly drifting when denied dialog in this highlighted, very beautiful scene. Instead, the experience offered is to enjoy and explore the densely textured monochrome gradations and modulating patterns made by the streaks of flowing water on the dark vehicle’s glass and chassis. Taking a more ‘auteurist’ line, we may of course seek to interpret Antonioni’s refusal to take us inside this protean couple’s temporary adulterous bubble for what it might suggest of Lidia’s individual frustrations or the repressive, privileged class she represents. But such immediate tweaking of the sound-image into a ‘text’ to be read not only involves consciously felt hermeneutic work; the will-to-interpretation also seems to commit violence upon the image in all its rich materialism and elusiveness, its properly ambiguous reality. While different readings of the shot in the context of this narratively ‘slack’ film can provide genuine pleasure – and likewise fruitful accounts of the reality offered by La notte in terms of its portrayal of modern Italy’s business ‘winners’ alongside our more anguished protagonists from the intellectual sphere – such interpretive and analytical frames, while perhaps revealing and informative, are also themselves overwhelmed by the undeniable cinematic facts: constantly shifting patterns and transforming shapes brought about by a slowly moving car in the rain, undulating chiaroscuro effects of a flashing traffic light, and the background architecture of a quiet street.

The image’s material-aesthetic ‘autonomy’ is a crucial part of this cinema’s distinct realism. Each shot in L’eclisse has an undeniable solidity in rendering a particular material reality within Roma’s various inner and outer regions (plus the small Verona airport where Vittoria enjoys a lyrical interlude), all the while intimating an unstable flux between the clarity and vaporous ambiguity Lefebvre describes as comprising modernity’s experiential real. With the film’s final minutes, in which the viewer is denied the film’s protagonists, we are confronted with the most famous (although cited much more than actually analysed) loss of fullness, character and drama or ‘fiction’ in Antonioni’s cinema. The viewer is challenged, or offered, to pursue other interests that while seeming ‘new’ are in fact comprised of the same environment that dominated much of the film but now taking on an explicitly ‘starring’ foreground role.

Highlighting just one brief moment from L’eclisse’s aesthetically and conceptually rich final minutes, the camera observes floating debris in the water of a barrel into which Vittoria had earlier placed a piece of wood at an awkward moment of indecision and stasis with her potential love interest, the vain young stockbroker Piero. Following a cut, an extravagant tracking shot shows water leaking out from the barrel along the ground. Other shots of the EUR intersection follow, including some that feature human figures that from the back could be our protagonists but upon turning around are revealed as ‘strangers’. Then another interior shot of the barrel is followed by two decontextualised close shots, presumably showing the leakage on the ground as it forms a slick, made up of entirely abstract shapes. Following the earlier barrel and water tracking shots, this miniature-sublime double-image in many ways crystallises the way the whole sequence replaces narrative and thematic development (shaky from the very start) with a descriptive and inherently ambiguous detailing of the world. The familiar street corner and surrounds now emerge as an ever-modulating material set of facts, the contours of which are changing beyond recognition before our eyes. The images of this seven-minute ‘coda’ together comprise a freshly dripping canvas by which to wash away our memories of the recognisably human through looking directly upon the phenomenal world in a ‘documentary’ or ‘experimental’ rendering of material space as transforming through time.

18_HF_005 - L’eclisse (M. Antonioni – 1962)

Like an enormously elongated incarnation of Pasolini’s ‘insane pan’, L’eclisse’s ending may well be Antonioni’s singularly most radical sequence. Yet rather than a special case, it ultimately makes explicit what is present throughout: the reality of the filmed world as very consistent yet epistemologically destabilising ground upon which a genuinely modern realism is forged. Rohdie argues that these films’ true productivity lies in ‘the new shapes, the new stories, the new, the temporary, subjects which they permit. To lose perspective, to lose identity, which are often open “tragedies” for Antonioni’s characters, are opportunities for the films.’ (1990, p. 2) In the case of L’eclisse it is the viewer who is challenged to overcome the ‘tragedy’ of the protagonists being evicted from the film, to see if another ‘opportunity’ can be grasped through such loss. But this risky relationship between film and viewer is in operation throughout Antonioni early ‘60s cinema no matter whether the characters remain in the frame. For the now infamous May 1960 Cannes audience first confronted with L’avventura, largely unused to such treatment of spatial and temporal reality, the island sequence outlives its stay in purely narrational terms – the search for Anna, who has already disappeared from the film, by the remaining people – and enters into a realm of increasingly abstracted documentary essaying. The framing and choreography of bodies moving in space generate enormous thematic inference for the viewer watching these very privileged figures of post-war Italian modernity (yet clearly also suggestive of historically inherited wealth and power) dragging their jaded and dysfunctional human investments across this primordial ground, dwarfed by the overwhelming environment and unforgiving power of the Aeolian sea, the violence of which may have taken one of their number (whereas in fact, like Vittoria and Piero at the end of L’eclisse, she has simply left the film).

18_HF_006 - L’avventura (M. Antonioni – 1960)

Despite far less obviously ‘sublime’ mise en scène, La notte is even more immediately dominated by pictorial abstraction with Milano’s architecture and concrete taking the place of L’avventura’s volcanic rock, the urban environment no more comprehensible or reassuring than what William Arrowsmith calls nature’s ‘deep primordial time’ in reference to such indexes in Antonioni’s work (1995, p. 55). In a more overtly reflexive fashion, it is formal experiment and aesthetic play with colour, line, texture and bodies – human and otherwise – that dominates Il deserto rosso. Yet the director’s modernist appropriation of realism, or vice versa, and here the absolute flattening of distinctions between historical and filmic ‘realities’, means that none of these highly tactile, at times seemingly ‘3D’ and increasingly virtual images culminating with Antonioni’s first colour film are ‘beyond’ reality. Rather, they strikingly yet most fittingly present the various ‘shocks’ and radical modifications of familiar experience within this technologised, hyper-industrialised world, even as the viewer’s gaze upon it is clearly very different to that of our troubled, closely felt yet never truly accessible protagonist.

Brought to life by viewer engagement, each of Antonioni’s early ‘60s films offer a distinct ‘reality’ comprised of a doubled vision that becomes flattened into one ambiguous modernist-realist image comprised of the on-screen world closely tied to ‘real’ contemporary Italy in its distinct regions and cities in context of which the notional characters life and move, and the often ‘abstract’ framing of all this before the viewer. This means that while the films offer loosely character-based narratives, the tentative offering of ‘feeling’ and meaning is ultimately untethered to the characters and their drama and rather more to the less usually highlighted nexus famously stressed by Walter Benjamin: the camera (1992, p. 672). We sense this more strongly than usual with Antonioni’s most famous films perhaps because the images seem to have at least a partial stake in the human drama but as a frequently detached onlooker also equally, or sometimes much more so, drawn to other potential interests. There are moments where the viewer can feel Claudia, Lidia, Vittoria or Giuliana ‘within reach’ (or at least the performative embodiment of Vitti or Moreau). In terms of proximity this is often the case thanks to the camera skirting the personal space of these favoured subjects, only to be denied clear and sustained ‘identification’ with them despite being privileged over all other potential subjects. In L’avventura we are able to perceive Claudia’s anguish, sometimes sensing it up close on the island and later on the Sicilian mainland, but we never really get to know her or understand her actions despite being more invested in this character’s fate than that of any other (disturbingly including Anna, whose potential return we may also come to ‘fear’ along with Claudia late in the film at the Taormina hotel). In La notte the frustrations and jaded ‘ennui’ of Giovanni and Lidia are palpable from the start, but only through a very broad sketching of the couple as representing a formerly idealistic northern intelligentsia. No matter how much time we spend with these bodies, they remain out of reach as subjects. In L’eclisse, the dialectical fascination-meets-dissatisfaction exhibited by Vittoria when confronted with Roma at its fabled core and modern, half-built but recently rejuvenated periphery is strongly felt, and we feel more for her than anyone else in the film (and perhaps even Antonioni’s entire work). Yet we understand hardly anything of her desires, ideals or intentions throughout.

Rather than sharing the protagonist’s perspective, we observe her predicaments from a not disinterested but also not entirely committed distance as played out within evocative yet always recognisable and ‘real’ post-war space. The camera travels along nearby the favoured human figures observing them, Ian Cameron suggests, not from a clearly ‘subjective’ perspective, but rather from ‘deep-not-quite-subjective-shots’ (1968, p. 10) that can appear to offer, but never totally allow, ‘identification’ in part because there is no entirely convincing subject on screen with whom we can relate. If up until L’eclisse a kind of mid-way camera position forces the viewer to work at achieving any kind of subjective view of character, with Il deserto rosso a heightened sense of the ‘subjective’ seems more palpable to the point of what can appear a kind of neo-expressionism, while at the same time protagonistic subjectivity is at a dual apogee and crisis point from which it will not recover. This occurs through a combination of exaggerated and denuded colour, out-of-focus shots, flattened depth-of-field, and compositions mixing industry and the ‘artificial’, polluted nature, and human components. Such perceptually confusing formalism can be seen – or ‘justified’ – as acting ‘empathetically’ with Giuliana, the most apparently ‘neurotic’ of Antonioni’s protagonists. However, Seymour Chatman writes of the film: ‘But who is the subject? Subjective can refer to the psyche of the character, or to that of the camera, the film’s mute narrator, or to both concurrently.’ (1985, p. 131) Even where we might seek to order and explain the filmic reality in front of us as ‘accessing’ Giuliana’s psyche, the subject is concurrently never more in doubt or felt as directly borne of the film’s formal construction and heightened reflexivity.

18_HF_007 - Deserto rosso (M. Antonioni – 1964)

Rohdie argues that ‘though the camera is often subjective’ – even as what this means is not clear – ‘that subjectivity and subjective look is in turn “objectively” regarded; Giuliana’s subjectivity is more an ‘object’ observed than a subjectivity to identify with.’ (1990, p. 185) Regardless of how ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ their gaze or doubling thereof can appear in a given instant, the films make perceivable the actuality of such a moment as generated for the viewer through distinct cinematic procedures. Like the heavily qualified enactment and skirting of subjectivity, objectivity for these films is itself an always ambiguous domain of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty describes the capacity for ‘objectively observable behaviour’ as a site for meaning to an extent no less than within the realm of subjective experience, provided that ‘objectivity is not confused with what is measurable.’ (1964, p. 24) No matter how seemingly ’objective’ they become, Antonioni’s films never equate the gaze with measurability. Their dissolution of distinctions between objective and subjective gazes, realism and modernism, drama and abstract ‘documentary’ interests, space and intentional graphic detailing, both enormously challenges and energises perspective. Pascal Bonitzer writes of the importance in what seems like a non-human perspective shared between L’avventura’s camera and viewer:

While strongly marked by a sense of autonomy and non-anthropocentric concerns, this ‘other point of view’ in which the films ‘come to rest’ is still ultimately ‘human’ but in an often very unfamiliar sense. For Gilles Deleuze, all Antonioni’s shots, including the most seemingly ‘inhuman’ or ‘objective’ images, offer what he calls an ‘invisible subjectivity’. Here objectivity becomes internalised, Deleuze writes, so that it is ‘formed through becoming mental, and going into a strange, invisible subjectivity … of feelings which go from the objective to the subjective, and are internalised in everyone.’ (1989, p. 8) These films allow us to gaze upon bodies in and of the world, human and otherwise, so as to ‘see’ this reality for all its oscillation of clarity and ambiguity, in the process internalising objectivity – including its most ‘alien’, subject-challenging elements – just as subjective energy and desire transforms our understanding of the material world.

‘I feel the need to express reality in terms that are not completely realistic’, explains the director in relation to Il deserto rosso (1996, p. 28). The world is rendered in Antonioni’s films through a focus on the objects, places, spaces and forms of the physical reality in front of the camera as transformed by its inherently artificial gaze – a ‘new’ but now essential component of modern reality and how we see it. ‘In Antonioni’s work the world is never merely a setting or a symbol,’ writes Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier in 1960 of L’avventura (1989, p. 194). Instead, the ineffable presence and confronting ambiguity of space and time takes over. Examples abound throughout the films where specific environments in all their objective power and genuinely mysterious resonance seem to overwhelm the characters, dwarfing the human drama and subjective frame. Ground zero in terms of nature is L’avventura’s island search. But the film enacts reality’s more radical and human-made power as the architectural and topographical spaces of Sicilia somehow work to overwhelm the original purpose of Claudio and Sandro’s road trip with creeping nihilistic effect. The central moment of this remarkable development seems to be when they visit the modern Fascist-built but never occupied workers’ village when looking for Noto, the scene concluding with a remarkable sense of presence evoked by a slow eerie tracking shot down an exterior corridor towards the couple as they get in the car and drive away. A very surprising edit then ushers in their first kiss and embrace, framed from below against blank sky. Here perhaps is the moment that best explains Deleuze’s description of Antonioni’s cinema as uniquely taking up ‘the Nietzschean project of a real critique of morality’. (1989, p. 8) Any such philosophical reading can only come about, however, because the filmed reality of Sicilia, the deserted village, and the stretched tracking shot followed by a spatially and temporally indeterminate ellipsis can be read as ‘forging’ this morally confronting event.

18_HF_008 - L’avventura (M. Antonioni – 1960)

A more consistently modern source of filmed reality’s uncanny power can be strongly sensed in L’eclisse, not only in its famous conclusion but also in a small moment such as when Vittoria seeks out the source of eerie sounds made by flagpoles in the nocturnal breeze of a deserted EUR boulevard, and slinks within the shadows of an absurd oversized statue. For the protagonists, but even for the viewer watching these images giving an unprecedented role to the power of both primordial and modern time, and natural and human-made space, the world seems ‘”already there” before reflection begins – as an inalienable presence’, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s description of experience (1989, p. vii). Antonioni’s films suggest this in the prominence given to the world in all its quotidian imminence and ubiquitous sublimity, its historically located modernity and primordial intimation, prior to, during, and particularly after the humans have played out their drama. ‘By tying perception to the actual shape and status of the external world,’ Rohdie writes, Antonioni ‘made them both equally subject of his films, and equally ambiguous and tenuous.’ (1990, p. 72) This joining makes neither any less impactful; on the contrary, reality as viewed becomes more imposing and ineffable than ever.

The presence and primacy of the physical world is emphasised in these films through the unusual prominence of location, space, time and the world of objects. In Theory of Film Kracauer characteristically describes ‘the tremendous importance of objects’, writing that ‘the actor too is no more than a detail, a fragment of the matter of the world’ (1960, p. 45) and pointing out the potential in rendering ‘real life complexes which the conventional figure-ground patterns usually conceal from view.’ (ibid, p. 53) The first image of L’eclisse strikingly evokes this effect with a very surprising but entirely appropriate ‘establishing shot’, a graphically dense composition showing desk lamp and cluttered objects flattened against a textured wall.

18_HF_009 - L’eclisse (M. Antonioni – 1962)

The subsequent pan then reveals part of the object-mass of this everyday yet somehow strange-looking reality to be the shirt sleeve-covered arm of a male body, which we now see staring off screen right yet in remaining immobile retains the appearance of an object. The lack of distinctions in such an image between form and content, subject and object, fiction and documentary, figure and ground, narration and reflexive thematising, demonstrate the central tenets of Antonioni’s re-conceived realism as both challenging and genuinely ‘liberating’ in the sense Bazin described of deep focus and time’s entry into the filmic image. The result is aesthetic juxtapositions that, to borrow Kracauer’s view of cinema as objective realism irrespective of any purported fictional or dramatic content, reveal ‘configurations of semi-abstract phenomena’ (ibid, p. 54). Is there a better description, to take just one brief but very notable example, of the image in La notte when Lidia/Jeanne Moreau is transformed into a tiny figure barely visible in a far bottom-left slither of the frame, almost evicted from it by a giant expanse of stark concrete wall as seen from many floors above (a vantage point that may or may not be the apartment in which her husband Giovanni listlessly lies)?

18_HF_010 - La notte (M. Antonioni – 1961)

The majority of Antonioni’s ‘semi-abstract phenomena’, including his most ‘painterly’ images, do not in fact show something strange in itself. Rather, historical reality is photographed in a way that brings out both the startling modern beauty and nihilistic power of its spaces, no matter their intended purpose, all the while evidencing palimpsestic history. Originally designed for the cancelled 1942 World’s Fair to celebrate two decades of Italian fascism, the EUR is seen in L’eclisse newly refurbished, born anew as ‘economic miracle’ and Olympics showcase, yet as filmed it comes across as a highly ‘science-fiction’-like environment. In Il deserto rosso we see the other, less glamorous but equally futuristic-looking side of the modern Italian story with Ravenna’s heavy industry, high technology and environmental degradation.

 As viewers of Antonioni’s films, our engagement with the world as presented on screen is one in which, to again borrow Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘the mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects’ (1964, p. 166). To indulge the visual in all its confronting and enabling ambiguity is at the core both of this modernist cinema’s re-configured realism and its enormous seduction. Antonioni says that his visual technique is ‘in moving from a series of images up to a state of things.’ (qtd. in Tinazzi, 1996, p. xvii) The viewer also collates these images into a whole ‘state of things’. Each of us brings not only customised order but also qualified meaning to the reality of this film-world. More than usual, however, in the process we realise that such a manoeuvre remains both tenuous and viable only for an audience of one. What prevails is the space and time of the world in all its ambiguity as manifest on – in fact as – film. In his famous letter celebrating the director’s ‘fragility’, Roland Barthes extols a ‘discernment’ that never confuses ‘meaning with truth’. (1989, pp. 209 & 210) This is the secret weapon of the still challenging freedom offered by Antonioni’s endlessly generative early ‘60s work, in which modernism and realism achieve their richest and most historically appropriate union.

]]> http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?feed=rss2&p=2197 0 http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?p=2106 http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?p=2106#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:29:05 +0000 admin http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?p=2106 by ROBERTO CAVALLINI

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his essay sets out from a basic premise: to perform a close reading of Antonioni’s short documentary L’amorosa menzogna (1949), followed by some considerations on Jacques Rancière’s rethinking of the concept of documentary as a mode of fiction and Antonioni’s views on truth and authenticity. L’amorosa menzogna is certainly a minor work within Antonioni’s overall oeuvre. However, I argue that it contains an already fully developed aesthetic dimension that explores the transitional elements, within a documentary perspective, of what Rancière would call the “labour of fiction”. It is somehow difficult and probably hazardous to discuss and theorize on such a minor work without falling into a generalizing discourse. My limited attempt here would be to approach L’amorosa menzogna as one would look at a miniature: I believe that its brevity and dimension do not reduce its refined structure and cinematic intensity. However, choosing to approach the film in this way does not mean to downgrade it as a inaugural, immature work by a young Antonioni preparing for his feature film debut with Cronaca di un amore (1950). On the contrary, the minuteness of a miniature does not conceal the autonomy of its visual composition although the iconography and its construction can be experienced as less direct and straightforward. In the context of Antonioni’s oeuvre, I definitely agree with the inevitable necessity to consider his early films as autonomous works; they not only anticipate strategies of vision and composition that can be found in Antonioni’s later works but, as Leonardo Quaresima insists, they should also be thought as foundational to neo-realism’s poetics, as an intrinsic product of neo-realism.[i]

I would argue that Antonioni’s early films in general and L’amorosa menzogna in particular, which is constructed in a style based on an extremely refined mise-en-scene, points precisely towards an understanding of (documentary) cinema as “the labour of fiction”, borrowing an expression from Jacques Rancière’s work which will be developed further throughout the essay.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’amorosa menzogna (1949) is a short documentary film shoot in Rome that interweaves both fiction and documentary approaches to explore the popular phenomenon of the comic books known as photoromances (fotoromanzi), as they affect the lives, the dreams and the imaginary of the Italian people (particularly women) in the post-war period.

18_RC_001 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

18_RC_002 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

18_RC_003 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

Photoromances were an Italian editorial invention that staged melodramatic stories performed by actors in a sort of static, motionless film. Targeted largely on working-class audiences and the emergent petty-bourgeoisie, photoromances magazines such as “Il mio sogno” or “Bolero” started being published in 1947 and obtained an immediate and great success, discarding the previous comic books (“Grand Hotel”) that had a softer impact due to the employment of drawings instead of photos.

The Second World War created obviously a fracture in the production of melodramatic and popular stories in the Italian cinema industry: neither neo-realism nor Hollywood cinema could or wanted to fill in this gap. Before the advent of the television (1954), only the photoromances and the melodramatic films by Raffaello Matarazzo (Catene is shooted in 1949 as well), covered partially this transitional period that de Berti brilliantly defines as the “Italian melodramatic void”.[ii] This absence allowed photoromances, by employing film actors and actresses at the beginning of their careers (Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida are just two famous examples), to enter the houses and the hearts of Italian women and men and, to some extent, improving the very low rate in the post-war years of adult literacy.

Antonioni’s interest to this widely popular phenomenon of photoromances is not accidental. If one looks closely at his entire career, one could assert that his primary fascination was concerned with the re-staging and re-framing of the genre of melodrama in a complete modern and innovative cinematic style. It suffices to point out at the trilogy composed by L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962) in which the melodramatic genre is totally exploited, producing a reversal that finds in the alienation effect the conditions of invalidating melodrama’s excessive elements through a geometric and spatial distancing of the characters within a given, urban or natural, landscape. Melodrama in Antonioni is emptied out and somehow frozen and the tension between inside and outside is amplified and far-fetched towards abstraction. The often extreme, but never totally reached, balance between documentary style versus melodrama genre found in many of his feature films, indicates his incessant attempt at capturing and observing reality through the same suspension of those laws of attraction and repulsion that makes of him a melodramatic director in disguise.[iii]

Turning our attention to L’amorosa menzogna, one could interpret it both as a document that illustrates the photoromances phenomenon and as a statement in which Antonioni creates a cinematic structure that plays with different levels of representation within the same film: Sandro Raimondi and Anna Vita, photoromance stars, are followed from their real life to the photoshooting set; actual passers-by visibly impersonating themselves as characters while reading the magazines; young women posing and glancing maliciously to the photo star Raimondi, are just few examples.

18_RC_004 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

The film is built through these transitional moments, each character swing smoothly through these thresholds in a combination of proximity and distancing.

L’amorosa menzogna’s opening scenes portray the frenetic loading of piles of magazines inside a truck,  accompanied by a voice-over making a list of the most famous photoromances of the time (“Bolero”, “Grand Hotel”, “Incanto”, “Luna Park” etc). We then follow the truck reaching a square and unloading some bundles of magazines on the ground besides a newspaper agent, while the stentorious voice-over announces the magnitude of the business: two millions copies sold with more than five millions passionate readers throughout the Italian peninsula.

18_RC_005 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

Already from these first sequences, Antonioni’s attention to the aesthetic meaning of the construction of the image emerges in a very dramatic way. The long shot of the square immediately resonates with iconographic elements of Italian paintings by De Chirico, Mario Sironi and the “Valori Plastici” movement of the 1920s; similarly to other previous works such as Gente del Po (1947) and N. U. (1948), the spectator is taken through a marginal and suburban Rome, from Via Tuscolana to the working-class district of San Lorenzo, from Primavalle to Piazza Zama.[iv]

18_RC_006 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

After having sketched the dimensions and the numbers of this popular phenomenon, Antonioni introduces the two main actors: Sandro Raimondi and Anna Vita. In real life, Raimondi is a mechanic and we see him working at a car repair shop before running to the photo shooting set. Vita’s introduction sequence is much more elaborate and it deserves a careful consideration because it inaugurates the central part of the film which explores the backstage of the creation of an actual photoromance titled “L’amorosa menzogna”.

The sequence starts with Anna Vita appearing on the top of a staircase: we catch a glimpse of her through a glass door. We are in the basement where the set is located. We see her while she walks down the stairs and she stops just in front of the door; she takes out a pocket mirror from a bag and she adjusts her blonde hair while the voice-over speaks up her name. She enters the room, closing gently the door and she is greeted with a gesture of impatience by the director. The camera, at the opposite side of the room, and in a higher position, makes a pan shot following Anna crossing the space and entering her very modest dressing room. In Antonioni or the Surface of the World (1985), Seymour Benjamin Chatman points out, in a chapter dedicated to the director’s early documentaries, that L’amorosa menzogna is a film not “visually striking” except for one sequence in which Antonioni performs the first “mirror” shot of his career:[v] Anna Vita (and not Annie O’Hara as Chatman suggests) is getting ready before the photographic shooting and the pan fluctuates between two mirror reflections, two magazines covers pinned up side by side on the wall and finally ending on Anna putting on her lipstick. The sequence materializes itself in a very unexpected way and it is edited in-between the constant inquisitive voice-over’s accumulation of facts and numbers (just before the pan, it announces that a photoromance is usually composed by five, six hundred photos).

18_RC_007 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

Antonioni seems here to employs a certain logic of the supplement in order to make manifest the illusionary and fictional mechanisms existing both in the photoromances and in the art of cinema. The mirror scene functions as a supplement through which Antonioni designates the possibility of immediacy as suspension, in order to emphasize once more the discrepancy between appearance and reality, lie and authenticity. This logic of the supplement, which emerges as a moment of transition and as a movement of mediation operates as a double-bind: it is an allusion to cinema’s virtual potentiality (cinema as “l’amorosa menzogna”, a loving lie) and to cinema as a form of representation (melodrama) and interpretation (documentary) of reality between the incongruity of an event and its crystallization into an image. It is this process of substitution, as that which constitutes the divergence from the fact to its consequent representative image, that provokes the reverberation of a disappearance which many critics defined as one of Antonioni’s original traits, the dimension of immobility and alienation.

In a famous text titled “Il fatto e l’immagine” published in “Cinema Nuovo” in 1963 (and translated as “The Event and the Image”), Antonioni insists on cinema’s ability to create a new perception of reality based on spatial and temporal relations as an indivisible whole. In Italian, the multiple meaning of the term “il fatto” can generate some linguistic ambiguities (literally “il fatto” means “that which is made”, and more generally the “fact”, understood in terms of evidence and ultimately the “event”, that which happened).  However, the event as something which is made, constructed and produced must be understood as something that is made, constructed and produced after it has occurred. The one who inherits the event comes always late, a witness of a potentiality yet to be articulated within a system and a context of signs and their readability. In “The Event and the Image”, Antonioni reports a biographical fact that he witnessed in Nice before leaving for Paris where he had been appointed assistant director to Marcel Carné. In the example reported in the text, Antonioni dismisses the pure “fact” (a dead man floating on the sea) and maintains the vision of that particular image (the white sky, the desert-like sea, the empty beach) before it is invested by its own array of meaning and causes. The image of the event, without the consequences and the explanatory motives related to it, is enough for Antonioni in order for the fact itself to be cinematically understood as authentic.

Antonioni’s cinema, as it is commonly judged, aims at defying the truth of the event focusing on the suspension of its own narrative explanation. In L’amorosa menzogna, the photoromances as a popular phenomenon are obviously “the fact” to be documented. However, their documentality is not observed and analyzed through an ethnographic approach, through interviews or sociological perspectives. The photoromance become a pretext through which Antonioni accurately steps back and immerses his vision in the laboratory and photographic set where those images are created. Antonioni here is somehow concerned with the creation of those images, how the truth of the image, if such a thing exists, is made and produced. The particular position that L’amorosa menzogna occupies in his filmography is also due to the fact that his ironical and witty qualities emerges at the best in the portrays of the director and the photographer of the photoromance. Both of them are depicted as caricatures happily exaggerating their postures or visual expressions, with frequent close-ups, especially the little funny photographer with his twin-lens Rolleicord.

18_RC_008 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

After the “mirror sequence” with Anna Vita, a following scene repeats the same strategy of composition. It is the sequence in which Sandro Raimondi enters an inner courtyard and he is acclaimed and passionately welcomed by a group of female fans and a little girl dancing and attracting his attention, functions very much similarly to the previous scene. Just a moment before, the voice-over reads a fan letter full of passion and infatuation for Raimondi and comments: “Dream, dream about me, girl, even this is a form of happiness”. The cinematic execution of the following scene is constructed not through a smooth pan but with a subtle work of editing. The half malicious and half dreamy gazes of the female fans are set against the gaze of a young man overlooking the scene from a balcony and smoking nervously. These two points of view take on the function that the mirrors occupied in the Anna Vita’s scene. When the little girl starts dancing within the circle made by the fans, the gazes of the women and the man are all directed towards Raimondi: the final result is indeed visually striking and minimal at the same time. The languishing gazes of the girls are confident and upfront, the man’s jealous gaze from a higher position seems to dismiss what is happening but it naturally betrays the lack of self-confidence.

18_RC_009 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

18_RC_010 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

18_RC_011 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

These two gaze perspectives, staged and acted in an over exaggerating manner, are directed to the photoromance star who is not slightly affected by them: half hypnotized by the little girl dancing, Raimondi never exchanges a glance neither with any of the girls nor with the man. The film star, who is the source of passion and dreams for the girls, or envy and jealousy for the man, is, in real life, a mechanic, a normal person. His paternal gesture of lifting up the little dancer reinstates the conditions of the reality he lives in and belongs to. The little girl polarizes the gaze’s crossing: in three, fours shots, Antonioni makes us witnessing an entire universe of micro-social dynamics within the inner courtyards of a “casa a ringhiera” in the popular quarter of San Lorenzo in Rome.

L’amorosa menzogna ends with another fictional re-appropriation: the voice-over reads two letters sent by female fans and addressed to Sandro Roberti (another photoromance star) and Anna Vita.

18_RC_012 – L’amorosa menzogna (M. Antonioni – 1949)

Different images appear on the screen: a newly built suburban landscape geometrically shaped by council blocks as dramatic as the square at the beginning, a man and a woman cycling and stopping at a “salone”. Everyday suburban life with a strong neo-realist intensity is counterposed to the desires and fantasies of women, writing from Puglia or Sardegna, instigated by the performances and love stories impersonated by the actors and actresses. Their only distraction and entertainment is limited to reading stories of love and passion through the photoromances, dreaming about a life so full of excitement, or at least this is what the voice-over implies. The composition delineated through the reading of these naive letters and the associative images depicting everyday life in a modern landscape, ends with a woman walking out from a milky shop (“latteria”); she goes to a newsagent and buys the last copy of “Sogno”, a photoromance magazine. In the moment in which she folds the magazine, there is a cut to Anna Vita who is walking in Piazza Zama to catch a tram. She is reading a fan letter that, as the voice-over illustrates, admonishes her saying that “one should take distance from women like you, that only thinks about love, have on their lips the scent of magnolia and gives poisoned kisses”. This refined juxtaposition between the female reader of photoromances and Anna Vita impersonating herself while reading a resentful letter, creates a fascinating encounter and short-circuit at the borders of fiction.

In the recent debate about the difference and definition of fiction and non-fiction film, the work of Rancière re-establishes a critical focus on the ways in which one could approach such anodyne dichotomy. Looking beyond what Williams previously identified as a dialectic doubling between melodrama versus documentary in Antonioni, here I would like to shift from the constellation of melodrama to the more general notion of fiction in the context of Rancière’s reflection on the aesthetic regime of art and the documentary as an aesthetic problem.[vi]

Rancière, exploring the problem of difference between documentary and fiction films, affirms:

The event (or the fact) versus the image, melodrama versus documentary. The reframing of reality as a fictional system does not appear as an effect or a consequence to be reproduced over and over again. Moreover, “memory is a work of fiction”,[viii] as Rancière indicates, because it deals with recollection and storytelling: the reconfiguration of a common or individual experience is accomplished through the work of memory and through the rearrangement of the facts and, mostly important, their readability (reading is a fact, fact is a reading).[ix]

Rancière’s critical stance does not, as Hito Steyerl affirms, create confusion once again between two cinematic modes of representation (documentary and fiction) but instead inscribes, within the aesthetic regime of art, the conditions of possibility of fiction as such.[x] Documentary as that which triggers authenticity should deal with facts in a sort of fictional construction and reappropriation: (documentary) cinema as an aesthetic problem becomes the visual re-framing of the real, that is the moment in which authenticity finds its unity between chronicle and invention. In an essay titled “The Paradoxes of Political Art”, Rancière introduces the expression “the labour of fiction”:

Embarking on a process of re-conceiving fiction today, and not only in the context of documentary cinema but maybe departing from it, is a very intriguing suggestion, which opens up incredible avenues both theoretically and practically.[xii] What does imply the expression “labour of fiction”? All too quickly, it probably consists in the reorganization of given facts and impressions through a process of framing and re-framing, making visibile the invisible, and audible the inaudible; it implies the moment in which our imaginary meets the authenticity of a certain event, what is left out and appears to refuse any objective explanation. From this it becomes evident, as Antonioni asserts, that one “cannot penetrate events with reportage” and that the production of truth embedded in so much neo-realism or documentary films is never really effective if we do not accept the fact that is “not cinema at the service of reality but reality at the service of cinema”.[xiii] Reality is certainly a much richer, fascinating and complex source of storytelling: the labour of fiction is constituted by a work of memory which is generated by acts of exposures more than based on acts of representation; it would deal more with reporting events without explaining their genealogical affiliation, that is treating the real as a fact to be understood, as Rancière puts it.[xiv] However, it is the way in which this act of understanding is devised as a labour of fiction the crucial point here. For Rancière, as Baumbach notes, “cinema as documentary” constructs an aesthetic of knowledge which aligns fiction and fact with the work of memory.[xv] Documentary understood not as a transmission of pure information but as a mode of fiction implies that “the potential of documentary is not to challenge lies and distortions with sober facts, but to allow for new kinds of histories to be told that create new common worlds heterogeneous to official narratives marked by inequality”.[xvi]

Documentary as a mode of fiction whereby fact and invention are paired together, perhaps, as Antonioni hints in one of his writings, shows us an understanding of cinema as caught between the fierce ingenuity of a lie and the spectral neutrality of authenticity:

This simple and intense passage implicitly affirms the complexity of the problem of an aesthetic reality of cinema, of what precedes and what follows the production of authenticity or truth, of what perhaps Ranciere calls the labour of fiction. Here Antonioni provides a much effective statement and analysis of any theory that addresses the incongruity between fiction and non-fiction films. In this sense, I would argue that Antonioni’s reflection resonates in Ranciere’s previous statement about fiction as that which triggers the definition of new frames, new perspectives and new worlds. The equation that ‘a reading is a fact and a fact is a reading’ escapes any tautological proposition in favour instead of an understanding of (cinematic) invention centred upon the question of readability and transmission. In L’amorosa menzogna, the labour of fiction becomes more apparent in those scenes where Antonioni rapidly and all of a sudden, through the logic of the supplement, substitutes his observational stance with a refined system of transitional movements and determinations. Through rapid juxtapositions, perhaps, we witness the labour of fiction as a constant work of proximity and distancing; of infringing and violating thresholds; of bringing side by side the actor and the spectator and even switching their roles; of combining a fictional apparatus of authentic portrayals along with their dreams, projections and desires.

The fact or the event as it is received and observed by the director provokes automatically a process of storytelling and narration, which does not need to follow any linear, expository or explicative development. Later on in his career, Antonioni embraced the idea of cinema as a loving lie, with all his melodramatic tones and minimalist manners; the lying of cinema as the subtle, maybe unconscious manifestation of an authentic truth yet to be discovered or articulated. This seems to coincide with the aesthetic mission of Antonioni’s poetics: the extraordinary possibility that cinema offers of lying while telling the truth. In this sense, documentary as the labour of fiction becomes probably Antonioni’s unusual melodramatic attitude on how to tell authentic stories through the invention of lies.

L’amorosa menzogna

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I

n writing an essay on Heidegger and Antonioni, it is not easy to decide how to express the relationship between the two.  One might say that Antonioni is intentionally conveying Heidegger’s insights through his films, or one might say that Heidegger’s concepts merely help us to appreciate Antonioni’s films, even though there is no deliberate intention on Antonioni’s part to express Heideggerean insights.  Based on some of Antonioni’s comments, there is some reason to make the former, stronger connection.  In one interview, he directly refers to Heidegger and the idea of Being-in-the-world. (Antonioni, 83)  In another, he straightforwardly admits to being influenced by existentialist philosophy: “Existentialism, and later on phenomenology, are two philosophies that I felt very close to.  It is possible to see them reflected in my films…” (188)  And he readily admits that his films can be understood as statements on alienation.  (60)  Yet he never explicitly says that he has set out to express philosophical insights by way of his films.  In fact, the above quote continues, “but I have never been a man of learning who interpreted everything through culture.  My way of seeing is in the eye, I believe in the force of the image, of its internal rhythm.” (188)  This, I think, is the best way to understand Antonioni.  Though intelligent and well-read, Antonioni isn’t out to demonstrate anything about the works of philosophers, though his overall world view, shaped as it is by post-war European culture, might be affected by Heidegger and others.  He is an artist, first and foremost, capturing the world with his unique aesthetic talent.

My intent in this essay is to show that Antonioni is able to effectively convey important insights about our world and ourselves through his art.  The way in which he depicts human beings – by displaying the often mundane objects of their world – is particularly effective when one understands the relationship between self and world.  This is where a consideration of Heidegger’s work is helpful.  It illuminates that relationship between via the notion that our kind of being is essentially Being-in-the-world.  By viewing Antonioni’s work through the lens provided by Heidegger’s concepts, we will be able to appreciate just how effective Antonioni’s style of filmmaking is in capturing who we really are.  And as Heidegger teaches us, explicitly becoming conscious of who we are puts us in a position to choose, more authentically, who we might be.

Being-in-the-world

Before considering Antonioni’s work, our first task is to review those central tenets of Heidegger’s thought that are necessary for our purposes.  This is not a general overview of his views, but an account of just those key concepts useful in deepening our understanding of Antonioni’s works.  The focus will be on Division I of Being and Time, where Heidegger establishes the character of human being as Being-in-the-world.

Heidegger, in general, is attempting to deepen our understanding of the concept of “being,” and he does so by examining those beings for whom this is an issue at all – human beings.  In order to emphasize our unique nature, he uses the term “Dasein” – or “being there” – in place of “human being.” This term already implies the essential character of ourselves as being in a place, involved in a world.  Since Heidegger’s phenomenology is a descriptive enterprise, this is essentially a description of our experience.  If I ask what my conscious life is like, I find that I am fundamentally part of a world of objects and persons which shape my awareness.  As Heidegger explains, “’Being-in’ is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state” (1962, 80).  Objects which I am aware of should also be understood in this descriptive way: I am only concerned with how those objects are present to me, not how they are in-themselves, apart from anyone’s thinking them.

This approach to our subjectivity is much different from what one typically finds in the history of Western thought, where subject and object are sharply distinguished and far more isolated.  This is a point that will be significant when we compare Antonioni’s style to that of other filmmakers.  Subjects are not fundamentally different than the world they live in: “’world’…is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself” (Heidegger 1962, 92).

When we consider the objects that constitute this world, at least in our typical, everyday experience, we find that the objects are as dependent on us, in terms of what they mean, as we are on them.  Objects that we most frequently interact with – computers, cars, pencils, chairs – are “ready-to-hand,” meaning that we encounter them as a thing for a purpose or use.  When we come across a hammer, for example, we think of it in reference both to my own potential use of it and to carpentry generally.  In fact, we only pick out those objects for which we have an interest already.  Think of the many insignificant objects (that bit of dust or minor scratch on the table) that might be part of our visual field everyday but never registers with us, unless it should help or hinder our interests in some way.  It is because we have “concern” for these objects that they are part of the world we become aware of.   Another way of describing this, which will be particularly useful when discussing filmmaking, is that we “disclose” the world according to our concerns.  We reveal objects as what they are for us, that is, with the meaning they have for us.

So when we say that Dasein is in-the-world, what we mean is that Dasein exists within a web of references among entities for which it has some concern. Those concerns disclose the meaningful part of my experience of the world, and in turn those disclosures constitute who I am: “Dasein is its disclosedness” (1962, 171).

But in addition to objects, Being-in-the-world also involves Being-with-others.   We encounter others as the source of ready-to-hand objects; they supply many of the purposes and references through which we disclose things.  In fact, we rarely invent the meanings of things ourselves.  We are brought up to be part of a world and taught what things do and what they are for.  We internalize these meanings and make the concerns of others our concerns.  By the time we are adults, we assume these interpretations of things and take them for granted.  This is our normal way of functioning, what Heidegger calls “everydayness.”  The source of these everyday meanings, the vague sense of others from whom we have learned these references, we refer to as “they.”  “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge… The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness” (1962, 164).

But most often this everydayness is inauthentic precisely because we do not intentionally choose those interpretations and meanings.  Heidegger’s notion of authenticity involves various other aspects of his thought beyond the scope of this essay, but the general point is that we can distinguish between inauthentic states whereby we allow ourselves to get caught up in the concerns defined by others (“they”), or authentic states in which we acknowledge the contingent nature of those interpretations and then make a deliberate choice whether or not to affirm them.  Authentic Dasein owns up to its condition, taking responsibility for the way in which it encounters the world (Carman, 289).  We are all subject to inauthentic states from time to time, perhaps most of the time, though some may be far less willing than others to detach themselves from the expectations of the “they.”  Such inauthentic persons are content to “go with the flow.”

In sum, describing human existence reveals that we are thoroughly involved in a world of objects, activities, and purposes, whose meanings we inherit from our culture.  Those involvements are not mere accidental attributes to an otherwise distinct subjectivity; they constitute our way of being.  Human being is a form of disclosing the world, though that disclosure can either conform inauthentically to how “they” have disclosed the world, or to a more authentic disclosure based on our willingness to affirm as our “ownmost potentiality for being” the meanings we deliberately embrace.

Disclosing the World Through Cinema

If consciousness is itself a kind of disclosure, then one appeal of art is to allow us to gain or alter perspectives on ways of being.  In fact, Heidegger considers art quite valuable for that reason. (Heidegger 1977)  Narrative art, however, also presupposes that we are competent in our understanding of the everyday world.  In cinema, for example, we bring our everyday expectations to the film in order to make sense of it.  We do not just see shapes and colors or hear sound effects and music in some objective, abstract way; we perceive these things within a context – an interconnected set of references we already understand.  As Aumont et al describe the nature of narrative cinema, “every object already carries (at least for the society in which it is recognizable), a whole array of values that it represents and ‘narrates.’ Every object is already, in itself, a discourse” (69).  As Heidegger would say, “they” have already determined the meaning of a revolver or a menacing musical score prior to whatever use is made of these things in the film.  So films, in order to be meaningful to us, assume the everyday interpretations of what things are, even if the film adds some unique meanings through its particular narrative.  In that sense, they reveal our own world even while they reveal fictional worlds.

There is a distinct difference, however, in the kinds of uses made of these everyday meanings.  In the case of traditional Hollywood films, and films intended for entertainment generally, those everyday meanings are employed as mechanisms by which the filmmaker conveys the plot.  Heidegger refers to the primary goal within a system of relations as the “for-the-sake-of-which” (Heidegger 1962, 114-9), and in most narrative films the various narrative components are employed for the sake of entertainment.  When viewing these films, we are happy to give ourselves over, inauthentically, to the pleasure of the narrative spectacle.  We do not need to think much about the meanings and relations we assume while taking pleasure in the film.  However, in some films, particularly art films, the purpose isn’t merely to entertain in some way, but to make us think about ourselves and our world.  In those films, disclosing our world is done in such a way as to enable us to reflect on those meanings.

Antonioni’s  films do precisely that.  The narrative filmmaker who began making documentaries reveals persons, environments and objects that are not products of the studio, but are to be found in the world we live in.  There are two levels at which we encounter “the world” in Antonioni’s films.  On the most immediate level, the images he uses allow us to understand the characters and the narrative.  But on another, more subtle, level, those images allow us to take a critical position on our own world – and thereby on our selves – because the manner of disclosing the world also distances us from everydayness.  Rather than comfortably taking for granted the meaning of mundane objects in the world, we are led to ask ourselves about the appropriateness of those meanings.  I will return to this point about critical distancing in the next section.  In the remainder of this section, we will explore the unique way Antonioni reveals the world: how he employs images of the contemporary world as a means to reveal our modern selves.

While all of Antonioni’s films make use of the imagery of our modern world to some extent, it is the films from the early sixties,  L’avventura (1960) to Il deserto rosso (1964), that do so most extensively.  My focus will be on the mundane objects and environments that characterize Antonioni’s filming during this period – those everyday things we tend to take for granted and which strike the attentive viewer for the very fact that they get so much attention.  Most filmmakers underplay the ordinary and emphasize the extraordinary, for obvious effect.  Not so with Antonioni, and this is precisely one reason why his films succeed so much in bringing our world to us. As Chatman points out, referring to Antonioni’s eye for found art, “The object trouvé undeniably guarantees the ‘thereness’ of the real world, not because it is verisimilar but because it really was there” (101).

A comparison to other forms of filmmaking puts into relief the unique approach Antonioni has mastered.  Bergman, for example, is also starkly honest about the human condition, confronting us with images of contemporary humanity.  But Bergman’s films (like Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, or Cries and Whispers) more typically aim inward, at the experience of subjects.  Through close-ups and dramatic personal narratives, Bergman conveys what the characters are experiencing. For example, in Winter Light (1963), the male protagonist reads a long letter from his estranged lover, and the scene cuts to a close-up of her reciting the text in monologue.  The scene conveys all the powerful emotions she feels as she expresses her frustrations.  There are no objects or images in the scene to compete with the dialogue and the actress’s expressions, and that helps us focus entirely on the character. Few filmmakers are as skilled at getting us to share the intense emotional experiences of their characters as Bergman, but his films do not bring the world to us the way Antonioni’s do.  As with many filmmakers, Bergman brings us to the world that he devises and in particular the inner lives of the characters.  Antonioni, on the other hand, brings our own world to us.

18_WP_001 – Figure 1: A close-up from Bergman’s Winter Light.

Before turning to particular examples of Antonioni’s work, it should be noted that I do not think that all of his images serve the purpose of relating to actual things as we encounter them in the world.  Antonioni is an artist, and often he captures images simply because he finds something beautiful in framing particular objects or environments.  For example, close-ups of power transformers, pipes, and other industrial equipment in Il deserto rosso are included because Antonioni finds them aesthetically appealing (Antonioni, 286).  In that film, he even paints objects for particular effect, which departs from the documentarian’s eye for found art that I have been focusing on.  Similarly, the opening scene of L’eclisse (1962) is carefully constructed to highlight various everyday objects, but they are positioned and framed in such a way that they take on new meanings beyond everyday ones.  Antonioni is an accomplished filmmaker who does many different things with the camera.  I do not claim, therefore, that his ability to represent our Being-in-the-world is the only or perhaps even the primary aspect of his filmmaking, though it is significant and one of his unique accomplishments.

My focus for a discussion of Being-in-the-world is L’eclisse (1962), which more than any of his other films makes use of mundane objects and environments to sometimes startling effect.  The film follows Vittoria (Monica Vitti) from a difficult break-up with her soon-to-be former lover through the ultimately unsuccessful relationship with her mother’s stock broker, Piero (Alain Delon).  Much of the film takes place in the EUR district, a section of Rome originally intended by Mussolini to be a statement of the Fascist era, but which was turned into a business and residential district after World War II.  The choice of this setting for location shooting as opposed to the beauty and opulence found in other parts of Rome is significant.   This is a film about the modern world, where working and getting by has more to do with the functional, if often banal, neighborhoods of the EUR.  If Antonioni had used the studio and deliberately selected props to make this film, the effect would be entirely different. But he is letting the objects of our own world speak for themselves.  Brunette, in commenting on the montage of images that conclude the film, makes this point in terms clearly influenced by Heidegger: “This now apparently humanless terrain also attests to the power of the sheer facticity of objects in the world…a truth that reminds one of the phenomenological insistence that Being is always being in the world” (88).  While this point is intended to describe the film’s montage ending (discussed below), it is no less true of the settings in the rest of the film.

Turning to a specific example, consider a scene involving a stroll through the EUR that Vittoria and Piero take as they get acquainted.  It’s a pleasant area, but not sensational.  They come across an outdoor café, populated by a couple of bored customers, and after tarrying just a moment, resume their walk.  As they cross the patio, the camera begins by following them but then holds while the couple walks out of the scene.  There is a short pause on the place now devoid of characters (a technique Antonioni is fond of). We have a bit of time to examine this environment.  Half the scene is the adjacent hillside, atop of which is a road.  It is rather barren and unfinished, running wild with weeds.  Curved metal street lights (the same type that appear in the film’s final scene) line the road on the hill.  None of these things are very attractive, though they are common scenes in developing suburbs throughout the Western world.  Most filmmakers would avoid this sort of scenery altogether, but Antonioni centers the camera on it, frames it with the café on one side and a Coca-cola umbrella on the other, and then holds the scene to make sure we get a good look at it.

18_WP_002 – Figure 2: The café which situates the relationship between Piero and Vittoria.

Why choose such a banal landscape as a backdrop of the couple’s emerging love affair?  In terms of the characters, one might readily conclude that images like these provide visual statements about the couple’s relationship.  That makes sense, particularly when you know that they do not stay together.  But it also puts the characters in the world most of us actually live in.  Most of us only vacation at the charming plazas that a classical Hollywood director would have chosen for such a scene; but we live in urban or suburban areas that are more functional then beautiful.  Part of what I want to argue is that these scenes make us aware that relationships have to occur in our modern world, with all the challenges that it represents.

One of the most commonly discussed locations in L’eclisse makes this point more dramatically: the construction site that becomes the couple’s meeting place.  Close-ups of building materials combine with long shots of the half finished building, and at one point a low angle shot of Vittoria’s head set off against another curved metal street lamp.  The environment is, again, remarkable for its choice as a meeting place for lovers , but there is also a menacing quality to these images, both in the scenes that occur earlier in the film and, of course, in the famous montage at the end.  The ways these images are framed and sequenced makes us reflect on the meaning of the objects, both for the film’s narrative and for the objects themselves.  Again, by choosing real objects that constitute our world, Antonioni involves us and our world in the film.  If these images unsettle us, then there is something unsettling not just with this particular narrative, but with the world itself.

18_WP_003 – Figure 3: The construction site where Piero and Vittoria meet.  Note Vittoria dwarfed in the foreground.

Many commentators attempt to explain the effect of these images in terms of symbolism, but my point is that it is the direct representation of objects in-the-world, in our world, that makes them so powerful, over and above what meanings we can assign as symbols.  In fact, as Brunette points out, it does a disservice to Antonioni to boil down his images to the equivalent of verbal meanings that they symbolize.  Rather, he claims, they contain visual meanings that do not reduce to any verbal meaning at all  (79).   I agree that Antonioni’s imagery does not have to be taken as communicating a particular personal statement, or conveying any special, indirect point.  Rather, it is really about disclosing certain aspects of our world to us so that we are able to understand who we are.  Dasein is its disclosedness, after all.

Revealing Ourselves and Thinking Authentically

To more directly apply Heidegger’s concepts, consider the sort of settings discussed above in their everyday, ready-to-hand meanings.  Urban landscapes (the EUR, or La notte’s images of Milan) and industrial environments (Il deserto rosso’s factories, or the construction site in L’eclisse) have clear meanings, and in the context of our everyday lives we do not think twice about what they are or why they are part of our world.  We recognize the world Antonioni captures as our world, but in calling attention to just these elements of the world, they no longer fall comfortably into a system of references that constitutes our everyday, taken-for-granted attitude (a condition Heidegger calls “falling”).  Rather, we start to become aware of what these images ultimately refer to, the “for-the-sake-of-which” that these are all about: the values shaped by our economic and industrial institutions.

This, I believe, is one of the central insights conveyed by Antonioni’s films from this period.  Without ever saying so directly in the film’s narrative, Antonioni’s imagery makes us conscious of the extent to which our world is steered by forces of production.  He has directly said as much in an interview: “Even though we don’t realize it, our lives are dominated by ‘industry.’ And by ‘industry,’ I don’t just mean the factories themselves, but also their products.”  (289) In direct reference to a depiction of the Roman stock exchange in L’eclisse, where we are originally introduced to Piero, Antonioni explains the power of money in today’s world: “Whoever lives within the Stock Exchange sees life through banknotes.  The consequence of this is that even real feelings can be filtered through the cobweb money creates around the mind of whoever is involved in it and doesn’t see anything else all day long.” (199) And since, if Heidegger is right, we are constituted by the world we disclose, we become aware of who we, in contemporary Western society, really are.  We are very often all about money and productivity, even to the extent that these things “eclipse” our emotional life.

No where is this more forcefully demonstrated than in the closing montage of L’eclisse.  Vittoria and Piero agree to meet, and the camera waits for them outside the construction site.  Neither arrives, expressing the poverty at the heart of their relationship.  But the collection of images in and around this intersection lasts several minutes, and it is through the images conveyed that we receive insights about why their relationship is doomed and, I would argue, about what is troubling about the human condition generally.  We see the building that is under construction multiple times and from multiple angles, and while there is an attention to lines and angles that may be a simple aesthetic appreciation of this found art, these images also carry with them the associations of growth and productivity that we naturally attribute to them.   There are also images of natural objects – trees, ants, water trickling from a barrel through the dirt – and persons walking in and out of the space of the intersection, going about their day-to-day lives.   The juxtaposition of the natural and the human with the industrial and material is suggestive.  What affect does this productivity have on us and our environment?  There is no one clear meaning that we can attribute to all of this, but as other commentators have pointed out, there is an unfocused sense of dread that pervades. (Chatman, 64)  This arrangement of images, together with a light musical score that is darkly dramatic, makes us encounter these objects in ways which suggest the threatening nature of the world we otherwise take for granted.  What are the deeper values and purposes that our-day-to-day activities serve?  What are we really all about?  There may be no one way to explicitly articulate answers to these questions, but Antonioni shows us what we take for granted and brings it to our attention.

18_WP_004 - Figure 4: The construction site revisited in the montage.

18_WP_005 – Figure 5: The sense of foreboding in the human images of the montage.

Dasein is its disclosedness, Heidegger says.  So what we are, in part, are persons whose everyday activities ultimately serve the economic and productive priorities that make the world what it is.  We do not necessarily choose these priorities – “they” choose it – but the urgency of economic production constitutes who many of us are nevertheless.  (Despite the fact that many commentators identify Antonioni’s films with the specific conditions of Italy during the period they were made, the basic condition I have been describing is no less true of the Western world today than it was when these films were made.)  Perhaps most of us are unreflective and inauthentic about this.  Piero is a good example.   He takes for granted the validity of the stock market where he does much of his work.  He wishes to be a success, but he never questions why the pursuit of money should count as success in the first place.  He never becomes conscious of the world the way we become conscious of it by viewing the film, and so, one must assume, he will remain inauthentic.

But L’eclisse, like other films of Antonioni’s (particularly L’avventura and Il deserto rosso), does not allow us to fall comfortably back into everydayness like Piero.  By holding before us a mirror of who we are, Antonioni is making us explicitly conscious of certain aspects of ourselves that we should find disconcerting.  This is accomplished in part by the open narrative of the film.  If Vittoria and Piero had met at their designated spot, ending the film on an expectation that they will live happily ever after, there would be nothing much to think about.  Like most Hollywood movies, the film would have provided a tidy closure and the purpose of the film would simply be the narrative’s own feel-good experience.  By defying our expectation and giving us no indication of the characters’ future, we are left to wonder what the film is about.  The anxiety produced by the irresolution stimulates thinking.

 But the more forceful way in which we are encouraged to think is, again, through Antonioni’s depiction of the world.  By seeing who we are, we become aware of the value and meaning we operate under.  We therefore awake to the possibility of taking authentic control of those meanings, perhaps rethinking them in ways we find more appropriate.  For Heidegger, being authentic means we acknowledge the fact that we are responsible for disclosing the world.  We no longer uncritically take for granted the world view that we have inherited from others.  Antonioni’s films, by allowing us to confront our world in a critical light, encourage us to think authentically.

In fact, the anxiety that is very pronounced in the closing montage of L’eclisse (and which exists in a more subtle form throughout many of Antonioni’s films) is, from a Heideggerean perspective, an indication that we are being roused from the fallen state we have probably brought with us to the film.  While hints of cold war threats may invoke specific fears, the anxiety I refer to stems from a deeper sense that our whole manner of looking at the world may not be appropriate.  And, by questioning overarching assumptions about the world, we are questioning our own being.  “That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself” (Heidegger 1962, 232).

Anxiety is therefore a movement toward becoming free to choose another sort of meaning about who we are.  “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being – that is, it’s Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.” (Heidegger 1962, 232) The ability to think more freely about our world and ourselves, then, accompanies experiences of anxiety.  Antonioni’s cinema, along with any art that makes us confront and think about the world we have constructed yet take for granted, provides us the opportunity to be more authentic thinkers, even if it disturb us.  What sets Antonioni’s art apart from others, as I have been arguing in this paper, is that it delivers its insights by bringing our own world before us.  For the beings whose fundamental way of existing is Being-in-the-world, Antonioni’s art is profoundly important.

I

n discussing the opening sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962), critics often focus upon Vittoria’s rearrangement of objects she views though an empty picture frame (figs. 1-2).

As Ned Rifkin notes,

And Peter Brunette observes:

For Brunette, then, the question of framing creates a duality within the film:

Even more important than Vittoria’s toying with the frame, I suspect, is the implication of the painting Vittoria glances at a moment later (fig. 3). Considerably more representational than the many abstract paintings on the walls of Riccardo’s apartment, this naïve view of a town, its harbor, and surroundings, unrealistically stacks the details of its simplified landscape vertically to compensate for its lack of perspective. As a complement to the empty frame, the painting’s style of primitive, less than photogtraphic realism may hint at the purpose of the consistent errors in continuity editing in this sequence.

Like the painting, L’eclisse presents itself in its opening sequence as something less than perfectly realistic in its continuity editing.[i] Perfect continuity editing allows viewers to become absorbed in what they are watching by making shot changes seem to caused by action within the diegesis. A character looks off-screen, for example, and the following shot shows what the character is looking at, as though the character’s glance caused the shot change. For viewers, the change of shot is barely noticeable. In contrast, the flawed continuity editing in L’eclisse consistently calls attention to itself. It is repeatedly distracting, forcing viewers again and again to consciously construe spatial relationships or adjust to visual discrepencies. But just as viewers can understand what is depicted in the less than perfectly realistic painting despite its lack of perspective, so audiences, with effort, can understand the logic linking shots together in L’eclisse even though shot changes are not perfectly executed. Neither the painting nor l’eclisse is entirely abstract; they are simply less than perfectly realistic representations of reality in each’s medium. So like the viewers of the painting who have to consciously ignore the spatial illogic of the depiction as they focus on discerning individual detail, L’eclisse’s viewers have to consciously ignore the distractions caused by editing mismatches in order to follow from one shot to the next the evolving narrative.

Foregrounding the viewing process, as I have, is to acknowledge L’eclisse as an example of art cinema, which “…defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode.”[ii]To anyone familiar with the conventions of commercial filmmaking, one of the most striking features of the opening sequence of L’eclisse is how consistently poorly the elements of continuity editing (shot/reverse-shot cutting, eyeline matches, and the 180⁰ rule) are constructed.[iii]The film’s first cut, for example, from Riccardo to Vittoria

fails to signal their relative spatial positions as would happen were the shots a normal shot/reverse-shot pair in a conventional feature film (figs. 4-5). Given the alienation of the characters following their all night discussion of the Vittoria’s decision to end their relationship, it is hardly surprising that Antonioni would have wanted to present the couple as facing in opposite directions. Yet if Antonioni and his editor, Eraldo Da Roma, had ended the shot of Riccardo slightly earlier and begun the shot of Vittoria slightly later, the result would have produced an eyeline match indicating the spatial positions of the pair relative to each other (figs. 6-7).  Instead of such an eyeline match, only the breeze from the

oscillating fan blowing on Vittoria’s hair, most likely a minimal concession to traditional continuity, indicates the pair’s relative positions.

Nine shots later, Vittoria and Riccardo finally appear in the same shot, establishing the relative screen positions of the characters within the space of Riccardo’s narrow apartment (fig. 8). But no sooner has the film provided what would be a master shot in standard continuity editing, then Vittoria turns to kneel on the couch behind her and continuity again becomes problematic.  Her kneeling upon the couch is edited as a matched cut: she begins to kneel at the end of the master shot (fig. 9) and finishes kneeling in the following closer shot (fig. 10). In the cut from long shot (fig. 9) to close-up (fig. 10), however, spatial continuity is broken because the camera crosses the line established as the action axis. To maintain the 180⁰ rule established in the long shot, the camera should have been kept to the left of Vittoria’s head. One might dismiss this error in continuity editing as a minor mistake if there were not so many other comparable errors in the opening sequence. Indeed, the opening sequence of L’eclisse is virtually an encyclopedia of purposefully flawed analytical editing.[iv]

Soon after this error, another occurs in a shot/reverse-shot that begins with Riccardo on the left (fig. 11) in the shot, but on the right in the reverse shot (fig. 12). In addition, the sudden shift in the size of the figures from one shot to the next is jarring. Later, when the direction of glances are more or less correct, the characters are oddly positioned within the frame(fig. 13-14). Even though Riccardo in this shot/reverse-shot pair is to Vittoria’s left, he is positioned at the right side of the frame, rather than toward the left, so that he and she seem to overlap in the same space when the shots change. The graphic similarity of the backgrounds make the overlap even more startling. In addition, Vittoria is oddly placed, lower in the frame. One shot/reverse- shot pair is set the directly on action axis, overlapping the heads so that while one is seen from the back, below the other’s face (fig. 15-16). While the

camera appears to be tilted down past Vittoria’s head toward the seated Riccardo, as it should be, the reverse shot, oddly, which should be tilted up past Riccardo’s toward the standing Vittoria, is not tilted at all, but shot straight-on with the camera lens above Riccardo’s head. As a consequence, the angles of the backgrounds relative to the actors are noticeably misaligned. As these examples illustrate repeatedly, the construction of shot/reverse -shot cutting throughout the sequence deviates jarringly from established norms.

Antonioni combines the jarring mismatches I have described thus far with a variety of shots that are either difficult to fully take in, as these images in which Riccardo and Vittoria are separated so widely within the frame that it is impossible to focus on both of them at the same time (figs. 17-18), or shots

whose spatial relationship to one another are uncertain (figs. 19-20), as in the cut from a desk top to an empty, non-adjacent area of the apartment, or oddly contrived shot/reverse-shot pairs in which one of the reverse-shots are barely legible (figs. 21-22, 23-24, and 25-26), either because Riccardo is hidden beneath a lamp shade, or a lampshade obscures our view of Vittoria, or because Vittoria barely appears in the frame before opening the door to leave the apartment at the end of the sequence. These images, together with the other oddly constructed instances of continuity editing listed above, present viewers with a fragmented continuity that demands an unusual degree of conscious attention.

 As these numerous examples of awkwardly constructed continuity demonstrate, Antonioni purposely filmed and edited the opening sequence of L’eclisse unrealistically. Consequently, viewers are consistently challenged to comprehend the spatial relationships between the two characters within Riccardo’s small, narrow apartment. In effect, Antonioni provides a visual analogue for the characters’ awkward attempts at communication and mutual understanding. Where perfect continuity editing would offer the reassurance of perfect, easy comprehension, the awkward continuity editing in the opening sequence of L’eclisse forces viewers to struggle, in much the same way as the characters, for any nuance of meaning. Ironically, then, by denying viewers the illusion of perfect cinematic realism, Antonioni transforms the cinematic experience of l’eclisse into something closer to the actual experience of puzzling lived reality.

The Opening Sequence

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

ad cow, avian and swine flu pandemics, international terrorism, counterterrorism and war, religious extremism, global warming, pollution and nuclear threats, economic crises caused, but not suffered, by financial liberalism: menaces that spread through the porous national frontiers of 21^st-century globalization. It is not surprising that such a plurality of global threats, exploited by political and media discourses, have created a certain degree of anxiety regarding humanity’s present and future.

In World Risk Society (1999), Ulrich Beck studies late 20^th-century “second modernity”, a period characterised by “interlinked processes: globalization, individualization, gender revolution, underemployment and global risks (as ecological crisis and the crash of global financial markets)” (2). The novelty of this second modernity, Beck states, is that it has to respond to all these challenges simultaneously. Thus, after the Cold War bipolar world of identifiable adversaries was over, the end of the century was moving “from a world of enemies to one of dangers and risks” within a new global order (3-4).

In this context of uncontainable threats, global audiences watch narratives of catastrophe and contamination on cinema and TV screens alike, sensationalist news blurring the line between spectatorship/citizenship in a “seamless digital landscape” of mass media, television, film, music, video games and the World Wide Web (Gere 9). Global media spreads viral flows of ominous information and images simultaneously around the world, confirming “the supremacy of visual media in the creation of negative imagery and hence, in the formation of stigma” (Ferreira 299).

Film spectators of dystopia observe the rumbles of fictional cities that closely resemble their own and fictional rumbles that need only copy the ones in present-day countries at war. As contemporary flâneurs walking the cinematic arcades of 21^st-century global cities, the viewers of committed dystopian narratives are not offered uncanny figures to slaughter in straightforward cathartic endings. Instead, they are invited to reflect on the threats that shape world risk society and its responsible agents. These, the films suggest, are not outward monstrous figures, but inner evils of an ecocidal economic system and the corrupt, imperialist politics at its service. Like Walter Benjamin’s detached stroller enjoying the pleasures of the modern city in Arcades Project (1927-1940), spectators of dystopia take pleasure in the apocalyptic spectacle from the comfort of their cinema seats and living-room sofas. However, down-to-earth aesthetics and film spaces closely connected to the images of everyday news make spectators uncomfortable tourists of cinematic catastrophe, demanding from them a critical approach to the contemporary world risk society broadcast live by the mass media.

This is the case of the recent film dystopias V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2006) and Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), which overtly criticize politics’ exploitation and manipulation of media channels. They respond to the culture of fear that apocalyptic media helps to sustain by means of highlighting its hidden corporative links with groups of economic interest and power. The alienated citizen/spectator in the films is reminiscent of Guy Debord’s “homo spectator” in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). This society is, for Debord, the product of a capitalist established order that has relied on the media to create new realities and a market of passive consumers. Under the “dictatorial freedom” of a market of commodities that still rules, Debord pointed at media spectacles that were replacing reality as lived social practice by images defending the interests of particular economic, political and social formations (9-15).

As Debord did in the late 1960s, the aforementioned 21^st-century dystopias downgrade TV news to the level of spectacle, mistrusted as an unreliable narrator. V for Vendetta’s opening, for instance, presents a TV screen in close-up. “The voice of London” (Roger Allam), a megalomaniac TV presenter, passionately supports, Big Ben standing at his back, a strong government. Amidst invocations of God and attacks to homosexuals and immigrants as the corruptors of the nation, his speech copies that of the “High Chancellor” (John Hurt). The Chancellor rules the nation as an omnipresent Big Brother holding on faith and nationalism under the slogan “England prevails”. The government fabricates news according to their needs, using terrorism as a label to apply to all political opponents. An obliging BTN broadcaster informs of official truths, while showgirl TV shows keep spectators entertained at home. Television ties them up together in their dependence on the only source of information and entertainment available in a London of deserted streets after the curfew.

 17_MM_001 -Poster of Big Brother from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (G.Orwell - 1948)       

        17_MM_002 - V for Vendetta (J.McTeigue - 2005)

James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta is an adaptation of a 1980s comic book series by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Set in a futuristic London following a nuclear war that destroyed most of the countries in the world, a fascist party emerges offering solutions for a nation drowned in chaos. Manipulating the media and defending strict Christian morality against a menacing Muslim Other, the government builds, with the help of surveillance technologies, a police state. “V”, a mysterious masked insurgent, leads the story. After escaping a concentration camp for political activists where he was tortured, he manages to overthrow government blowing up the Houses of Parliament, finding inspiration in Guy Fawkes’ failed Gunpowder plot in 1604.

After 9/11 terrorist attacks, an anarchist planning to blow up the British Parliament was a controversial cinematic figure. Some critical voices denounced a film that was allegedly supporting terrorist acts against legitimate governments, even if totalitarian in practice. In spite of this, his mask has become a common face in recent demonstrations and protests. Following the WikiLeaks scandal in which Western governments’ secret information concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was revealed on the Internet, and after WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange’s detention, the mask has become the symbol of the pro-WikiLeaks group “Anonymous”. It stands for the right of citizens to know what activities their representative governments engage in, while it prevents the use of CCTV cameras to identify demonstrators.

 17_MM_003 - Anonymous        

Back to the film, we also find Evey (Natalie Portman) who, lost between political discourses on terrorism and V’s radical agenda, will have to decide what side she wants to stand in. She is the troubled consciousness of a citizen-spectator threatened by terrorism, counterterrorism and CCTV. Thus, 17^th-century Guy Fawkes, resurrected into literary figure in 1980s Thatcherite Britain, is retrieved again two decades later as a film character and, subsequently, as symbol of an inquisitive citizenship aware of governments’ dishonest media facade. McTeigue’s post-9/11 narrative is clearly concerned with governmental surveillance, the radicalization of right-wing politics and their demagogue slogans, which, satirized by the feature, might be read as an ironic mockery of the US “War on Terror” campaign, relabelled recently as “Overseas Contingency Operation” by Barack Obama’s administration.

Cuarón’s narrative, like V for Vendetta, opens with Londoners attentively watching TV screens. We, spectators of the film, and they, characters, are informed at the same time about the death of the youngest person in the world: a Brazilian 18-year-old guy for whom the whole planet is crying in its lament for a childless humanity. Viewers of the film are strategically positioned in the place of those submissive observers within the narrative, listening to the voice of a TV presenter who announces the latest catastrophes: day 1000 of the siege of Seattle, the deportation of immigrants and closure of borders, the death of the Brazilian Diego Ricardo. The BBC in Children of Men, BTN in V for Vendetta, ties citizens to the ubiquitous screens of the city, located inside and outside double-deck buses, in trains, at home, in cafés, at work and on the huge screens of Piccadilly Circus. Their images, together with recorded warnings coming from loudspeakers and governmental advertising campaigns, fill the public space with official messages.

        17_MM_004 - V for Vendetta (J.McTeigue - 2005)

        17_MM_005 - Children of Men (A.Cuarón - 2006)

Children of Men shares many of the narrative anxieties in V for Vendetta regarding governmental surveillance and unreliable media, but it departs from graphic-novel aesthetics in order to present a traumatized London drowned in a palette of greys. In Cuarón’s, London is a security area. A despotic government restricts citizens’ freedoms and imprisons illegal immigrants in refugee camps outside the city following the new “Homeland Act”. However, a militarized state is not the biggest problem of characters. Probably caused by an ecocidal economic system, sterility threatens the human species with extinction. The Others to blame, according to media propaganda in a conscious attempt to deviate political responsibility, are two: the already mentioned illegal immigrants, portrayed as parasites of a nation with limited resources, and “The Fishes”, a military group fighting for the rights of refugees that the government brands as terrorist.

Explicit and implicit references to contemporary politics and social debates abound in this feature, urban surveillance, the militarization of civic bodies and media manipulation among them. Theo (Clive Owen), the main protagonist in the film, is a civil servant subject to constant identity checks and monitoring by the protective Orwellian eye of the state. He used to be a political activist and he used to be a father, but he no longer is any of the two. Julian (Julianne Moore) is the mother of his deceased son, one of the many victims of a global pandemic. She is now the leader of The Fishes, the immigrants’ rights group. Julian asks Theo to help a pregnant woman, through his family connections in government, get to The Human Project, a humanitarian organization that sails international waters. The irony comes from the fact that Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the young woman who is expecting a child and therefore harbouring hope for humanity’s survival, is an illegal immigrant.

When Julian, leader of The Fishes, is shot dead by other members of her group disguised as road muggers, Theo, like Evey in V for Vendetta, will have to find out who is the enemy amidst incessant struggles for power among terrorists and government. He will finally manage to help Kee reach the coast with the help of Jasper (Michael Caine), an old academic living in the forest that is now reminiscent of failed promises for a civilized world. After both friends sacrifice their lives to ensure Kee’s survival, Human Project’s ship “Tomorrow” emerges from the sea mist in the last second. Unlike V in V for Vendetta, Theo’s sacrifice does not involve violent action, but the defence of the dispossessed in an attempt to build a sustainable future for humanity.

       17_MM_006 - Children of Men (A.Cuarón - 2006)

In order to legitimize the restriction of liberties that determines the freedom of these characters, governments in these narratives devise, with the help of TV news and the military, fear societies in permanent state of alert. Used to justify surveillance technologies, the political objectives behind the culture of fear have been analysed by recent documentary films such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and the BBC series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004). In line with these documentaries, Steve Macek studies in his book Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (2006) the role played by the mass media in fostering terrifying profiles of the American city during the 1980s and ‘90s. Criminality and moral decline, often associated with black and Latino citizens, were, Macek asserts, used to legitimize “‘law-and-order’ remedies for the nation’s urban ills” (xiii).

However, this was not taking place in the US alone. Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis (1978) analyzed how, during the 1970s’ mugging crisis in London, black street crime was made “to stand for everything that had gone wrong in British society” supporting Thatcher’s conservative ideologies (qtd. in Macek xiv). Now and then, fear functions as an effective tool to promote political agendas according to Macek: “the deviant, threatening, or troubling objects of a panic are social constructions, produced by particular social agents in particular contexts for specific purposes” (xiv).

But governmental authorities are not the only social agents that might be interested in promoting a society of fear. On the contrary, “the Savage Urban Other” is exploited by the security and consumer industries in media advertising campaigns to sell devices of protection for agoraphobic citizens that enable them to stand out from the risky poor (Macek 37). Following Eduardo Galeano, fear is for these agents “the raw material that sustains the flourishing industries of private security and social control”, turning citizens into “guards and prisoners: guards keeping an eye on whoever’s nearby and prisoners of fear” (qtd. in Macek 257).

Mainstream commercial film, Macek states, also contributes to the moral panic over the city, apocalyptic narratives consolidating the image of urban dystopia. Yet, the dystopian films I am analyzing here do not look for the culprits of social chaos down in the ghetto, but in the city’s highest spheres occupied by economic, political and media empires. The family in these narratives is not threatened by black, Muslim or Latino Others. It is menaced by surveillance systems that use viral propagation of fear through the media to justify totalitarian politics and the restriction of freedoms.

Also highlighting the necessary role that media plays, Martin and Petro claim the following in Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror” (2006): “The politics of war, terrorism, and security can hardly be separated from the practices and processes of mediation” (1). Since 9/11, Martin and Petro argue, “fictional and fact-based threats to U.S. and global security have helped to create and sustain a culture of fear, with far-reaching effects” (1). Politics copying the language of apocalyptic sci-fi, “fact-based fictions and fictionalized facts” helped, according to Martin and Petro, to support US War on Terror (2). Thus military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq followed George W. Bush’s apocalyptic worldviews, who, in a speech at the Citadel on 23 September 1999, was already warning of “a world of terror and missiles and madmen; an era of car bombers and plutonium merchants and cyber terrorists and drug cartels and unbalanced dictators” (qtd. in Martin and Petro 4).

A terminological war of euphemisms and metaphors, exploited by governments and terrorists alike, accompanied the military interventions responding to the attack on New York Twin Towers, an icon of capitalist Western civilization. This figurative warfare of icons, emblems and propaganda finds a place in the analysed films, where V in V for Vendetta and The Fishes in Children of Men try to find symbolic actions and figures to counteract governmental monopolization of media channels. Their allegorical linguistic battles bring us back to George Orwell’s 1936 essay “Politics and the English Language”, since the abuse of language it denounces is perfectly illustrated by these narratives, which, in turn, find inspiration in everyday politics. What Orwell stressed in that essay was the fact that political discourse should be an instrument to express reality, not to prevent thought or conceal meaning. Politics’ prefabricated sentences, worn-out metaphors, foreign expressions, lack of concreteness, all of them relied, according to Orwell, on evasiveness and euphemism in their “defence of the indefensible” (2390).

These euphemistic linguistics and demagogue speeches are parodied and strongly criticized in the analyzed dystopias, released at a time when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom”. In V for Vendetta, for instance, the British government uses slogans similar to those in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother’s “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” are replaced in McTeigue’s by “Strength through Unity. Unity through Faith”. This narrative seems to agree with Orwell’s assertion concerning the camouflaged purpose of political language, designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (2393). Meanwhile, Children of Men displays governmental nationalistic adverts in public settings drowned in threatening, catastrophist slogans such as: “Jobs for the Brits”, “The world has collapsed. Only Britain soldiers on”, “Avoiding fertility tests is a crime” or “Suspicious? Report it. Report all illegal immigrants”.

        17_MM_007 -  V for Vendetta (J.McTeigue - 2005)

By exposing the euphemisms and demagogy of political language, the analyzed film narratives are inheritors of the postmodern scepticism about the “grand narrative”. They mistrust the official discourses that Lyotard defined as an “apparatus of legitimation” in the introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Two years after Lyotard, an also sceptical Baudrillard drew, in Simulacra and Simulation, a society consumed by symbols and signs that no longer bore any relation to their signified entities. Debates on reality were, for Baudrillard, no longer a question of false representations of the real as they were for Orwell, but “of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” that Disneyland fantasies helped to preserve embodying the imaginary (12).

However, the analysed 21^st-century film dystopias reclaim the reality principle Baudrillard rejected. They denounce the ideological corruption of language and the political manipulation of citizens’ anxieties through media channels that help to conceal the real, affirming thus its existence and wishing its restoration. Illustrating how threats are exploited to create a culture of fear, these films offer anxious accounts of individual citizens struggling in the CCTV city. Their “micro-narratives” focus on traumatic urban experiences at street level, counteracting Manichaean meta-narratives and universalist debates on terrorism vs. freedom.

Regarding their aesthetic choices, these committed dystopian features merge spectacle and gritty realism creating down-to-earth visual narratives. Although special effects are used, sci-fi drives towards the explicitly virtual are avoided. Besides, there is a clear preference for hand-held cameras, both during action scenes and emotionally intense passages. In Children of Men, the frame persistently offers eye-level shots from Theo’s side, accompanying him everywhere. We are told his story standing next to him as the cameraman next to the war reporter. The moving, nervous camera gets infected with the emotional intensity of the moment, either shaking in fear, shocked in surprise or slightly trembling with anxiety. The only calm moments in which the protagonist can rest with friends are the ones when the shot swivels a bit gently, as if taking breath for the next emotional upheaval. Not even editing interferes with the agitated atmosphere. Instead of multiple cuts, long takes are favoured to convey the limitations of the protagonist amidst the surrounding chaos, the camera swerving, escaping and hiding, shifting views nervously.

       17_MM_008 - Children of Men (A.Cuarón - 2006)

Instead, V for Vendetta’s camera distance and movements are, generally, slightly more distant to the action, as if its intention were to provide an unmediated perspective to the viewer. Its camera heights, distances and angles often reproduce those in the comic novel the story is based on, close-ups and detail shots stressing key ideas and face gestures, as if they were frames composing a storyboard. Besides, static shots and panoramic views are rare in both films. When offered, they display desolating views of a panoptic London that still keeps its Victorian aroma in V for Vendetta, or glance at the few remains of unexploited nature with nostalgia in Children of Men. The prevailing mood outside these exceptional instants of peace stands on the verge of emotional breakdown, awaiting apocalypse and death around every corner. This climate of fear taints the whole narratives from beginning to end, extending vertically towards higher spheres of power and horizontally among fellow citizens turned into suspects.

Nevertheless, the films scorn the paranoid aesthetics and formal strategies of the sensationalist media that feed citizens/spectators with terror spectacles whenever they have the opportunity. V for Vendetta ridicules the blatant manipulation of politicized news that present V’s firework and bombing feast as an unexpected celebration arranged by the government. Similarly, Children of Men disparages melodramatic TV shows and the way Parliament exploits terrorism in the press to incite fear and justify conservative policies. Regarding this role of the media as fear-enhancer, Macek comments on the bleak portrayal of American cities in the 1990s press as follows:

The media’s ubiquitous images of urban mayhem (along with the dark fears they aroused) were skilfully harnessed by reactionary politicians to further their agenda of strengthening the punitive, policing powers of the state while scaling back its (liberal, ameliorative) role as a provider of aid to cities and relief to the poor. (293)

But, trying to apprehend the clues of an unmappable globalized world at permanent risk, characters in these films cannot help turning to their TV screens in search of answers. However, the information overload, often consisting of manipulated accounts defending the interests of governmental and corporative agents, provides no helpful indications. Lost amidst ominous information flows from unreliable sources, protagonists develop a protective psychological shield against contradictory signs, advertising images and governmental warnings. Their disorientation in a city in emotional quarantine, terrified by threatening media discourses on pandemics, multicultural “plagues” and environmental pollution, give rise to the Panopticon, the ideally governed metropolis; a utopia for governors in that everything is perfectly ordered to avoid contagion (Foucault 197).

Surveillance enters the scene, veiling for the protagonists’ security from above. Cameras are not used to inform citizens this time but to observe them. CCTV appears as mute menacing spy of the characters in the analyzed dystopias. Bird’s-eye shots and high angles convey entrapment and intimidating vigilance, public and private spaces under permanent aerial surveillance. From above, protagonists look like defenceless creatures unable to see the big picture they belong to, looking at their TV screens as if they were the observers of the action and not vice versa, unaware that their lives, determined by the claustrophobic spaces of the panoptic city, are monitored by eyes above like the characters entrapped in others’ televisions.

The films’ viewers are sometimes forced to look at the protagonists on CCTV screens within the frame. At the same time, the owners of the gaze within the narrative, like Norman Bates spying on his naked victim, enjoy the power their privileged position confers. We, spectators, tempted to share the voyeuristic pleasures of the observer, uncomfortably stand as forced Peeping Toms reflecting on the ethical implications CCTV surveillance entails. Mise-en-abyme narrative strategies thus confront the spectator’s gaze to the camera’s, the latter focusing, in turn, on the intra-diegetic gaze of characters observing others within the story. The different levels of the panoptic structures in the films provide a myriad of gazes and perspectives entangled in power relationships.

That power, AlSayyad states in Cinematic Urbanism (2006), always remains on the side of the owner of the gaze: “the powerful authority lies behind the lens, whether it is the individual, a private corporation, or the state” (166). The agents that have access to view others offer their interpretation “as the reality of the public sphere”, according to AlSayyad, modernity arising from the “mutually constitutive relationship between the real and the reel” (166). The analysed dystopias are involved in that relationship presenting visual texts that reflect on contemporary reality and the way governments and corporations, the powerful authorities behind the lens, use the media to shape a reality that fits their purposes. Emphasizing the social inequalities inherent in hierarchical surveillance societies, their committed aesthetics counteract sensationalist media and the culture of fear promoted by governments in order to justify the Panopticon.

In these features “visibility is a trap”, following Foucault’s words on the panoptic society, that guarantees the automatic functioning of power (200). Disciplinary power, on the contrary, becomes invisible to the public eye: “as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized” (Foucault 193). The documentary Erasing David (David Bond and Melinda McDougall, 2010) denounces this paradox, while recent events such as the 2009 UK parliamentary expenses scandal and the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal illustrate the lack of rigorous control on governments and media corporations’ finances and behaviour.

Besides the analysed London-based dystopias, a long list of recent film releases deal with the deficient visibility of governmental and corporative codes of conduct. However, the enquirer that follows the threads of hidden illegal activities and struggles to get to know the truth behind politicians’ propaganda is less and less frequently the figure of the incisive reporter of 1970s films such as The Parallax View (Allan J. Pakula, 1974), All The President’s Men (Allan J. Pakula, 1976) and Blow Out (Brian de Palma, 1981). Now it is usually individuals who are not journalists and grassroots organizations that lead the investigations in features worried about opaque international public affairs and corrupt companies. Their narratives expose national security services’ illicit affairs, and the hidden links between governments, media corporations and industries of diverse economic interests. This is the case of The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005), The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004), Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005), Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006), The Good Shepherd (Robert De Niro, 2006) and The International (Tom Tykwer, 2009).

The committed narratives of Children of Men and V for Vendetta engage in critical discourses on global contemporary society that share many elements in common with the aforementioned political thrillers. Their departure from the fantastic, their dramatic documentary aesthetics, their choice of real urban settings for on-location shooting, their explicit and implicit references to ongoing military conflicts and social debates on surveillance position these narratives at the centre of a politically conscious cinema aware of the faults of an unfair global order and critical of the role of the mass media as unreliable narrator of constructed realities.

Thereby, escaping Armageddons, sci-fi spectacles, virtual settings and alien uncanny creatures, these films denounce, in the first decade of the 21^st century, corrupt hierarchies of power and the role of global media as promoter of the culture of fear in contemporary society. Children of Men and V for Vendetta redraw, among other recent features, the map of science-fiction dystopia turning its aesthetics, narratives and locations into realistic images and settings of present-day global societies. They reject orientalist political discourses, pointing, rather than at racial or religious Others, at the concealed links between governments, corporations and the media. Global threats, skilfully exploited by these agents, help create spirals of fear upon which the panoptic CCTV city rests.

Thus, these films isolate fear as a plague in itself, coming not from a risky outside, but from Others within that benefit from it. The alienated citizen/spectator of the society of the spectacle is invited to react against the fragmented social order and the restriction of liberties in the urban Panopticon. The emotional mapping of global London these 21^st-century dystopian films portray responds to governmental “strategic fictions” in a post-9/11 global culture of fear (Petro 2), with cinematic strategic fictions whose apocalyptic spectacles look and are, unlike those of the mass media, more down-to-earth and committed than ever.

THE AUTHOR

Monica Martin

Mónica Martín is a Film PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is researching 21st-century dystopian cinema. She holds an MA in Film Studies from University College London and has worked as a Research Assistant for the Hispanic Research Centre at University of Roehampton, where she studied the final year of her degree in English Studies as an Erasmus student coming from the University of Zaragoza.

T

he question asked by the theme of this issue, namely the articulation of the contemporary ‘cinematic inquiry into reality’ is in itself challenging, for it unapologetically employs a critically and theoretically overcharged term, namely reality. Indeed, it is reality and not the Real, since, as Lacan and Žižek have widely shown us, the Real as such, is not just undescribable, but always already out of reach. That said, reality carries undeniably a certain genetic connection with the real, and thus it has always been questioned, and understood as an unstable and amorphous entity, and as being a continuous state of metamorphoses, for the only way to perceive it is through its appearance, that is to say, through images. While an inquiry into the different theoretical articulations of the relationship between reality and appearance is beyond the scope of this article, I would nonetheless briefly gesture towards the main points of such an important debate in contemporary philosophy. Already Nietzsche in ‘How the “true world” ultimately became a fable’(iii), a brief interlude included in his The Twilight of the Idols, describes in six consecutive short passages how the ‘true world’ has become increasingly  ‘unattainable, undemostrable and unable to be promised’; namely, an idea ‘useless and superfluous: consequently a refuted idea’. Thus, for Nietzsche once ‘we have done away with the true world, what is left? Perhaps the seeming?’ No! He replies, ‘in doing away with the true, we have also done away with the seeming world’(iv). In the wake of Nietzsche, during the twentieth century, the main European philosophers who have interrogated the critical correlation between real and appearance have been Heidegger, Klossowski, Baudrillard and Perniola.

Positioning his inquiry outside the realm of metaphysics, Heidegger, instead of focusing his attention on appearance, investigates the phenomenology of being and things; the other three thinkers find in the concept of the simulacrum (with important differences within their individual theories) an alternative to the weary dichotomy real versus appearance. Pierre Klossowski claims that after the ‘ontological catastrophe’ caused by Nietzsche’s God is dead, the simulacrum is that which gives an account of the authentic, explaining that:

Concluding that:

What Klossowski refers to here is an extreme instability of being. As if to say that being cannot be not whole, but only a fragmentation of itself into a myriad of feasible appearances. We have moved, following Nietzsche’s claim, from ‘the real world’ to the ‘fable’. Klossowski regarding this very matter interrogates the etymological nature of ‘fable, fabula (that) comes from the Latin fari, which means both “to predict” and “to rave” (..) Thus when we say that the world has become fable, we are also saying that it is a fatum; one raves, but in raving one foretells and predicts fate’.(vi) But is it not the case that when one foretells and predicts fate, that is, the future, what one attempts to deal with is a simulacrum, namely, a copy of a missing original? Mario Perniola suggests in fact, that since Nietzsche ‘the concept of a copy is abolished for there is no prototype anymore’; from the death of God onwards ‘things as such have been just copies of a non existent prototype, or better to say, copies of a prototype that the death of God has destroyed for ever; they are simulacra not phenomena’.(vii)

According to Perniola, however, the very first thinker who presented, in a coherent fashion, the concept of simulation is Roger Callois in his theory of play. When Callois claims that ‘the basic attitudes governing play (are) competition, chance, simulation and vertigo’, he immediately adds that there is an intrinsic interrelation between simulation and vertigo.(viii) Perniola explains this interrelation as follows: ‘mimicry, once it is pushed to its extreme, results in the erasure of the original; which causes the experience of the void.’(ix) Simulacra, thus, are not a recreational spectacle, but rather ‘a mimesis that implies the discovery of being and of the suspension of individual subjectivity’, which is to say that simulacra act as therapy to help us to survive the feeling of displacement.(x) Displacement and survival, I would argue, are at the core of the 2010 documentary Catfish directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost.

17_GCN_001 - Catfish (A. Schulman and H. Joost - 2010)

In 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost decide to document the development of Ariel’s brother Nev’s digital friendship with the eight-year old Abby, her mother Angela and her older sister Megan. Yaniv Schulman, aka “Nev”, is a photographer residing in Manhattan who had one of his photographs published in the New York Times some weeks before the beginning of the filming. Abby contacts Nev via email: she has produced an exceptionally detailed painting of Nev’s published photograph and has attached an image of her painting to the email. This is how Nev and Abbey’s friendship starts. From a copy of a copy of a copy. While their friendship continues digitally, Nev receives packages in the mail containing Abby’s “original” paintings. So far, so good. Nev is “friended” by Abby’s mother, Angela Wesselman, with whom he has regular phone conversations about Abby and her artistic talent. Nev’sFacebook contacts with Abby’s family expand rhizomatically to include not only Abby’s mother, but also her father and brother, some of their friends, and her attractive older sister Megan. Nev and Megan develop a cyber-crush on each other that moves from chat to text messages to phone conversations, becoming progressively more personal, intimate and explicit. Megan is a veterinary assistant, who, in her spare time, paints, models, dances, sings and composes music. It is exactly at the moment when Megan emails Nev a few self-recorded covers of Nev’s favourite songs, that Nev, Ariel and Henry start to question the sincerity of the girl’s intentions. Megan’s “covers” are not her own, they are freely available on Youtube, and by another artist. Intrigued by this unexpected twist, they all fly out to Michigan to pay a visit to Abby’s family.

17_GCN_002 - Catfish - A. Schulman and H. Joost - 2010

Once there, the crew rents a car and drives towards Ishpeming, the little town where the family lives, where Nev has to face reality: Abby is oblivious to her friendship with him, Megan is nowhere to be found, and Angela, who looks quite different from the attractive version of herself depicted by her Facebook profile picture, is the author of the paintings and the only person Nev has had any contact with over the past eight months. Angela is Angela, but also Megan, Abby and all their friends: ‘the woman created an elaborate charade involving three phones and 21 fake Facebook profiles’.(xi) Since her off-line life is spent tending to her husband’s two disabled sons, Angela has created for herself a different life on the web through a series of simulacra, in order to survive the feeling of displacement, to say it à la Perniola. Angela, in fact, wanted to become a painter, but since her life took a different course, she felt that through social networking she could be who she was not. ‘The disparity between the world Angela created for herself, and the one she inhabited, is what gives Catfish its poignant kick’, although ‘there are those who believe the whole film is a hoax performed by actors’.(xii) Suspicion is what Boris Groys interrelates seduction with:

Such designed surfaces are the simulacra through which Angela has interacted with Nev, the power of which seduced Nev and trapped him in a web of deception. Those designed surfaces, however, are also the very reason for the audience’s suspicion towards Catfish. Suspicion is the theoretical apparatus of this documentary, in which the place of an aesthetic of objectivity is taken over by an “aesthetic of amphibology”. Trinh T. Minh-ha, writing about documentary, reminds us that ‘truth even when “caught on the run”, does not yield itself either in names or in filmic frames’; and even if ‘truth and meaning (…) are likely to be equated with one another. Yet what is put forth as truth is often nothing more than a meaning’.(xiv) I would argue that what we encounter in Catfish is the absence of meaning as such, which frames what I refer to as an “aesthetic of amphibology”. Amphibology is the crucial motif of Catfish. The ambiguity of the title – in which the noun catfish performs already in itself an oxymoronic coexistence of terms, namely of cat and fish, is the symptom of a crisis of meaning that virally contaminates the whole documentary, from the characters to the locations, from beginning to end. Catfish, I claim, turns amphibology into aesthetics.

 17_GCN_003 - Catfish (A.Schulman and H.Joost - 2010)

According to Groys ‘in recent decades it has become increasingly evident that the art world has shifted its interest away from the artwork and toward art documentation’, so that ‘art becomes a life form, whereas the artwork becomes non-art, a mere documentation of this art form’.(xv) Considering these claims in relation to Catfish we are in fact confronted with a problematic form of documentary, one that instead of capturing some sort of ‘truth or reality on the run’, as Trinh T. Minh-ha would say, presents us with a quite evanescent, fragmented, and pixelated performance of real(ity). I write real(ity) in such a performative way, to stress that even the term reality can no longer be spelled out straightforwardly; for it is a term without a fixed form. Therefore, real(ity) shows that we are not talking about the real, but we are not talking about reality either. Real(ity) is a term that, overall, performs a profound crisis of identity, which is similar to the crisis that Giorgio Agamben articulates in his work. He argues that nowadays ‘identity is without the persona’ since identity is no longer ‘a function of the social “persona” and its recognition by others’.(xvi) For Facebook’s digital natives and digital immigrants(xvii) alike, those who in the end are represented and addressed by Catfish, identity more than being vacant of the persona, happens to be saturated by too many personae. It is an identity that is fragmented throughout the kaleidoscopic performances of the self-enabled by the opaque technology hiding behind Facebook. What we paradoxically witness is the advent of “personae without the person”. In other words, what we have, are not simulacra without an original, but rather a confusion of originals without a prototype, for in the age of digitalisation, as Groys states, ‘the digital image is a copy – but the event of its visualisation is an original event’. Moreover, he contends, ‘a digital image, to be seen, should not be merely exhibited but staged, performed.’(xviii) The performance of the digital image in Catfish, an image that falls into the crack between transparency and reflexivity, embodies amphibology to its nth degree. Ernesto Laclau, already in 1988, asserted that objectivity is impossible: on the one hand ‘the sense of many things escapes us’ while on the other, ‘the “war of interpretations” introduces ambiguities and doubts about the being of objects’; concluding that ‘in the “war of interpretations” what is at stake is not the construction of the object, but its correct apprehension’.(xix) I would claim that in our contemporary biopolitical times, even interpretation is unfeasible. To interpret comes from the Latin interpretari, to explain, to translate. Indeed, it is clear, that in order to translate we need to have an “object” caught between two languages, namely, the original language and the one into which we are translating. What would happen if we did not have the original language? How could we translate in the absence of an original expression, or image? This very issue is what I feel is at stake in Catfish, and largely in our contemporary biopolitical times, in which ‘cloning has become today’s emblem of biopolitics, for it is precisely in cloning (…) that we perceive life removed from its site, which is perceived as the real threat of contemporary technology.’(xx) Cloning, duplicating, but not to create a copy, but rather to create an original with its own rights. Cloning, as Angela did when she stole profile pictures from other people’s Facebook pages, so as to create her numerous digital doubles. Cloning that reduces identity to a cipher, to a number, to a nebula of codes lost in the abyssal gyre of the web.

The reductionist ethos of technologies such as Facebook has even been addressed by one of the major pioneers and sustainers of the “democratically” interactive and user-generated technology of the web 2.0, philosopher and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. In his 2010 You Are Not a Gadget. A Manifesto, Lanier claims that in the twenty-first century ‘lifeless world of pure information’ where ‘the widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interactions’, the philosophical belief ‘that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationship’ is a mistake which turns ‘life into a database’ and ‘persons’ into ‘rarities’.(xxi) Agamben, in turn, seems to respond to Lanier’s concerns by stating that ‘the historical experience of our time is that of (…) a sending that has no message’(xxii), in other words, of a performance that although missing the performers, the content and its audience, keeps being performed, ad infinitum. I argue that what we see happening in Catfish is a fragmented performance that, firstly, has nothing to perform and yet keeps being performed, and secondly, it is a performance whose fragments will never coalesce into a cohesive whole. As if we were given pieces of a puzzle – the different Facebook identities of Angela – and we were led to believe that it was just a matter of piecing them together in order to obtain a coherent understanding of them all. Unfortunately, though, these pieces, these images, will never fit together, so what to do next? Try to make them fit with our imagination. Such a performance of images presents itself as transparent. Perniola explains the illusory transparency of simulacra in relation to the fact that ‘the new imagery is positioned beyond metaphysics and ethics’, which makes us perceive it as transparent, for ‘it appears for what it is, and reciprocally, it is what it appears to be; and it has one dimension only, which overcomes the complementary concepts of real world and apparent world’(xxiii). What is more, the Italian philosopher adds, the striking trait of contemporaneity is what he calls ‘the socialisation of imagery’, which implies ‘the dissolution of the subject’(xxiv), a dissolution that I believe has gained a self-reflexive visibility in social networks such as Facebook.

By proposing a conceptual dialogue between the aforementioned theories and Catfish I am attempting to show how the latter establishes a self-contained and interpretation-resistant “aesthetic of amphibology”, in which, the real cannot be spelled out anymore, but neither can the virtual. Thus, in the same way as I refer to real(ity), I will refer to vir(tu)ality, since ambiguity is indeed at stake here more than ever. The seemingly innocuous performances of self-expression that we see documented in Catfish, can also be seen as an eerie collective-expression of contemporary biopolitical performances of control: we do not just inhabit the ‘panopticon’, we actually choose to be in it. And if, on the one hand, such performances are proof that on-line freedom of expression is but ideological trickery, on the other, they expose the vir(tu)ality these very same performances hide at their core, showing in the end that freedom, like democracy, is nothing but an ‘empty signifier’.(xxv)

By reflecting the opacity hidden behind the apparent transparency of the social network Facebook and by employing opacity as a legitimate artistic means of expression, as an aesthetic form,Catfish can be considered a filmic paradigm of what Agamben laments as being the cipher of our current biopolitical times, that is, the ‘crisis of communication caused by the alienation of communicability itself’.^(xxvi) The relationship between art (in this very case documentary) and the contemporary performances of self and the everyday happens to be always-already entangled in the vertiginous digital matrix that frames, and at times constitutes, our lives. In one of the reviews of Catfish it is argued that ‘staring into the computer picture of other people’s lives is like gazing into an abyss: you get digital vertigo’^(xxvii), which seems to echo the fundamental trait of Walter Benjamin’s baroque Trauerspiele, namely a ‘feeling of dizziness’(xxviii), which is what Perniola recognises as being that which ‘makes us ready to face with the same indifference anything that might happen’.(xxix)

 17_GCN_004 - Catfish (A.Schulman and H.Joost - 2010)

Once again, what we encounter in Catfish is an ambiguity of meanings and messages, which gives us a seductive feeling of dizziness, for we experience an apparent disconnection between action and consequence. In other words, in Catfish, it is never clear who is deceiving whom, who is exploiting whom: for example it is Angela who claims that ‘she was who exploited the film makers and not vice-versa’(xxx), a claim that seems to find some substance in Abby’s sending Nev ‘a share of her winnings from a local art competition, to repay his encouragement. Which kind of con-artist gives money to their victims rather than taking it?’(xxxi). Groys’ answer would be: anybody in a time of contemporary biopolitics! ‘In today’s world’ he says

Groys’ definition of sincerity as being that moment in which we see the crack on the surface of designed images exposes how the meaning of the term sincerity has shifted in our times. The term sincere comes from the Latin sincerus, which for some scholars etymologically descends from the expression sine-cera (without-wax) in reference to the ancient artistic practice of repairing the cracks in damaged sculptures by filling them with wax. Sincerity, therefore, seems to suggest a necessary sense of wholeness. Nowadays, on the contrary, that which is sincere, is that which shows its cracks, as if to say that its sincerity is proved by the very suspicion that we hold towards it. Groys claims that ‘we are ready to believe that a crack in the designed surface has taken place’, which means ‘that we are able to see things as they truly are – only when the reality behind the façade shows itself to be dramatically worse than we had ever imagined.’(xxxiii) This is precisely what Catfish does: it shows a real(ity) worse than we could imagine: pictures stolen from random people’s Facebook profiles in order to fabricate anew a series of fake identities makes us shiver. Our image could have been one of them.

Let us refer back to Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God as discussed in the beginning of this article. What can follow the death of God? In the ideological vacuum caused by his death, even faith in the image is missing. Such a crisis in postmodern thinking leaves us with what Catfish embodies: ambiguity. We cannot tell what is what any longer: we are left wondering if what we are seeing is the real world or the fable. This is, I claim, one of the main theoretical nodes of contemporary biopolitical times. We cannot call ourselves post-modern anymore since we are not able to distinguish the virtual from the real; nobody, in other words, has the magic pill to show us ‘the desert of the real’. Contemporaneity can be easily encapsulated within a sign, namely, the question mark. This represents what Žižek refers to as the ‘unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about’.(xxxiv) It is this pretending not to know about that becomes with time a simulacrum of ignorance that has its origins in knowledge. We pretend not to know, but in fact, we do know.

It is this state of confusion and ambiguity that is aestheticised in Catfish becoming what I have called an “aesthetic of amphibology”. An aesthetic that is profoundly seducing. To seduce from the Latin se-ducere, means to divide, to tear apart. Therefore, as Perniola reminds us, seductio ‘should signify that act able to subtract anything at all from its original context, as if it was a kind of détournement’.(xxxv) Seduction, thus, in Catfish tears the seduced – the audience and the characters alike – from their own context, showing through the cracks of the designed surfaces the blinding digital abyss that the “absence of presence” creates. Catfish nonetheless is still a documentary, for it documents the ways in which the performances of the self, in the age of digital biopolitics, strive to conceal such an absence with self-reflexive signifiers such as photographs, online-chats and text messages. By articulating the facets of what I have called the “aesthetics of amphibology”, I would conclude by advancing that Catfish shows that when it comes to digital information, whether it be social networks or online infotainment, we all adhere to such an ambiguity and in so doing we mould it ourselves into an aesthetic form of (self) expression and (self) documentation, which has very little to do with any kind of ‘inquiry into reality’. After all, if we consider for a moment the philosophical weight of the many digital images, or rather the many digital faces that populate the Internet, we would certainly agree with Agamben that, the face is in itself one of the most highly ambiguous features of the human body, for ‘the face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden.’^(xxxvi)

THE AUTHOR

Gabriella Calchi-Novati

Received a B.A. magna cum laude in Letters and Philosophy and an M.A. with honours in Public Relations and Corporate Communication from Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy). She also received an M.Phil. in Irish Drama and Film from the Drama Department, Trinity College Dublin, where she is completing her doctoral research entitled Performativities of Intimacy, and where she also lectures in Performance Studies and Critical Theory. While her work on contemporary theatre has been published in international journals such as Theatre Research International and About Performance; her more recent work, investigating the interconnections between “biopolitics and performance”, has appeared in academic publications such as Performance Research, Performance Paradigm and Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image; as well as in edited collections.

Mobile news

n December the 2^nd 2011, newspaper The Guardian announced the theatrical release in Los Angeles of Olive by director Hooman Khalili, the “first feature film shot entirely on a smartphone” (a Nokia N8)[1]. Less than a year ago, the same newspaper announced the first short film shot entirely with the new iPhone 4, Paranmanjan by Korean director Park Chan-wooks which was released 27^th January in South Korean cinemas[2]. However, mobile movie-making[3], -this is the practice of shooting a movie with a mobile phone device-, is not a 2011 phenomenon but a film practice that was born in 2005, when the first built in cameras were incorporated to cell phones.

The first films shot with mobile phones appeared between 2005-2006. One of them is feature film SMS Sugar Man (2005-2006) by South African director Aryan Kaganof. This film is regarded as a revolutionary alternative way of making films with the limitations imposed by the mobile phone.

 17_CBL_001 - SMS Sugar Man (A.Kaganof - 2005/6)

Another pioneering film considered amongst the first ones would be New Love Meetings (2006) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.

The reception of these novelties highlight the use of the new technology and its limitations becoming assets; The Guardian reports about New Love Meetings on 14^th of June 2006: “The limitations of filming with a mobile phone – having to film at close range, weak sound capture and the slightly shaky picture – turned out to be advantages for them, leading people to open up a little more easily.”[4] Even though both films are very different, -the first one being a narrative ode to “film noire” and the second one a documentary film, an ode to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1965 Love Meetings,- they made film’s attention shift towards the issue of how reality, the world out there, is filtered through a cell phone’s camera. Not only because of the low-resolution imagery but because a cell phone is such a domestic object everybody carries it in his or her pocket: fiction or reality both films feel very close to us, spectators. A lot has happened since then; 2011 seems to signal the jump from cell phone to Smartphone…possibly the next experimental film will be shot with an iPad. The terms keep evolving together with technology but the one common aspect of these gadgets is that they are mobile devices offering the user the possibility of making photos and videos. They “insert” a lens in everybody’s hand: capturing reality at any moment and place of the day has never been so accessible. The possibilities this offers has not gone unnoticed, from common users to professionals: during the past years, films made with mobile phones have received the attention of not only the press but also film and media scholars. In order to better understand them, there is a tendency to root such practice within certain film traditions; moreover, scholars have attempted to define the aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of cell phone made films, resulting in the creation of categories and definition of possible tendencies.

17_CBL_002 - New Love Meetings (M.Mencarini and B.Seghezzi - 2006)

The mobile, portable aspect of the filming device is of utter importance when it comes to understanding cell phone made films. Regardless of the device filmmakers use, be this a cell phone, iPhone or smartphone (something that becomes highlighted by the press as the attractive piece of news) their mobile characteristic is what catches the attention of writers such as French scholar Roger Odin, one of the first ones to attempt to categorize cell phone made films. Odin brings forward a distinction made between cinema uno[5], the photographic cinema of the “trace”, “made to be seen in a room by a spectator invited to adopt a specific discipline of the eye” and cinema due or digital cinema which is consumed in many different kinds of “dispositiefs”, “which are often inscribed within the communication of the multimedia, of the game (…) or of the physical effect (…) rather than with that of the narrative”. (Odin 2009) Within cinema due the camera phone stands out as a different element: the camera as a prosthetic eye in the hand, as an extension of the body that makes mobile made films different, as the camera slowly integrates in the human body. (Odin 2009) This distinction deserves a special consideration since cinema due is too vast, Odin comes up with a subcategory: p-cinema: “is the part of cinema due which is made with a mobile phone.”[6] Odin’s category is to be based on the prosthetic aspect of the mobile phone, which translates into a shooting style.  And so with Odin a new category is born which opens the doors to new interpretations and analyses of an emerging cinema practice. Odin and others[7] have had the courage of sharing their thoughts and theories on a new subject; today, seven years after the first cell phone shot films, it is time to make a retrospective exercise. This paper will revise the evolution of aesthetic characteristics and typologies of mobile made films that have been suggested by several authors offering a short history of this recent phenomenon. Every attempt to explain the style and aesthetics of cell phone made films is an attempt to define a recent way of approaching reality; moreover it might define the characteristics of a possible new language. My objective is to place these considerations into perspective in order to offer some suggestions for future ones.

Before I continue and for the purpose of this article, I wish to clarify that the term “mobile” can be understood in two different ways; first as a type of device, the mobile phone, -also called cell phone,-  shares today stardom with the newer smartphones: hand held devices that not only allow us to make a phone call but that have become close to portable computers with Internet connection. The second use resides in the context of the mobility the term implies, as the devices are mobile in the sense that we take them with us everywhere, all the time. In terms of mobile movie-making, the technical characteristics of the device and its mobility generate a wide spectrum of filming possibilities, for example (as I will explain here below) the amount of pixels and portably of the device amount to certain aesthetic characteristics. This double understanding of the term points towards a holistic idea of mobility: the aesthetics of mobile movie-making are “mobile” not only due to the mobility of the devices but also due to their changing characteristics and constant state of evolution.

Mobile aesthetics

The way we perceive reality through a cell phone, built in camera has changed through time: pixelated images due to the camera’s low resolution, -so iconic in the beginning,- have become a conscious choice and high definition (HD) is now the new standard.  The first films made with camera phones in 2005-2006 had no other choice but to take advantage of the camera’s shortcomings: low resolution and the consequent pixelation of the image gave impulse to a low-res aesthetic. Far from being rejected, this effect is embraced by makers and considered as an asset to the end result. But low-res was soon superseded by better quality cameras; for films made in the last years (2010 on) low resolution is an option as, for instance, the mobile device iPhone4 records in HD where there is hardly any trace of the pixel. This phenomenon raises important questions about the quality of the image as a characteristic of cell phone made films. Is the pixelated image an aesthetic quality essential for the identity of cell phone made films? Is there such thing as mobile aesthetics beyond the celebrated shortcomings? Is the tool itself a unique asset when it comes to capturing reality, regardless of the amount of pixels? In their short life-spam, what seems to be true is that the very concept of cell phone film aesthetics is quite “mobile” itself as devices keep developing and changing very rapidly.

Media artists and scholars Camille Baker, Max Schleser and Kasia Molga support the idea of image pixelation as a defining characteristic in mobile aesthetics but they also consider other aspects that derive from the accessible character of the cell phone. In their common article Aesthetics of mobile media art they argue for the “existence of aesthetics unique to the mobile media” looking at the “mobile media specific qualities of immediacy and intimacy” (Baker et al. 2009: 101) Counter to the HD phenomenon, they consider mobile phones to have brought new standards when it comes to aesthetics. Moreover, considering filmmaking, German director and film scholar Max Schleser, co-author of the above mentioned article, has introduced a new category derived form the use of cell phones: the ‘mobile-mentary’. Schleser writes: “The category can be defined through the characteristics of an original aesthetic signified by pixelated video images. Thus, it is the mobile phone’s limitations that are the defining pattern for the establishment of this new format.” (Baker et al. 2009: 102) His statement seems to define a timely image previous to the improvement of the cameras.

The image quality issue, as Italian scholar Alessandro Amaducci points out, has had a fluctuating course throughout the history of cinema. The same fluctuation is present now a days when it comes to camera phones. Considering the past, the shortcomings of amateur technology which translate into a specific image quality, have been embraced by filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas or Stan Brakhage. Low quality image is considered a way of artistic expression; for instance, Mekas supports the “grammatical anarchy” of the “audiovisual avant-garde to defend the means that the market does not consider professional. In the 60s the Super8 or 16mm, abandoned formats of the mainstream production, become the new weapons of the artists who want to create moving images.”(Amaducci 2009: 143) Today, video artists such as Amsterdam based artist Raul Marroquin, exploit and defend the effect of low-resolution aesthetics, making the evident trace of the pixel the protagonist of the image[8]. Te thick quality of the pixels becomes an aesthetic filter through which reality is perceived. However, low resolution is not exclusive of video art and avant-garde cinema. Image quality is often distorted to achieve a desired effect such as, for example, that of a surveillance camera (Look who’s watching, 2007, Westley Emerson)[9] or POV effect made with a DV camera (Cloverfield, 2008, Matt Reeves entirely shot with this effect). We could say that, when a new technological tool comes out, like the DV camera or the mobile phone, the quality of the image is given as not optimal but with time the tool develops and strives towards professionalism, which is in this case as close to 35 mm or HD as possible. Low resolution defines the aesthetics of the beginning period of cell phone made films; once there are better options, low-res becomes an aesthetic choice[10].
As Amaducci writes:

Based on this, it seems as if the aesthetic line between experimental and mainstream film is blurring. Moreover, the quality improvement of built in cameras and generalization of HD video brings mobile made films closer to mainstream aesthetics. Thus, recalling the category of p-cinema (coined by Roger Odin) which refers to the portable, prosthetic character of the camera, can we say at this point that all the films shot with camera phones share aesthetic characteristics? Perhaps it is necessary to look beyond the question of the image quality to find unique traits of cell phone made films. Max Schelser refers to the new mobile aesthetics as “Keitai” aesthetics. In Japanese Kaitai means “hand-carry, small and portable, carrying something, form – shape or mobile phone”. (Baker et al. 2009: 102) Given this definition of Keitai, the concept of aesthetics derived from it goes beyond image quality into more philosophical aspects of the mobile phone use. Schleser assigns three levels of Keitai aesthetics. To begin with, the visual level which is characterized by the pixelation of the image. Even though he doesn’t mention HD built in cameras, he marks a certain periodization: “In mobile phone filmmaking, the period between 2005 and 2008 is characterized by advancement from the 3GP mobile phone video file format to the mpg4 compression format.” (Baker et al. 2009: 102) Schleser’s own work is a good example of this as it contains both formats in one video: Max with a Keitai (2008)[11] produced with two cell phones during 56 days in 2006. (Baker et al. 2009: 102-103)

 17_CBL_003 - Max with a Keitai (M.Schleser - 2008)

Moreover, Odin suggests certain “tendencies” that can add further meaning and information about the pixelation aspect within the visual level of Keitai aesthetics. Odin mentions contingent elements that depend on the pixelation of the image: constrains “which can be quite productive in terms of creativity” (Odin 2009: 367).  Having in mind the above-mentioned periodization, we can consider his examples as early works made with mobile phones with certain characteristics: first, pictorialism, in which we find a direct reference to painting, mostly due to the resemblance between the brush stroke and the pixel but also because of the correspondence between the vertical format of the painting and the mobile screen. Examples of this would be the short film La Perle[12] (Marguerite Lantz, 2006); in this short film a young girl uses a cell phone as a mirror to dress and compose herself as the lady in Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. Odin argues this effect works as long as the pixel is visible to make reference to the brush stroke.[13] Another tendency would be abstraction; referring to the short film Tourner en rond et se laisser consumer (Vincent Moon, 2006)[14] Odin describes a “frenetic rhythm of lines and of spots which scroll at great speed on the screen, a visual sarabande on which he couldn’t help adding violins” (Odin 2009: 367) And last, diegesis of the pixel effect, this means the importance of the pixel within the narrative of the story. For example, in Nocturne pour le roi de Rome (Jean Charles Fitoussi, 2005) where the pixels gain a subjective character that supports the portraiture of the protagonist’s physical and psychological state. (Odin 2009: 367).

In Aesthetics of mobile media art, the authors don’t mention yet the possibility of making HD films with a cell phone; they do bring forward the format difference which seems to point towards an improvement of the image quality, becoming this slightly less pixelated. An example that can illustrate my concern towards the quality image issue is the work by French filmmaker and producer Benoît Labourdette. Labourdette made a 64-minute feature film Triton[15] (2007) shot with mobile phones and HD cameras, as he explains on his website[16]. Within the film we notice different image qualities. If we take a later work from 2010, for instance Etude pour main 11[17], we don’t find the pixelation from 2007.

 17_CBL_004

As I have suggested before, pixelation becomes an option at a certain point and therefore is not a continuous “unique” characteristic to mobile phone aesthetics but an optional trait.  Dutch filmmakers Cyrus Frisch is an example of this, as he shot his film Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan (2007) with a low resolution mobile phone (he purposefully bought the lowest resolution possible) in order to stress the alienation feeling the protagonist feels when he looks at the world from his balcony;

 17_CBL_005 - Why didn’t anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan  (C.Frisch - 2007)

in this case the narrative becomes stronger by the use of a pixelated image: “I started to film teenage immigrants. Because of the limitations of the medium, you can’t hear them so well. It seemed a threatening and scary experience. […] It became a perfect metaphor for what was going on with society at that time. People are scared for things they can’t name. […] I saw this view of the world through the images recorded with the phone”. (Botella 2011: 25-27)

Intimate, immediate and everyday aesthetics.

A year after the publication of his co-authored article, Max Schleser comments about the improvement of mobile technology and its influence in filmmaking. In a short period of time, camera phones have gone from not being recognised by manufacturers as filmmaking devices to having mini-jack connectors; this gives the possibility of recording digetic sound and interviewing with microphones. Further than this, the focus can be manually adjusted and filters and add-on lenses are becoming available[18]. Where does this leave the first level of Keitai aesthetics? The attention shifts from visual image quality to a deeper understanding of the identity of the image: intimacy, immediacy and everyday images which are available to us due to the portable, daily use of the device become now the elements to define mobile aesthetics; as Schleser writes: “as a portable and personal medium that one has always in reach every day and night, the notion of the everyday remains prominent.” [19] The attention shifts from low-resolution to the camera phone as a tool that captures our everyday reality.

Schleser summons up two other kinds of aesthetic levels which consider not only the surface of the image but the implications of new media’s processes. The second aesthetic level is related to the effect cell phones have on body language and how this is assimilated in the viewing and screening process using cell phones. (Baker et al. 2009: 103). This brings together new media aesthetics with the theory of embodiment: the experience of the world (as maker and audience) is not only limited to our vision but involves the whole body. A change of paradigm is suggested: from a “dominant ‘ocularcentric’ aesthetic to a ‘haptic’ aesthetic rooted on the embodied affectivity. (Baker et al. 2009: 104)[20]. This has changed media experiences incorporating “the capacity of the body to experience itself “as more then itself”, and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new[21].” (Baker et al. 2009: 104) These elements as characteristics are what the authors suggest to adapt “to the works produced for and by mobile devices. The mobile device incorporates the haptic notion as one touches the device actively to record/playback an audio-visual media file.” (Baker et al. 2009: 104)

The term haptic has a history in film theory, previous to mobile made films but we can easily connect it with the second aesthetic level. To begin with, the haptic refers to  “the way the eye is compelled to “touch” an object […]”(Marks 1999: 172). Haptic properties in film and video include distortion of the image such as out of focus, under- and overexposure, graininess, etc. By deploying such effects the viewer engages with the screen rather than the represented objects. As a result, “haptic images may also encourage a more embodied and multisensory relationship to the images in the films that use haptic qualities in combination with sound, camera movement and montage to achieve sensuous effects […] ” (Marks 1999: 171-172).  The characteristics and styles described until now regarding cell phone made films can be found in Mark’s idea’s; for instance pixelation as a form of graininess or Odin’s explanation of abstraction in the use of image and sound. Secondly, in the same way as Baker et al., Marks go beyond the surface by using the concept of “tactile epistemology”: the knowledge we can filter through our skin or giving significance to someone else’s physical presence. (Marks 1999: 190) Moreover, Marks refers to haptic cinema in terms of an object with which the audience interacts rather than just a narrative illusion (Marks 1999: 190). Both physical presence and interaction are embedded in Scheleser’s ideas. By means of considering the mobile device’s ability to link any location to a digital image, Schleser adds the “haptic sense of physical location” and “being there” which “allows the audience/viewer to identify with the location” (Baker et el. 2009: 105)

Finally, the third aesthetic level dwells in the previous one; it is “connected to qualities of a state of “in-betweenness” which refers here to “how mobile media operate in between photography, video and the internet, while simultaneously establishing new links.  The mobile phone merges communication and lens based media.”[22] This translates into a reflection about the private and multimedia role the cell phone has gained in the past years, not only as an object to take pictures or make movies but also as a tool for verbal communication. We can find a trace of these multi-media related levels in Odin’s categories and examples. For instance: he suggests the tendency the telephone and its different uses.[23] The cell phone is reflected upon in its GPS function in GPS yourself[24] (2008 Rémi Boulnois). In this movie where a man uses his own telephone in order to locate himself via satellite, we could find a metaphor to the second level of Keitai aesthetics which relates to the mobile device as locative media. (Odin 2009: 371)[25]. Another example of the cell phone as locative media but in relation the haptic is Fear Thy Not (Sophie Sherman, 2010). The filmmaker’s hand remains always in close-up and guides us through the space she finds herself into. By this means she is able to communicate her experience of a certain location[26].

Cell phone made films also reflect the cell phone’s identity as a place where communication and images blend. This is expressed through various means such as recording image and the voice of a telephone conversation. An example of this is the above mentioned Max with a Keitai, through which we hear the author have a conversation about the video he is making while we see the footage he took in Japan and hear the beep of incoming SMS messages. French filmmaker Alain Fleicher explores the different aspects of mobile representation conveyed by voice and image. One example of this is Chinese Tracks (2006), in which the filmmaker, lost in China, communicates his whereabouts to someone on the phone, while we see the images as he walks the city. As Fleischer says: “First of all what interests me is that it [the camera phone] is primarily a phone, an object of speech transmission […]. We don’t hold it as a camera (there is no viewfinder, no handle), we don’t stick our eye in it but our ear. […] I decided I would keep his phone as a phone, that is to say, against the ear.”[27] The cell phone is also seen as a multimedia object which substitutes others such as the television, the pen, camera, pocket lamp, book note, computer, etc in Totem[28] and Object à Usage[29] (2008, Delphine Marceau). This aspect represents the different links which are established by the use of the mobile device. For others, the invasion of the mobile phone as a tool for everything is translated into absurd scenes, such as in Extension du domaine du portable (J.B. Pouy) where the mobile becomes a shaving razor and La Savonnette (Sylvie Moisan) where it is used as soap bar under the shower.

It should be clear by now that defining mobile made films’ aesthetics is an intricate and changing enterprise. It becomes clear that it involves different levels of and approaches to reality: on the one hand we consider how the cell phone filters the world through different types of lenses (low-res, HD), on the other how we experience our environment (and vice-versa) through a mobile device and even further what kind of communication and information we have access to through the device. It is the combination of these levels and approaches that point towards a unique way of filmmaking. As Schleser point out, since the pixel is not a distinctive trait anymore and HD becomes the norm, cell phone films face the risk of blending with the rest of the video content and the challenge of remaining distinctive through developing their own image language and identity points towards the creation of “personal and autobiographical statements”.[30] Therefore we find aesthetics that derive from the portability of the mobile device, such as the immediacy, intimacy and the everyday which a cell phone camera can deliver and which become a unique aspect of mobile filmmaking. This brings us back to Odin’s subcategory of p-cinema: the size and mobility of the device stimulate a certain use of the camera phone which translates into what might be a new shooting aesthetics. Moreover, Baker et al. suggest[31] that portability facilitates the movement of the camera which creates a gesture and blurring effect. On the other hand portability and size encourage intimacy which translates into personal images and a predilection for close ups. Finally, the portability factor brings the world closer to the user through the lens and the mobile screen which becomes a “window on the world”.  (Baker et al. 2009: 108-109) Thus, regardless of the image quality, Odin’s p-cinema seems open to convey and embrace the three aesthetics levels mentioned here above. All important and enduring aspects of cell phone made films seem to derive from the accessible and portable characteristics of the filming device: it ultimately makes reality available to record (as it becomes the “window on the world”) and therefore possible to construct personal narratives. An already epic example of how directors director use a cell phone camera as a “window on the world” to construct a narrative is La Paura by Italian director Pippo Delbono. Delbono makes a “mobile-mentary” by filming things such as populist political and religious meetings, t.v. programs, the reality of poverty in Italy, etc. With this raw material he constructs a critical discourse about the current political and socio-economical situation in Italy.

Mobile conclusions

The changing, unstable identity of the mobile phone as a multimedia device reflects upon the works made and the theories written. The device’s place within a cinematic tradition but also within the history of media calls for a multidisciplinary approach that will allow us to have multiple views and a better understanding of the uniqueness of cell phone made films. In this article I have brought forward several considerations which were coming from different disciplines: from film and media scholars to filmmakers and media artists. This transversal analysis is the key to regard cell phones made films within and beyond traditional film practices. For instance, based on the last levels of Keitai aesthetics -the embodiment of a physical location and the hybrid character of the mobile device which merges communication with lens based media,- we find ourselves in the realm of new media (as Baker et al. suggest) which might represent an invitation to challenge the traditional way of using the camera phone for the sake of making movies and embrace a more unique practice that includes the internet and other media platforms. The analysis and understanding of styles and aesthetics unique to cell phone films have become more complex as technology itself becomes more intricate. I have attempted to disclose this development: from the first observations that focused on the limitations of the camera and pixelated image to this last suggestions that encourage to look beyond the traditional use of the camera.  Without entering the realm of other media platforms, the uniqueness of a portable camera phone with a screen offers already a wide range of possibilities. The complexity of the mobile phone within the cinematic context (not only as a portable camera but also as a portable viewing tool) can be exemplified by the following: film festivals are starting to transcend the traditional viewing situation of the projected image for an audience to making use of the cell phone’s screen as viewing “dispositif”. Curiously enough, an example of this can be found in Japan, Professor Masaki Fujihata founded his own film festival; honoring the land of keitai, the Pocket Film Festival in Yokohama, focuses on showing films on the small screen. (Hart 2009)

In order to be able to develop a theory about the aesthetics of cell phone made films and therefore about how they relate to reality and to what reality they relate to, it is necessary to consider all disciplines which are involved in the field: film scholars, filmmakers, artists, festivals, etc. Briefly having done this, I would like to suggest two approaches to understanding and analyzing mobile made films: a traditional, film oriented approach (e.g. Odin, Amaducci) which places films within a historical tradition and attempts to differentiate tendencies and styles; and a second approach which integrates new media, the Japanese influence represented by Schleser’s consideration of the cell phone’s cultural roots and Fujihata’s approach to unique viewing characteristics of the cell phone. Moreover, Fujihata, who also teaches young people to use the cell phone as filming camera, attempts to define a specific uniqueness to mobile phone filmmaking. His ideas are comparable to elements which have been brought up here and underscore the fact that a mobile phone is not to be used for making a traditional film, they can offer a unique way of looking  at reality. Simple and spontaneous films shot from the hip, almost like a “sketch or a memo”: these are Fujihata’s tips to develop a specific filming language for mobile phones. In his teachings, the movies to be recorded are simply not meant for the big screen but for the small, mobile screen. (Hart: 2009) Whereas the first line of research robs cell phone made films of the aura of novelty the press so much likes to announce, the second one offers a path for exploring unique styles and aesthetics of mobile made films. Perhaps this will offer a set of ideas that come closer to the ontology of the images made with mobile devices as a reflection of our “mobile” existence. After all mobile devices are constantly changing the way we communicate with others and for us, most importantly, the way we filter our daily, everyday life through an incorporated camera.

THE AUTHOR

Caridad Botella Lorenzo

Caridad Botella Lorenzo (Madrid, 1977) is an Amsterdam based art historian, film scholar, curator and art/film critic. She has recently graduated from a Film Studies MA at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis about cell phone made films as an emerging film practice. In March 2012 she will participate in Udine’s International Film Studies conference with a paper about how professionals teach mobile movie-making.

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he main purpose of this article is to understand Samuel Fuller’s films “Shock Corridor” (USA, 1963) and “The Big Red One” (USA, 1980) in the context of an emergent debate on “Ethical principles, Moral acts” in Cinema. To achieve this task, an attempt has been made to answer the questions: How do these specific “fiction” films approach reality? How did the so-called ethical dilemma, suggested by films, pose the question of regaining contact with the world by the bridge of memory?

In each one of these particular case studies, we consider that it was a previous specific condition of production – a reporter` sight -, that made possible it to overcome the distance between the film space, configured by mise en scène, and the time of History somehow  preserved in the memory of man. Our final claim is also a statement: the barrier configured by the screen is, indeed, the passage – the “in between “-, to the consciousness. In fact, these films are accurate examples of the so-called “cinematic inquiry into reality”. Both of them address deep questions designed by non-linear stories, looking beyond the surface of the screen. Characters are more than bodies, skin and flesh. They are ethical figures, examples to audiences, above all things. Film image is a projection surface, a mirror perhaps, where audiences can “see” the “unseen”; human paths of moral decisions, based on knowledge and memory.

The first film, Shock Corridor, set in a Psychiatric Hospital, is the story of John Barrett (Peter Breck), a newspaper reporter working for the Daily Globe, obsessed with a man’s death in a place off-limits to journalists. Barrett wants to discover who murdered a man named Sloan, and why. To achieve the task he decides to work undercover, going to the hospital as in-patient. In order to convince the medical staff, he rehearses his “story”, that of someone seriously disturbed by a sexual fixation with his own sister, a role performed by his girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers).

Barrett’s intention is to win the Pulitzer Prize with a true story. In his opinion, it would be possible and easy to reach the truth, and the reality, by listening to the testimonies of the three witnesses of the crime, though they are usually not conscious of their beings, and stay lucid only for short periods, every once in a while. Once in the hospital, he approaches the assumed eyewitnesses and waits patiently for their rare lucid moments, to ask the question: “Who murdered Sloan?”.

When, finally, one of them says the magic words, telling Barrett what really happened to Sloan, this moment is likewise a turning point, concerns Barrett’s memory and consciousness. In fact, things do not develop exactly as he expects, and he begins to feel confused about his purpose and identity. Acting out of character, as if he is a real patient, he actually becomes one, and soon he can hardly tell what is real and what is not. Like the other patients of the “shock corridor”, he feels as if he is sliding into madness, and soon he experiences disorders such as anxiety and depression, with deep consequences on his language. Ironically, when Barrett remembers the name of the murderer, he cannot speak, and when he is not catatonic, he cannot remember the name…

As a matrix of an unsolved dilemma, the final sequence of the film is a paradox. The scene is the most unexpected end of a sad story of an ambitious and amoral reporter. It is a sort of moral sentence written on screen. The black and white pictures are sublime, alongside an outstanding montage, and some strange poetic images of insanity. On the contrary, the argument is frightful and anguished.

17_MIA_001 - Shock Corridor (S.Fuller - 1963)

The film passes over the aesthetic dimensions of the images, avoiding the simple linear narrative, to look behind the scenes for the limits of the contemporary ethical problems and their radical consequences. Images and words seem to be converging ideas of a final statement: a need to behave according to a code of ethics, either professionally as a reporter, or acting as a guide for the audiences. Samuel Fuller – and his character -, work from life, like a painter of landscapes whose intention is to change the audience’s outlook on nature and existence. By breaking the rules, Barrett exposes the dangers of an amoral conduct. Consequently, by simply watching moving pictures, people might understand, and see the possible results of unethical behaviour, not on the screen, but in their consciousness, that is to say, in-between.

Yet, at the same time, the film is a metaphor for the problem of representation. In respect to the cinema, fiction and reality are both sides of the same coin. However, to be a “good” performer in a film is not exactly the same as being a good “actor” in real life, and certainly never has the same results. As far as we can see in Shock Corridor, different usages of the concept of “good” might actually be either disastrous or creative, whether in the context of real life or in fiction. Directors might have excellent fictional results, if they combine actor’s technique and history verisimilitude to have a great reality effect on audiences. However, people acting in the real world might not succeed pretty well, because the presentation of self in everyday life is more complicated.

Questioning language, memory and professional behaviour in the field of mass media, Fuller’s film Shock Corridor deals also with two kinds of art and fiction registers: the filmic image and cinematic representation of the human condition. The film is a flashback introduced by a narrator – actually the character John Barrett -, whose voice-over tells the story. His “ghost voice” comes from two different inner spaces; the geometric interior space of the mental institution and the character’s mind and memory. As a result, what we have in front of our eyes are some of the infinite possibilities of representing, in motion pictures, human mementos and remembrances, as well as the deepest and unknown paths to the so-called “truth”, through a process of filmic images and language games.

The audience sees the hospital from Barrett, the patient’s point of view, either when he is acting as investigative reporter, or losing his mind. Deeply moved by other patient’s memories and “realities”, the motivations of the character gradually become ambiguous. That is to say, the Shock Corridor space is on frontier and reality. It is a space in-between, full of shadows, or sudden illumination, yet with no way out. It is a claustrophobic and frightening prison made by Barrett’s mind, where distorted memories of his girlfriend became a huge nightmare, sculpting her character as a depraved human being.

By losing touch with reality, Barrett inhabits a new strange world, which is an image, and an alien picture in a kind of mirror, built by superimposing pictures and sounds, as if Barrett’s reality (or whatever it really is) had multiple dimensions – layers of memories, fantasies, dreams, fears, etc., everything coming and going, with no order or control.

17_MIA_002 - Shock Corridor (S.Fuller - 1963)

Barrett describes his experience as a «ghost haunted by God in the street of no return». The “street of no return” is actually the name of the corridor where the non-violent mental in-patients can walk and talk to each other. Moreover, it is the place where Barrett is looking desperately for the truth, but also his one-way to the prison-labyrinth of his peculiar mind.

Finally, the first statement of the film deals with the ambiguity of the truth, as well as the relations between reality and memory. Actually, Barrett does not want to find out who murdered Sloan because he loves the truth and wants justice, but because he wants to achieve fame and glory, by simply exposing the facts, as the truth. Barrett acts in the hope of being recognized as a reporter. Because a personal and selfish interest motivates him, his work is less than a reasonable or safe way, with no limits for his moral acts or professional code of ethics.

At this particular point, it is important to consider the concepts of moral and ethics in their etymological senses. Moral (from the Latin. Mor le-, «practice, behaviour») is related to the standards of good or bad behaviour, fairness, honesty, etc. which each person believes in, rather than the laws or other standards. In relation to communication practices and investigative journalism, the moral obligation is always a philosophical question to consider. It relates to the problems of man’s conduct, not only in his personal life but, specially, in his labour and social life. In this case, moral could be a particular system of ethics, guiding professionals along the path of their existence.

In this context, the film claims the moral high ground. Shock Corridor shows how difficult and ambivalent might be the attitudes, and the corresponding answers to the problems of merging life and fiction. The questions, “What is the limit for investigative journalism?”, “What is the convenient distance between life and news?”, “What possible objectivity may come from this kind of stories?”, “What is the degree of contamination, and distortion, caused by human emotions and emerging conditions of work?” have no answers for investigative reporters unless they use a code of ethics.

Ethics (from the Greek ethos and ethiké, epistéme) is the study of the concepts of practical reason, such as the good, correct behaviour, obligation, virtue, freedom, free will, etc. From a philosophical point of view, the ethics is also the discipline that searches for the purpose of human life, looking for the right methods to perform the task, and stating value judgements to distinguish between right and wrong. In this context, writing an informative story or shooting a “real” event according to the truth, are in fact ethical problems that demand for a sub-system of values, as well as a professional code.

Samuel Fuller (1912-1997), like Barrett (Shock Corridor) and the Sergeant (The Big Red One) – which in reality are  cinematic figures of his alter ego -, was a reporter, and a soldier. His movie pictures and scripts are statements about life, fiction and reality. Any film is a unique melting pot, and a laboratory where people might feel and “live” outside the limits of normal existence. Sometimes it is a good experience and sometimes it is an awful one. Nevertheless, it is always safe, and performs an essential help to raise a personal or political consciousness.

The preceding questions set up the bridge to the other Fuller’s movie, The Big Red One (USA, 1980), an autobiographical war film, and a personal point of view on horror, violence and genocide. As Fuller says of his own experience, “War itself is organized insanity. Both sides are trained to kill, and everyone is a potential enemy. We were given rules of conduct, but the rules were hypocritical as hell. When you see an enemy pissing, it is still your choice whether to shoot him or not. Civilized wars just don’t exist”. (Fuller, 2002:120)

During World War II, Samuel Fuller was in the First United States Infantry Division, known as the “Big Red One”. On 9 May 1945, using a 16mm Bell & Howell camera that his mother sent him while he was overseas as a soldier, Fuller shot a twenty-two-minute film recording the aftermath of the liberation of Falkenau, which was a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, and one of a hundred sub camps of Flossen bürg concentration camp. Actually, Fuller was asked by his battalion commander, Captain Kimble Richmond, to “film the gruesome spectacle” of burial preparations for the camp victims’ emaciated bodies, which had been «thrown on top of each other like newspapers». What a cruel and yet a fundamental picture of reality this film is!

As Georges Didi-Huberman mentioned (Remontages du Temps Subi, L`Oeil de L`Histoire 2, 2010), Samuel Fuller had already defined himself as a sort of Candid or Don Quixote facing History, but he was not entirely conscious of the important role of this film and his later cinematography. “He joined the Army to fight Nazism, but also to be a witness and cover the greatest crime of the 20th Century”. (Didi-Huberman, 2010:33) Those intolerable images captured by a 16mm camera would never leave his mind. The Big Red One is undoubtedly the ultimate film of Fuller’s haunted memories. We might even compare his writings on Falkenau with the last powerful sequence of this film, when the soldiers enter the concentration camp, and confront the evidences of hundreds of wartimes atrocities committed against men, women and children from all over the world. The explicit or subliminal images of violence are reflections of his life experience. Never again, will fiction be so close and so far from life and death, seeking for signs of a hurt soul or a moral consciousness.

17_MIA_003 - The Big Red One (S.Fuller - 1980)

Although no film would be able to capture the full horror of the concentration camps, those “impossible” images of Falkenau, along with Fuller’s memories and emotions experienced as a witness, would haunt the filmmaker throughout his life and career, emerging in his films and, specially, in the one which revisits Fuller’s war experiences, The Big Red One (1980). In this film, the audience really sees what he remembers: “(…) that first face of death (…) imprinted on (…) mind like a leaf in a fossil, never to fade away.” (See The Third Face, My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking, 2002).

Fuller describes the events of 1945 with crudity:

The Fuller`s Falkenau sequence in The Big Red One is the most bazinianne of all war sequences ever made in cinema. If there is an ultimate ontological image of non-indifferent nature of humankind, this is it. Writing about other cursed directors, André Bazin (Le Cinéma de la Cruauté, 1975) says that cinema claims responsibility for the denunciation and the accusation of amoral conducts and social lies. Similarly, Serge Daney is not against the cruel pictures on films, but against the unnecessary violence as an outrageous consequence of moral lack on art, such as the unfortunately famous “tracking shot in Kapo”, that he condemned in his statement (“The Tracking Shot in Kapo”, 1992).

17_MIA_004 - The Big Red One (S.Fuller - 1980)

In their article, “The Arts and Education” (Performing Arts Journal, 1995), Daryl Chin and Larry Qualls refer the pedagogical importance of specific “auteurs”, including Samuel Fuller. Chin and Qualls claim that a movie should be considered in its social and historical dimensions, as well as in the context of its reception, instead of themes and motifs. However, in Fuller’s cinematography, this means also that he remarks on the urgency of ethical principles and moral acts, more with pictures than words. On the subject of art vs. theory, it is relevant to quote the authors’ theory on the role of art in Education: “(…) During the past decade, traditional cultural studies have faced enormous challenges. Post-structuralism, multiculturalism, and the politicization of culture have destabilized notions of the aesthetic, and this has had consequences in the arts in terms of American social policy (…)”. (Chin and Qualls, 1995:1) Chin and Qualls are acutely aware of the problems caused by the distinction between art theory and practice. In addition, one of the possible inquiries leads to the fiction-reality polarity.

In the Portuguese introduction to the book The Sense of an Ending (Frank Kermode, 1997), José Augusto Mourão wrote that, in spite of its suspicion, fiction is necessary, because fictional worlds are always signs of humankind.

Seventeen years after those remarks, it is clear that the frontier between ethics and aesthetics is still one of the most important questions, with fiction and reality being opposite worlds. Sometimes, in cinema, this is the chiasmus, which leads us to the answers. Nevertheless, art was never the field of aesthetics in opposition to the everyday life, which is the privileged and common ground of ethical experience. Art is, more and more, a philosophical subject engaging ethics and aesthetics.

Using Murray Smith’s final argument about different films but similar ethical questions (“In and Out of Character”, 2011), we might say that the reason why Samuel Fuller’s cinema is «capable of making a vital contribution to moral philosophy» is because “imaginative, emotionally-informed reasoning is part of the process of high-level reflection that we call philosophy”. (Smith, 2012:10) We know for sure that reality is often quite different from its artistic (re)presentation. However, films like Shock Corridor and The Big Red One are potential exercises for life. They are “only pictures” but, within their limitations, these movies are the only chance we have to “imagine” – in a cognitive sense -, some kind of primitive emotions, and to learn by pictures how to behave in real life.

Finally, my intention here has been to emphasize the possible implications of visualizing morals and ethics, and in light of Samuel Fuller’s preoccupation with violence and genocide, to provide a prolegomena towards an area of film research to be pursued more comprehensively in the future.

THE AUTHOR

Maria Irene Aparício

Maria Irene Aparício is an integrated member of the Philosophy of Language Institute of the New University of Lisbon, and a researcher on the project Film and Philosophy: Mapping an Encounter. She obtained her PhD degree in Cinema at the New University of Lisbon. She has published several essays, namely on art and science, and presented a number of papers on questions related to film. Her research interests include Cinema and Philosophy, and Film History and Aesthetics. She is the Book editor of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, and the editor and founder of artciencia.com, Journal of Art, Science and Communication Sciences, an online project since 2005

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he climax of Frost/Nixon (R. Howard, 2008) may be considered the famous interview with the ex president of the United States Richard Nixon, released on TV in 1977 three years after his resignation following his involvement in the Watergate scandal. During the interview, Nixon cannot avoid dealing with the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which gives  rise to a duel with David Frost, a journalist interested in leading him to an admission of guilt in front of the camera. The metaphor of the duel, also present in the title, takes the form of a struggle implicating the press and political power, a pursuit for the truth and an opaque system hiding a secret. Similarly, in Good Night and Good Luck (2005) George Clooney tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, a CBS anchorman who, since 1953, had been criticizing the claims and the work of Senator Joseph McCarthy. On the TV screens there emerges a contrast between the integrity of the reporter, determined to clarify the facts, and the unfairness of a political structure like the committee chaired by McCarthy.

The narrative line of movies such as Frost/Nixon and Good Night and Good Luck is well-established in the journalism film genre that is usually made up of a fight and a quest for a true version of the facts: like detective stories, the conflict in the journalism film is based on  the search for truth, although the inquiry process has wider social implications than the mere discovery of a crime.[1] In both the aforementioned titles the conflict involves the high offices of state, arousing the suspicion that the rules of democracy are infringed by people abusing their power.

Symbolic of this kind of genre is All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), which, twenty years before Frost/Nixon, had tackled the topic of the Watergate scandal. Adapted from the homonymous book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two reporters of the «Washington Post» who uncovered the link between the Watergate burglars and a criminal system linked to the White House, the movie by Pakula retraces the whole inquiry through a clearly presented reconstruction of the work involved in fitting together the pieces of a complicated puzzle. According to Carl Bernstein, the film owes its success not so much to the characters or the roles played by Hoffman and Redford, but rather to the methodical process of reportage which, in the film, is totally visible, a cinematic explanation of the reportage technique. [2]

On the one hand, in All the President’s Men the inquiry process becomes a difficult quest for evidence and sources, an interpretation of data and piecing together of apparently disconnected events. The obstacles of the research are cleverly synthesized in the sequence filmed in the Library of the Congress of Washington through the high-angle shot that, starting on the hands of Bob and Carl turning over hundreds of book requests, then moves away to show the characters alone in a planimetric abstraction of the library.

   17_MG_001 - All the President's Men  (A.J.Pakula - 1976)

This kind of movement, aimed at conveying the immensity of the data examined by the journalists, makes its return in another sequence, when Bob and Carl are driving the car in search of the members of the Committee for the Re-election of the President: an extreme long-shot shows the great extension of Washington, and suggests that the solution to the rebus may be hidden within the city itself.

17_MG_002 - All the President's Men  (A.J.Pakula - 1976)

On the other hand, the truth emerges as the result of a collage of microscopic signs and clues caught at in a flash. From the very beginning, information on the Watergate break-in was hard to come by: when Bob follows the trial of the five men involved in the burglary, he chances to hear  that one of them was a C.I.A. agent (a key declaration that kicked off the «Washington Post» inquiry) and he has to prick up his ears in order to catch part of the debate in front of the judge. The role of sound is essential here, and the soundtrack frequently becomes a barrier to the inquiry. The conversations on the phone, possibly Woodward and Bernstein’s most important means of investigation, are disturbed by the chaotic sound in the newsroom or by linguistic incomprehension; the dialogue between Carl and a woman is covered by the deafening passage of an aeroplane overhead, and so on. The sound level is also a forbidden channel, for instance when the main characters have to communicate with each other by means of their typewriters to avoid the danger of being intercepted.

17_MG_003 - All the President's Men (A.J.Pakula - 1976) 

This risk of interception, particularly on the phone, is also present in the best-seller that inspired the film. In their book, the authors recall for instance «the standing office joke had it that Bernstein heard the whole Watergate story and didn’t understand it».[3] The best-seller also includes references to the fragmentation of clues: «what information the reporters were getting at this point came in bit and pieces, almost always from people who did not want to discuss the matter. Their fright, more than anything else, was persuading Woodward and Bernstein that the stakes were higher than they had originally perceived».[4]

The gathering of details defined the entity of the Watergate scandal, and the movie is nothing but a way to lay bare the distribution of each piece of the circumstantial puzzle: notebooks, handouts, photos, card indexes, lists, bank cheques, phone tabulations, even paper tissues, all of which represent clues in the puzzle underscored by the camera.

17_MG_04 - All the President's Men (A.J.Pakula - 1976)

Bob and Carl make notes and collect seemingly useless and ambiguous details, as asserted by their editor Ben Bradlee, but nevertheless the connection between the single parts offers unexpected interpretations of the events. It is a method that recalls the system described by Aby Warburg in a letter to his brother Max, a system with which the German art historian tried to identify the characters of a fresco through coins, genealogies, codes and other clues. «In this attempt of mine I employ the same method I learned at school to play chess, a method which consists in the transfer of every move onto pieces of paper. In this way I discovered how to second-guess every move. Today, I use the same technique for the different hypotheses of historical identification».[5]

This reference to historical identification is by no means secondary, and goes beyond the explanation of a method used by the characters. All the President’s Men is the re-enactment of a fundamental moment in American politics, an event which had occurred only a few years before the movie. As an adaptation of a journalistic investigation, the film by Pakula makes use of many sources, from the Washington Post front-page headlines to the TV reportage on the triumph of Nixon in the primary elections. During the narrative, we see Woodward and Bernstein watching TV and listening to the people responsible for the Watergate affair denying the contents of their articles (for instance  the declaration released in 1972 by Richard G. Kleindienst, stating that he had not been informed about the destruction of documents of the Committee for the Re-election of the President). While the «Washington Post» newsroom, the documents, and the journalists are made to look as realistic as possible, the TV videos are absolutely authentic and contribute to the creation of  the reportage style of the film. Such a mixture can achieve astonishing effects – consider, for example, the last shot in the newsroom, where we are shown the celebration on TV for Nixon’s re-election and, in the same shot, the couple of reporters at work, ready to reveal their story. Thanks to All the President’s Men, the use of authentic material became a cornerstone in the journalism film genre, as testified by Good Night and Good Luck, with real TV appearances of Senator McCarthy, a recurring character of the movie that is not played by an actor.

The search for facts, an essential element of this genre, as we have already seen, is brought out with equal force in the narrative style: the contrast between the transparency of the reporters who shed light on a story and the reticence of those in power is expressed in terms of a reality/fiction relation. Telling the duel for the truth, the cinema makes use of original documents, enhancing the mise-en-scène of the true/false relation. And while on the subject of the mise-en-scène, the effect achieved by the lighting is particularly interesting: the diffused light of the newsroom, a place for the reconstruction of events, makes a stark contrast with the darkness of the Watergate complex, and with the shadows of the garage where Bob meets “Deep Throat”, the famous secret informant. As frequently happens in the movies, darkness metaphorically hinders the resolution of every mystery, and it is perhaps no accident that the White House is shown in the light of the evening, while a car crosses the entrance gates showing a copy of the «Washington Post» on the front seat highlighting the latest news on the Watergate inquiry.

 17_MG_005 - All the President's Men (A.J.Pakula - 1976)

THE AUTHOR Massimiliano Gaudiosi

Massimiliano Gaudiosi got a PhD in Comparative Studies (Literature, Theatre, Cinema) at the University of Siena with a dissertation on the image of Naples on film. His research interests include theory and film analyses, the relations between memory and cinema and the representation of the landscape. He is co-author of Analizzare i film (Venice, Marsilio, 2007) and he published essays on film journals and edited books. He is one of the founding editors of Cinemascope. Independent Film Journal.

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For its 16th issue, Cinemascope.it focuses on the ways in which films represent struggles, revolutions, rebellions and social disorders: events that have profound effects on societies. In relation to the images of ‘the revolt’ on screen this issue addresses the following questions: what does subversion of power structures mean and how is subversion represented in film? Does the image of the urban landscape play a role in the evolution of a revolt? How are citizens represented in film in the context of their reaction towards conflict and change? How is their attempt to reclaim the past and reconstruct the present depicted in different films? In addition, in the context of the recent political and social shifts in North Africa and Middle East, what role does the new media play; in other words, what kind of images circulate around us when we think about the images of ‘the revolt’?

In this issue Cinemascope.it seeks answers to these questions as the contributors offer a variety of fascinating and thought provoking responses on the images of the revolt; the concept of subversion as well as political and social change. In this Introduction as the editorial board of the journal, we would like to celebrate the variety of texts, contexts and ideas offered by the contributors of this issue.

On revolution. Tunisian cinema before and after by Gina Annunziata is an exhaustive follow shot on the actual situation of the movie Tunisian production. Annunziata focuses mainly on documentary films and examines the ways in which the images of the public and the private shift.

With (Un)Homely Revolt in Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, Dwayne Avery examines the ways in which the urban space function in films about subversion and revolt.  He argues that often the domestic space is represented as locus of  an individual revolt that mirrors collective humors.

The paper by Mariana A. C. da Cunha is focused on the iconography of revolt in Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, and particularly on the representation of the landscape in this masterpiece of Brazilian Cinema Novo. The movie by Rocha displays a tension between modes of narrating and space, and the article investigates the construction of the landscape as a stage of revolt.

Proshot Kalami examines a recent underground film by the iranian director Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009), a movie made in Tehran without any permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance or state support, that explores the underground music of Iran following bands of Indie-Rock, Jazz, New-metal and Rap in underground concerts escaping the hunting guards of the Islamic authorities. As Kalami points out in the paper, the movie explores “a liminal space between crime and freedom, where these young artists create their music. Their act of creation is their soundless revolt”.

Thoithoi ‘O Cottage offers an insight in the Indian State of Manipur analyzing how Ningthouja Lancha in Mami Sami manages a minimalist aesthetics – minimized dialogue and long pauses, avoidance in conversations of reference to the socio-political problems, etc. – in order to portray an ‘unquiet silence’ made necessary by the socio-political forces in the state of Manipur.

In Rebellious Affects in the Battle of Stokes Croft, paying attention to the emotional and embodied reactions, Steve Presence presents, the idea of ‘riot porn’, like the melodrama, as a work on the body to elicit affective responses. This, he argues, shows us the interconnectedness between the personal and the public (social).

Cecilia Mangini e Alina Marazzi: An Italian  Story, by Francesca Marone e Valeria Napolitano, considers the work of the two directors who, in two different periods and discusses the ways in which their work relocated and shifted the stereotype of women as subjected to ‘male gaze’. The article focuses on the image of Woman (with a capital W) on the screen as well as at the level of production.

For the masterpiece of Gillo Pontecorvo, with The “urban theatre” in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Algiers Elisa Uffreduzzi analyzes the ways in which the Italian director finds in the masses’ emotions the system to express the dynamics that bring a country to independence. In particular, Uffreduzzi underlines the principal aims of Pontecorvo’s choices to narrate the Algerian destiny: the heredity of neorealism and the aspiration to the journalistic documentary.

In It Happened Elsewhere: Godard’s Last Revolt Christoph Hesse writes about the events linked to Jusqu’à la victoire by Jean-Luc Godard started in 1970 and then suspended, becoming a “film in pieces, just like Amman”, as Godard himself declared. The article discusses the idea of films as tools of plurality of thought and ideology.

Again, Cinemascope.it couldn’t choice an issue better than this to subverted its landscapes,  presenting  itself in a new graphic habit, friendly and responsive, to give more pleasure during the reading and more information about the authors and their interests of research.

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			by CHRISTOPH HESSE
  

                                      
    
                                         
 
 
 
 

 

		

			

				In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.

Walter Benjamin
			
		
	

 
To take a picture at the very moment when the conditions of society are hopefully changing, this is what fascinates Godard about Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925).[1] Such a powerful picture could not have been made elsewhere at any other time. Mistaken for a re-enactment of the events of the year 1905, it would probably merely look like an historical costume drama pretending to represent what has passed aforetime. Regarded as a document of its own time, however, it bears witness to what substantially mattered in the Soviet Union up to the mid-1920s, a provisional state having been established under the auspices of war, still deeming itself the harbinger of an expectably worldwide socialist revolution. Vakulichuk’s outcry ‘Brothers!’ as well as the red flag on top of the battleship sought to momentarily address both the workers and intellectuals across the world. Already in October (1927), Eisenstein’s next film, this faithful expectation has perceptibly waned. While Eisenstein now displayed a tricky concept of intellectual montage for which he was forthwith reprimanded by Party officials, the political rhetoric of the film was already shaped by the nascent mythology of the Great October Revolution. Contre cœur, its commissioned anniversary picture artfully testified to the transformation of genuine hope into false wisdom.
Decades after the dire decline of the promising revolutionary cinema in the Soviet Union, Jean-Luc Godard made another attempt under significantly different terms. ‘Real socialism’, as being represented by the Post-Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, had fallen into suspicion also among many left-wing intellectuals, at least since the Prague Spring of 1968 had been stamped down by Soviet forces. By the late 1960s, revolutionary esperance was being centred mainly on the so-called Third World, on liberation movements struggling for a distinct social development independent of colonial or post-colonial dictation. It is not by chance that the political protest movements emerging in Europe and the United States at that time symbolically aligned with the guerrilla warfare taking place in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Godard, unlike his former mates of the Nouvelle Vague, enthusiastically embraced the upcoming revolt also in cinematic regards. Impressed rather by the angry New Waves surging elsewhere—particularly Glauber Rocha and the Brazilian Cinema Novo—than by the tasteful European art cinema being served by François Truffaut and the likes, Godard called for a disruptive transformation of cinema into an instrument of political study. Presenting his film La Chinoise at the Avignon Festival in August 1967, he released a press book including an anticipatory handwritten introduction which soon gained prominence as the Manifesto of the shortly established Dziga Vertov Group:
Fifty years after the October Revolution, American cinema dominates world cinema. There’s not much to add to this state of affairs. Only that at our own modest level, we must also create two or three Vietnams at the heart of the immense empire, Hollywood-Cinecittà-Mosfilm-Pinewood, etc, as much economic as aesthetic, that’s to say struggling on two fronts, to create national cinemas, free, brotherly, comrades and friends.[2]
His next film, Week-end, was to be released in December that year. With this picture, his biographer Colin MacCabe reckons, ‘Godard demonstrated that he was ready for revolution. He even told his crew he had worked with for almost a decade that they should seek other employment.’[3] While in itself still being part of the now suspected ‘world cinema’ – recorded on 35mm Eastmancolor, the film was supposed to be shown in theatres across the globe – Week-end exhibited a highly intellectualised, yet just as harsh and cheerful devastation of narrative cinema. The final title card states: ‘Fin de conte, fin de cinéma’ (‘End of the story, end of the cinema’). Certainly, the endeavour to reclaim cinema as a means of perceiving the world, not to contribute to the dutifully arranged illusionist spectacle it had long since become, was not entirely new to Godard then. With hindsight it becomes evident that earlier works such as Les Carabiniers (1963) or Masculin féminin (1965) had already paved this way. The conclusion Godard eventually arrived at, could thus be considered the termination of his previous cinematic career. With Week-end he exhausted, at least provisionally, the possibilities of narrative cinema by dismantling its concept from within, by dint of its very own means, as it were. Henceforth he would be going to abandon the institution of cinema itself. Consequently, he decided to quit the position of a well-reputed professional filmmaker to become a comparatively poorly equipped amateur instead, or rather – allowing for the double meaning of the French word – un amateur de la révolution which he believed would shortly take its course across the world. In contrast to Che Guevara, though, the former doctor who in his Cuban Diary proudly reported that during the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra he had swapped his medical drugs for munitions, Godard did not dismiss his proper profession straightaway. Perhaps more meticulously than ever, he was still concerned with shooting films. Cinema, he declared, ought to be destroyed by its own means[4] in order to deliver it from its ideological burden. Adopting Dziga Vertov’s flaunting contempt for bourgeois fairy-tales, Godard now went about taking pictures and noises of a world which he thought defied a faithful cinematic recording on conventional terms. As he sought to demonstrate in Le Gai savoir (1968), the very matter of cinema itself, i.e. the relationship of sounds and images, of words and pictures, of signs and references, was yet to be explored. But the sort of science he proposed turned out to be in fact less gay than Émile Rousseau and Patricia Lumumba, the two protagonists of the film, had expected. The production of several ciné-tracts and short filmic essays recorded on 16mm stock involved many, not only financial, imponderabilities, and even more so did the reception. Some of the films he made along with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group were being watched by some two hundred people, and among these two hundred people, Godard suspects, there were perhaps twenty or thirty who really watched them.[5] Some of these films had been commissioned by European television stations which eventually refused to broadcast them for political reasons. Indeed, most of Godard’s contributions to the revolution of the cinema remained widely invisible then, and only a very few people have seen them as yet. Retrospectively, one might grasp this malheur with a Godardian sense of humour, recalling what he lately said about his cinematic education in the 1950s: Cinema, that’s what we called the films we had never seen. [6]
Having decided to become a fellow-traveller of the revolution, or more modestly speaking, a man with a movie camera tracking the political and cultural shifts many countries underwent at that time, Godard left his Paris home for locations abroad. From 1968 onward, he travelled to the United States, to Britain, Czechoslovakia, Italy – and Jordan. Already in La Chinoise, a premature vision of Parisian Pop-Art-Maoism, it had been playfully surmised that a proletarian revolution would hardly get off the ground in an advanced capitalist country like France. There is a telling scene in this film in which Anne Wiazemsky, playing a young Maoist student, ingenuously explains why French revolutionaries nowadays have to centre their hopes on a foreign place three thousand miles away. Ironically, Godard himself, after all, was willing to mistake that heretical joke for a serious advice, even though he did not sail for China but for the Middle East – the only cinematic ‘Vietnam’ he actually sought to create elsewhere.

In 1970, Godard and his associate Jean-Pierre Gorin, meanwhile forming the hard core of the Dziga Vertov Group, agreed to a request from the Arab League to shoot a documentary on the Palestinian revolution, as it was called, and they spent considerable time in Jordan in early 1970. But their efforts were in the first instance ‘hampered by the fact that neither Godard nor Gorin spoke Arabic’, as MacCabe remarks. ‘They found themselves time and time again listening to a long and complicated speech, only for the interpreter to translate it in five words: “We will struggle until victory.” Eventually, Jusqu’à la victoire became the title of the film…’[7] Or rather the title of the idea of a film that never got materialised; the footage covered roughly two third of what they had scheduled. The money they had got from the Arab League ran out, and Godard’s and Gorin’s attempt to raise some fresh dollars by whipping up a new film in the United States did not succeed. Vladimir et Rosa (1971), the film they made in Chicago in a trice (commissioned by a German television station), proved to be a ‘hastily assembled mess’[8] while the fragments of Jusqu’à la victoire grew old in the meantime. Their picture of the Palestinian revolution had become obsolete before it got finished. The political circumstances Godard and Gorin had witnessed suddenly changed. Most of the young Fedayeen they had filmed a couple of months before were dead by now. In September 1970, the Jordan army, in order to reassert their authority over the Palestinians being suspected of terrorism, marched into Amman and killed thousands of them, several refugee camps were torn down.
‘The film is in pieces, just like Amman’, Godard said to Chris Marker who occasionally dropped into his editing room. For the time being, the remaining footage was shelved and a new large-scale project (Tout va bien, 1972) being started instead. Shortly afterwards, in 1972, the Dziga Vertov Group split up. Yet it took another two years until Godard, now along with his new associate Anne-Marie Miéville, harked back to the footage of Jusqu’à la victoire in order to put these pieces together. Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), the product of this reconstruction process, was accomplished in 1974, released only in 1976.
When Godard and Miéville reviewed the abandoned fragments, they apparently felt somewhat uncomfortable; found themselves remote from what they heard and saw, geographically as well as historically, politically as well as aesthetically. ‘Et puis on est revenu en France’, Godard comments, et de ça on n’en revient pas encore.’ That is to say, the maker of the film about the (eventually defeated) Palestinian revolution had not yet recovered from his return back home. Therefore Godard and Miéville now attempted to integrate their distant view from ‘here’ (France) into the film. Estimating the truth of the images of struggle from the Middle East, they took into account also the prospective spectators and their familiar surroundings. So they added, or rather contrasted, an ici part to the footage from ailleurs, thereby using video for the first time. The French family home in the film, by the way, was the home of cinematographer William Lubtchansky in Paris. Curiously enough, Lubtchansky had photographed Claude Lanzmann’s documentary essay Pourquoi Israël (1973) just a couple of years before.
What is represented here—ici—is a staged domestic scene of a middle-class French family, juxtaposed to the images of Palestinian warriors. It has been said above that the political situation had drastically changed since their recordings in Jordan had been interrupted earlier in 1970. The vivid picture of struggle had meanwhile turned into an obituary, as it were, and the idea of a Palestinian revolution Godard and Gorin once sought to portray, was to be called into question by now. Moreover, Godard and Miéville now detected several serious shortcomings concerning the cinematic document itself, the sound in particular. ‘If the Dziga Vertov group had used conversations, they were didactic’, McCabe notes, ‘one voice was given a necessary prominence and the sound was harsh and strident. In Ici et ailleurs, the voices are soft. Rather than dictating to us what the images mean, they attempt to discover what meaning they might have.’ Godard retreated from pictures of struggle to a verbal discourse, as if he had become distrustful of the sounds and images he had previously recorded. With this film, more explicit than in Le Gai savoir six years before, he rendered an instance of cinema as an instrument of thinking (‘instrument de pensée’[9]). Rather than presenting a final product of work, he exhibited the process of reflection and reconstruction itself, and invited the spectator to get involved in it.
Wheeler Winston Dixon provides a succinct summary of what this change of perspective—from Jordan (1970) to France (1974)—actually meant: ‘Ici et ailleurs acknowledges that although the 1970 footage in the film is “real”, the editorial decisions involved in constructing the final film are equally “real,” and they shape, distort, reconstruct, and otherwise transform the flickering images of dead Palestinians into a work which is a meditation on the creation of history, and the images that record (and transmute) that history into the fabric of our lives. On the soundtrack, Miéville offers telling criticisms of Godard’s use of actors and editorial strategies within the film. Although Ici et ailleurs uses, for the most part, recycled imagery, and is a work which speaks to Godard’s filmic past rather than his future, it marked the beginning of his new period of work, in which the filmmaker questioned not only his “bourgeois” films, but also the works of his Dziga Vertov period.’[10]
Ici et ailleurs certainly remains the most interesting leftover of the Dziga Vertov Group, in itself both an epilogue to that short period of militant filmmaking between 1968 and 1972 and at the same time a trial run of a forthcoming series of video works terminating in the voluminous Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–1998). Already in Ici et ailleurs, Godard began to slightly shift his view on history. He thereby also gained a different, more melancholic conception of film as a record of history. Douglas Morrey suggests that history, as being represented in Ici et ailleurs, would strike the viewer as a pile-up of catastrophes, according to Walter Benjamin’s boding formulation from the ninth thesis on the philosophy of history.[11] Though it might be doubted if Godard exactly in Ici et ailleurs has done justice to that fundamentally critical notion. ‘At the end’, MacCabe summarises, more cautiously, ‘Godard discovered a new and hesistant faith in the image, though this faith would involve a very much more profound recognition of death than had been available to the creator of Michel Poiccard.’[12] Although hesitant and tentative, Ici et ailleurs in some essential aspects remains nonetheless faithful to the original idea of the film from which it emerged.

Indeed, the armed struggle of the Palestinians against Israel, which Godard had observed during his sojourn in Jordan, lingered as a major political concern throughout his work since then. One can easily imagine that Jusqu’à la victoire, as it had initially been designed, would have become a somewhat unsavoury picture, fraught with populist slogans. The preserved footage is bearing witness to what Godard and Gorin had in mind at the ouset. And also the more intellectualised reflections being eventually presented in Ici et ailleurs do by no means conceal those ambitions. Considering the Islamist counterrevolution that has taken place in Palestine over the past two decades, it ought to be underscored that the numerous female warriors being portrayed in Ici et ailleurs are apparently not willing to hide their expressive countenance behind a Niqab. All the same, the political message reads quite simple: Palestinians, invariably imagined as the good people defending their inherited ground, are being violently oppressed by Zionist intruders. In this respect at least, Godard remained fully aligned with the Weltanschauung of self-proclaimed anti-imperialist claqueurs. Militant movements from a remotely romanticised Third World, regardless of their own political ambitions, could thus be received as a sort of substitute for revolutionary action proving unfeasible under the conditions of fully equipped late capitalist societies. The Palestinians in particular, in spite—or exactly because—of their fervent enmity toward Israel, have since then been fancied as the most glittering of those white hopes. It ought to be recalled, however, that, basically before the Six-Day War in June 1967, there had been genuine sympathies for the Jewish refugee home in Palestine also on the part of the Left. In Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), for example, Marianne (Anna Karina) asks why a woman, just because she is wearing a skirt and tights, should not be able to take arms in order to defend herself, as in Cuba, Vietnam—or Israel. Such a peculiar reference would hardly be imaginable in subsequent Godard films. By 1967, since having maintained its statehood against those reputedly oppressed nations that had taken measures to wipe it off the map by force, the Jewish state of Israel suddenly dropped off the agenda in favour of the indigenous people of Palestine. It was henceforth compared not to Cuba or Vietnam, but to Nazi Germany. This was exactly the case also in Ici et ailleurs.
Yet irrespective of those monstruous clichés, according to which the miserable fate of the Palestinians, allegedly caused first and foremost by ‘Zionist occupation’ (not by authoritarian politics in the Arab world, for instance), is summarily being equated with the systematic destruction of the Jews under Nazi rule in Europe, Ici et ailleurs holds some enlightening political statements as well. Contrary to the ominous concept of some innately righteous people struggling for the Good of Humanity, Godard and Miéville en passant suggest that Hitler too has inaugurated a popular revolution; a finding which ultimately challenges the comfortable misunderstanding of Fascism, and National Socialism in particular, as merely a dictatorial rule of the most reactionary factions of industrial and financial capital.
While working on his Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard suggested that the history of cinema has drawn to a close already in the early 1940s. Six million Jews were being murdered, he states, but the cinema was not there.[13] One might doubt, of course, if a cinematic account of what has happened in Auschwitz would be any good to convey critical insights into the catastrophe and its consequences. Yet apparently Godard has now caught a glimpse of the abyss that seperates the history before from the one thereafter. With the hindsight of the Histoire(s) du cinéma, most of the films of the Dziga Vertov Group, at least in political regards, look like playful mishaps. The form of these films, as Eisenstein would have it, proves to be more revolutionary than their palpable contenct. Ici et ailleurs, the most valuable heirloom of that period, might thus be considered the result of an intellectual advancement and at the same time the product of a defeat. The most overwhelming historical defeat, however, had long since taken place when the original film project got started under the heady title Jusqu’à la victoire.
note

					
NOTES
					






[1] See Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une veritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1980), 5ème voyage.


[2] ‘Cinquante ans après de la Révolution d’Octobre, le cinéma américain règne sur le cinéma mondial. Il n’y a pas grand-chose à ajouter à cet état de fait. Sauf qu’à notre échelon modeste, nous devons nous aussi créer deux ou trois Vietnams au sein de l’immense empire Hollywood-Cinecittà-Mosfilms-Pinewood-etc. et tant économiquement qu’esthétiquement, c’est-à-dire en luttant sur deux fronts, créer des cinémas nationaux, libres, frères, camarades et amis.’ (Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Alain Bergala, Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1985, p. 303). English translation quoted from Colin MacCabe, Godard. A Portait of the Artist at Seventy (New York: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 182.


[3] MacCabe, Godard, p. 200.


[4] See Godard, ‘Warum ich hier spreche…‘, Filmkritik, No. 225 (1975). p. 423.


[5] See Godard, Introduction à une veritable histoire du cinéma, 4ème voyage.


[6] See Godard, Das Das Gesagte kommt vom Gesehenen. Drei Gespräche 2000/01 (Bern/Berlin: Gachnang & Springer, 2002), p. 15.


[7] See MacCabe, Godard, pp. 230–231.


[8] MacCabe, Godard, p. 231.


[9] See Godard, ‘Le cinéma n’a pas su remplir son rôle’, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Tome 2: 1984–1998, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998), p. 335.


[10] Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 133.


[11] See Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005), p. 112–113. Also Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesen über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (1940), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), Vol. I, p. 697–698.


[12] See MacCabe, Godard, p. 243.


[13] See Godard, ‘Le cinéma n’a pas su remplir son rôle’, p. 336.

 



				

		

			

				

			
			

		
  
		

			THE AUTHOR

Christoph Hesse studied Cinema and Television Studies, German Studies and Philosophy in Bochum/Germany, PhD on Formalist and Neoformalist film theory (2003). He is currently working on a research project at the Freie Universität Berlin, dealing with German-speaking film émigrés in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s.
		
 
			
 
		
 
 
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		Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:38:21 +0000
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		http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?p=188
		
			
by F. MARONE and V. NAPOLITANO

 
INTRODUCTION
The current economic, institutional and political crisis is generating new forms of inequality against women in social representations as well as in political and legal projects. The “neo-colonized” female body is conveyed by the transmission of stereotypes through the mass-medias, and involves a process of building mental images of masculine and feminine, using subliminal conditioning socio-cultural mechanisms. The contrast produced by images of women devoted primarily to the care of home and family, worried about their appearance and involved in roles of low prestige[1], and, on the contrary, by images of males addicted to the domination and the seduction, has affected and still affects the spectator, who identifies with traditional representations, related to a “positive” male and a “negative” feminine[2].

The principle of subordination of women is a social construction based on the field of symbolic exchanges[3]. It is therefore appropriate to refer to non-exclusionary cultural strategies that can redefine the individual and collective identities, in order to design a future founded on self-determination of women, and on the centrality of relationships and exchange. In this sense, one can not ignore the ability of cinema to construct new critical practice to reality. The film is a symbolic representation of the world, and it contributes to the “social construction of the subject, shaping its identity and the way it represents the reality[4]“. Like the real body, even on the movies the body acquires meaning only within construction processes aimed at specific historical, cultural, ideological, and institutional practices[5]. A critical point of view does not manifest itself in bringing the woman to the stereotype of an entity unable to act in the events, but return her in the role of historical agent; so we must consider those authors whose works are characterized by two fundamental characteristics. On the one hand, the fact of being “open texts”, able to create and disseminate new socio-cultural representations, offering those who watch them the opportunity to live in a “space of possibility[6]“. On the other hand, the fact of being devices which give the status of reality to achieve awareness of their own and others’ subjectivity, for the construction of concrete spaces of active citizenship.

We should therefore consider the films of Cecilia Mangini and Alina Marazzi, who in different periods have questioned the long-standing cliché of the woman considered a passive object of male gaze, showing in their films the gap between real women, their lives and their desires, and how they were represented in the film industry.

When it comes to female characters in film alternatives referenced above, in the seventies, the Feminist Film Theory, and an independent cinema, especially Anglo-American (which stand out and Ida Lupino Dorothy Arzner) can permanently break the point of view Single men, encouraging the active role of women on the big screen. Key issues, such as the emergence of a new awareness of the experience related to the representation of women in film on one hand, and the empowerment of female pleasure from the male point of view on the other hand, seem to be closely related to Feminist Film Theory. However, women’s film history can not ignore these two Italian directors, who have contributed to the recognition of full citizenship to women in male-dominated industry. Their films offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the forms of expression and representation of women, not connected to the traditional logic of the show and the star system.
WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN ITALY
The feminist revolution in Italy between nineteenth and twentieth century coincided with the advance of modernization processes: in those years, throughout the industrialized West, women are gaining greater visibility in the public sector ad in private space.

Until the middle of the 800, women with a predetermined destiny for thousands of years, to become wife and then mother, had no access to public office because they were deemed inadequate and therefore confined to an inferior role, limited to family, child care and household chores[7].

In the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, thanks to the industrial revolution and its continuing upheaval, women gained greater freedom of movement in social life. They began, albeit with difficulty, to be granted the right to break the economic and symbolic ties that bound them to the father or husband. The outlook on life changed where women could be regarded as thinking subjects, and they could aspire to become politically active citizens, discussing wage labor, civil rights, and right to education[8].

Thus was born the emancipationist and with it the model of the modern woman, feminine matrix of multiple identities which foreshadowed the life of women in the twentieth century with all their contradictions. No more satisfied to be considered the core of the bourgeois family, head of the first cell of a state model that had been arguing with the Risorgimento, the Italian women claimed the right to vote and participation in public life, hitherto the exclusive domain of men. Out on the streets, they make speeches, demonstrate, communicate with others, joining with other revolutions, social movements (for example, with ups and downs to the worker), to participate actively in political life and public space.

This movement towards the acquisition of a mature awareness and new rights in the Fascist period waned since the women were no longer seen as an organized political party. The dictatorship recognized only two kinds of women’s associations: the Fascist Women’s, who were supported and reinforced, and the catholic women, just tolerated. Therefore, the Italian emancipationist movements had to deal with the “new woman” of the First World War, learning to relate to the male hierarchy, militaristic attitudes, positions based on biological determinism as a scientific and smuggled, primarily the narrow-minded conception of motherhood functional to the policy of the regime. While not having available channels with which to express their interests or discontent, some divergent women were able to express their ideas and became protagonist, albeit limited. Thus, women of the “Ventennio” were not passive victims without hope, but the unrest, rebellion, deception, skepticism and growing awareness of their rights of women and citizens were quite common even among those who took no active part the partisan struggle.

At the end of the Second World War, and in the fifties, the Italian women experienced the opportunity to give voice to their desire for autonomy and creativity, facing up to the rest of the world. In particular, they heard how the American women lived through the newspapers, but above all through the films (which were popular then newspapers, as many women were illiterate). The distance which they felt between their world and that of American women was significant. The film has created myths, but also the goals, and targets, not only in relation to possession of a modern kitchen, a washing machine, a refrigerator and other appliances, which allow the woman to toil less and have more time to itself, but also proposing family and loving models. Not to mention the social and political rights: for example, while the American women already had the right to vote, Italian women have obtained it only after December 1945; on January 31, while Italy was divided and the north was subjected to the “Nazism occupation”, the Council of Ministers chaired by Ivanoe Bonomi issued a decree that recognized the right of women to vote[9]. In 1946, the Italian women went to the polls for the first time and, in spite of those who had predicted a low turnout of women, many of them went to vote, registering a high percentage both in local elections in the spring, and in the elections of June. It was an important moment because it was going to affect the subjective dimension: an achievement of individuality as well as citizenship. That “secret vote” meant to have of themselves and their lives outside the control of fathers, husbands and brothers.

From the fifties on, thanks to the new needs created by industrialization, urbanization and the development of capitalism, a different mentality spread than the female labor, thus promoting the mass education of girls.

These were the years of the economic miracle; a miracle, however, involves only a part of privileged population, and especially in the South the rest of people work from 13 to 15 hours a day and women are the most penalized group. Italy is a country that is still conservative and patriarchal. In the sixties the claims of feminism was accompanied by a degree of economic prosperity, and a slight renewal of costumes followed a more general process of confrontation between the generations that led young people to challenge the family and the institutions perceived as too rigid.

In the seventies feminists, particularly in the U.S., revealed that despite the achievements of civil, political and social rights and the overcoming of economic exploitation, the work of emancipation was not yet complete because they had to deep questioning about the essence, the root, which continued to keep alive the patriarchy. They identified it with discrimination in the sphere of sexual reproduction, the biological difference, which has always been transformed into the difference in the roles and social difference that relegates women in conditions of subordination. Even in Italy feminism attributed a political role to sexuality. As a place of entrenched power dynamics, sexuality becomes a battleground, and sexual liberation is understood as liberation from the rules that patriarchy and bourgeois forces to maintain male dominance. This is the time in which the Italian feminists shocked the well-meaning burning bras in the streets and urging others to discover themselves and their own bodies, as from the sexual organs, crying “I am of my own”. For the first time the feminists took to the streets separately from men: is 8 March 1972 and the event takes place in the famous Campo de Fiori in Rome, with nearly twenty thousand women from all social classes, and different generations are united by desire for change, to count, to manage one’s own body. On either side of the square there is a massive police presence that soon charges protesters and is able to clear the square. However the event will mark a milestone in the history of feminism.

The words become slogans: “Donna è bello”, “Donne non si nasce ma si diventa”, dreaming of expanding the boundaries of political and social change. Subsequently, feminism has anchored the concept of sex to identity and not to gender – emphasizing the body as a women-specific – but this did not put the concept away by its instability and its perpetual transition, exposed to the crisis of encoded models, to discover the identity as multiple and fragmented from the eighties onwards.

Since the 70′s commitment to identify cultural experiences, as individual and collective, and the rise of a free female subjectivity, including through cultural facilities in the struggle for women’s citizenship rights, contribute to the affirmation of a thinking of otherness and interpreter of the contemporary world of emergencies in film: many directors, screenwriters, producers and performers embody the thought of difference, causing a scandal or consensus, however, by arguing.

In the eighties, however, with the demystification of current ideologies, the need for a real attention to the problems of women has set. In a historical sense, identifying the traditions that have led and organized the female exclusion and implemented practices to address this exclusion; and in a theoretical sense, making the difference a value with which to orient in the crisis of traditional values presented itself with the postmodern.

This produced not only political and social results, but also some effects in the field of knowledge, who are institutionalized or at least mentioned with the term of “feminist studies”, “women’s studies”, “female studies”, or “gender studies”. Women Studies have given priority to the theme of the centrality of gendered subjects in the construction of knowledge, highlighting the ways in which these are communicated and transmitted – and their subsequent rethinking of the methods of investigation, collection of sources and their interpretation.
ESSERE DONNE
The filmmaker, photographer and writer Cecilia Mangini realizes in 1965 Essere donne, pioneering documentary on the plight of Italian workers, in which women’s history becomes an integral part of contemporary life. For the first time in Italian cinema, the long-time ignored lives of working women are investigated in view of an indisputable and indispensable contribution to the socio-economic growth of the country. Essere donne offers the opportunity to reflect on the past understood as a valuable asset to interpret this. In the documentary of the fifties and sixties the woman considered as an active worker never appears. Filming working women was considered a difficult task, breaking the taboos, undermining the stereotype conveyed by the commercial cinema, gratified by female characters based on their role of wives and mothers. However, addressing workers of the factories and the countryside has allowed Cecilia Mangini to establish a picture surprisingly rich, in which the traditional image of women relegated to a marginal condition, “functional” to the figures of fathers, husbands and children gave way to that of a world of characters able to reconcile family responsibilities and ambitions of emancipation. The need to reflect on the condition of working women of the industries of Milan and the countryside of Puglia was fueled by the crucial support of the Communist Party of those years. But it is fair to say that, for the director, the pressure to analyze the ways in which the Italian woman trying to assert their autonomy in the half of the sixties, contributing decisively, despite persistent discrimination and cultural norms, the so-called economic boom, came from the desire to reflect on herself and on her role of a director and screenwriter in the fifties and sixties. Wondering what it meant to be women in factories and farms during the economic miracle, therefore, manifested the need to inquire about being a woman and make films in that same historical period.

Here emerges the stimulating aspect of the documentary, which incorporates the gestures of daily life of workers and laborers of those years and shows the distortion, put into practice by the economic system, of the boundaries between public and private sectors of Italian women. Essere donne shows the experience of working women in the factories of the North, with the assembly, and the fragmentation, and in the rural South, still widely referred to the phenomenon of illegal hiring. It is an anti-theatrical documentary, which as “poor, small-scale, ill-suited to transition to the market or industry” implies a “reduction to the essentials of cinema: the body and the machine[10]“. The woman in the documentary by Cecilia Mangini is the one who is not doing the actress by trade; on the contrary, she plays effectively the role of workers and peasants.

The protagonists are women sharing a common pride and dignity. Even the testimony of the tobacco’s laborers shows they are not passive victims, but individual women wishing to express their autonomy. So, the respect to those authorities most often indifferent to the new forms of claims by the female gender goes along with the demand for greater protection of labor rights, and implementation of social policies in defense of the working mothers. And the strike becomes a channel through which express, even at a high price sometimes, the now widespread intolerance against a system that a continuing effort to ensure the interests of employers rather than the essential forms of social assistance (pre-schools nest) continues to feed a female model (accepted by the majority of women themselves) condescending and reassuring. The images of the female manifestation repressed by the police represent the will of Cecilia Mangini to reflect on the “denial” status of women, and the consequent need for change. The doubts and worries of respondents on the one hand, and the determination and awareness of their rights on the other hand are reflected in the meta-analytic and reflective gaze of the director, who questions reasons of dissatisfaction on women, originated from a system which is difficult to change. To film workers’ sacrifices in the industry of the economic boom meant to reflect on their difficulties in conquering space usability professional in the film industry.

The desire of the author to identify with the working women during the olive harvest in Puglia, or with those who had to control the frames in the North creates a genuine political counter-investigation, able to examine the folds of Italian society. Why shoot the “other” does not mean necessarily to lock him up in the stereotyped patterns of the model, which inhibit the emancipation of the beholder. Instead, look for diversity as an object of analysis lead to reconsider the meaning of reality. On the subject of the origins of the identity of the Italian working women in the early sixties, it is essential to emphasize the historical and cultural humus of those years. Divided between the centripetal forces of tradition and the centrifugal desire for independence, the protagonists are women managed to combine two jobs (and family audience) because of their fierce dignity, the result of a past never static or homogenous. On their way to emancipation, the background of women of 1965 formed by feminist associations sprang up at the end of the Second World War – among which the UDI – Union of Italian Women, founded in 1944 by the experience of the resistance civil and military defense groups of women, stood out for its commitment in 1946 for the right to vote and stand, and then, from 1956 to 1968, in the struggles for the recognition of equal pay, the work of farmers, and social services such as childcare centers. And of course, a profound anti-fascist spirit united hundreds of thousands who gathered in the Italian association during the two decades following the end of World War II. A spirit also fueled by the memory of the Fascist laws that tended to discriminate against women who worked.

Discrimination implemented by fascism in the field of women’s work returned in a much more widespread practice of control. Especially the law of 3 April 1926, which prohibited strikes and lockouts, and the establishment of the Labour Court, eventually damaged the interests of workers in general, to the benefit of the employers. The most affected were women, however, since the fascist policy was explicitly designed to support reproductive function. Fits into this context, an article titled Donna e macchina appeared on August 31, 1934 “Popolo d’Italia”, in which Mussolini said that women’s work “masculinized woman, caused man unemployment, fostered independence and a fashion contrary to the birth that would lead to population decline, deprived the man not only of labor but also of dignity[11]“. On the other hand, precisely because of its realism, the regime knew he could not do without women, which is why many times it assumed contradictory positions for them. Some studies show about that on the ambiguous nature of the fascist policies against a female world in constant evolution[12], and argue that the results of a national women’s fascist activism went beyond the intentions of the regime itself. Others, however, bear out the theory of a repressive regime[13] on the work of emancipation, and unable to protect that same right to motherhood that, at first exalted, was later denied by the Second World War[14].

The effects of the fascist contradictions manifested themselves, since 1940, with the entry into the war. As already happened in the past, therefore, the war accelerated the process now underway to transform the role of women in Italian society. The most productive and versatile it was, needless to say, labor in the factories and the sharecropping sector, whose needs and problems were considered fiercely flexible at first by the emergency of war, and later by the urgency of reconstruction.

About the relationship between women and the square, Cecilia Mangini recalled during a recent debate the influence that had on her fascist forms of collective life, emphasizing the importance of regime ceremonies – “on those occasions we could go out and learn different forms of participation by those traditionally proposed by the Church” – by which Mussolini mobilized the masses in general, and female ones in particular. These practices conveyed a real desire for emancipation of women, even regimented, which – like the men themselves – under the dictatorship, took part in the collective life of the country, establishing a sense of autonomy and their drive toward emancipation[15].

Such reflection does not need to reconsider the ideological position (avowedly anti-fascist) of the director, but rather to avert the danger of creating a rift between the present and the past of those years. Cecilia Mangini was well aware of the specific nature of the events in the Fascist period. Emilio Gentile wrote that the man in fascism is not a subject with an identity (personal or collective, as in the case of the worker), but a cellular element of the crowd; his condition, in fact, turns out to be intimately linked to the reduction of “the spectacle of mass political participation[16].” For her part, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi notes that the regime’s refusal to grant a mass independent political subjectivity was the result of his association with the proletariat[17]. It was this, a balance of Mussolini’s policy, which in keeping with the ritual construction of his legend established the necessary detachment to the people. In particular, one of the causes that justified the rejection of the masses was their feminine essence, to which the fascist regime contrasted the image of a male leader. Just as female, the masses were “ruled with enthusiasm rather than with interest”, and “it was necessary to take account of their mystical side[18]“. In this sense, the LUCE reports show the great meetings in Piazza Venezia with the usual pattern characterized by high / vertical (the leader) and low / horizontal (the crowd).

Thanks to the great experience on Neorealist cinema, which stands on ruins of II World War, Essere donne reversed this pattern, giving voice to female subjectivities. This film has fostered the emergence of a new historical consciousness, and has broken established taboos and stereotypes, giving visibility to female configurations that can, despite the difficult socio-cultural trends, carve out specific spaces of active citizenship.


VOGLIAMO ANCHE LE ROSE
In Italy, the women’s revolution was more symbolic than factual; however a revolution for this can not be said to be less considerable. Alina Marazzi tells us very well this way of emancipation of Italian women from the late sixties until the end of the seventies in her documentary Vogliamo anche le rose, (Italy, 2007): a montage of archival footage and private diary fragments, but also a research documentary full of emotions, sensations and colours. A personal elaboration that allows the audience to trace the history of that decade full of changes and transformations of the society and the family, such as changing roles, life cycles, myths, fashions, disease, but also the transformation of women’s identities and women’s bodies, myths. The twentieth century was the century of women’s achievements, both in law and in the transformation of the cultural achievements, laboriously achieved through public and private battles, sometimes with very high costs on a personal level. In fact, thanks to them the life experience of women has changed significantly, so that it can not be called only in terms of discrimination, subjugation and marginalization. Yet these gains are not irreversible, we must be careful and vigilant. Hence the need to tell and produce memory, since the consolidation of the position of women in society and culture, depends on the value acquired by the thought of women[19].

Alina’s successful attempt is also that to remedy those “lapses of memory” – as Annarita Buttafuoco has shrewdly appealed – which resulted in the removal of a movement that for more than sixty years had occupied a place in the debate of liberal culture[20].

Above all, the film tells the need for change in relation to the collective political and social experience of women, but also to the most intimate and private experiences of individual women.

The awareness of the female subject passes through a self-locked and non-dogmatic comparison with other women who have started the same process of self-transformation: it is from her own biography that every woman has access to the “right”, its specificity, to experiment their mobility and break the divide between discourse and experience, specialized knowledge and relational attitudes, intellectual work and political urgency.

In enhancing the experience and the female subjectivity, the work of Alina addresses the issue of women’s language and narrative device which makes the affirmation and expression of identity, the legitimacy of female subjectivity through their story, faced to overcome the gap that still exists between women’s subjective experience and symbolic structure adequate to represent and signify. In Vogliamo anche le rose the ability of introspection plays with the voices of others, with the diaries that give away the existential projects, the desires and the motivations of our ancestors. With a skilful editing the director picks up some items; existential testimonies taken in particular by three diaries from the Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano, whose authors, Anita, Teresa and Valentina, write their memoirs in 1967, ’75 and ’79. The diaries are reworked in collaboration with the writer Silvia Balestra.

All three united in the experience of living in Rome, the protagonists are paradigmatic of different and equal conditions at the same time. Anita is from a middle class family with a Catholic upbringing overwhelming that comes from parents and enrols at the university just as the explosion of ’68; Teresa comes to Rome from a village in the province of Bari to undergo illegal abortion; Valentina, is a politically active woman who frequents the collective Via del Governo Vecchio. For these women, writing is the custodian of authentic, leading them in their own revolution.

The texts of the three main characters, assigned to the items off of the actresses Anita Caprioli, Teresa Saponangelo and Valentina Carnelutti, were mounted with visual materials from super8 or experimental film, conversations, pictures of the time, magazines and picture stories, film footage (Teche Rai, various Film archives, etc.) and private funds. Resistance of women in that crucial decade is shown both in relation to the cultural market, both in relation to traditional household tasks of women – who are told in their “inside”, recovering the memory of a past far from being sweetened. By the documentary women learn the forms of association, and political movements of opinion that, in the diversity of contexts of mental, cultural and religious paradigms, have accompanied the configurations of the feminine in our country. The document provides the tools to reflect on their history through a focus of identity of the private and the sexuality. The faces on the screen are those of girls of the time but the voices, the images and the fragments of lives, damage to the private shadows that became collective experience, and need for revolution and conscience: shadows with which each woman compares in her unique becoming to regain possession of intimate events, to integrate past and present, to emphasize her uniqueness.

The story of the plot between the complex history and histories is very interesting: we are under the impression that it is a “normal” strength and dignity grown at high risk for loneliness, but always aimed towards a genuine and profound communication of its difference. The feeling of exclusion and the desire to belong, the reason of otherness, both biographical and ideological, far from being an effective element of exclusion or marginalization of cultural purchase, gain, in the feminist discourse as in that of Alina Marazzi, a great evocative power.

The social and cultural differences, the current difficulties for the affirmation of civil rights for women and for recognition of their self-determination, the ways in which over the years the work is organized and the income is distributed within families, show as there still are considerable differences in everyday life. Of course, it is necessary to renew our commitment to acquire a status in the family and society, which respects the equality and, at the same time, guarantees the development of female characteristics. Therefore, in the sharing of our time, a changing time, which breaks down the barriers between East and West, between South and North, in the reshuffle as a prelude to meet new people and full of meaning for women and their relations, the study of subjectivity in social relations, needs, instincts and emotions in daily time plays an important role.

The film’s title, Alina Marazzi explains in his director’s notes, takes up the famous slogan “We want bread, but roses too”, with which in 1912 the textile workers defined their participation in a strike of weeks in Massachusetts: the bread is what is needed, fundamental rights, what is now taken for granted. But women have fought for a world that also gave space to the poetry of roses and often time does not coincide with the hopes of the time in history. And, as pointed out by Alina, is a battle that requires, more than ever, confrontation with contradictory aspects. On the one hand the pulsion to self-determination and, secondly, a desire for dependence, the desire of the relation: the need for affective which some women claim to have passed, but it fails again.

The oppression of women is not exclusively linked to socio-economic condition[21]; their subordination can not be reduced solely to that set of rules and social prejudices that define her in stereotypical roles, which would be dismantled until the final liberation. The question is played at a deeper level: it invests the structuring of the subject woman, the size of the unconscious, the problem of the imaginary, the symbolic identifications, and the language. It should be added however, that even at a collective level, the change should not be taken for granted: at the end of the film the director shows the key dates of the liberation (from the referendum for abortion to the liberalization of contraception).

The richness of women is, therefore, in all its variety and complexity, always hovering between internalizations, representations, knowledge and social practices, creating emotions and narratives that produce a different culture, more open to differences with which constantly come to terms. The movie gives voice and soul to different women, often alone, resisting against a power without a face for their right to life and health; these Italians do not give up for their own growth, contrasting oppressive and insane families, coercive relationships, reactionary environments in which gossip and slander are the only purpose of existence. They are rebels, sometimes with humour, and even with joy, sometimes leading to extremes their subversive plan. In this perspective, the female practice of citizenship shows its presence to other women in the world, and even to themselves to become citizens of the world, healing the rift between the planetary state and civil society, building on ties woven with oneself, with others, with work, with their environment, but also on the experiences and desires.
note

					
NOTES
					




1 V. Burr (1998), Psicologia delle differenze di genere, Il Mulino, Bologna 2000.



2 A. Taurino, Psicologia delle differenze di genere, Carocci, Roma 2005, pp. 56-57.
3 P. Bourdieu (1998), La dominazione maschile, Feltrinelli, Milano 2009, pp. 15, 53.
4 S. Angrisani, F. Marone, C. Tuozzi, Cinema e culture delle differenze. Itinerari di formazione, Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2001.
5 M. Foucault (1976), La volontà di sapere. Storia della sessualità, Feltrinelli, Milano 1978, vol I.
6 Jerome Bruner argues in this context that the role of cultural forms is to open to the dilemmas and assumptions. See Bruner, La cultura dell’educazione. Nuovi orizzonti per la scuola, Feltrinelli, Milano 1996.
7 Cfr. G. Duby, M. Perrot, Storia delle donne in Occidente, vol. 4, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1990-1992.
8 S. Ulivieri, Alfabetizzazione, processi di scolarizzazione femminile e percorsi professionali, tra tradizione e mutamento, in Ead. (a cura di), Educazione e ruolo femminile, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1992, p. 178.
9 Decree Law, No 23, February 2, 1945.
10 J. – L. Comolli, Vedere e potere. Il film, il documentario e l’innocenza perduta, Donzelli, Roma 2006, p. 7.
11 B. Mussolini, Macchina e donna, (August 31, 1934), in Opera Omnia, vol. XXVI, p. 311.
12 V. De Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista. Il fascismo ha emancipato le donne?, Marsilio, Venezia 1993.
13 M. Fraddosio, La militanza femminile nella Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Miti e organizzazione, cited above in E. Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione, Laterza, Bari 2002, p. 240.
14 A. Bravo (eds.), Donne e uomini nelle guerre mondiali, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1991.
15 Meeting held on the final day of the 2009 edition of the course “Women, politics and institutions – training for the promotion of culture and gender equality”, organized by the Department of Relational Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, promoted by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers – Department for Rights and Equal Opportunities, in cooperation with the Ministry of University and Research and in collaboration with the School of Public Administration.
16 Fascismo: storia e interpretazione, op. cit, p. 190.
17 Lo spettacolo del fascismo, op. cit, p. 87.
18 S. Falasca Zamponi, op. cit., pp. 48-49.
19 See the interview with Alina Marazzi, Cristina Piccinino, entitled ” Donne più che in rivolta”, published on Saturday, March 1 Alias ??/ Il Manifesto.
20 A. Buttafuoco, Vuoti di memoria, in “Memoria”, 31, 1991, p. 63.
21 R. Braidotti, Dissonanze, Le donne e la filosofia contemporanea, La Tartaruga edizioni, Milano 1994, p.192.
				


		

			

				

			
			

		
  
		

			THE AUTHORS

Francesca Marone, Researcher of General and Social Pedagogy, University of Naples “Federico II”, Faculty of Letters and Philosophy (ssd M-PED/01). Member of the teaching body of the Doctorate School of Psychological and Pedagogical Sciences, Gender Studies PhD.
Valeria Napolitano, PhD in Film Studies at the EHESS in Paris (research director Jacques Aumont). She is currently a PhD student at the University of Naples (Gender Studies).
		
 
			
 
		
 
 
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by ELISA UFFREDUZZI
 
             
    
                                         
 
 
 
 
 
 

Even today, more than forty years after its realization, The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, is a significant consideration in cinematic terms, about the concept of “revolt” and the implications that it entails about individual and collective dynamics, and in relation to the environment that constitutes their framework.

The author stated that the most fascinating aspect of algerian war, was in his opinion the birth, the development and the fall of the FLN organization[1] in Algiers, which is precisely the “Battle of Algiers”, because it gave him the chance to tell feelings and emotions shared by a multitude and the ability of masses to express some qualities and a kind of enthusiasm that usually can’t be found in the individual. Like shooting “the birth of a nation”. Pontecorvo was in fact interested in “the irreversible process which lead a country to independence and freedom, in spite of repressions and temporary setbacks such as the battle of Algiers has been. Actually the movement for the independence of the Algerian nation, despite the FLN defeat; three years later (1960) led to new demonstrations along the streets of Algiers and then to the independence of the country (July 2, 1962).

Winner of the Golden Lion at the XXVII edition of the Venice Film Festival (1966), The Battle of Algiers, received a good reception in Italy, but it drew criticism of moral ambiguity because of the attitude of balance and respect for both sides involved in the Algerian revolution. In the United States, where it received 3 Oscar nominations[2], extremist groups like the Black Panthers studied it as a manual of urban warfare.

Quite different the story of the film in France, where, banned for a year under the threat of the OAS[3], the film has been released until 1971, when a group of French filmmakers screened the movie for the first time in the Paris Latin Quarter.
In 1964 Salah Baaz came in Italy on behalf of Jacef Saadi[4], looking for a director willing to make a film about the Algerian independence struggle. Pontecorvo accepted the job, provided he was allowed to write a subject from scratch. Thus was born the project of The Battle of Algiers, in which Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas, the scriptwriter, tell the parable of FLN in Algiers between 1954 and 1957, identifying the episode of the battle of Algiers as the proof of the inevitability of liberation processes. After months of research, the script writing ended in the summer of 1965, then began the film shooting, where the story had truly happened.

Boumedienne’s government, in power for just a month after the coup that overthrew the one of Ben Bella, granted permissions to shoot in Algiers and put available lots of materials and army soldiers for mass scenes.

Saadi’s “Casbah Films” (half private and half of the State) offered funds that covered less than 50% of the budgeted cost, so Pontecorvo decided to risk investing on his own. Then he contacted Antonio Musu, thus beeing able to cover the remaining 55% film cost.

The movie was entirely shot in the North African city, which so becomes a fundamental presence, enough to get the shape of a real character in the film. In fact, significantly, the only scene planned in the screenplay that hasn’t been shot, was the one set in Paris[5]: confirming the author’s clear desire to dwell on the urban fabric of Algeria.

So there’s many shots dedicated to the set, sometimes repeated, as in the case of the Casbah pan shots of which the film is full.

Pontecorvo preferred the use of a single camera to better control the scenes and often used the hand-held camera, which allowed him to follow more closely actors movements and expressions through the narrow alleys of the Casbah, where it wasn’t possible to use the dolly. In addition, this mode of filming allowed him to shorten the distance between the audience and the portrayed events. So it was used the Arriflex, a lightweight camera, and sometimes (in crowd scenes for example) another camera equipped with a zoom lens. Only for explosions has been used up to ten cameras.

The film’s production designer is Sergio Canevari, who used a cheap polyester material for buildings intended to explode, because it easely burst with small amounts of explosive, or even polystyrene[6]. This is the case of Ali La Pointe’s house, which was rebuilt in twenty days inside the Casbah, in the same place (the only available) in which had been stood the true home of the FLN leader, before of French bombs.
An English critic wrote that The Battle of Algiers is «a neorealist film filtered through 10 years of television experience», so demonstrating on one hand the neo-realist vocation of the movie, and on the other, the aspiration to the typical shooting manner of television reportages. Pontecorvo too considered himself an heir of neorealism, because of his approach towards reality, his fidelity to “documents” captured by the camera and the use of non-professional actors, like almost all the interpreters of this film are. Among them, there is Jacef Saadi[7] too, who accepted to play himself in the role of Saari Kader, the commander of the FLN in Algiers Autonomous Zone. From these improvised actors, the director demanded a play without emphasis or redundancy.

The only professional actor was Jean Martin, a little known French actor of theater. His role of Colonel Mathieu, paratroopers commander in Algiers, was inspired by the real Colonel Massu. Masses of extras too were convened for the movie, including soldiers and people found on the street or at the University, as Pontecorvo will tell later (1992), when he will shoot the documentary entitled Return to Algiers for the television broadcast “Mixer -documenti “[8].

The realism of The Battle of Algiers far from being a mere mimetic operation is an ideologically oriented choice. The events selection is then based on a specific educational goal and for the same reason they have been eliminated from the script ingredients such as professional actors and individual main characters: so the public could identify himself with an unanimous protagonist, or the entire nation. Not by chance, there are many crowd scenes, and many locations have been chosen to give the illusion of a great multitude[9].

When the film was released, just the crowd scenes aroused the suspicion that had been used clips from real war documentaries[10], thus some American colleagues suggested to Pontecorvo to add a note to the headlines, to specify that not even one meter of a real documentary had been used in the film.

But the director aspiration to documentary, as well as in neorealist humus, has her roots in journalism too. The second World War was approaching, when Pontecorvo enrolled in a journalism school in Paris and began working as a journalist-photoreporter for the agency “Havas – Agence France Presse”, realizing reportages, which were mostly accompanied by long photo captions, so confessing a marked interest in photography. Here’s therefore the matrix of his interest for media and the perception of facts that the public has through them.

Coherently with the journalistic career at first, and then as documentary filmmaker[11]; for The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo wanted a “reportage” photography in order to increase the movie sense of truth. The author talked about it as a “dictatorship of truth”.

A month before starting to film in Algeria, the director made lots of experiments with his 16 mm and then 35 mm camera, to find the right balance between a documentary tone and a kind of photography classically “beautiful”. He then made a series of tests on the film with the cameraman Marcello Gatti until the solution to countertype once or twice the same “film”, making a new negative from the positive, thus getting the desired documentary hardness. That was the method already experienced in Pontecorvo’s movie Kapò. To avoid too strong contrasts Gatti proposed to use a very soft film, the “Dupont 4”, and all the outside shooting of the film were made protecting the set from the sun, using large sheets, so to ensure a soft, uniform light. Even the choice of the “black and white” goes in the direction of a news-like photography, featured by the use of telephoto lens, which television cameraman are often forced to use, having to stay at a long distance from the events.

Similarly, the editing also aims to create a documentary style. The editor was initially Mario Serandrei, with whom however the director came soon up against, because Pontecorvo was looking for an effect of “stolen document”, whereas he had made a too correct and accurate montage.

However Serandrei suddenly died and his place was taken by Mario Morra, who adapted himself to Pontecorvo’s idea of a dry, immediate, reportage. The final editing is in fact really quick and abrupt, “intellectual” in Ejzenstejn sense: the link among the shots offen depends from a concept, which is the result of the clash among multiple frames or between image and sound[12].

Not by chance the music plays a leading role in the movie. The soundtrack composer was Ennio Morricone, but cooperated Pontecorvo too, who was passionate about music, and he had studied music composition, thus being particularly attentive to the interaction between film image and sound. In The Battle of Algiers he uses religious music to emphasize the drama[13], while the most famous song of the soundtrack, the “Ali La Pointe’s theme” was composed by Morricone only a few weeks before the movie, created by a Pontecorvo idea. The music structure was foundamental for the director’s cinematographic conception. In fact he claimed[14]: “the metrics of my plans is very much influenced by the idea of counterpoint between sound and visual image”[15]. And so on: “For me, the alternation of silence and sound counterpoints the visual image”[16].

Music can emphasize or even replace images, for giving a particular feeling to shots, for example in the scene where the three Algerian women working for FLN are “dressing up” as European women to pass the checkpoints controlled by French soldiers. In the background it sounds only the “baba saleem”, the traditional Arab music characterized by the repetitive, percussive sound of the drums, mixed with the castanets one. The drum bass is functional to the drama of the scene, which hasn’t any dialogue. Actually drums prevail throughout the whole film musical score, creating a climate of tension.

The most evocative and distinctive sound of the film is the “ju’ ju’”, sung by Algerian women: it is the traditional Arab chanting-cry that here symbolizes the voice of all the people, united in the struggle for liberation from French domination. That strange chant accompanies the final scene, in which we see the demonstration of December 1960, the crowd facing the advancing police. Although the whole film is designed in a realistic key; here it takes a distinctive lyrical tone[17], thanks to the sound mix in the background, resulting from the “baba salem” and the “ju ‘ju’.”

The space that houses the narrative is often forcefully imposed to the attention of the viewer, as in the case of the already-mentioned pan shot-leitmotif of the Casbah. In this context, the human element, both as individual and as crowd, interact with the surrounding urban space, changing his face (by the attacks) and at the same time this is in turn influenced by it (think for example to the different way of dressing and act, involved by the passage through the checkpoints between the Arab side of the city and the European one).

In particular, the revolt acts in two different ways on the urban space, since the city of Algiers was divided in two distinct areas at the time of the events: the Casbah, Arab and the “European city”, inhabited by French settlers. The first one is a kind of a distorting mirror of the other, Casbah representing a primordial “state of nature”, opposed to the “social contract” imposed by European settlers.

Pontecorvo and Solinas, choosing to tell the parabola of FLN, focus not only on a particular moment of the struggle for Algerian independence, but also and especially on a particular place, excluding from the story telling the guerrillas fought in the rest of the North African country (eg on the mountains) and thus defining since the script the clear intention to treat urban landscape as a main character, like the actors playing in the movie.

The film was shoot in the Algerian capital on 26 July to 18 December 1965: five months in which the director, with a bare-bones Italian crew[18] and some Algerians that would have become “technicians” thanks to this experience, took care to document and reconstruct a plot and especially an iconography, as much as possible close to reality, impregnated with a smell of truth conveyed by the photography at first[19].
As the entire film is permeated with a special emphasis on the setting, a selection of three sequences illustrating the “shooting mode” of the film will be useful to highlight how the city becomes “theater” of revolt. The first sequence analyzed, is the one that functions as “Presentation of the movie set”, namely the Casbah and the “European city”. This sequence will allow us a glimpse of the “urban tissue” before the intervention of the revolt, which will irreversibly change his appearance. The second sequence analyzed concerns the attack on rue de Thèbes, inside the Casbah, with the subsequent manifestation along the Arab area streets. By this sequence you will be able to see how the revolt acts in the Arab area of the city, while in the third and last sequence analyzed, the chain of three attacks made in the “European city” by the Algerian women FLN emissaries, will allow you to see how the guerrilla “affects” the landscape of the “European city”.
The first scene analyzed is part of the second film sequence: the beginning of Alì’s flashback. It is a sort of a character presentation, with some biographical contents and his FLN affiliation. The flashback then will continue for most of the film, opened and closed by two freeze-frame on the face of Alì, very similar to each other and fuzzy as war reportage pictures. The first shot is a slow pan (00:06:34 to 00:07:02) [20] which “shows” action time and place. A superimposed caption says “Algeria 1954″, while the camera, framing here from above – as in most of the pan shots during the film – slowly moves on its axis to the right, finding at first the “European city”, then zooming in on “the Casbah”, as indicated by another superimposed caption. Even the script had provided a shot like this, showing how the director intended to pay particular attention to the landscape.

The slow camera movement which presents Algiers in both its aspects is followed by a series of shots along the Casbah narrow streets, which ends (0:07:45) on the insert of Alì’s hands cheating some naive pied noir[21] doing a card game.

While the hand-held camera executes some tracking shots, some very brief pan shots and follows the extras in the alleys of the Arab area, more than the photography and the unstable trend of the hand-held camera; it is the repeated presence of direct gazes towards the camera lens that gives to the image an unmistakable tone of documentary.

In this series of shots it is offered a fragmented and varied view of the Casbah before the revolt, in which the faces fade into the background by a sort of expressive amalgam that the “black and white” helps to create, equalizing the tones of environment and human figure.

Instead, in the frames of the “European city” taken before the revolt, figures are well insulated from the scenery, clearly distinguishable, as if to signify a kind of alienation, a separation between humanity and space around, in the city forcibly westernized. This different mode of filming suggest a closer and more harmonious relationship between man and nature inside the Casbah, as opposed to the tidy, elegant and aseptic European city space, which thus becomes the emblem of a sort of “fall from Paradise”, a kind of “loss of Eden”. As if to say that colonialism distorted the environment depriving it of its traditions and natural evolution. “Cement, reinforced concrete, asphalt,” as Solinas’s script tells, by a kind of anaphora. The camera shows us this cold architecture using as narrative device Alì’s escape. In fact he’s pursued by the police, who found him cheating people at his cards game (0:07:45 to 0:09:43). While he’s running through the wide streets of the Occidental city – gigantic in comparison to those of the Arab side – we savor the surreal atmosphere of the European zone, which is artificial, unnatural although reassuring, completely inappropriate as compared to the messy vitality of the Casbah.

The shots stability here suggests that Pontecorvo had probably given up the hand-held camera and the photography is not “dirty”, but sharper and more defined, thus diverging from the documentary style that features frames inside Casbah. The open spaces, the increased brightness and depth of field, the expanded length of the shots, the figures clearly standing out against the urban background: all contributes to define the framework of a “Cover space”, glossy, beautiful, nevertheless devoid of emotion.
In the second sequence analyzed, the revolt violently erupts into the Casbah space, in the form of the attack on rue de Thèbes. It is the French reaction to the series of attacks seen in the previous sequence. A French Vice-Commissioner[22] accomplishes the destruction of rue de Thèbes with some companions: it is the punitive expedition against a native scavenger, absurdly accused of an attack, among the general hysteria. The scenes we are interested in inside this sequence, shows the explosion and the visible consequences on the next morning.
The screenplay for the visual column records:


		

			

				RUE DE THEBES. EXTERNAL. SUNRISE – The dawn has a white and precise light, which lightens every shadow, well drawing every contour. Here and there, in midair, and strangely still, there are numerous clouds of dust. In that light, human figures seem black. Seen from a distance, they seem like ants on the piles of rubble. There are some still women, wailings in a low voice, always by the same voice of prayers. But every now, a sudden desperate cry, a sob, a race.
Another corpse pulled from the wreckage, mangled or intact bodies, even compounds, but they are dead. And people continue to rummage through the rubble and pitifully wait[23].
			
		
	

 
As soon as the attackers car has moved away, there is the explosion, that we see for three times: the same shot is repeated twice; then a third picture changes entirely the point of view on the explosion. Dust drowns the image, which emerges when the sun rises over the Casbah.

The highly evocative music by Ennio Morricone dramatizes what we see on the screen: two slow tilt shots from the top down[24] and a tracking shot, describe the desperate swarm of bodies in the rubble, “like ants”. In fact the second tilt shot continues, “tracking” to the right, then focuses on a veiled woman face and goes on to the right. Hereafter, there is a succession of short camera movements (always hand-held), which, by a simple cut, alternate with close ups that focus on bodies and desperate faces. Two plongée zoom on the chaotic rummage through the rubble, while they make to feel the presence of the camera – thus accentuating the “reportage effect” – they also give the sense of a superior look, all-knowing, as a divine Judgement.

Meanwhile, music in the background slowly blends with the pickaxes sound, but it remains “back”. For the whole duration of this series of shots (0:37:06 to 0:39:13), from the moment of the explosion to the women faces on the foreground which close the sequence, it is clear the instability of the hand-held camera, a tremor loaded of drama, as well as the “white and precise light, which lightens every shadow, well drawing every contour” already planned by the script and in which “human figures seem black.” This silhouettes’ net standing on the backdrop is in photographic terms the exact opposite of what we have seen in the Casbah presentation sequence, where figures are rather confused with the environment. As if a so heinous act would’ve reversed the sign of the image.
Then follows the scene (0:39:13 to 0:40:57) in which the crowd, led by Ali, goes to the European neighborhoods that spread over the sea. It is a “solid” front, advancing towards the lens, going down a staircase, up to reach the close up and then exiting from the framework, so disorienting the camera, which wander among faces and feet, unable to find a stable and orderly point of view, until they arrive Petit Omar and Kader, to restore calm in view of a “more thought” action strategy.

It brings us to the last sequence that will be analyzed here: the Algerian answer to Rue de Thèbes bombing. The revolt now overwhelms the “Occidental city” artificial torpor. Halima[25] has just left the seaport and quickly walks along one of the large “arteries” of the European zone. From the obsessive “baba salem” of the previous scene (in which the three bombs were delivered to the Algerian women) to go to the background noises of city life: motors, horns …on-screen we’re following from a distance Haliba that gets into the Caféterie, in rue Michelet. The place is very crowded, it’s late on an any Saturday afternoon and European households are getting ice cream, quietly chatting. Hassiba enters and again we hear the “baba salem” that mingles with the voices’ hum of people having fun… The camera is no longer hand-held. The photography is sharp, glossy, elegant as the clientele of the European club. Haliba leaves the bomb under the counter and exits.
It is Djamila’s time: Milk Bar, rue d’Isly, at the corner of Place Bugeand. Latin music is blaring in the jukebox, there is noise, boys and girls are chatting and dancing. Djamila enters, approaches the jukebox, pushes her briefcase behind the juke box and exit. Again no hand-held camera and a bright and clear photography.
Then the airport attack: Air France. Immeuble Mauretania, the ticket office and the waiting room. There are some employees, hostesses, and travelers. Zohra sits on a couch, puts her bag on the ground and begins to read a magazine, while she’s pushing the bag under the sofa, by her feet. She looks at the big clock that hangs in the middle of the room: it’s six forty p.m., she leaves.
From this moment on (0:50:30 to 0:51:23), back to the Caféterie, to see the impact of the explosion on an Occident symbol, in Algiers. Then back to the Milk Bar (00:53:02), to see how the explosion disrupts a scenery until now idyllic.

The moment of the first explosion (00:50:59) is repeating on two shots, taken from two different angles (the first from the right, the second from the left), outside the Caféterie, in the late afternoon. So we see the same tables and umbrellas outside the club – metonymy of the quiet “movida” in the Occidental city – jumping in the air, significantly twice. Then the crowd rushes and the editing become faster, increasing the amount of close shots – until the insert – framing wounded men and cadavers in the rubble. No hand-held camera and the photography becomes darker, abandoning the usual brightness given to the European city shots. A man comes towards the lens groping through the dust, until he falls to the ground. Then the camera “turn back” to the long shot, showing the bustle of the gathered messy crowd, until she retightens the frame on the bodies. The camera trend translates iconographically the frenetic agitation of the crowd. Photography is now “dryer”, coarse, and in the last frame of the scene boundaries become blurred, the image edges are fuzzy, like captured at a distance with a telephoto lens, and at the same time this device gives a dreamlike appearance, where the dream fades into the nightmare. A cut abruptly brings us back to the serene tranquility of the Milk Bar (00:51:25), where the explosion roar and the passage of some ambulances divert club customers from the Latin dance in which they are intent, just for a moment. This time the explosion is shown from both, inside and outside the room, alternating with a series of long shots, and again you can imagine there’s no hand-held camera. The post-explosion shots from inside the club, however, are darkened by the presence of a dense dust, which obscures the image giving to her a documentary tone, as opposed to the shots of the same scenery viewed from the outside of the bar: these are otherwise perfectly legible and sharp. This visual opposition highlights the “reportage color ” of the shots taken inside the Caféterie. Close shots here are sparse and do not ever get to the insert.

It closes the scene a brief tilt shot to down, which turns into a frame of the same rue d’Isly that we earlier saw serene and half-empty, inhabited only by the bored pieds noir distracted by the noise of the first explosion. Now there are only chaos, ambulances, firemen, curious and frightened crowd, dust and corpses everywhere.

The third explosion is only a rumble in the background, which comes to improve tension and drama of what we see in front of our eyes. In a sort of anticlimax, camera gradually receded: Close shots, which were frequent by the first explosion, now rarefy by the second one, whereas the third one it isn’t shown at all.

The dividing line that firstly distinguishes the revolt shots inside the Casbah from those inside the European city, is undoubtedly the use of hand-held camera. In this way it lacks from the “European” scenes – at least in part – that ‘”smell of truth” which impregnates the shaky images of the Casbah. Certainly the more space available along the wide streets of the European zone facilitates the use of tripod and dolly, but it wasn’t mandatory, so this behaviour becomes a conscious choice: even at the time of the tragedy, when the revolt get the peak of its expression, Pontecorvo retains to the Occidental city its dehumanized appearance.

 
When, in 1992, Pontecorvo returned to Algiers as correspondent for the TV broadcast Mixer, he found a country “on the brink of civil war”, as one of the original captions says, far from democracy yet. He chooses to begin his journey “on the thread of memories” from Barberousse prison, the witness of a touching film scene, in which an exponent of the independence movement was guillotined. The tour through Algiers goes on by a series of stages: firstly Bab el-Oued, the district at the foot of the Casbah, where many scenes were shot in the film. Once upon a time “kingdom” of the French racists, twenty-seven years later, ironically, the stronghold of the FIS[26]. The third stage is the University, a microcosm of modern Algeria where he meets veiled female students beside girls who wear in the Occidental manner. There he stops to discuss with students about the difficult political situation. Then it is the turn of the Koranic school, where children learn to read and write singing the Koran verses. He get permission to shoot in a cemetery during a Resistance leader funeral and he find that the high school Ben M’Hidi, officially a coeducational school, is indeed an emblem of division between men and women in Algerian society. Finally he get into the Casbah, whose access roads are controlled by the police. In the same place where once upon a time the struggle for the independence had his roots, after twenty-seven years FIS find his biggest support, helped by the anger of poor people against the bourgeoisie, which had enriched behind a single party (the after independence FLN). It closes the documentary a clip of Pontecorvo’s interview with Mohamed Boudiaf, president of the High State Committee, who had been murdered just in 1992, during an official ceremony.

The images that firstly allow a comparison with those of 1965 are those shot inside Bab el-Oued and the Casbah. In fact there is the same pan shot of the first sequence of The Battle of Algiers that we have analyzed here: the one of “presentation of the set”. Camera zooms out from the harbor, then slowly turns to the right. It stops, however, before laying eyes on the Arab area, so as the Casbah shots that conclude the documentary become a mirror image of these, ending the film where it began. To these frames Pontecorvo devotes eight minutes of his documentary. A “dry” and quick montage of long shots, often strongly angled – from below and from above – give us the coordinates of the surrounding space: an intricate cluster of narrow alleys and courtyards of crumbling houses. Then faces prevail and the camera continuously varies from full shot, to medium shot and close up. Pontecorvo interviews, asks for advices, tries to understand what’s happening in those neighborhoods, after FIS victory by he first round of elections.

Although he gave up the black and white photography in favor of a color one, he relies on hand-held camera, like in most of The Battle of Algiers shots. But this time not for giving a documentary aspect to the shots: what we see is real and pure documentary and avoidance of doubt the director himself appears several times inside the film shots, which thus becomes in its entirety a kind of “false point-of-view shot” by the author.





 note



					
NOTES
					



[1] National Liberation Front


[2] Firstly as best foreign film and the following year for best director and screenplay.


[3] Organisation de l’Armée Secrète


[4] Jacef Saadi had been the military leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the autonomous zone of Algiers.


[5] In that scene you can see the dispatch of  two crates containing the pieces of the guillotine intended to be used in the Barbeorusse prison, in Algiers, as we see in another film scene.


[6] Made of polystyrene are also the paving stones that the crowd throw against the army in the scenes of popular demonstrations.


[7] He recounted his experience of the Algerian war in the book Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger.


[8] That’s the episode of the Italian television broadcast called “Mixer-documenti”, by Alberto Isopi and Stefano Rizzelli, whose  presenter was Gianni Minoli, aired on Raidue in 1992. Director of the broadcast: Alberto Bevilacqua. The topic of the episode was just the documentary filmed for that occasion by Gillo Pontecorvo, during the difficult historical and political moment faced by Algeria in December 1991, when to avoid the risk of a religious fundamentalist turn, were suspended the first free elections in Algeria. The FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) had in fact passed the first round of those elections, thus constituting a serious and real threat against the establishment of a democratic government. Marco Pontecorvo collaborated at the documentary as director. The documentary film starts with the extract of a newsreel, shot in Algeria in 1962, which documents the departure of now former French settlers from the North African country.


[9] 2000 extras have been employed for the film.


[10] For example the mass scene in which French paratroopers arrive in Algiers led by Mathieu Colonel, has been filmed from a long distance with a telephoto lens of 600 mm. It opens with a blurry photograph, and then gradually focus on the face of Mathieu.


[11] After leaving his career in journalism, he started to work as documentary filmmaker: having seen Roberto Rossellini’s movie Paisà at the famous Salle Pleyel, in Paris, he bought a 16 mm Paillard camera and began to shoot documentaries.


[12] See the Manifesto about the asynchronous sound (1928), written by Ejsenstejn, Pudovkin and Alexandrov, in which the three Russian filmmakers supported the need to untie the soundtrack from the images, putting as opposed sound and visual element, so to shock the viewer.


[13] At the beginning of the film for example, resonate some notes of  Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the torture scene is accompanied by a choral Gregorian-inspired singing, written by Morricone.


[14] The translation of all quotations has been made by the author of the article, from the original Italian version.


[15] From Gerard Langlois’s interview to G. Pontecorvo, in Les Lettres françaises, June 1970, cited above in MASSIMO GHIRELLI, Gillo Pontecorvo, Il castoro cinema-La nuova Italia, Firenze 1978, p. 5.


[16] From the interview to Gillo Pontecorvo by Piernico Solinas: The Battle of Algiers, 1973, cited above in M. Ghirelli, op. cit., p. 5.


[17] This scene in the intentions of the author is a symbol of the inevitability of the revolutionary process.


[18] Nine Italians, including the director of photography Marcello Gatti, the second unit director Giuliano Montaldo, the set designer Sergio Canevari, the producer Antonio Musu and the script supervisor Anna Maria Montanari.


[19] All the informations about the genesis and the making of the film, have been detected in the two texts: MASSIMO GHIRELLI, Gillo Pontecorvo, Il castoro cinema-La nuova Italia, Firenze 1978 e IRENE BIGNARDI, Memorie estorte a uno smemorato – vita di Gillo Pontecorvo, Feltrinelli, Milano 1999. See also: Il mio film sull’Algeria: colloquio con Gillo Pontecorvo, in “Bianco e Nero”, a. XXVIII, No. 7-8-9, July-August-September 1967.


[20] The timing of scenes, shots and sequences reported here and in any other case in this article, refers to the DVD version produced by Surf Video – DNC in 2005 and realized by “La bottega dell’immagine”.


[21] This term means French people from Algeria. They have been repatriated in 1962.


[22] He’s a vice-commissioner in the original screenplay, instead of the newspaper editor that he is in  the Italian version of the film.


[23] The original script text is available on the second disk of the DVD version produced by Surf Video – DNC in 2005 and realized by “La bottega dell’immagine”.


[24] For the first tilt shot, the camera films from a “strong” angulation from above, while for the second one the point of view is down. Then the second one proceeds to the right with a tracking shot, etc.. The music gradually blends with the pickaxes sound, but this one remains “back”.


[25] In the Italian version of the film the girl is called Halima, although her name is “Hassiba” in the script.


[26] Front Islamique du Salut


				



		

			

				

			
			

		
  
		

			THE AUTHOR 

Elisa Uffreduzzi was born in Florence in 1983.
In 2007 she took, at Florence University, her three-year degree in “Disciplines of Arts, Music and Performing Arts”, by a thesis on Neorealism in Italian cinema journals, entitled Cinema Nuovo 1954: the degeneration of Neorealism.
Then in 2010 she took her master’s degree in “History, Criticism and Production of Performing Arts”, by the thesis Salome’s dance in silent cinema.
That work payed particular attention to the dance movement in silent movies, showing a new approach to the cinematographic image.
She is currently developing her PhD research in History of Art and Performing Arts, at Florence University, Italy.

		
 
			
 
		
 



 

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		http://cinemiz.net/cifj/?p=181
		
			
by THOITHOI O’COTTAGE
  

                                  
    
                                         
 
 
 
 

AFSPA reveals that it is an act of legitimizing the involvement of the military in the domestic space, and that it does not supplement but supplant the ‘civil power’.

Bimol Akoijam & Th. Tarunkumar, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958: Disguised War & its Subversions
 


Is the ‘revolution’ over or has it been hijacked and made petulant by whimsical, self-centred interpretations of it? These are some very pertinent questions, but one that people dare not ask openly.

Pradip Phanjoubam, Widening the Human Rights Debate
 
 


Milton: Pressure. It changes everything. Pressure. Some people, you squeeze them, they focus. Others fold.

Lemkin & Gilroy, Devil’s Advocate
 


Silences shape all speech.

Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I
All artistic productions in Manipur, the most serious among India’s troubled north-eastern states[1] forming one of South Asia’s most contested spaces (McDuie-Ra, 2009), have greatly and forcibly been shaped by the socio-political ‘others’ threateningly ubiquitous in all spheres of civil lives in the state. The contest in the state takes political roots in the Merger Agreement of 21 September 1949 between the hitherto independent princely kingdom and the then just independent India and the consequent merger of the kingdom into the Indian Union in the middle of the following month (15 October) during the latter’s conscious legal political nation construction just after independence in 1947. The legality of the Merger Agreement has been contested by armed opposition groups (AOGs) that started to appear officially on the scene at different points of time during the last 60 years since as early as 1964 fighting for a sovereign Manipuri nation state, and in their refutation of the Indian state they have reactively opposed whatever Indian element present there starting, besides fighting the Indian Army, from banning of Hindi language and Hindi films (since 1998) to killing of migrant workers and businessmen from the country’s mainland.
The heightened struggle between the Indian state army and the AOGs had already reached a very dangerous stage by late 1970s that the Government of India in 1980 declared Manipur a disturbed area thereby introducing in it the infamous counter-insurgency mechanism of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (1958) (AFSPA) part of the Section 4 of which reads:

		

			

				Any commissioned officer, warrant officer, non-commissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces may, in a disturbed area,- (a) if he is of opinion that it is necessary so to do for the maintenance of public order, after giving such due warning as he may consider necessary, fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or move persons or the carrying of weapons or of things capable of being used as weapons or of fire-arms, ammunition or explosive substances (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1958).
			
		
	

 
The Section 6 of the Act protects the army personnel acting under this Act:

		

			

				No prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central Government[2], against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1958).
			
		
	

 
A replica of the British Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance (Human Rights Watch, 2008) enacted in colonial India to counter the Quit India Movement of 1942, AFSPA bestows upon the military personnel unlimited powers to act according to his whim without any culpability, and the struggle between the Indian nation-state armed forces and the AOGs on the background of this Act has killed more than 20,000[3] people (Asian Centre for Human Rights, 2004) and caused the disappearance of over 20,000 other people (Majumder, 2010) besides hundreds of rapes, thousands of tortures, displacement and detentions in the last three decades.
This situation of Manipur (and six other states in the region) being considered as an abnormal place which no normal legal infrastructure can contain is an extreme example of what Carl Schmitt (1922) calls the ‘state of exception’ where the constitution and judicial order are suspended (Agamben, 2005) or the law operates by being suspended (Baishya, 2011). In a state of exception the sovereign state extends the military authority’s wartime powers/biopolitical powers into the civil sphere who, by regulating human bodies, whimsically decides who to live and who to die just as the gods in the Manipuri legend of Henjunaha do. With the state operating by erasing any legal status of the individual thereby producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being (Agamben, 2005), any individual (militant or not) captured in Manipur has the status of neither a person charged with a crime according to Indian Penal Code (IPC) or Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP) nor even a prisoner of war defined by the Geneva Convention, but is simply a detainee subject to a pure de facto rule (Agamben, 2005). It was against this catastrophic, traumatic lawlessness driving people into varied degrees of madness that the 12 women hysterically stripped naked and marched in July 2004 to the gates of the Army Headquarters at Kangla Fort demanding justice against the brutal killing of Manorama and discarding her corpse out on the pavement, her genitals mangled beyond the point of recognition.
There have been no known studies on the differences in the complexes of attitudes, behaviors and emotions which Indian military men who have served in any of the ‘disturbed areas’ not less than three years show upon entry into the areas, discharge and entry back into service in any other places in the country or into civilian life. Such a study will definitely reinforce the intensity of the psychologically traumatizing and dehumanizing effect of the AFSPA even on the offenders (leave alone the victims) as will be evident from the difficulties of various natures they undergo while negotiating their new military or domestic environment.
At the same time, besides their offensive and defensive measures against Indian state army, the AOGs have also assumed a de facto regulatory authority of the socio-political life channeling the state’s existential dynamics off those of India which involves imposition of several express and unexpressed dos and don’ts upon the public any noncompliance with which meets the insurgents’ intolerance.
Film being an influential media, the insurgents keep a special, vigilant eye on it and following the release of a few Manipuri films arguably modeled on Bollywood films[4] the KCP (P) (one of the factions of the KCP) announced in September 2005 the blanket banning of shooting and screening films and music videos in Manipur for one year and the permanent banning of film Dr Yaima (2005) and music video Star (2005) threatening:
Aany body who were found filming or screening digital film and album in defiance of the diktat would be given capital punishment without giving any prior warning (Chanu, 2005).
 
The ban came along with a few strict regulations:

		

			

				Content and story of the film should be based on Manipuri culture and tradition and not imitate the film of other culture, should not have vulgar acting, it should be whole-some entertainment where all the family members could watch and enjoy together, and there should not be any scene with male and female character embracing each other in the film…Filming should not be outside Manipur and actor/actress from outside Manipur not be casted in the main role, singers from outside Manipur would not be allowed to sing songs in the film nor State singers copy the tune of other people and no remake of other people’s film would be allowed. There should also be proper dress code while filming scene for college and schools and no women character should be made to, wear trouser. (Chanu, 2005)
			
		
	

Such express regulations among other unwritten and unspoken (hence indefinite) guidelines which are to be understood as corollaries of the winds of the times, and what one will incur through any nonconformance with the diktats bespeak another ‘other’ who declares a non-state state of exception the indefinite power-rules of which are to be honored and feared for life. Writing in Eastern Quarterly, Pradip Phanjoubam (2005), editor of the Imphal Free Press, daringly observed:

		

			

				We have a surfeit of draconian laws like the Disturbed Area Act, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and National Security Act. But the underground organisations too have been meting out very militaristic decrees and edicts, which are enforced equally brutally, if not more, as the state’s draconian laws.
			
		
	

 
These straightjacketing, extremely localizing pressures imposed on the tiny Manipuri film industry (to speak of only film) on the contrary form a bonsai of the industry clipping its expanding roots and branches not only disabling it to reach even the fringe of a global market but also threatening its very sustenance within the state’s geo-political boundaries. If by doing so the insurgents do not impose their propaganda on the film industry for it to be film messages, they have curtailed the freedom of the arts in the state and have not tolerated any content in film (or any other products or art) which goes counter to their objectives.
Thus, caught between the oppressive armed forces and the oppressive armed militants and between rival factions, and exposed perennially in the narrow space in between to their violence, the people naturally fearfully regard both the state army and the AOGs as others encroaching upon their spaces, forcing them to undertake struggles that have little prospect of success but invite a complete rethinking of the forms resistance can take (McDuie-Ra, 2009).
Made in such an environment, Mami Sami (2008), literally meaning ‘murky’, while having to be strategically silent about many things and greatly minimalize the screen space to a safe extent in an attempt to daringly address what is ailing the state, has given an innovatively appropriate aesthetic response to the pressures, which is never an easy thing to do. This essay examines how the state of exception both the state and the non-state have wreaked like havoc on the civil spaces blocking virtually all modes of normal artistic expression has necessitated a new and more sophisticatedly subtle way of expression immune from easy invalidations which I loosely for now term screen minimalism to symbolically voice what has been minimized and left out through minimized dialogue and the ensuing long pauses, avoidance in conversations of references to the socio-political problems which have ended thousands of lives and destroyed families, silence and reticence of the newspaper editor Wangthoi, absence of on-screen struggle between the opposing forces, unpopulated spaces, rains, wintry fogs and mist, etc. I also argue in this essay that this minimalist aesthetics is an artistic bypass necessitated by the socio-political forces in the state of Manipur.
 
II
 
While there have been a few films which at best make some timid-if-honest, indirect reference to the state?insurgent encounters problematizing the state, Ningthouja Lancha, if not the first, has addressed the issues with the most single-minded seriousness. The inability of older generation and other contemporary filmmakers to address these problems staring them most starkly in the face is itself due at least to their inability to formulate a way of a nuanced artistic expression; however, a genius’s art is too powerful energy to keep contained in a confining canister because in a genius’s hand art in constant search of ever more effective expressive means/escapes takes a very slippery, elusive form in difficult socio-political times acting as a powerful catalyst to minds potent to think contagiously and release powerful, regime-changing energies. Mami Sami with its expressive formulation of the silenced subaltern existence, thus, is an infallible artistic response to the suppressing forces.
With the actions in the film spanning beyond the frames, the film is more like the viewfinder of a news TV camera selectively following just a line of actions in a mob leaving other related happenings out of frame while these off-frame realities are never strands cut off from the in-frame events. Rather what happens off-frame shapes the attributes of in-frame events in the film—the fates of the on-screen population, particularly of Tayal and also of Tombi and Wangthoi.

Most confrontations that feed the tension of the film happen off-frame—we just hear the sounds of gunshots, gunfights and bomb explosions, or are told of people being killed and markets being dispersed; and these off-frame events drive the in-frame people crazy—they make the people run back home breathlessly from works, run in tensed silence to collect dead bodiesof innocent people discarded by warring forces, or propose to one another if they should go find somewhere to live leaving their ‘bewitched spot’ which one can no longer call home because something ‘other’ has appropriated and usurped it (Rapaport, 2005).
What mysteriously happens to Tombi after the bullet has left him unconscious in the waters of the Loktak lies totally beyond the frames’ coverage until his ghost-like return at the end of the film to verbally demystify the mystery destabilizing Tayal’s reconstructed realities, traumatizing her and driving her back to relapse. To cinematically express this, Ningthouja Lancha uses open framing (conceptual and physical) in most scenes as if he is recording, while randomly panning the camera across a field, just a few bodies lying dead or fighting in a battle which is characteristic of war movies. Using open frames here is significant in that the technique by dint of its general association with (though not limited to) war movies not only successfully forms a connection between the images of the secret, unofficial or disguised wars (Sahni, 2011; Akoijam, 2005; Akoijam & Tarunkumar, 2007) being fought there and our collective optical unconscious but also archive these images into the collective psyche. 
This abscission of actions from the screen imitates the off-screen realities lived by the people of Manipur where many acts of violence are perpetrated in dark mystery the effects of which are left for the people to suffer out in the open while they cannot reason why such absurdities keep happening. Everything about their life, their fates is indefinite, murky and bleak, and their fates seem more to be determined by these unfriendly forces than their own karmas or some almighty God. The situation Tombi finds himself in is never one in which he can play almost a role in shaping his own destiny. The violation of human rights in the maddening theft of his bullet-hit, unconscious body and his transportation/trafficking to Burma (today’s Myanmar) without his wife’s knowledge by the Wanglen faction of an insurgent organization, their giving him no opportunity to go back to or at least to communicate with his wife, his five-year term in a prison after a Burmese army crackdown—these are the series of events that have shaped his destiny against or contrary to which he can do nothing but bear with silent patience before total conditioning of his mind though the irony/inconsistency keeps consistently staring at him—what has destroyed his family is the bullet from the insurgents, what has trafficked him from his maddened wife are these insurgents, but he in no way can defy or escape them but serve them rather as a programmed mastermind just as a fish in poisonous water cannot defy or escape the water it is in. The playful hands of these alternative determiners of destiny haunt homes, break families, separate husbands and wives, drive wives crazy, make husbands homecoming from disappearance see their faithful wives live in marriage with other men.
These unbearable pressures squeeze them constantly into mysteriously impossible shapes beyond what generally called life can contain keeping everything about them in the bleak, murky shadows. This sense of faintness/indefiniteness is accentuated by the film’s constant low-key lighting, and rainy and misty atmosphere. All crucial events in Mami Sami occur at nights or on rainy or misty/foggy days or in very poorly lit rooms making it at times too difficult to tell one thing or person from the other and make out what is happening. At times as it is too dark due mainly to the state’s literal and symbolic power supply failure, they have to light candles or oil lamps for their faint life to go on in their faint light. However, such candle lights cannot show what happens to those who the state forces turn to after letting go of Wangthoi and the women in the opening sequences though we sense from the sound something not less than torture is being done.
While open framing has strategically abscised from the screen events epitomic of miseries the Manipuris are undergoing thereby lending a disguised silence to the film to conversely liberalize the frame so as to bring what it has left out within its undemarcated limits, silence itself is also one of the dominantly vocal devices Ningthouja employs in this film and this operates at least on two levels—first, minimized dialogue  and the resulting long pauses in conversations; second, avoidance of references to the socio-political problems causing sufferings the people are living through.
Compared with the average ratio of a film’s runtime to its talktime (time all talks in the film take together), Mami Sami’s talktime is much below the average thereby leaving a good amount of silent moments scattered across the runtime space. In Mami Sami these silent moments are never quiet (especially in Wangthoi’s presence, and between him and Tayal), the obvious tension being strained even tighter at times by the avoidance of non-diegetic sounds. This unquiet silence strategically contrasts and connects to the noise the state army personnel’s hatefully threatening shouts on the soundtrack when they confront and manage to forcibly silence the protesting public using guns, batons and tear gas while the opening credits are rolling out on the screen with Wangthoi’s printer swiftly churning out freshly pressed sheets of newspaper. We do not know what has particularly happened this time to lead the people to a protest of such a great scale, but it is not essential to know this for such provocative things and the resulting protests are more or less events of daily frequency that have long failed to surprise the people, and this protest and clash between the public and the state forces is just one insignificant event of them. On the soundtrack the people’s angry din is overdinned by the state forces’ offensively threatening cries, firing guns and explosions of tear gas canisters.
Ningthouja Lancha intensifies the silence of less speech with his politically strategic avoidance of references to the socio-political problems which have plagued the state. In the context of the state’s bleak socio-political realities, an honest discourse is profanity, blaspheme, a taboo or an offensive language and it never goes with impunity. Thus, Ningthouja’s necessary minimalist handling of these unspeakable issues is like discussing some offensive topic without naming it while you consistently keep it hanging loosely but with nuanced care in the audience’s consciousness.
There is still another dimension of silence in the film manifesting itself in Wangthoi’s person. Wangthoi is by nature a silent and reticent person and this silence and reticence are even more deepened after he has become a newspaper editor through whose fingers the sadly pulsating stories of the state’s civil lives flow every day. But what does his silence mean? Is this his failure to react to the events in any practically useful terms as they, as Gaikwad (2009, p. 310) puts about the 12 naked women ‘leave us absolutely speechless’? Or is this silence a resistance, or both? If it is a resistance, who then is he, representing the thinking minds in the population, resisting?
Wangthoi’s silence shapes Ningthouja’s discourse of silence through which he can say a lot of things. In the off-screen political context, Wangthoi’s voice would change the scheme of things thereby hijacking the whole plan for a loud action movie which will fail to address its raison d’être, and would end up being banned if it does not do the opposite of what it intends to do as in the case of many films which preceded this one. Mami Sami’s apparent silence is not to be misunderstood as its failure to address its agenda. In spite of his apparent choice to remain silent about currently irresolvable issues it would be unwise and unsafe for one to think aloud of one’s own desired solution(s) to, Wangthoi’s position about these issues is implicit in his behavior, speech and activities, while there are a few things where apparently conflicting things can be brought at peace with each other which the film works toward.
Wangthoi speaks much through his silence; his silence is louder than his voice his censored subaltern vocal chords can produce under perennial surveillance. His silence thus is a resistance. The significance of his marrying the mad, widowed Tayal goes much more than just love, it is also an act of construction and protection against destruction which will have very deep consequence in his life when Tayal’s husband reappears long after his disappearance (assumed death) which makes her relapse into madness.
The small family of three—Kala, Randhoni and their son, Krishnamani—in spite of their apparently comic relief-like appearance enables Ningthouja to work out a synthesis between two souls—the Manipuri and the Indian—through the harmonization between initially mutually misunderstanding indigenous music loving father and his Hindustani sangeet loving son (whom his mother encourages) who always is protective of his symbolic harmonium which his father always tries to break. Kala imposes that his son should live for indigenous music forms like khulang eshei and pena, while his harmonium holding son is adamant to go on with his Hindustani sangeet. It is only when Wangthoi convinces Kala that one can do indigenous music with the harmonium that the comic but serious conflict ends. This harmony is Wangthoi’s contribution and it is toward such a harmony of a larger scale that he is working. R.K. Birendrajit’s music score itself is a fusion between Manipuri indigenous music forms and Hindustani sangeet with the incorporation of western and Chinese elements.
These general, comparatively less harmful issues of silence, on the other hand, cover a traumatic situation which particular, even more silent traumatized lives live in. Here, the camera looks rather like one panning across Moirang stopping at a hut on one of the Loktak’s foomdhis (floating grass islands)  with the incidents it has captured in this slight movement showing the virtual impossibility of deciding who the ultimate culprit is—the state or the AOGs? The first appearance of the AOGs on the screen starts to eat into the calmness of Tayal and her husband Tombi’s poor but happy family by their peremptory request for help and their consequent befriending of the couple taking advantage of the grudging help thereby involving the unwilling couple helplessly in situations operating beyond their ability to draw back from, but sliding gradually then sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand they fear. Tayal and Tombi are rocked by splits in the AOGs into factions and their internecine fights, and consequently sense the insurgents’ growing manipulation of even their lives dictating to them whom to be friends with and who to be their enemies—regulations imposed on the couple’s personal space disrespecting which would lead to nothing good.
It is while the couple is caught in this inescapable, sticky situation that the state police who are supposed to help, rescue and protect civil lives come to the couple’s hut to arrest the husband accusing him of turning his hut into a militant camp. Bluntly refuting Tayal’s defensive answer against this incriminating accusation saying that her husband is a civilian and therefore innocent, the police officer sarcastically says ‘all militants are civilians, innocent’. This politically significant statement bespeaks the state’s convenient blurring of the boundaries between ‘civilians’ and ‘militants’ which the AFSPA’s Section 4a quoted above sanctions. The state argument is the couple or any other civil families harbor the militants, feed them and doing this is to support them and hence legally culpable, while Tayal or any civilian’s answer is ‘how can we resist if they come to stay?’, because their sugar-coated request is always peremptory, which can be no legal excuse.
This state merger of ‘civil’ and ‘militant’ boundaries is also clearly evident in the opening sequences in which the armed forces shout in utmost bitterness to ‘drop your weapons’ and rush in a warlike maneuver to whomever coming in the van. The point of view in this part of the scene from those the audience identify themselves with, i.e. editor Wangthoi, his rubber-bullet hit wife Tayal and four other women who are on their way back home after treatment at hospital for injury in a public protest dispersed by the state forces as we hear from soundtrack as the opening credits roll out, shows the threatening maneuver in an absurd and ridiculous light because we know they/we are innocent. What the state, represented by the police officer and his attendants who are never protective of the civilians, does is never the protection of civil lives, but to manage to wipe out the militants, their rivals whom they fear, by killing as many of them and fast as they can anywhere, anytime in any way while their glaucomatous eyes blur the boundary between civilians and militants.
Now, on the other hand, the insurgent infighting kills Krishnamani, who (as the narrative is from the civil point of view) we know is clearly innocent, for ferrying a rival faction’s members in his childish/immature pleasure in ferrying whoever requests him across the lake. Tombi has always loved Krishnamani’s childish simplicity, and his death shocks Tombi out of his fisherman’s life. Throughout the film till this moment we have seen Tombi almost always in his farming/fishing gear—his fishing net, towels and the coolie hat, but Krishnamani’s death separates Tombi and his farmer’s gear—we see them discarded hanging on a pole, wavering in the wind silhouetted against the blue sky. We never see him using them ever again after this event. Krishnamani’s death is soon followed by Yaiphabi’s killing and disposal of her body at the foot of the hills as in the case of Manorama, this time by the insurgents. But nobody can raise a voice. It is death and deterioration alone that’s happening but no birth at all, no sign of regeneration. Tayal’s marriage with Tombi is without a child, her four-year marriage with Wangthoi is childless. This is a land of death, not of life.
This acute irony of protectors in principle and those who claim are protectors killing to protect reminds one of Dany Boyle’s political allegory zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002) in which the army contingent led by Major Henry West, frightened by the mysterious ‘rage-virus’ which has devastated the rest of London, the only organized society left on earth after the great devastation, kills in the protected domain of life whomever showing a likely sign of infection. In both films bodies are the site of political power struggle, and gaining control over bodies and what they do become essential for winning the contest. This is the utmost cruelty of a state of exception, no matter who makes it exceptional—be it the state or the non-state or both.
In a state of exception people are strangers in their own lands, homeless in their own homes. When the internecine insurgents and the police haunt their house, their home is not a home any more, but a ‘bewitched spot’, in Benjaminian terms, which is no more a home because a very inhospitable and repulsive other has appropriated, usurped and rendered it unlivable. When Tombi sees police approaching, he swiftly steps into the boat and sails away from home to evade them. He is not at home at home—he runs away from home where the ‘others’ live and act actively, confidently in. He feels guilty for no guilt he has done. 
This unstable home is uprooted from the floating ground when his bullet-hit, unconscious body disappears, and his floating island and the piece of field are sold to pay for his maddened wife’s treatment which will wake her up in the midst of loneliness and homelessness which she would not be able to bear. When he returns home after at least six years, his hut, land and wife are no more there to be seen but finds himself in utter homelessness, groundlessness which makes his homecoming impossible.
When Tayal recovers from the trauma she finds herself in an even more insulting loneliness and homelessness. And with Wangthoi’s feeling drawn toward her in growing awareness of his inability any more to let her go in that feeble condition besides his love for her threatening, as a result, his impending marriage with her doctor, and with Wanthoi’s father and sister having opened up against her threatening stay, she can no longer bear to stay in that house. In utter shame and anguish she runs one night from the house; however, she has no home—nowhere to go, nowhere to live but the quiet, bare, unpopulated spaces which disturbingly cut a couple of times in the smooth run of the film’s narrative. She stops on a bridge, approaches the parapet and (seemingly) considers committing suicide, but she has no place to die as well—her suicide will defame Wangthoi’s family.

Whose gift is this homelessness? This is an unwelcome gift forced upon them accepting which will drive all their senses off their minds. This is the unquiet silence haunting every ‘bewitched spot’ which they can neither live in nor leave—a wall-less cell in a wall-less dungeon.
However, India rather than struggling to solve these ramified problems of insurgency/militancy  manages all it can to cover all these ugly scenes from the international community by not accounting for such tragedies on the destabilized grounds while making is sure to lend the balance sheet a positive look in their annual reports which define the situation as a low intensity conflict (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2010-2011) in which fatalities are over 100 but less than 1,000 per annum[5] amounting ironically to more than 20,000 deaths since 1980 which shows their accounting for just the decreased number of security forces personnel casualty over the years implying their concern for the safety of their own personnel only rather than whom they are supposed to protect.
III
In this essay we have seen that Ningthouja Lancha, using screen minimalism, manages to portray the euphemized shadows of ghost-like others and their maddeningly haunting activities thrown on the dark walls thereby showing the under-cover nature of the state-enacted AFSPA and the equivalent but nameless draconian diktats devastating the civil space in the state. This minimalism and euphemism are his aesthetic response to the pressures of the time squeezing in from various directions, but for which the very life of the filmmaker would have met the same fate of one of the characters in his work.
note


					
NOTES
					



[1] I do not appreciate the wide-scale use of ‘Northeast’/‘North-East’ as a proper noun for the marginal states in India’s north-eastern region which stemmed from mainstream India’s marginalization of them as evident in this wholesale generalization and grouping of the varieties in the region into one reductionist taxonomy.

[2] There has been no sanction given so far.


[3] Writing on Youth Ki Awaaz: Mouthpiece for Youth in April 2011, Basu quoted official sources saying more than 25,000 people have been killed till date.


[4] This is a case of mutual misunderstanding born of prejudice and generalization of particular cases that the Meitei fundamentalists think the mainland Indian culture (including Bollywood films) is morally loose as most mainland Indians think the same of those hailing from Manipur and other states in the north eastern region.


[5] In this report, the number of civilians/security forces personnel killed in 2010 was 367 reduced from 659 in 2009, and the arrested, surrendered and killed insurgents were 1,626. 
				





					
BIBLIOGRAPHY
					


Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. (K. Attell, Trans.)  Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.
Akoijam, A. B. (2005). Another 9/11, Another Act of Terror: The ‘Embedded  Disorder’ of the AFSPA. Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts , 487.
Akoijam, A. B., & Tarunkumar, T. (2007). Armed Forces (Special  Powers) Act 1958: Disguised War & its Subversions. Eastern Quarterly , 3 (1).
Annual Report 2010-2011. Ministry of Home Affairs.
Baishya, A. K. (2011). Trauma, Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and the  Post-Human. Wide Screen , 3 (1).
Basu, A. (2011). Irom Sharmila Chanu’s Satyagraha – On a Political  Fast for the Past 11 Years. Retrieved July 18, 2011, from Youth Ki Awaaz:  Mouthpiece for the Youth:  http://youthkiawaaz.mobstac.com/2011/04/irom-sharmila-chanu-fast/
Macdonald, A. (Producer), & Boyle, D. (Director). (2002). 28 Days  Later [Motion Picture]. United Kingdom, United States: 20th Century Fox  (UK), Fox Searchlight Pictures (US).
Chanu, L. L. (2005, August 5). KCP (P) bans Manipuri digital films,  album. Retrieved July 10, 2011, from E-Pao:  http://www.e-pao.net/GP.asp?src=12.12.200805.aug05
Gaikwad, N. (2009). Revolting bodies, hysterical state: women protesting  the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958). Contemporary South Asia ,  17 (3), 300.
Gaikwad, N. (2009). Revolting bodies, hysterical state: women protesting  the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958). Contemporary South Asia ,  17 (3), 310.
(2008). Getting Away with Murder: 50 Years of the Armed Forces Special  Powers Act. Human Rights Watch, New York.
Pamhei, H. (Producer), Lancha, N. (Writer), & Lancha, N. (Director).  (2008). Mami Sami [Motion Picture]. India.
Kopelson, A., Kopelson, A., Milchan, A. (Producers), Lemkin, J., Gilroy,  T. (Writers), & Hackford, T. (Director). (1997). The Devil’s Advocate [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Bros.
Macherev, P. (1978). A Theory of Literary Production. (G. Wall,  Trans.) London, Helney, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Majumder, K. (2010, November 20). Irom and Her Sisters. Tehelka ,  7 (46).
McDuie-Ra, D. (2009). Fifty-year disturbance: the Armed Forces Special  Powers Act and exceptionalism in a South Asian periphery. Contemporary  South Asia , 17 (3), 255-270.
Phanjoubam, P. (2005). Widening the Human Rights Debate. Eastern  Quarterly , 3 (1).
Rapaport, H. (2005). Spectres of Benjamin. Textual Practice ,  19 (4), 419.
Review of AFSPA: Too Little, Too Late. (2004, November 4). Retrieved July  17, 2011, from Asian Centre for Human Rights:  http://www.achrweb.org/Review/2004/45-04.htm
Sahni, A. (2011). Survey of Conflicts & Resolution in India’s  Northeast. Retrieved July 15, 2011, from South Asia Terrorism Portal:  http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlines/volume12/Article3.htm
Schmitt, C. (1922). Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre uon  der Souveriinitat. (G. Schwab, Trans.) Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. (n.d.). Retrieved July 11, 2011,  from Ministry of Home Affairs:  http://www.mha.nic.in/pdfs/armed_forces_special_powers_act1958.pdf 
				



		

			

				

			
			

		
  
		

			THE AUTHOR


Thoithoi O’Cottage, born in Manipur, India in 1977, Thoithoi O’Cottage writes poems, short stories and essays, and his works have appeared mainly on the Chumthang, the Poknapham, the Quarterly Journal (State Kala Akademy, Manipur), Image, Calcutta University Journal, etc. He also translates poems, short stories, novels, non-fictions, essays from Manipuri to English and vice versa. He taught English Language, was Assistant Editor at the Chumthang (a literary magazine), is now Senior Researcher at Europa, Routledge, a division of Taylor & Francis in New Delhi.
		
 
			
 
		
 

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by PROSHOT KALAMI
  

                     
    
                                         
 
 
 
 
 


		

			

				Poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn’t be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail.
			
		
	 Slavoj Zizek, Revolt, “Introduction, The Tyrant’s Bloody Robe”

 
In recent times, Iranian films have been at the centre of attention in world cinema. Since the fraudulent Election in June 2009, Iranian cinema has had to follow a different path of destiny. The poetic allegorical camera and narrative can no longer satisfy the filmmaker who now must work within the politically-charged and troubled narrative of nationhood, human rights violations and questions of artistic integrity. The unjust prison sentences passed on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof made this road more challenging. In this essay, I examine the notion of “revolt” by means of creative process in Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009). This is an underground film—made without any permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance or state support—on the underground music of Iran within an underground culture that survives against the severest odds. This is the last breath at a crossroad that leads to dead-ends in all directions.
The politics of fear is the mobilising force exercised by the Islamic state to keep the nation from potential “Westernization” and anti-Islamic behaviour, through harassment, imprisonment and other nefarious measures. No One Knows About Persian Cats addresses this issue by following a group of Indie-Rock, Jazz, New-metal and Rap bands, and the challenges they face in arranging rehearsals, underground concerts or escaping the hunting guards of the Islamic authorities. Meandering through the streets of Tehran, Ghobadi’s camera travels with them into another Tehran, a liminal space between crime and freedom, where these young artists create their music. Their act of creation is their soundless revolt. And Ghobadi, I argue, has tried to give the sound back to the otherwise muted underground music of Iran in this film.
I Don’t Wanna’ Go to Jail, Why are You pushing Me? [1]
The narrative of the film is locked between two reverse top shots indicating two blinks of the eyes of an injured young man from whose perspective the camera shows the running lights of a hospital corridor’s ceiling in a Kafkaesque manner. The person on the emergency bed-on-wheels, we find out later, is called Ashkan, who remembers in between those blinks all that he has gone through within a few weeks in Tehran. Although the narrative of the film is fictional, the people/actors of the film, barring the professional actor Hamed Behdad who plays the role of Nader, are real and use their own names in the film. Most of the events that are depicted in the film have actually taken place, one way or the other, but not necessarily in that sequence and not exactly to the same people/characters[[2]]. Knowing these factors is important in order to understand, therefore investigate, the connection between the viewer and the material of the film. This becomes more important in regard to Ghobadi’s style that constantly moves between the self-reflexive documentary and the fictional narrative film. This notion in the film is apparent in the way in which he has used the camera, the various rhythms in editing, the selection of locations and with his deliberate casting of largely non-actor real-life musicians.
In the very first frame of the film we see the ceiling with the sharp white fluorescent lamps moving across the frame that look like white markings on a road at first, until you realise that the camera is actually facing upwards. The sound that we hear is more like the muted and unclear breathing sound that one can hear from under the water or over a sealed barrier, a breath at the dead-end[3]. The next shot is the reverse angle, this time an out of focus top shot, showing a young man’s bloody face, covered with an oxygen masque on an emergency bed-on-wheels moving through what seems like a hospital corridor, while another hand with a large piece of gauze is holding one side of his head. We shall meet him again. But Ghobadi leaves his viewer with this bleak image along with that eerie sound of breathing to make a jump cut to another location. The second sequence is located in a dimly lit sound studio. We see the sound editor/engineer managing the recording that is apparently in session along with a few female musicians with their instruments in the background, waiting for their recording session to come. The point of view is of the recording room. The sound is a mixture of a few people talking in the background and a number that none other than Bahman Ghobadi himself is singing in Kurdish. The narrative starts from this moment, not directly though, but through a side conversation that the engineer has with one of the female musicians, who does not seem to recognise the singer in the recording room as the famous film director! The sound engineer says, and we hear, that Ghobadi could not make his films, he did not receive permission to shoot and was stopped by the authorities, as a result he was forced to give up making films. All these made him so depressed that he tried to sing, a hobby that he always kept on the side, to feel slightly better and positive. Babak, the sound engineer also tells us, through their conversation that now Bahman Ghobadi is busy making a film about the underground music scene of Iran. Ghobadi, we hear that, was intrigued by the news of Islamic Guards ambushing an underground rock concert and arresting hundreds of people. There are no professional actors, Babak says, in the film. This, apparently, is the true occasion for making No One Knows About Persian Cats. Ghobadi himself re-asserted this, not only in the “Special Feature” section of the DVD, but also in the 2009 London International Film Festival, during a number of post and pre-screening “Question and Answer” sessions. Why is this information so important that he has to open his film with it and why is it that he repeatedly emphasises this fact at every opportunity he gets? The role the music plays, the importance of creating music and the importance of breath in the creation of voice in songs—all within the oppressive atmosphere of Tehran— and the difference between reality and the truth, I argue, are some of the reasons that this film gives us as way of understanding the importance of this occasion for the filmmaker.  In this regard, music is both the apparent subject as well as the political and philosophic metaphor or allegory that the film has to offer.
It is only after this information has been given that we finally see the opening credits running over the screen. The credits are set to the song that Ghobadi himself was recording in that studio. The song, as I mentioned, is in Kurdish, Ghobadi’s native tongue. It is called “The Youth” or “Jouwani”.  Persian Cats[4] is not Ghobadi’s first film on the subject of music or musicians. His Marooned in Iraq (aka The Songs of My Motherland, 2002) and Half Moon (aka Nive Mang, 2006) are all based on a quest for music and musicians, restoring players and singers (particularly female singers), and these are embraced as the central theme of these films. In an interview in 2007, when questioned why music and musicians are the central part of these two films, Ghobadi answers that:

		

			

				“If I had not turned to be a filmmaker, I would have been a musician. I love music. I make film with music[…].Music makes me dream. It strengthens my imagination and creativity. I can travel with music. I close my eyes and I travel with music all over the world. Stories come to me one after the other[…].In the next two years I am going to begin recording and composing music.”
			
		
	[5]

What follows the title sequence is a long shot of a street in Tehran with the tower of a prison looming over the street. Ahskan, the young man whose face we saw at the opening sequence, with a small bag in hand is crossing the busy street. This is cut by another long shot of the Tehran skyline, over a rooftop where the silhouette of a couple against the dying light of sunset is visible. Nothing but the far away shadows of TV antennas soars across the free and empty sky. There is no music played here, only the tranquil ambient location sound. It is only through the next sequence that we learn, again within a course of a conversation between a young girl, Negar, who introduces herself as “Negar & Ashkan” with the same Babak—sound engineer—that Ashkan, now freed after 21 days of imprisonment, was apparently among 250 other people who were arrested in an underground concert. This is a fact that had actually happened to Ashkan Kusha in real life. His crime: playing music! Once again, Ghobadi mixes his narrative with documenting the real and reality. Another factual reality is that Ahskan Kusha and Negar Shaghaghi, were invited to perform in a music festival in Manchester. Ghobadi weaves that into the scenario of his underground film. The fiction that he adds for the narrative of his film is Negar and Ashkan’s quest to put together a band for the upcoming festival and another underground concert before they leave their country for good.

Babak, the sound engineer who also is a member of a jazz band introduces Negar to Nader, a man of all tricks. Through Nader, these two young musicians get to meet some other underground music groups who, just like them, are in love with music but have hidden their art in the many infernos of Tehran. Nader persuades them to arrange a concert before leaving Iran while helping them at the same time to meet a counterfeiter who is supposed to get Ashkan a passport and the entire band, the visas for their European tour. Along them and in their quest the viewer gets to see and hear different musicians and musics in the underground scene of Tehran of 2008-2009, jazz bands, Indi-rock bands, rap artists, folk musicians, etc. etc. One major factor connects all of these musicians together, although they practice different types f music. And that is fear. Fear from the government, from being found, from being arrested, from the prison, from the silence.
Every time the young couple meets a group, we travel with them a few flights of stairs, spiralling down below into dark tunnels, passage ways and corridors into some underground rehearsal space of which there are many. One, for instance, is a made up space with egg cartons, one put together with the excess material from a construction site, one in a cow shed among hay stacks and cow dung, another in the basement of a house with half acoustic walls, but all illegal spaces! In a conversation between Negar and Babak we find out that the state TV has actually produced a programme condemning the underground music scene of Iran calling them “Satan worshipers who drink blood”, which in so many words bring them down to the level of the subhuman. Within the structure of the Islamic Republic “committing” underground music—and I deliberately use the term committing with regard to the true sense of the term as a transitive verb suggesting the weight of a crime—and distributing illegal music are both considered to be crimes. Therefore, these people are criminals. The music of these underground rock bands is stamped as “Satanic”, therefore inferior, by the government[6]. Accepting this as the standpoint of the establishment and the state and assuming that the state has the interest of its subjects in mind—although in this case it is quite difficult to entertain such a position even hypothetically—Ghobadi, sets out to follow the rebel, the criminal as it were, from the very beginning of his film while he, himself is committing a crime[7]! Following Ashkan, who has just come out of prison, and regardless of the looming watchtower of the prison, Ghobadi moves towards knowing the criminal in becoming one. Because otherwise, his showing will not gain depth, and therefore perspective, to put the “music” in the socio-political context of “identity discourse” within the body of a regime, like the Islamic Republic. It is apparent that the state rhetoric—established trough its media and ideology—situates the “presupposed subject” (i.e. the criminal musician) as not “another human being with a rich inner life filled with personal stories which are self-narrated in order to acquire a meaningful experience of life, since such a person cannot ultimately be an enemy. ‘An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.’ [8] […] The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim.” [9] Once the suspect is removed from its “human” position, it is easy to deprive “it” of its human rights! The terror, therefore, is legitimate. Politics of fear “focuses on defence from potential victimisation or harassment”. [10] The rubric under which the Islamic Republic functions is that of defending and protecting its subjects from any contamination from the blasphemous West! Therefore as Zizek says, its immediate justification is in avoiding victimisation. This also justifies its many acts of implementation of oppression, ambushing concerts and parties, arresting musicians for practicing Indie-Rock or Rap music, etc. etc. Understanding this will make the mechanism of the fear that pushes these artists to go underground more tangible for an audience that has always lived outside such dynamics. This will also shed light on the difference between the Iranian underground music scene and what in the West one may think of an underground music movement. In most Western cultures, underground music is not necessarily illegal or occasion for arrest and imprisonment. But in Iran, Ghobadi himself attests to the fact that “like the underground music gangs, I have to make my underground film.” [11]
Dying for the Luck of Your Dark Hair[12]
It is the music that situates, sets and composes the rhythm of the editing. This is particularly true in case of music videos in Persian Cats. Whenever a particular band or artist is signing a number, Ghobadi changes the structure of the film and transforms it into the music video style. Suddenly the rhythm in editing and camera angles leave the narrative sequence to enter a visual space that works like a blade slashing the smooth movement of the celluloid as it were, to create a rhythm of its own. One of the best examples of this is when Ghobadi features “The Difference”  (aka Ekhtelaf) [13] by “Hichkas”, with the singer and songwriter Soroush Lashkari, composer and musician, Mahdyar Aghajani. We see them first in their rehearsal session on the top floor of the skeleton of a building under construction (yet another ‘secret’ rehearsal space!) when Nader (the man who stitches all the pieces of this collage together) goes to visit Soroush in hope of asking him to join Ashkan’s group to accompany them abroad in their European concert. Sourush, answering in the negative makes it clear that he belongs to Tehran and he has to “rap” in Farsi. He then explains that he is recording a music video and wants to catch the sunlight before sunset. And that is when Ghobadi’s camera leaves the narrative and enters the space where this music of absolute revolt against all that Tehran encapsulates, commences.
The sequence of “Ekhtelaf” by Hichkas begins with a base that is nuanced with silence. The music is written in such a way that there is always a bar of silence in between each melodic bar. When the melodic bars are played, the shaky frame is a hand-held shot and when the silent bars come, there is cut to black frame. The sequence is established first with long shots of Tehran skylines, Tehran streets and gradually medium shots of people of Tehran on the streets. The rhythm and speed of editing pick up in correspondence with the subject of the “Rap” lyrics[14]. But Sourush’s song seals his point of view as an artist and says it all, both for him as well as, perhaps, Ghobadi’s film. Sourush’s lyrics, and I quote extensively, read as follows:
This is Tehran,

A city where everything you see provokes you
Provokes your spirit in the dumpster until it prevails that you are not a human but a piece of trash
Here every one is a wolf.
You want to be a lamb? Let me enlighten you a bit!
This is Tehran, god-dam-it, it’s no joke!
There is no flower or popsicles!
This is a jungle; eat before you are eaten!
Here, folks are half oppressed half wild,
Class differences are extreme.
It wounds and mars the spirit of people
Side by side the poor and the wealthy, jammed in a taxi,
None are willing to pay the cabbie
The truth is clear!
Don’t turn a blind eye,
I’ll make it more clear, stay and don’t give in:
Oh God! Wake up! I have years of talking to do,
Hey get up, get up,
Don’t get upset of my deeds
You’ve seen nothing! This is just the beginning.
Oh God! Get up, I, a piece of trash, need to talk to you
The peddler with his cart stands by a Mercedes
His whole life and the cart together, is just a tip for the Mercedes,

You and I and him were all a part of a united drop!
Now observe in between us the gap
The gravity is not the reason for earth’s rotation
It’s the money that runs the earth, isn’t it fun!
These days, there is first money then the god!
For all; the master, the farmer, the village keeper.
If a kid wants to play with an orphan, his father will forbid him,
Why? The orphan wears dirty clothes, his only clothes!
Oh yeah! We are all aware of these misfortunes,
Even the angels will not cross these terrains to save us from this fortune!
We don’t need help, Just a drop of tear is enough for us!
How come the sick one understood me?
I didn’t finish what I was saying, I gave up! Come back I am not finished!
Oh God! Wake up! I have years of talking to do
Hey get up, get up,
Don’t get upset of my deeds
You’ve seen nothing! This is just the beginning.
Oh God! Get up, I, a piece of trash, need to talk to you
Have you ever been in love with a girl?
I want to talk, let’s be blunt?
You tell yourself this is it, a historic love!
Stop dreaming, she is with a rich kid!

Remember that he is the other,
Leave every thing behind,
You see all those around you as nothing
And the other, as old as you, is riding a care, when God sniggers as you!
Then you pray with bitterness that one day you want to be rich and have a blast!
Don’t pray! It won’t do anything, no one will understand you!
You wanna’ fall asleep? Come see the nightmare awaken!
Let’s curse this world together!
You have to be blind not to see the vanity everywhere,
On the sidewalks, not to see poverty and prostitution!
God, get up! A piece of trash wants to talk to you!
What if even you think whether it is worth it to listen to me?!
Oh God! Wake up! I have years of talking to do
Hey get up, get up,
Don’t get upset of my deeds
You’ve seen nothing! This is just the beginning.
Oh God! Get up, I, a piece of trash, need to talk to you![15]
By the time the music ends we have seen all the nasty and unpleasant realities of Tehran, the paradoxical city of polar contrasts. Considering that the film is entirely filmed in Tehran—the first urban film that Ghobadi has ever made—this song, that addresses the city directly, somehow finds an important place in the body of this film. Nezamedin Kiaie, the sound engineer of the film (who is one of the most established and well-known sound engineers in Iranian film industry) in the “Special Features” of the DVD suggests that Bahman Ghobadi has paid a tribute to Iran in Persian Cats. He believes that

		

			

				“you see Iran in this film, all of it…, with its people; with its tangible people…. If there are images that may not be pleasant for some, these are the images that exist. They are in front of our eyes everyday. We may have normalised them for ourselves or we may turn a blind eye to them. But when we see them on film we will gain a deeper look. We all must be responsible for each and every frame that we see here.”
			
		
	

 
I Am Standing, Why Are You Sat! [16]
Between the two book-ended, parenthetic marks of life and death, in the liminal space of the last breath at the centre of a crossroad that leads to dead-ends, the impossibility of telling writes itself palpably in shapes beyond the conscious attempts of creation. Here a distinction needs to be made between truth and truthfulness, real and reality, between the personal experience of these artists and the factual events that had happened to them. Zizek, arguing the reliability of a victim of a traumatic event mentions this important fact that at the core of the narrative of trauma there is “confusion” and “inconsistency.” Questioning the position of the victim he says 
		

			

				“if the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. The problem here is part of the solution: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content ‘contaminated’ the manner of reporting it.”
			
		
	[17]

In Persian Cats, the reality of the story takes place in the music that, in turn, is the crux, the occasion, the excuse and the raison d’être of the film. As a line in the lyric of one of the “New-metal” band’s songs of the film says, “dreaming is my reality” ![18]
That is, indeed, why Bahman Ghobadi enters the under-world and adopts the ways in which the underground music finds its way of surviving the oppressive policing presence of the state. As a traumatised filmmaker whose last film was banned, who did not receive any permission to make his next film, Ghobadi assimilates with the traumatised musicians of the infernos of Tehran in order to tell his story through theirs. And in turn they tell theirs through his. This, I argue and borrowing from literature, is writing against death. This is the space within which the music of revolt and the attempt to find freedom, when freedom is the last breath of a singer, a note on the line of a music bar, the vibration of the string of a guitar or the words of a lyricist. That is the muted breath that the opening sequence of Persian Cats begins and ends with. That is the last breath that Bahman Ghobadi took before he left his homeland for as long as it is controlled by the tyranny of an autocratic fundamentalist religious regime. In 17 sessions of filming with a very small team, on the back of a few motor bikes, Ghobadi, remembers his experience with this film as one of the most emancipating filmmaking experiences he has ever had. Is it the confessional act of telling one’s personal stories through forbidden songs and music that first renders and then makes communicable such an elevating experience? One can always speculate, wonder and hope. “This is the voice of a man whose dream / does not reside at a dead-end / […] my words were not criminal /  but were hung dead / The limits of your thoughts do not fit me /” as Nikaeen, one of the musicians in the Persian Cats sings[19].
Towards the end of the film, we see that the counterfeiter gets arrested by the Islamic Republic police. Nader, realising the gravity of situation, loses it. Negar and Ashkan who could not locate Nader for a few days, finally find him a few hours before their underground concert opens, in a secret party. But the party is ambushed by Islamic Guards. Ashkan, in his attempt to escape another arrest and imprisonment jumps from the window. Next is a cut to a shaky frame of a bird-eye angle showing a foetus like body of Ashkan on the ground. This is followed by nervous jump cuts of medium shots of the underground concert with the waiting crowd holding candles, and the bird-eye shots of people gathering around Ashkan who lies still on the ground. On an extreme close up of Negar’s face, we hear her voice, singing one of the numbers composed by her and Ashkan together. The tense jump cuts between three locations continues until Ghobadi takes his viewer back to the opening sequence. And that is when Ashkan blinks for the second time from the emergency bed-on-wheels in the corridors of the Tehran hospital. The music bar however, dos not go into silence.
The everlasting effect of the revolutionary act of making music underground, or making a film underground, is not the immediate “real” in the act of the making music, and the real in their lives. But it is in “how” their reality, now woven into the narrative of the film, appears to the observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The “reality” of what went on in those basements and forbidden studio recording sessions, the sublime moment that generated the enthusiasm in these young people; that reality belongs to eternity. That is perhaps why the hundred and six minutes of the film, between the two moments of reverie, the moment of liminal existence between awareness and death, when we, through Ashkan’s eyes look, from what can easily turn into a six-feet under position, at the running lines of fluorescent lamps that pass before our eyes, creating a sense of eternity. Perhaps this is a suggestion that their whole life was worth it, if in reflection one can only remember and recognise the effort, only the effort for creating something that is forbidden, creating a symphony of sounds of revolt—against the state and its ridiculous yet consequential punitive regulations—that are otherwise silenced for eternity. The hope that is built in our minds come forth through following Ashkan and Negar’s Dante-esque meanderings through the dark undergrounds of Tehran in search of their music, their freedom; and that hope echoes in their voice and is heard again, rearticulated in Persian Cats.
“The memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place. In this place that is a palimpsest, subjectivity is already linked to the absence that structures it as existence and makes it ‘be there’… This being-there acts only in spatial practices, that is, in ways of moving into something different (manière de passer a l’autre).” [20] That is why the whole film is continuously meandering in the past, perhaps in the memory of Ashkan in reverie, suspended between life and death, through streets, quarters, corridors, basements and the hidden studios of Tehran. We are hearing and visiting memories of a musician in between two blinks of his eyes. We are traversing spaces that are haunted by many different spirits that would have otherwise remained silent. This time, Bahman Ghobadi in his quest for breathing the breath of a singer, invokes these ghosts that emerge from their six-feet under basements of Tehran. It is indeed that underground space that defines the art of these musicians. Their city becomes the endless tunnels and staircases that lead them to the ultimately subversive sound of their music, where all sounds, one would expect, are destined to die. That is where the Persian Cats voice their revolt.
note



					
NOTES
					




[1] “Zendan” aka “Prison” by Hichkas: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/asphalt-jungle/id202480855


[2] In the “Special Features” of the DVD of No One Knows About Persian Cats, (by Network Releasing © 2009 MIJ Film Iran) Bahman Ghobadi explains this fully.


[3] This is a reference, we will find out later in the film, to a song that one of the artists called Shervin Najafian, in this film sings with a group of refugee Afghani children, called “Who Am I”. The lyric is as follows:  “Who am I/A wonderer/Lost in quarters/the most kicked-out sound of the soundless city/ Where am I from?/South of the city/Where the breath is at a dead-end/Where the daydream/is imprisoned in a cage/I am the centre of a cross/ homeless and tiered/At a cross road where there is dead-end from four directions/I am the centre of a cross/homeless and tiered/Who am I?/A tramp/Full of questions without any answer/I drew in my dreams hundred roads on the wall….”


[4] From this moment onward I shall use Persian Cats in lieu of the full title of No One Knows About Persian Cats.


[5] The interview was conducted by Peter Scarlet, the artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival and the host and co-curator for CINEMONDO, in late May of 2007. The video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mTQrvPNvXc and in the original Link TV web archive athttp://www.linktv.org/cinemondo


[6] An AlJazeera English report, 10 August 2009, on the subject of Iranian Rock band. You can see the clip here on the AlJazeeraEnglish YouTube channel:http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish


[7] In the “Special Feature” of the DVD he expresses that although the process of filmmaking was “like a picnic” he was nonetheless under tremendous pressure because he was filming without permission. In fact, he used a fried’s permission document for some of the locations and for others he simply risked it. This means that not only did Ghobadi receive absolutely no support from the state, he actually risked everything to make the film. It is noteworthy here to mention that cinema industry in Iran is by and large a state-funded and state-supported outfit.


[8] This is endnoted in the source (by Zizek) as: Epigraph of ‘Living Room Dialogues on the Middle East’, quoted from Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, 2006, p.1.


[9] Zizek, Slavoj. Violence, “Chapter 2: Allegro moderato- Adagio: Fear Thy Neighbour As Thyself!” Profile Books, London. (2008). P.39


[10] Ibid.
[11] The “Special Features” of the DVD of No One Knows About Persian Cats, (by Network Releasing © 2009 MIJ Film Iran)


[12] The opening line of the lyrics of a folk song that Hamed Behdad sings in the film. It is called DK, by Darkoob: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/no-one-knows-about-persian/id365023728


[13] The music video of this particular clip has been available on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7L9y-Wmz1o


[14] The irony is that Sourush who says in the film that he belongs to Tehran and rejects the offer to go for a concert abroad, in real life, has left Iran and is currently producing music in London.
[15] The translation is mine. Although the subtitle of the movie does provide a translation, I found that to be accurate. However, I have also consulted with the artist Soroush Lashkari himself about this.


[16] Aka “Man Vaistadam” 2006, lyrics by Hichkas in collaboration with Mahdyar Aghajani: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/asphalt-jungle/id202480855


[17] Zizek, Slavoj. Violence, “Introduction: The Tyrant’s Bloody Robe”, Profile Books, London. (2008). Pp.3-4


[18] “Dreaming” by The Free Keys: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/no-one-knows-about-persian/id365023728
[19] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHfaQW5ce5k&feature=related

 


				

					
BIBLIOGRAPHY
					


De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, “Walking the City”, Translation by   Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley. (1988)
Ghobadi, Bahman. No One Knows About Persian Cats, DVD, “Special Features”. Network Releasing ©. 2009, MIJ Film Iran
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/asphalt-jungle/id202480855
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/no-one-knows-about-persian/id365023728
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mTQrvPNvXc Link TV web archive at http://www.linktv.org/cinemondo May 2007
YouTube Channel: IranIndieMusic | 28 Dec 2010: http://www.youtube.com/user/IranIndieMusic#p/u/1/J7osr7NvH6g
YouTube Channel: khayambashi: | 10 Jun 2006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkFfUA170pA
Zizek, Slavoj. Violence, Profile Books, London. (2008)
				




		

			

				

			
			

		
  
		

			THE AUTHOR                Proshot Kalami has received her PhD in Comparative Literature & Cinema from the University of California Davis. But prior to that from 1994-97 she worked as a playwright & radio director at IRIB and taught as an adjunct lecturer in Iran. In 1998 she won the “Best People’s Choice Award” in pastel painting from Davis Art Center, California. She has taught in three campuses of the University of California: Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Davis before moving to the UK to teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University. Dr Kalami has co-directed a short documentary on Len Dixon (one of the first South African Black persons who became the head of a Drama department in a UK university). Her second documentary film is on mystic rituals and performances of South Asia. As a professional videographer of live performances she has worked with the Asia Society in the US, recording live performances at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, the “Mondavi Center” at UC Davis, at the “Chorus Repertory Theatre” in Manipur, India, with Nalanda LLC at Berkeley and Calcutta and finally “The Pit” at the Barbican in the UK. Throughout her carrier, Proshot Kalami has received many international grants and fellowships to work on her books as well as her documentary films from US, India and Germany. She has published a number of articles on world cinema, in “Cinemascope,” “The International Journal of the Humanities,” “Journal of the Iranian Studies” and “The Annual Film Focus Issue of Weber Studies” in addition to her book Iran’s Reel Spectre: The Cinematic Epic of a Nation (Chicago University Press/Seagull Calcutta, London, New York). In addition to be a trained musician in classical western music and a painter, Proshot has published two poetry collections in Persian.
		
 
			
 
		
 

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